Well, I get that aspect. When you present people with material that challenges their pre conceived notions, there’s always gonna be resistance.
To me that’s more indicative of people’s inability to consume a complex story though, more than it is an indication that the story was sloppily put together. And this is coming from someone who definitely felt there were issues with how the story was told.
But overall, I still think a lot of this criticism comes from people not really giving it a chance. If you did give the story a chance, understood all of its layers, and still don’t like it, more power to ya. But it should at least be given a fair shake.
It’s a miserable world. The game should reflect that, at least on an aesthetic level.
But there’s some profoundly human concepts and stories that get explored, that makes it all worthwhile imo. Not to mention I just really dig the gameplay, story stuff aside lol
The world can be miserable, lots of videogame worlds are miserable. Its the hope, the light at the end of the tunnel that makes you push forward. That you can be better and over come the shit pile.
This game seems to be about shitty people treating eachother like complete shit. No thanks. I get enough of that at work.
That I can definitely understand. It’s one of the reasons why I just never got into the Walking Dead or Attack on Titan. Crapsack worlds for the sake of being Crapsack worlds without a uplifting payoff is just something I’d rather not get into.
It is about shitty people being shitty to each other, that’s one of the reasons I find the ending so powerful. Someone finally rises up above all the petty human nature to put an end to the cycle of hate. It’s a dark and dreary world sure but I think some profound questions about our own humanity rise up out of it.
It also just makes it that much more uplifting and meaningful when you see these people act like friends to one another, or the random acts of kindness you might see here and there.
I get it tho! The game can be a downer for sure sometimes.
Yea I’ve watched a good deal of the story here and really all I got was watching people who managed to eek out an existence bending over backwards to burn it all to the ground. It’s not profound. It’s sad and really pathetic.
Summary
By the end I wanted Ellie to die because she had devolved in a truly shitty human being who did shitty things to other people so she could get her own, and then she loses her balls in the very end and can’t finish the job and goes home to everything she threw away. Like that last moment “Joel wouldn’t want this” sorta revelation she has is fucking meaningless after she’s left a long as fuck trail of dead bodies behind her. It’s too late at this point. You’re not a good person. You’re not gonna save your soul sparring Abby. Commit to the awful person you have become and finish the damn job. You flushed everything else down the shitter, send the last of humanity there to and finish what you started.
If I where a big fan of TLOU1 ( I’m not) I honestly wouldn’t give a flying fuck about a 3rd one unless it was about completely different people cuz at this point I wouldn’t even want to look at Ellie anymore.
I don’t need this kind of negativity in my life. It’s just shitty people being incredibly shitty: The game imo. If you all liked it that’s awesome, i wont say anyones wrong for liking it or the game even, wont even say the game is bad, but I found it pretty pretentious and void of anything really meaningful to say beyond human beings can be really shitty which…yea…no duh.
Never cared about a single killed dog either.
After leaving a mountain of corpses behind her. Too fucking late to awaken to “being better” in my opinion.
I mean, she could’ve continued the cycle of hatred and she didn’t. Nowhere does it imply Ellie is a good person, quite the opposite in fact. The whole last segment is her reflecting on everything she’s lost because of her need to avenge Joel. She literally had PTSD about it. Years and years later she has literal crippling mental breakdowns over it.
She’s not justified at all, that’s what the entire epilougue is about. She’s become a monster who only cares about revenge, and probably would’ve straight killed Abby if Abby had killed Dina. That’s the point. She stood above the never ending cycle of hatred and let her go. It doesn’t make her good. It makes her complex, and it further sows this theme of both revenge and mercy being contagious.
Every character in this game has a trail of bodies behind them, I hardly think that puts Ellie in stark contrast to a lot of the other main characters.
That makes everything she did in the game for fucking nothing. What good does breaking the cycle do her with the mountain on bodies in her wake, nothing to go back home to and losing two fingers so she can’t play her guitar again. I hated everything about that ending. I would have been more satisfied if Ellie and Abby killed each other off.
She didnt end the cycle. There’s still a mountain of bodies behind her and anyone who knows any of those people could come after her down the road like Abby did with Joel.
Nothing ended. She killed tons and tons of people. The cycle could easily still be going. It’s naive as fuck to think because she let Abby go at the last second that this shit is over with. That’s why I find this interpretation of the ending childish and naive at best. All she really did was puss out at the last second long long after it was far too late.
Edit: Game bends over backwards to sell you that everyone, even the NPCs are people. So that means they have people that care about them, and will notice they are all dead and will want to know how and why.
The cycle isn’t even remotely close to over. That’s naive as fuck.
Sure, if you think it was for nothing at all I can’t change that. But now you don’t have some other group of people attatched to Abby coming after Ellie. And then another group coming after the people who killed Ellie. So on and so forth.
Everything Abby did was for nothing too, I’m not sure why Ellie is the only one garnering such a reaction from ya’ll. Abby is just as shitty of a person as Ellie. None of these people are good people, but they’re still capable of making good choices, which is what the ending is about. I can’t imagine ya’ll being satisfied with both of them dying either, you would just call it equally pointless. Except if they both die, you entirely lose the message of forgiveness that the entire game spent setting up.
Because we accept Abby is a shitty human being the moment she beat a wounded unarmed man to death with a golf club. It’s why so many find the attempts to humanize her after this to be utterly laughable.
It is a revenge story though. It attempts to deconstruct revenge and go deeper, into a tale about how intense trauma can shape a person. But it makes decisions that, to me, were giant misses.
-It starts off with Abby killing Joel without much of any build up. People are split on this, but I fall squarely into the “what were you thinking” camp. I am biased here, but my likability of Abby went into the gutter here.
-Characters make decisions that don’t make much sense. The funny thing is that if Abby was MORE of a monster, things would have worked out way better for her. Abby could have killed Ellie and Tommy, leaving no witnesses after Ellie straight up says she’s going to kill her. But she let her live and her friends got killed as a consequence. She could have killed Ellie again after their fight, seeing as how Ellie’s killed all her friends. But she decides to let her go again. Ellie decides to let Abby go after going on yet another trek to find her. She decides at the end it’s pointless.
This despite both Abby and Ellie having left so many bodies in their wake before any of the “let them go” decisions. Abby is known for killing (Scars, but w/e) in her unit, and we kill damn near that whole unit as Ellie. So them deciding to pull back at these moments seems contradictory. I know in the case of the first moment, the game would have ended there, but the second and third were just dumb.
Also, Tommy tries to talk Ellie out of going after the WLF, but ends up going after them himself? That was a bit weird.
-Though it’s kind of random, the amount of times people survive due to being saved at the last second is a bit much. Not the biggest complaint, but it is noticeable.
That’s not what a good chunk of the story is about. Ellie’s hunting Abby for a while, Abby’s on her own side-quest for a while, then Ellie’s hunting Abby again. The fallout between Ellie and Joel over the Fireflies is something implied at the start and revealed through flashbacks. I meant a whole game centered around Ellie growing up and then finding out.
But admittedly, I didn’t play the game. I watched the story and the accompanying gameplay.
I meant something different with the situation. Like what I said; an evolution of the virus, or something besides “the infection? Yeah, it’s still there”.
