finally completed my most recent T.LOU2 playthrough, here are some disorganized, extremely tired and probably unintelligible finishing thoughts
The second half of the game is definitely more enjoyable than the first or at least easier to get through imo. I did the section from the start of Abby & Lev going to get surgery supplies up until the end all in one day bc idk the pacing was better I guess, or it was easier to just enjoy playing for the most part because the environments felt less repetitive and it felt like I was actually getting somewhere instead of feeling like Sisyphus like I did for the first half of the game.
I love Abby and Lev but them trying to subtextually equate / compare their relationship to the one between Joel and Ellie after they've only known each other for three fucking days makes absolutely no sense to me. I could believe it by the time we get to the Santa Barbara section, they had the time, but not in three days lmao. Don't insult me like that.
On that same note I think that is one of my biggest problems with the pacing of this game, that the main portion of the story all happens over only three days and yet they try to cram MONTHS worth of development into that short span of time. It's outright jarring.
I hate that fucking ending. No, I didn't want Abby to die, but why have Ellie go all that way and jeopardize the life she had built again JUST to have her let her go?? It's all part of this bullshit "revenge bad" narrative and that last section of the game feels so fucking pointless because of this. It's like the devs dangled some sort of catharsis in front of the players and yanked it away for like the fourth time in this damn game, which could work for the middle acts with the story still progressing, but NOT at the goddamn climax.
This game did a wonderful job at making me feel like absolutely nothing fucking happened by the end when really SO MUCH happened over the course of this game. Nothing had weight that lasted more than 10 minutes outside of what happened to Joel. Nothing. Even the moments where I did stop and go "oh my god", all of that was gone because this game was so crammed with shit that they wanted to force an emotional reaction from and yet would not give us the time and connection with these characters that we needed to have that reaction. It was like three games crammed into one and turned into a confusing, messy blob of abstract concepts and events by the end of it all. Two-thirds of it felt like a waste of time.
tl;dr 90% of this game was just daft, emotionally-detached misery p*rn with horrible pacing and a very questionable narrative about trauma and cookie cutter "revenge bad" bullshit that does a complete disservice to the narrative and characters of the first game. 4/10, Lev is Baby, and Abby / Ellie / Joel all deserve better stories.
