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

Time played: 27 hours, 23 minutes The Last of Us Part II is an artistic and technical masterpiece. Anyone who has played the first part knows what to expect in the game's systems, but they are expanded and refined in a natural way. In the first game, I felt like I was suffering through the gameplay just to get to the next cutscene. In Part II, the expanded stealth mechanics and the improved enemy AIs made the actual gameplay flow much better between cutscenes. Even though the game is extremely linear, the smarter gameplay allowed for more emergent storytelling since the encounters felt nearly as important as the cutscenes. This is a spoiler-free review, and I intend to maintain that. Naughty Dog makes some very deliberate and interesting narrative decisions for the story of this game. These decisions compellingly explore and reinforce the themes of the story. It is not always obvious which direction the story is going, but once I started picking up the pieces, it became very compelling. On the other hand, these interesting narrative decisions are likely what motivated the “games are too long” discourse that resulted in Troy Baker quote tweeting a 400-word Teddy Roosevelt quote, but I am sympathetic to the criticism. I also want to give a big shoutout to the world building and environmental story telling done in this game. That was one of my favorite parts about the first game, and they knocked it out of the park in the second part. There’s a few loose “background stories” that I found super interesting, especially in the context of the world that ND has created. I have rated the game 5 stars here, but if I were afforded more granularity, I would have given the game a 9.5 out of 10. I am okay with giving the game the full stars because I think Last of Us Part II is a near perfect execution of what Naughty Dog was trying to achieve.