3/5 ★ – soaje's review of The Last of Us Part II.

Some decisions were clearly made to be controversial and push the edges of storytelling in this game. No, I'm not talking about any trans hate or anything as bigotted as that. The decision to make the player hate a character, then have them play and sympathize with them while alienating the previous main character (Ellie) and making players miserable and dislike everyone who isn't dead in the story was a very risky decision and to me, it doesn't pay off. Having the player play as Abby BEFORE playing as Ellie may certainly have worked better in my opinion. Along with this, several other risks in storytelling fall flat for me in tLoU2. Lev and Yara were probably the best new characters of the series, while Isaac (the 'main' villain of the game) is played by a huge, great actor in Jeffrey Wright, and yet Naughty Dog completely underused him. He appears in about two scenes and does absolutely nothing before dying. Dina and Jesse are okay additions to the franchise, but neither come anywhere near close to filling the Joel-shaped hole in the cast around the main character Ellie. In truth, Abby is definitely the main character of this game, as everything revolves around the player gaining sympathy for the person you know nothing about other than that she was saved by Joel only the best him mercilessly with a golf club not one hour later. Once this event happens, in my opinion, most people are lost and no longer even care to find out why she did it. They definitely took a risk leaving her backstory until the end, I would much rather have come to care for this character BEFORE finding out she goes for par with Joel's head. Ultimately, The Last of Us 2 tried to be very clever and attempts to push the boundaries of how much misery and hate a player can take, but ultimately just falls completely flat because of a rather confusing choice of sequence of events. I would give the story aspect to this game a 4 or 5 out of 10. Fortunately, the gameplay, animation, just about everything else, is astounding and carries the weight of this game to bring it up to a 6 for me.