Alyssa Maronek

*SPOILERS IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED THE GAME IN ITS ENTIRETY PLEASE DO NOT READ AS ITS VERY DIFFICULT TO DISCUSS THE FLAWS WITHOUT MENTIONING SOME KEY SCENES IN THE GAME* First off i want to say this, as terrible as it is that joel died very very early on in the story, i am not simply leaving a bad review on the game because of this. I will touch on this later after going over the positives. The gameplay itself is very nice, the areas you are left to explore are beautifully created and the suspense you feel during the playthrough navigating through the post apocalyptic world are even better then the first imo. Some people complain about the abundance of resources but I never thought of this as an issue since a major part of the game takes place the area is riddled with enemies, and you are tasked xploring a city with an armed forced marching around and in another half on the side of the large armed force,therefore the abundance of reaources makes sense. The dialogue between all characters was well written, especially during the flashbacks of Joel and Ellie. Now this may seem like a fair amount of positives, maybe enough to get it a 2 or 3 star but while i appreciated many elements. The game overall just left a bad taste in my mouth. Switching over to Abby after seeing her kill more characters that we has grown to care for just made me feel as if i was slugging towards the finish line,only continuing to see why the game took this turn. And while the purpose of being in abby's perspective was not necessarily a "mistake" or "wrong" move, showing how her motives for revenge are similiar to ellie, it just felt so out of place. Its a difficult task to show this "moral grey ground" theme between both sides when the characters are just not comparible at all. Abby as a newly introduced character literally kills off joel within the first hour of gameplay, a character that people have bonded and loved for 7 years now. And that makes her actions feel so much heavier. And then as a complete stranger who has done all these terrible things to characters we have bonded with we are then forced to play through and in the end sympathize with her. The theme and overall story are not bad per say. I kind of like the idea of focusing on the struggle between human groups in a "zombie" genre game, its just the writing and planning for how it could have been told that makes the difference. A quick fix i was thinking about was having us play from Abbys perspective FROM THE START. Introduce us to her task, tracking down her fathers killer but leave it in the dark about who it is. Build up good dialogue for her and her team. She already has these good interactions and the game does a good job showing how close she is to her companions. And then when we work up to meeting and getting saved by joel, drop the bomb like in the game. THEN we enter as ellie. Ellies motives dont need to be as established, most players can already sympathize with the feelings she has as we have already bonded with joel as well during the first game. Yes this will kill the secret as to why she did it for us, but it would have bought more time for Abby to attempt to get an even playing field amongst an already favored cast of characters. Granted i dont do storyboarding for video games this is just food for thought or things ive imagined.