The Last of Us: Part II | How Dissonance Can Destroy an Experience
In many ways, The Last of Us: Part II is a hallmark achievement in video games. The accessibility options open games to a broader audience than ever before, including people who have been sidelined by game designers for years. The graphics are unparalleled, full of stunning detail. The world-building is immersive and consuming. Mini-stories are lodged into every nook of the environment, even into the clothing of the infected. The combat made my curl my toes in terror. The animation is a jaw-dropping technical feat—fabric sways without clipping, faces express realistic emotions which pull at the heartstrings, and lighting pings and floods across the screen, providing the perfect atmosphere for each section. The acting is gut-wrenching and will no doubt win awards. As it should.
But The Last of Us: Part II struggles with its story. Not in the way you might think. The story follows through on the set-ups and navigates the peaks and valleys a story needs to be effective. If it were a television show or a book, it might have been successful. But it’s a game. And therein lies the problem.
The hardest thing to justify in video games is violence, which is why war or inhuman creatures are such a common subject matter. Character motivation is simplified when it comes from the command of a higher authority, like the top brass, or when the enemy isn’t human. When games don’t have this, it can get complicated, and while that’s not a bad thing, it does force the writers to think things through. Critics have long admonished the Tomb Raider series for its character’s unjustifiable actions. Lara Croft kills scores of people and destroys far more precious artifacts than she preserves. If you look too hard, you discover she certainly isn’t “good.” So, Naughty Dog sought to use the story of The Last of Us to show that how challenging it is to justify violence in “good” characters, even in the post-apocalypse. The moment you step into the game, you step into that confusing middle ground. Is the enemy really the enemy? Or are you?
The snag in The Last of Us: Part II is that it is difficult to get on board with its characters’ actions. In the first game, we’re not always fond of Joel, but we are sold on his goal of getting Ellie to the Fireflies. And as we see the flickering of his possible redemption, we become more invested. Even at the end, when we’re running through the hospital with an unconscious Ellie, questioning whether we’re doing the right thing, a small part of all of us wants to save Ellie because we’ve grown to love her. Just like Joel. While the story is a tragedy, the fall takes place in the last five minutes when we play as Ellie, thus removing us from being Joel and allowing us to wash our hands of his actions.
The Last of Us: Part II offers no such meshing of player desire and storytelling. The gameplay and cutscenes are so visceral, the gurgles and screams of fellow humans so traumatizing, that the audience is shocked as Ellie and Abby slice, shoot, and strangle their way through the population of Seattle in the name of vengeance—something we know is wrong the moment Ellie sets foot on her journey. This leaves the audience in a state of emotional dissonance (a discrepancy of felt and expressed emotions) as we play.
Some have stated that the game is boring. It’s not. When there is cognitive or emotional dissonance, it becomes too chaotic for the human brain to handle, and so we react by checking out. What many players are experiencing is not boredom, but the triggering of a defense mechanism, one which stems from being forced into an inauthentic story.
In the middle of the game, the perspective changes to Abby. “Why are we here?” the player asks. We’re quick to discover it’s for a guilt trip. While Abby’s story is well-told, the force-fed shame is hard to swallow after already being uncomfortable with what is happening in the plot. The game ends up being a morality tale in which Naughty Dog bludgeons the player. “Do you get it?! Do you?! You’re the monster!” By hour 15, the player knows this all too well but is left trying to shield themselves from the story’s assault as they navigate Ellie and Abby through another 10+ hours of violent gameplay which undercuts the story’s moral. The onslaught is exhausting.
The last section in Santa Barbara is the hardest to play because the player fully understands the consequences and destruction that comes from death and trying to “eat the clock,” but the writers drag us away from Dina to Ellie’s final confrontation with Abby anyway. Story-wise, it needs to happen because we broke with Ellie to play as Abby before she completed her arc. While Ellie relents and realizes that vengeance is an empty gesture, the audience learned this lesson hours and hours ago, and so the scene is robbed of its catharsis.
As Ellie walks into the woods, alone, the thing she feared the most in the first game, the moment does manage to stir tenderness once more, but it’s due to seeing Ellie’s relationship with Joel in a prior cutscene. The game has to invoke a dynamic it developed in the first game to get us to re-engage with the story (it did this in an earlier section with Joel and Ellie at a museum, too). Sadly, it does little to soothe the drudgery the player has gone through. The continuation of Ellie’s narrative has potential, as does Abby and Lev’s, but who knows if the audience will trust Naughty Dog with another experience after this.
The Last of Us: Part II is a milestone in gaming development. By most quantitative measures, it’s great. But qualitatively, emotionally, morally, it leaves the player wondering what the story just made them do.
Multiple times, I thought about quitting so I didn’t have to play as characters whose goals were the antithesis of my own, but that meant skipping the story and incredible technical craftsmanship. So, I completed it. And I do wonder if I made the right choice, because the game itself kept telling me that stopping was the moral thing to do. This leaves me to conclude that you win by not participating in the violence, the brutality, the revenge. You win by flipping the ‘off’ switch.
