Nothing new here I don't think. (I started writing this before Tacos posted)I agree with everything except
All just reiterating what I've said.Spoiler for Hidden:
The criticism around this game has been weird.
Personally the game is weird because it feels like one of the best flawed games I've played.
There are some games that I've played that I just have a hard time pointing to a fundamental flaw. Uncharted 2, Bloodborne are like this for me. Not that either are perfect. But I personally have a hard time picking out major issues I have with either.
But this game I feel like has a few major flaws, and something that isn't really a flaw, it just feels worse compared to the previous game. But I still enjoyed the heck of it. I'll get back to this.
The other part of weird criticism, is that it feels like ~80% of the criticism of this game isn't actually criticism of the game but just nonsense.
Like complaining that Abby is trans, when she isn't.
So there's a weird issue where people are mostly talking about nonsense.
Most of the criticism that I really disagree with seems to come in 2 categories:
-that the game is political (due to LGBT stuff mostly)
-People that just couldn't get over Joel's death (people thought Joel would never have gone into a room with people), (that having a woman kill him was a political thing), (I can't play as the woman who killed Joel)
It seems like a lot of the criticism comes from people who either didn't play the game or they went in expecting an agenda and they focused on everything that agreed with them.
Like Joel's scene:
-people thought that they were giving too much information. Like the Angry Legend review brought this up. But if you watch the scene, they give their name and basically a generic we live around here. And yet the angry Legend review had a skit where they were giving guard patrol information and everything else.
-people thought that Joel wouldn't have gone into that room. Despite the fact that they were chased by a horde of infected, and they basically saved Joel and Tommy's life. Even then, if you actually watch Joel, he's tensely looking around the room. Tommy is being more pleasant, and that's always been who he was.
It's just ridiculously frustrating.
I think the game has some fundamental issues with it's structure. I'm not sure what the best thing to do would have been.
It doesn't feel like there's a perfect way to structure the story, a lot of it feels like pros and cons.
Like if you swapped Ellie and Abby, getting to know Abby before she kills Joel, it'd be weird because the swap would be further back. It seems really hard to intertwine stories like this, while mostly retaining the surprises and continuity.
I almost think the best thing would have been to have Abby play in her own game between the first and second. Would have helped some people like the game better, but something would be lost.
It just feels like how ever the game were to get structured something would get lost because of it.
(Like Legend pointed out, the switch to Abby where you start humanizing the people that Ellie killed was pretty powerful. Swapping their story lines might have made Abby more relatable, but you would lose out on that humanization.)
Swapping between Ellie and Abby every day is another thing that could have happened. But it would have hurt some things.
I said before that the thing that really makes the first game shine by comparison, is that it was broken up by smaller lighter moments. It made Ellie feel human, when you had these little moments. No one gets that treatment in this game. It's not a flaw per se, it is just something that I think should have been changed.
The pacing is the other big issue I have with the game. Some of it comes with story structure, setting the players expectations better. I think I was like 2 hours in, when I was finally expecting that Abby's section would be 8-12 hrs long like Ellie's was. Before that I was expecting it to be half as long, to get back to the cliffhanger.
And overall it's just a really long game. Like I am certain another studio would have packaged it as 2 Uncharted sized games, that are each 10-12 hrs long.
Spoiler for Hidden:
