Famously, Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann once proclaimed, “We don’t use the word ‘fun' [for The Last of Us].”
This would prove to be the rallying cry for The Last of Us: Part II apologists, in essence if not literally. What, you don’t like having your favorite characters tortured to death in prolonged cutscenes by brand new characters? You don’t like watching Ellie get her fingers bitten off while her arc from the previous game is erased off-screen? You think everything should work out in the end? You don’t get it. TLoU2 isn’t meant to be fun. It has meaning.
This was the primary justification for the game’s grotesque violence. One of Part II’s innovations was that every NPC was given a name, so that, while you removed the brains of some poor puppy one switchblade stab at a time, you’d know that he was actually someone’s real pet called Rex. Shoot a bandit in the head, hear another cry, “No! Her name was Susan and she had twelve children! How could you?” (Or something to that effect.)
In this way TLoU2 was trying to use the intrinsically violent nature of its medium to convey the shockingly original message that violence is bad. This was why you had to execute people begging for their lives every once in a while, in case you were starting to forget that they were real people, too (or in case you were beginning to like Ellie too much).
Yet it was Jim Sterling who most memorably pointed out a small problem with critically calling attention to violence in a video game: fictional violence actually is fun, and you won’t ever convince me otherwise.
The quest for ever-more-photorealistic computer graphics has been driven in large part by the desire for more realistic blood splatter, dismemberment, and decapitations in our video games. Series like Doom and Left 4 Dead are quite literally sold on the appeal of their obscene levels of gore. It is an iron rule of interactive media that your average player will prefer larger and more disgusting fountains of viscera at any opportunity, if given the choice.
Yes. Any game. Including Animal Crossing.
Thus I am not shocked or appalled when I see Ellie slowly carve the arm off of a pregnant woman, or witness the screams of the man whose legs I have removed. Instead, I smile. You know you do, too.
So Enters The Last of Us: Part II - Remastered
The failure to reconcile the enjoyability of fictional violence with an apparent desire to shock the player is one of countless reasons why The Last of Us: Part II is the video game equivalent of an exploded sewer line. I don’t think there is much need to rehash my opinions on it as a whole here, except to briefly say that my feelings have only sunk lower with the passing years (and any lingering warmth I felt toward Druckmann utterly annihilated by The Last of Us on HBO).
But I still load it up to replay Ellie’s sections once a year or so, because I do think the fundamental gameplay design is engaging (and, yes, fun), at least in small doses. It also looks gorgeous and has the best animations of any game ever made. The stealth avoids the “cock-up cascade” problem of similar survival games, while the movement, shooting, and crafting systems are all tight and satisfying.
Also, you get to kill off-leash dogs. What’s not to like?
So when I heard that its remastered edition, released last week, has a new arcade “Roguelike” mode called “No Return,” I was interested. I had been awaiting the now-canceled multiplayer version of TLoU2 (lol); and given the fact that the franchise has been completely and utterly destroyed by Druckmann’s mismanagement, this seemed like the only opportunity I would ever get for more The Last of Us gameplay. You could even say that it would be the last of The Last of Us.
I’ve now played “No Return” for a few hours and mostly exhausted its limits. I’ll write more about it below, but for the moment I want to observe how amusing it is that ND has effectively given up the charade about The Last of Us being more than a post-apocalyptic action game.
There is no story in the new “No Return” mode. There is just gameplay. Crafting, stealth, collection, shooting, punching, yes: talking, cutscenes, bad melodramatic dialogue, and being grabbed from around corners, no. Best of all is that you finally get to play as Joel again!
And guess what? It’s fun. One of the things I find particularly fun is when I use a shotgun to cripple a WLF soldier, and he spends the next thirty seconds screaming in agony while slowly bleeding out and dying. I also find it fun when I blow off a Clicker’s arm, or dismember a Runner, and find him still coming to kill me. Such grotesque violence is pretty much unparalleled in other games, and I have to say: it’s immensely satisfying. A shotgun that can take limbs off really does have weight to it.
So I wanted to thank Neil for admitting he was wrong. The Last of Us is fun after all.
By the way, Remastered?
Given that I paid $70 for a graphics DLC on the first The Last of Us last year, I’m both shocked and moderately impressed that the “Remastered” upgrade for Part II only costs $10 (if you own it already for PS4; $50 otherwise). The graphics haven’t actually been remastered at all, but it does run in 4k and 60fps now, and I don’t know what else you could have wanted. It still looks fantastic.
The extra content is probably worth $10. That’s the right price for the “No Return” DLC, and there’s a decent amount more in there, too. You’ll get access to three brief alpha versions of cut levels, a documentary about the making of the most offensive game of the last console generation, commentaries from smug developers, and a “speedrunning” mode of the main story.
Speedrunning mode? That’s funny; I speedran Abby’s sections already!
Is No Return Actually Good, Though?
In “No Return,” choose any major character from the game and survive through six missions and a boss fight; at the end, your run is over, but you’ve collected new skins, characters, and enemies to use and fight on your next attempt. If you die, you have to start over.
Each run is procedurally generated. Various stages take place in locations taken from the campaign, and most have some kind of twist or modifier: these range from interesting, like increased enemy speed or no long guns, to horrifically nightmarish, like all enemies being permanently invisible (?) or a photo mode filter that makes the game look like diarrhea.
Some of these modifiers are so bad that you might as well start over the second you get one. You cannot fight invisible instakilling clickers. But they’re mostly inoffensive otherwise.
It feels cheap and thrown together. There are no new voice lines or environments. In a Jackson-aligned run, you’ll notice that you can fight alongside Dina, Joel, and Jesse, but not Ellie. This is presumably because Ellie has no companion AI in the game, and no new AI was added. The characters are unnecessarily restricted in their equipment selection, and the designers haven’t even bothered to give a name to the currency you have to collect: it’s not ration cards or supplies, but simply “currency.”
Encounters vacillate between far too challenging, with way too many enemies coming from random directions in too-small arenas, and far too easy, with three or so Runners charging at you at a time down long hallways, while you have infinite ammo. In general I’ve found the arenas to be way too small for the number of bad guys, but this becomes less pronounced as more locations are unlocked.
The character selection is laugh-out-loud comical. Jackson gets Ellie, Dina, Jesse (the sperm donor), Tommy, and Joel—you unlock Joel last, naturally—while Seattle gets Abby, Lev, Mel (not pregnant version), that other dude, and the guy who calls everyone “pendejos.”
I thought maybe Seattle would get Fat Geralt, or the selection would include characters from the first game.
I thought wrong.
Maybe there are people out there in the world who want to grind to unlock the guy who had anal sex with Abby as a playable character. I personally stuck with Jackson.
I do like that Joel and Ellie (really, who else are you playing?) have different mechanics. Joel is sturdier but can’t dodge; Ellie is nimbler and gets more skills, but doesn’t get a flamethrower. Joel also starts with an extremely OP twelve-shot revolver, which I imagine looks something like this:
But I also don’t think the game works very well without dodge. Joel isn’t nearly powerful enough to compensate for such an enormous deficiency.
It still feels amazing to be back in Joel’s body again. His running animations are bizarre, but he’s still recognizable as the man from the first game. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for Fake Ellie. Inhabiting a character that you identify with is half the battle in a third-person action game.
There are plenty of minor issues. Upgrading your weapons requires you to sit through a pointless animation each time. Runs are too short in general, and there’s no metaprogression scheme beyond characters and cosmetics. I would have liked the ability to risk longer runs for better gear, but the course you take is linear after a certain point, so you can’t choose to risk two more missions before facing the Bloater like you might be able to in a real Rogue-like. I also would have liked to see a better character selection, at least including Bill, Tess, and Henry.
I suspect they would have been more popular than Lev and Abby. Perhaps that is why they were not included.
It is otherwise still The Last of Us: Part II. Despite being underbaked, it’s fun for a few hours. You can edit out the worst types of missions and extend timers using the “Custom Run” feature as well, so if you really don’t want to have invisible clickers instakill you, you don’t have to.
This is a preferable way for spending time with Ellie and Joel than enduring the main campaign again.
But its worst flaw is that it isn’t multiplayer. “No Return” would be a phenomenal co-op version of The Last of Us. Playing as Joel and Ellie together, fighting through a procedurally generated Seattle, and beating the shit out of generic bad people would have been thrilling. The lack of any PvE coop was always one of my biggest complaints with the first game’s multiplayer. The Last of Us as a franchise is about cooperation; why not let us play both characters at once?
The missed potential is painful, but the same can be said for this entire franchise. I guess we should just be happy to receive something that isn’t abjectly terrible for a change.
You can buy it here on PSN.