Josh Grant

All of the backlash against this game giving it one star is absolute nonsense. I beat the game last night, and can genuinely say it's one of the greatest examples of mixing gameplay and storytelling I've ever seen. The entire point of this game is to put you into a situation where you spend hours building up a specific mindset and reinforcing those beliefs, and it then forces you to reassess them and really think "Sometimes things aren't always as black and white as they seem." Every single one-star review is someone who just feels the need to call Naughty Dog out for making them actually evaluate themselves as a person and acknowledge their faults. If you genuinely just didn't like the story of the game, that's fine. Not every story can please 100% of people. But the visuals are amazing, the environmental design is phenomenal, and the voice acting as absolutely top notch. Even if you say you personally hated the gameplay to it's very core and not a single aspect of it was enjoyable for you, the game had no major glitches, was incredibly well put together, was visually stunning, and the characters all felt real and like they genuinely believed in what they were doing. That makes this game worth no less than two stars (I would argue three personally, but I'm talking absolute lowest possible review score) because at the bare minimum it works well and looks and sounds great. The fact that it has almost no 4, 3, or 2 star reviews compared to the thousands of 5 and 1 stars should show you exactly what's going on here. The game obviously isn't perfect. Nothing is. there were a couple of small bumps here and there, and anyone could cherry pick a handful of instances to argue against the compliments I gave the game. It's something like sixteen hours long, nothing can be absolutely perfect for sixteen hours with absolutely no flaws for anyone when it's being played across thousands of systems with billions of variations in the inputs leaving potential for something to throw an unexpected wrench into the gears of the game's internal formulas for what to do and when. But the fact remains that as a whole, this game is a major milestone in gaming and is something every game should aspire to be The Last of Us Part II is a perfect argument of games as art. It uses the interactive media in which it's presented to make everything much more impactful than the story would be if it were just passively consumed. And to top it all off, it's one of my favorite games that I've ever played.