https://www.cybersport.ru/games/articles/propaganda-istinnykh-cennostei-i-luchshaya-igra-pokoleniya-obzor-the-last-of-us-part-ii

Gray square Drackmann

If you closely monitor the world of games, then you probably remember the “gray morality”, which became the highlight of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare advertising program. The concept itself cannot be called new, but with regard to video games, it was shy to use then, for now, for some reason, at least among top developers. What happened then, we all remember: the game was called not to be released in the Russian Federation, was accused of violating all possible norms and decencies, and was even convicted of demonstrating weapons prohibited by the Geneva Convention. In general, the promotion campaign really succeeded.

However, the notorious “gray morality” then, it seems, remained a beautiful inscription somewhere on the blackboard in the office of the PR service. In Call of Duty itself, the consumer was waiting for another story about the brave and highly spiritual military, saving the world from evil, albeit with a bit of gloomy scenes. Yes, the protagonists joined the ranks of the rebels, allowed innocent people to die, and sometimes still played dirty – but there were terrorists on the next side of the scale, and balance is hardly possible in this situation. All this is a frank substitution of concepts: not “gray morality”, but an attempt to tarnish the main characters slightly, and even that is not very convincing.

Blaming Infinity Ward in this situation is difficult – these are the traditions of mainstream game scripting. Audiences a priori need a hero who can empathize with, and ideally, also a villain who wants to hate. Creating other stories is always a risk that not every publisher will agree to, because even praises of a handful of connoisseurs do not guarantee product commercial success.

And it is precisely in this regard that The Last of Us Part II is a breakthrough, revelation, and simply the main event in the development of game scripting in recent years. Throughout the sequel, the main engine of history is a sense of revenge. The reception, of course, is not new – this is one of 36 classic stories according to the classification of the French theater expert Georges Polti, they even resorted to it in the famous “Boxer Revenge” by Maddison. However, The Last of Us Part II on this ill-fated canvas made several new strokes, and this radically changed the picture.

Craig Meisin, screenwriter of the Chernobyl series, by the way, recently shared a very accurate observation about the gaming industry:

This is the problem that The Last of Us Part II brilliantly corrected. The new brushstrokes mentioned above in the archetypal story of revenge are a refusal to demonize the enemy. Ellie sincerely hates the enemy, but the player, even understanding the emotions of the heroine, can hardly forget for a second that the same people are on the other side of the barricades.

The protagonist is not a superhero or even an antihero. Ellie is a man who survived the apocalypse, but could not forget everything that happened after. And the thirst for revenge in this case, of course, is not a noble, but very understandable motivation, which, with all desire, cannot be doubted. But this time, unlike the original, the universe is not so one-dimensional: Ellie is still the center of history, but not the center of the world, in which everyone has enough worries.

In the sequel there are no operetta villains – gangsters who want to kill everyone simply because they are villains, or cannibals who eat people just because the scriptwriters so wanted. In Part II, everyone has motivation and background – from the central antagonist to ordinary soldiers.

In the preview I already told how the developers were able to “revive” the patrol squads throughout the city: their members communicate, react very humanly to the death of their comrades, etc., etc. But now I can say more: when passing Part II, the load responsibility will sometimes press you down even during the killing of monsters – after all, they used to be human. If you were impressed by the scene with an infected child from Resident Evil 2 – get ready, here such sketches will wait for you at every step.

Such episodes produce a very sobering effect. The brutal scenes in the sequel are scary not only in the context of the game, but also in the context of universal ideas about morality. Everything is disgusting here – and that’s why they are felt by really living people. In the original, the good-natured Joel killed hundreds of enemies and as if he had not experienced any torment about this. There is no room for a ludonarrative dissonance in the sequel: Ellie will also arrange local genocide, but if you look into her eyes in any of the scenes, you can see that she knows what she’s done and, moreover, she’s very happy about it.

Naughty Dog completely suddenly was able to get away from the usual formula of children’s tales: in the second part there are no cartoon villains, naive heroes and the struggle for the common good. And therefore, one really wants to – in this universe – no, one has to believe: after all, each of us balances through life in a square filled with a gray gradient. And let Captain Shepard continue to draw a clear line between the hero and the apostate.

Living dead world

This character upgrade is one of the two main Highlights of The Last of Us Part II. The second of them is the gameplay, which managed to make a huge quality leap forward with the same tools.

In the reviews of the original, every second journalist wrote that Naughty Dog managed to erase the line between cut scenes and gameplay – supposedly the transitions were completely invisible, and the cinematics were so carried away that the player did not lose the feeling of immersion for a second.

I do not agree with this opinion – The Last of Us had terrible gameplay that, after the first third of the game, could evoke emotions only from a narrow spectrum: from apathy to irritation. I expected the same from the second part, but it turned out to be wrong. It is interesting to play Part II, even if you close your eyes to the plot, and this despite the fact that Naughty Dog really remained true to the traditions of the original.

As in 2011, the player is free to decide how to go through all the locations. You can break through the battle, killing all the enemies, or you can, throwing bricks and bottles on the sides, sneak to the end without harming anyone. In both cases, the game will relate to what is happening with understanding: Ellie will not look around with fear, opening the gate, if before that you have cleared the entire location.

It is paradoxical to say this about the game Naughty Dog, but Part II is interesting to play in all ways – well, or rather, it’s nice. In skirmishes and hand-to-hand battles, the weight of the weapon and its recoil began to be felt, and the stealth ceased to seem so conditional – the patrol routes and their actions now have some kind of logic under them. The enemy may suddenly turn around before reaching the corner, or refuse to run to the sound of an abandoned brick, deciding to send a partner instead – because of this, hidden segments do not seem so routine.

However, the real devil is in the details – in the expression on Ellie’s face at the time of killing another opponent, in the animations of blows and deaths, in amazing sounds … Each battle in The Last of Us Part II is like a specially staged scene that you yourself do not know , played clearly according to the script. As the sequel passed, I took almost a gigabyte of screenshots, and a good half of them are kind of news from the fields.

In one shot, the bandit frowns, falling to his knees after an arrow flew into his stomach; but Ellie takes the knife behind him after a sweeping blow, drawing an arc in the air with a stream of blood – and the opponent at that moment buried himself in the wall and is about to begin to slide dramatically on it. When I go through the game again, I will not be able to repeat these scenes, and that’s fine. Because of such nuances, each encounter is truly unique – it is not surprising that the battle mode was added to the press version of the game, which allows you to load any battle scene from the plot, skipping all the screensavers.

With peaceful scenes, everything is somewhat more prosaic – in them you cease to be an artist and rather turn into a visitor to an art gallery, who is led forward by a guide with the strange name of “Script”. Having plunged into the plot, you will not notice the substitution – the game feels very well when you need to pause and let Ellie walk around the surroundings a bit, and when to push her forward at a fast pace. However, if you deliberately try to break all the frames, you don’t have to go far: in any location you can find invisible walls, painted doors and rails on which you need to move on.

But this is not bad – the open world Naughty Dog did not promise and that is why she was able to saturate each location to the maximum with a narrative. Once in a high-rise building, you will be able to read the correspondence of residents who at the beginning of the epidemic did not guess to quit their apartments, and on a shopping street another text performance awaits you – about a local avenger who did not want to put up with the lawlessness of the gangster bandit. Even further – a safe, the owner of which can not part with the past: as a combination there is the date when the owner first became an employee of the month in a local supermarket.

Such notes on the fields (battles) are not new in the industry and even often a sign of bad taste. However, Naughty Dog managed to maintain a delicate balance in them: they do not meet often enough to bother, and always where they really have a place. In addition, they are really well written – this is not “The Lustful Argonian Maiden” in Skyrim. And so the game world — dead by definition — seems alive, however paradoxical it may sound. These notes are not directly related to the plot, but at the same time they reveal it very subtly, because they often talk about the treachery and cruelty of people who cannot pacify their greed and pride even in the face of disaster.

No longer the Odyssey

This is an excerpt from a letter that Neil Drackmann sent to reporters. Like you, these lines seemed too pretentious to me when I received the key. But now, having completed the passage, I can only nod with feeling, reading through these words. This is really such a game – one of the few.

Because of this, the Part II game director wants to regret: from the very first trailers, the game was branded as “SJW-craft” and “abuse of the original,” and with the advent of spoilers in the network, the crowd crowd intensified many times. Drackmann sneered at this – asked to name the game “SJW Part II” and quoted Kurt Cobain, suggesting that the haters simply not buy the game, but this is not at all what the person who created such a story should do.

In The Last of Us Part II there is no propaganda of homosexual relations, feminism, or other topics that, for some reason, so excite the conservative part of the gaming community. But in the game there is a very gloomy philosophical commentary on the nature of people – imagine how cool it would be if Twitter would discuss about it, and not about Ally’s orientation?

Because of everything that happened with the game in the info field, many have the impression that Part II is some kind of optional superstructure on the cult first part. But no. This is a game that rose above the plastic original and turned the story of Joel and Ellie into a finished (or not?) Work. I think that the creation of Naughty Dog did not accidentally get the subtitle Part II, and not a simple figure in the name: this indicates the complementarity of the two The Last of Us. Part II – not a sequel in the usual sense, but the second chapter of the story, supplementing the original and correcting all its many flaws.

The Last of Us was a fairy tale – a kind of Homer Odyssey, in which the main characters, the brave knight Joel and the little Princess Ellie, traveled across America in search of happiness – that is, a magic potion that would save the whole world. Only the ending was knocked out of this concept, and it is precisely her ideas that Part II continues. The new Naughty Dog game is no longer an Odyssey, but a novel in the spirit of Irwin Welsh, with all its gloomy and repulsive features, and when you dive into this mud with your head, you will forget about what orientation your hero is there.

If the Oscars were given for achievements in video games, we would already be able to honor Neil Drakmann today. In the sequel you can find everything: a great action, a gorgeous picture, a sentimental story … But you knew all this without me – it’s after all Naughty Dog. Another thing is important: all these elements are wonderfully balanced in such a way that even with the forced passage of ten hours a day, The Last of Us Part II will not be able to bother you.

The game corrected the gameplay flaws and squeezed out, as they say, all the juices from the PlayStation 4, but most importantly, it did not lose and even actually increased the legacy of the first part. If you liked The Last of Us, Part II will return your favorite characters and let you know more about them – much more. If you, like me, were waiting for the second part with skepticism, then it may become for you the greatest gaming revelation in recent years.

At the beginning of my career, I liked to think that not a single game would get the highest score from me – simply because there are no perfect games. There will always be drawdowns in pace, technical problems, poorly registered characters or, in the end, an unsuccessful scenario. I am still convinced of this: well, you cannot achieve an ideal in the field of creativity – everything here is subjective and relative. But if there are no perfect games, The Last of Us Part II got close to this mark frighteningly. So much so that I am ready to write off the difference as an error.