I feel like the only people who like the last of us 1 and hate 2 are

i hate the second one because its gross zionist propaganda with awful writing. like even before i saw he said it was an allegory for Israel i thought the morality was gross and unrealistic.

Neil druckman has said Joel was a bad person and not a hero.

He's the protagonist and the prime mover of the story. You can credibly describe him as an anti-hero. But when you set him up as the avatar of the player, you're inviting sympathy. That's before you get to the point where his primary motivators are grief and love.

Imo he got what he deserved.

There's a (heavily doomer-slanted) view that everyone in The Last Of Us gets what they deserve. But this comes from the portrayal of the various characters as desperate, short-sighted, and inherently flawed beings. That ads a great deal of artistry to the setting. The fungus-zombies become more of an environmental hazard than antagonists, while the humans continue to plot their own futures in increasingly dire circumstances.

I also think last of us 2 is a great (albeit brutal) game

LoU1 ends with a certain sense of hopefulness. Survival in the face of tragedy and desperation.

I think LoU2 might have been a better game if it changed genres. Move away from the 3rd person survival-puzzle-horror and into civilization building, where you collect survivors and build up your neighborhood in the style of a Co-op Fortnite or Arma game. Maybe even flirt with a 4X style, where you get a certain number of days between major events that you can use to explore, hunt/gather, tech up/diplomacize, and finally try to wipe out the zombie menace with your coalition of family, friends, and allies.

Instead, it feels like the game fell into the Walking Dead trap, where they just kinda repeated the same themes and tropes from the original with a different suite of secondary characters.

This lined up well lol

LoU2 kinda annoyed because it's just makes the main character completely unlikeable and unsympathetic. I basically wanted Ellie to die for being the worst fucking person imaginable.

The first game is one of my all-time favorite games, absolutely love it, so it's interesting that I never had the slightest interest in the second. I very much doubt I'll ever play it. For me, the ending of the first game is devastating, and is the end of Joel and Ellie's story. We don't need more. We know their lives will continue past the credits, we know the world the characters inhabit will go on, there's more plot that could unfold, but it doesn't need to. We know who these characters are now, we know the rules of their world, and whatever comes next is not going to reveal anything new about Joel and Ellie. We've been given enough that we can fill in the rest of their stories in our minds.

Which is why I didn't need a sequel with these characters. Or any sequel at all really, because as well-drawn as the setting may be, it's just another zombie apocalypse. The story of Ellie and Joel is why it's worth my time to trudge back out into the thousandth video game zombie apocalypse, so a sequel with the same setting and new characters was going to need to be spectacular. From everything I've heard, it sounds like a game that's jaw-dropping on a technical level, but is decidedly inferior to the first. I don't feel any fomo by skipping it. In my mind, it doesn't exist.

I just think the last of us 2 has a bad and confused story that doesn't execute its themes very well, which is not something I'd necessarily say about the first one

I don't like the 2nd one because it's got the worst case of a soggy middle I've seen in a recent game

By the time the actual ending came, I was still fearful that there was gonna be another epilogue

I couldn't get into the first one. Not really into zombie apocolypse settings, and didn't really feel hooked by the story which based on the gameplay i experienced seems to be the only reason to play it.

I have a sort of resentment toward games that really want to be a movie instead. As if being more like a movie is what makes a game "art."

I know the general story and the ending of TLOU 1 does seem genuinely heartbreaking and well done, and i know a lot of peopoe love it, its just not for me

I liked TLoU, and I wouldn't say I hate the second one, but I definitely didn't like it.

The viewpoint switch half-way trough was just such a weird storytelling choice. It didn't work at all for me.

After you've played trough half the game and (hopefully) gotten invested in it, it just suddenly expects you to play the rest of the game as someone else you have zero reason to care about, and it basically starts a completely different plot that feels unrelated to what came before.

By the time they got back to Ellie for the final part, I was so bored I had just stopped caring. Maybe more competent writers could have pulled something like that off, but the Tlou2 team definitely didn't.

Did you make this post just to dunk on Joel? lol