So as I said I did play it. Honestly, didn't hate like the first 18 or so hours.
I'm one of those sad austists that really likes the naughty dog way of making a game, so gameplay wise everything was good for me. I like adventuring around in abandoned cities and digging through the trash of the old world and I've actually spent a lot of time in Seattle so it was nice to see it all destroyed, give it another couple years of crazy leftism and we can go play the Last of Us part 2 exploration in real life. Yay.
Some of the flashback scenes with Joel were pretty good, like him and Ellie's dynamic is still the best part of this game series and of course they just par 5'd that right into oblivion. GG cuckmann. The first half where you play as Ellie works well enough with her doggedly hunting down the members of Abby's party who wronged her, torturing one to death in the basement of hospital was pretty good. Killing the support base of the weird love triangle and eventually admitting that yeah, we gotta get the fuck outta here with Dina being preggers and out of leads only for Abby to show up and kill Jesse unceremoniously and wound our boy, Tommy. This part of the game was fine, it should have ended here with a boss battle as you playing as Ellie and killing Abby in a fight but it doesn't, no.
Instead we go to where the game falls apart; after watching all the shit Abs McManshoulders has done to the characters we, the player give a shit about we go and play as her. This segment tries to humanize some of the rando's you end up killing but sadly I don't care. A: I still want them to die because to the player, me, they're still the bad guys who cracked my surrogate daddy's head open with a club. We also go deep into just how much of a fucking retard Butch Manjaw is, she almost immediately disobeys the orders of her faction to go help a friend who shot one of their own. We then go on a 10 fucking hour sidequest to help some dumbass transboy and his sister. I think the devs were trying to set up a Joel/Ellie dynamic with Abby and Translife boy but it doesn't work because you already hate one half of this pairing and the other is a dipshit who constantly makes stupid choices.
Abby then proceeds to betray her faction to get stuff for transboy's sister to amputate her arm. During this segment you callously kill members of transboy's former faction and while he's okay killing the shit out of them he gets mad when Abby calls them names. Like the fuck, dude. At some point during this one of Abby's friends fuck her, cheating on their pregnant girlfriend, couldn't remember when it happens but it does and even by my own degerate standards, I hated it. After this 10 hour sidequest is complete you save transboy's sister's life by having your friend chop her arm off. Transboy then goes back to his crazy cult home to try and convince their mother to join them, an action even the legendarily retarded Abby says is stupid and won't work. We then go to save transboy from his own retardation and find he's killed his own mom. His sister then dies like a retard and the leader of Abby's faction is then killed by the sister in her dying act. Abby then proceeds to just, kill anyone who isn't her or transboy. Coldly slaughtering people not even a few days prior had been friends and allies.
-This is our new hero, wow -
Then the boss battle against Ellie happens and we all know how that goes. I purposefully failed like, twenty times to find all the ways Ellie can kill Bolt Vanderhuge. My fav is still the shotgun to the chest.
The ending has us play a bit as Ellie, broken and jumpy from having her face smashed by Thud Meatcrunch and living with Dina, she decides to go for revenge again because that went so well last time. Translife Boy and Mort Manchest have gone to California because, even in the post apocalypse world that shit hole still attracts the gender weirdos like flies to fucking shit. They get captured by some gang that Ellie then fights her way through to the ending scene we've all watched by now. Like the fuck.
Overall it started strong, Joel's death was stupid and the creative decisions taken have probably murdered the franchise because the best thing going for it was those characters and the ones they wanted to replace them with are just awful. I got paid $4 to take this off the store's hands and honestly, as negative as I am about the game as a whole, I can always just play the first half and have an okay game.
I'd say it definitely seems like Druckmann got out of hand and I'm sure when they started having outsiders play test it they must've gotten more red flags than a parade in North Korea but they still pushed it out anyway. There are flashes of good and even brilliance but it's all buried under a fucking mess, kinda like if your sewer backed up into an art studio, sure there's still some really good things in there, but does anyone want to wade through that to get them?
