My thoughts:
The Last of Us 2 was a bit disappointing. But lets talk about the positives first. Graphics and art direction are amazing, combat has improved a bit, the facial mocap is some of the best I've seen, and inclusivity is welcome to see.
But lets talk about the elephant in the room, the story. The story is bare bones and ends on an unsatisfying note. Its message about violence is completely lost in its indulgence and glorification of it. Plus it forces the player to kill certain people, leaving no choice, and then tries really hard to make you feel bad about that choice. It just doesn't work. It tries to pull every cheap trick in the book to make you feel bad, but it ends up feeling manipulative. I think an argument can even be made that it commits character assassination in order to move the plot where it needs to go. But most importantly, there is a huge ludo-narrative dissonance here between the gameplay and what the story wants you to feel.
For example, the game wants you to feel real bad about killing a pregnant woman, but this is a scripted event, so the player had no hand in it. More importantly, the hours leading up to that scene Ellie has shanked hundreds of people brutally in the throat. She is a brutal killer at that point, and NOW the game stops to feel bad about it.
I had no issues with Joel's death, other than it being predictable, and a bit clumsily written into the story. He stumbles upon his soon to be killer by accident.
I was also really put off by the violence in the game. It is unpleasant and cruel, and it made me dislike the game even more. Whatever the writers were trying to say about violence, was lost in their glorification of it.
Forcing the player to play as Abby was the wrong decission I feel. It feels cheap when the game makes you play with the dog twice, knowing Ellie kills it. The game has taught the player at this point that dogs are annoying enemies that should be killed. So why is this one dog any different? Also, you had no choice to spare the dog, so it really wasn't the players doing.
Gameplay wise, the controls seem less responsive than in part 1, there are more bugs, and ai partners behave much more irratically. The fact that monsters ignore your ai allies is blatantly on display when your buddy parcours through a room full of enemies, dancing around 5 feet in front of them, which completely breaks immersion. The ai also often gets in your way when you are trying to stealth. During combat it is very obvious that the ai waits to let the player do most of the fighting. I also feel Clickers are a lot less threatening than they used to be. Melee combat is clunky as hell and I hate it. And why do they make the player spam the same button for everything? There are also too many stealth and combat sections, and it starts to outstay its welcome quickly. Plus, I don't think this game's stealth system is particularly good.
It feels the game goes on for longer than it needed to. It builds up to an ending, and then has Ellie go on yet another quest for revenge, only to have her change her mind at the end. It feels unevenly paced. It also feels like with this game Naughty Dog has reached the breaking point of their scripted transition mechanic, where they become annoying, predictable, and you start to dread them. You can see them coming from miles away, and now they feel like an unwelcome interruption of your game. I started to resent them, as if someone constantly took away my controller, killed some characters, then handed it back to me and said: "Look what you just did!"
