YMMV / The Last of Us Part II

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A-C

• Accidental Aesop: If you're gonna murder someone, make sure to kill all the witnesses. Especially when your intended victim has loved ones who won't take kindly to their death AND know your identity AND know where you live.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • One underlying interpretation of Ellie is that from the first game she has something of a death wish. Her talking about her and Riley's infection, and even now after her immunity is revealed she is still waiting "her turn" for the end, her general reckless nature, along with discovering the truth of what Joel did in the hospital, coming to terms that her immunity now means nothing overall with her being chosen over any hope for a cure, outright telling Joel that he should have left her there, stating "my life would have fucking mattered!". This along with the severe mental trauma she suffers from the second game's violent revenge cycle, it could be seen that Ellie's decision to finish things with Abby at the cost of her family is her wanting to die, notably forcing the former into an outright fight rather than just killing her when she was tied to the pillars.
  • Another moment that's open to a number of different views is Ellie ultimately letting Abby go. One possibility is that amongst the pain she feels, Ellie is suffering tremendous guilt over the falling out between her and Joel over what happened in the Firefly hospital. Abby's killing of Joel was torturous and brutal, but in an emotional way, as was Ellie cutting ties with him for years, and it's understandable how he would find the latter more painful. Ellie hates herself for not doing more to forgive Joel, and her hatred of Abby is part of all those externalized feelings, her revenge mission being like an addiction allowing her not to self-reflect.^note Or, more precisely, she is only able to partially self-reflect because of her horribly mixed feelings about Joel – whose uncertain, messy mixture is alluded to through her reflective flashbacks – and her traumas that can be tipped in favor of sparing Abby by her memory of her conversation with Joel the night before he was murdered. While she is pulled towards staying with Dina and JJ, she is still unable to live healthily and without PTSD episodes, and so she goes after Abby in California less out of a need for revenge at this point than desperation to make her suffering stop by getting rid of the last major cause. Her above death wish helps.Seeing a vision of Joel from their last ever conversation, Ellie has a realization, is able to forgive Abby and herself – or at least start trying to, as she said to Joel – and come to terms with what happened between her and her father-figure.
  • In a similar way, Ellie leaving Joel's guitar behind is a melancholy moment that shows just all she has lost through her revenge. While a sad scene, it can also be taken as symbolically showing her finally forgiving Joel, making peace with all that happened between them, and being finally ready to start a new life.
  • Considering that the early part of the game hints at Tommy having been ruthless in the past, and he ends up going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge after his brother's murder, what does that say about him? Is he a decent person who ended up being pushed too far, or is he more of a Retired Monster who'd merely kept his demons in check while living in Jackson? Considering that in the previous game, Tommy and Joel went their separate ways for what is implied to be differences in their actions, it's possible Tommy was somewhere in between the two.
  • Many have criticized how Joel and Tommy were so quick to reveal their identities to strangers; resulting in the former's death. However, some have defended this (most prominently Video Game Dunkey) by claiming Joel is not the same person as he was before. He has warmed up and is more willing to put his guard down and help others; also arguing this makes his death more tragic.
  • Minor character Seth giving Ellie a sandwich as an apology for the awful homophobic insult he made towards Ellie and Dina is open to different interpretations. The game appears to frame it as an insincerely hollow gesture given Maria seemly had to force him into it and his excuse of being drunk is as a lot of people can agree pretty damn feeble. Yet on the other hand one of the notes you can find reveals Seth’s wife and eldest son were killed by bandits and his other sons almost starved to death, meaning his gesture of giving Ellie food could actually been genuine and his backstory, while not justifying his actions in the slightest does regardless explain why he’s got such awful attitude. Seth may just be a sad old widower with homophobic views.
  • Joel's calm, dignified words to Abby may indicate that he's expected to die like this for some time, acknowledging that he deserves it, and his sole (unanswered) plea is that Abby not do it in front of Ellie, meaning at least he has died as man who has relearned to value others' lives before his own.
  • Was Abby truly a cruel person out to avenge her father in the most extreme ways possible, or was she a vulnerable woman easily manipulated by Isaac and the WLF’s influence which led her down a dark path with years of training leading her to becoming desensitized to her humanity with her brutal methods like her murder of Joel the only thing she’s been taught? It may be possible if she had been with kinder people she would have either decided to kill Joel quick or decided he wasn’t worth it.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Dina repeatedly reminding Ellie that they should get back to the "Fuck FEDRA" gate with the gas gets rather annoying if you're trying to explore downtown Seattle.
• Anvilicious: The game's anti-revenge/violence message, and the ways it portrays that message (such as enemies crying out the names of their comrades) has led to debate if the game needed to be heavy-handed and unrelenting or is shallow and emotionally manipulative. Comparisons (positive or otherwise) to Spec Ops: The Line, NieR, NieR: Automata, Metal Gear Solid, Undertale and LISA were common in the months leading up to and after the release of the game.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • For some, the game has a problem picking a lane and sticking to it, using flashbacks and perspective switches to jump around to multiple different plot threads. The frequency of these flashbacks can disrupt the pacing of the game severely, and many a review from critics and gamers mentioned getting pretty irritable at this and just wanting to get on with the story. While, yes, this is meant to make you feel for the characters especially those in Abby's group, it likewise bogs the pace of the game down. It's been suggested if they wanted to tell both Ellie and Abby's stories, then it would've been better if they made them separate campaigns rather than cramming them into one story.
  • Right as the game seems to be leading up to a climax with Ellie and Abby's confrontation in the theatre, the game abruptly cuts back in time three days to show Abby's side of the story, putting the theatre climax on hold for several hours. Several critics (especially Writing on Games and Zero Punctuation) specifically identified this as a pacing killer, as the tension from the confrontation is undercut by having to spend hours with Abby. The fact that the flashback happens after she kills Jesse makes this worse.
  • The WLF/Scar conflict has been criticized by many as being a drawn-out conflict that just exists to give Abby human enemies to fight and to justify her not being around during the scenes where Ellie kills her targets. While the WLF receive a fair bit of fleshing out, the Scars are far more flat and have no real charisma.
• Badass Decay: Some players feel like Joel trusting Abby and her friends and telling them his and Tommy’s names was out of character for him. As a man who spent more than two decades doing whatever it took to survive and killing several people out of self-preservation, he should have known better than to trust a group of people whose motives were unknown to him. Another common complaint is his death is so undignified as most players expected him to die while protecting Ellie.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Abby. She became so controversial that her voice actor, Laura Bailey, was sent death threats by both the fans and detractors of the game just for voicing her. She got a lot of flack right away for killing Joel in cold blood in front of Ellie. To make matters worse, gamers had to play as Abby in order to understand her point of view. Is she an irredeemable psychopath who deserves to lose everything, or is she actually a sympathetic character who realizes the error of her ways and tries to redeem herself by taking care of Lev like Joel did for Ellie? To make matters more contentious, it is Abby who ultimately is granted the moral high ground above Ellie as she is the one to stop her revenge crusade and spares Ellie and Dina as opposed to Ellie who learns her lesson far too late and loses everything. However, the latter point is undermined by Abby taking pleasure in the thought of icing Dina even after learning the latter was pregnant, only stopped when Lev objects. Even Ellie is horrified when she learns Mel, who she murdered, was pregnant. It doesn't help that Abby is given the grace of not having alienated everyone in her own quest of revenge, and the ability to recover enough just in time to have a happy ending with Lev, seen often as an undeserved karmic surplus compared to Ellie, who is left alone, only just having come back from the brink, and sadly not soon enough to still have anyone by her side.
  • Ellie's portrayal in this game proved quite divisive at least. Is she a jerkass psychopath who only cares about herself and abandons others for her own sake of revenge, or a sympathetic Woobie that was forced to watch Joel get murdered in cold blood, nearly gets killed briefly after, and had to endure all the hardships caused by herself and Abby? Some are also divided on whether or not Ellie deserves living her biggest fear at the end of the game: being alone, especially in contrast to Abby, who was able to recover and find happiness with Lev, despite not fundamentally being a better character. The only possible recourse would be Ellie finding someone new in the aftermath, or Dina forgiving and returning to Ellie.
• Best Boss Ever: The Rat King boss fight is the game at its most high-octane action-filled best, as it becomes like one of the more action-based Resident Evil titles. It's truly scary, yet exhilarating and it doesn't even end when you beat the Rat King as the Stalker that breaks off from it is waiting for you after you're done.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Shortly after launch, the game's infamous sex scene between Abby and Owen became one of the most-discussed moments, with a still from it becoming a meme.
• Best Level Ever: Ellie's flashback to her 16th birthday with Joel where they explore a museum has been praised as one of the few moments of sincerity and levity in an otherwise very bleak game, while calling back to the better parts of Joel and Ellie's bond in the first game.
• Better as a Let's Play: After the controversy regarding story leaks, many a potential player decided to wait it out and see the game from Let's Players videos. Wanting to see how others would react to it, especially the infamous scene where Joel gets murdered.
• Broken Aesop: The game has the messages that violence isn't always the answer and revenge sometimes just becomes a cycle of violence and further revenge and can even destroy everyone you love, with an attempt to call players out on their treating death as nothing by making the death animations very brutal and giving every character a name. There are four problems with this, however:
  • One: The game often gives you no choice but to kill and will continue to call you out on it, even if you avoid violence as much as the game will allow. Furthermore, although some wounded enemies will beg and plead for mercy, if you do decide to spare them then as soon as you turn your back and try to walk away, they'll get up and attack you anyway.
  • Two: Much of your killing/violence is in self-defense against those who have actively done worse things than you (like the Wolves, who kill anyone who happens upon them, danger or not).
  • Three: Inconsistency of character reactions to killing and death. This one depends on the character.
    • Ellie avoids it. Each successive chapter, which if the game is played according to the typical gamer's behavior, has her violently killing swathes of Wolves and Seraphites, mostly in self-defense, and at times killing one of Joel's murderers. This brings her nothing but agony. She's in a downward spiral psychologically and emotionally, being torn apart by what she's doing, as a real and truly decent, and traumatized, person would be in a world where There Are No Therapists. It culminates in her killing Owen and Mel when they try to fight against her, forcing her to kill them both...and she realizes to her horror that Mel was pregnant, an act that she believes she can't come back from, and right after decides that revenge may not be worth it. Although she later continues her revenge, she initially rebuffs Tommy's encouragement to do so until he guilt-trips her. The narrative treats her as being wrong for this: She ends up losing basically everything that matters to her by the story's conclusion, and this is treated as being a result of her lust for revenge, which she doesn't really have.
    • Abby doesn't avoid it. Her character's ascent from Hate Sink begins when she becomes playable, and it's clear through her dreams that killing Joel brought her nothing. The guilt from this subtly eats at her, encouraging her to try and find redemption by helping Yara and Lev escape the Seraphites. This is fine, but the problem starts when she's in active combat against Seraphites, wiping out swathes of them in the same way Ellie killed numerous Wolves. Eventually, the Wolves, which she was part of for four years, betray her, forcing her to kill them. At no point does Abby express any emotional turmoil or trauma over the deaths of these people. She's entirely unaffected by the massive amount of killing she does, flying in the face of the anti-violence aesop of the game. It gets worse when she discovers Mel and Owen's bodies, and tracks Ellie down to her hideout, where she kills Jesse, beats everyone up, and gets ready to gleefully kill the pregnant Dina. The only reason she doesn't is not out of morality or guilt, but because of Lev's abject horror seeing that she was about to knowingly murder a pregnant woman. The narrative treats her as being right for this: Abby is allowed to have these outbursts with little consequence, to the point of even getting inadvertently rescued from the Rattlers by Ellie in the end.
  • Four: Despite the game’s message about how your enemies are people too and that every life is precious, almost every faction is borderline cartoonishly evil so you don’t feel bad about gunning down their mooks en masse and there are several characters, up to and including some of Abby’s friends, the people the game condemns Ellie for hunting down, whose violent and painful deaths are meant to be cathartic.
• Broken Base: This game is extremely controversial for many reasons. It's quite telling that even Wikipedia notes that "discourse surrounding the game became adversarial".
  • The game's early plot twist: Joel's death at the hands of Abby. Supporters commended Naughty Dog and Neil for making an incredibly bold decision, felt it was necessary for Joel to die as a consequence for his actions and felt it fit perfectly with the theme of revenge, loss, and mercy. Fans of the original game went ballistic, saying that not only did the scene betray what made the predecessor so special, but Joel was killed in such a contrived and anticlimactic way that it was unemotional and rather laughable at best. A third group confesses that they were okay with the plot point in theory considering many had guessed it would happen before the leaks went public, but felt that the execution was poor and ultimately why many were upset about it.
  • As evidenced by him letting his guard down constantly and even giving out his name (although it was Tommy who gave their names first) unlike the cautious and Properly Paranoid man he was in previous game, Joel's overall behavior was also extremely debated by fans. For defenders, they claim that since Joel lived in Jackson for four years, it was only natural that his survival instinct had begun to dull. Fans believed that living in Jackson for four years doesn't eliminate the fact that Joel is a survivor with 20 to 25 years of experience and he wouldn't have let total strangers know so much about him or his brother and get the drop on him so easily. Even further, the complete lack of foreshadowing of Joel losing his survival edge makes the assertion feel forced.
  • Was the infected taking a backseat in the narrative necessary? Supporters claim that focusing on the infected was unnecessary as it would have put less focus on the theme of revenge and that it already has enough infected shown to the point that they really weren't taking a backseat. Fans believe that a lot of opportunities for the infected could have been shown, as shown by the Rat King, and thought that the infected should've had more importance in order to learn more about them and expand on the lore.
  • Is a theme of revenge really an appropriate choice for a game with two playable characters, that advances only on player agency, where the plotline is each character taking revenge on the other? Supporters argue that this is the point: Seeing both characters fleshed out supports the theme of how bad revenge is. Critics argue that trying to humanize the target of a revenge story works too well, making the player uninterested in helping the protagonist get revenge.
  • Whether Abby's sections and her development should have been excluded. Supporters believe that not only does it allow two different perspectives and allow players to make a connection to Abby and empathize with despite her actions, while others argued that her sections were poorly paced and too outside of the overarching plot, feeling more like a string of random side quests. In addition, they believed Abby's section should have been either DLC or its own separate campaign as it would have made Abby a more compelling enigmatic figure in Ellie’s story.
  • The climactic battle between Ellie and Abby is the second most controversial part of the story. In the end, Ellie decides to spare Abby's life. Critics saw this as an Ass Pull without Foreshadowing after her many other murders, and/or argue that it would have been better story-wise if Ellie killed Abby as a sign of her making a terrible mistake and having to live with it. Supporters argued that Ellie sparing Abby made sense because of her guilt, and/or that it was a better choice story-wise for breaking the cycle of revenge.
  • While the gameplay is generally less controversial than the story, there's still a bit of a split between those who were happy that Naughty Dog kept with the same overall gameplay as in the first entry, and those who wish they had gone down the Actionized Sequel route and leveraged the extra power of the PlayStation 4 to have the main focus of the game be taking on much larger hordes of infected. Those who would have rather this have been a more out-and-out action game point out that for those who don't like the story, there's essentially no reason to play this game over its prequel or any number of other contemporary survival horror games, while those who were happy with the gameplay direction tend to feel that going down the Actionized Sequel route would have made it too similar both to the previous year's Days Gone and to another contentious survival horror sequel, Resident Evil 6.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • A pretty unique one regarding Abby. She murders Joel and later Jesse, but she's also playable so she can die in the gameplay. Because of that, players that actively dislike her can let her die in plenty of gruesome deaths. For instance getting beaten to death by runners and human enemies alike, crushed by rubble, burned to death or even letting Ellie kill her, consummating her vengeance. In fact, just like with all the deaths Joel and Ellie can suffer in the first game, there are montages dedicated to them.
  • Tommy killing Manny — arguably the least sympathetic of Abby's friends, who gleefully took part in Joel's murder and even spat on his corpse — was met with roaring approval from those who spent the game waiting for that character to get his comeuppance.
  • Ellie throwing herself and Nora into an area full of spores with no masks, and eventually cornering and torturing her to death with a pipe, especially after she had the balls to mock Joel's death in front of Ellie. Made all the more pleasing by the fact that Nora suffers a similar vicious fate to that of Joel. The only upsetting aspect is the impact it has on Ellie.
  • Ellie mowing her way through Wolves really serves as this. Despite the numerous attempts to humanize the enemies and demonize Ellie, it doesn't change that they still attack her on sight without nary a hesitation. Plus, many times members will try to plead for mercy, only to try to kill Ellie when she turns her back. Add that to what's learned about them later on, especially with how brutal and xenophobic they are towards outsiders, and are more than willing to torture people, and even kill children just because they come from the enemy, it makes it much more cathartic to see them go from being all high and mighty to pleading for their lives as Ellie takes them down.
  • Abby getting captured and beaten by Rattlers can be seen as well deserved karma not only for brutally killing Joel but also for killing Jesse, shooting Tommy and attempting to kill Dina especially relishing after being told she was pregnant and just leaving the theater unpunished. And if that’s not enough, beating her down in the final battle is just icing on the cake.
• Cliché Storm: One common criticism towards the story held by those critical of the game is that once you strip away the fancy exterior, all you are left with is a fairly by the numbers revenge plot, using all the common tropes and cliches that have been done to death over the years with very little to actually set itself apart.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Ever since the game’s plot was leaked, Abby has caught a lot of flack for brutally murdering Joel, and claims also circulated about her allegedly being a trans woman, even though she is cisgender. This misconception was due to a combination of a leak saying that there was a transgender person in the game, not specifying who it was, and a very selective screen capture of her appearance in a very pivotal scene that was part of the leaks, wherein her long braided hair was not visible. Her long braid not being visible, combined with her muscular physique and flat chest, caused a major case of Viewer Gender Confusion and led to a lot of transphobic jokes at Abby’s expense and general mockery. It’s rather ironic considering her companion, Lev, who actually is a transgender boy, is completely ignored by the same people who made such jokes about her, though this probably has a lot to do with the fact that Lev is nowhere near as widely hated as Abby.
  • Many people have spread false information stating that Neil Druckmann did motion capture in the sex scene between Abby and Owen, even insinuating that he's a sexual abuser on-par with Harvey Weinstein. There were faked tweets being circulated, becoming a big enough issue to the point where Laura Bailey had to debunk the rumors herself, and point out that the tweets stating otherwise were fake. It's also worth noting that the character people claimed was Druckmann's self-insert was Manny, who, a) is actually based on his actor, Alejandro Edda, and b) never had sex with Abby.
  • Since the game was leaked, many fans have bought into Joel's lie that there was no cure for the infection and that the Fireflies had experimented on many immune people before with no success.
• Complete Monster: Isaac Dixon is the leader of the Washington Liberation Front (WLF), aka the Wolves. A warmongering tyrant, Isaac has sacrificed many of his own men to take over, having citizens rounded up to be controlled in one place and shot if they refuse. Engaging with the religious cult, the Seraphites, Isaac abducts prisoners to torture for information before attempting a wide-scale assault with the intent of massacring the Seraphites completely to the last man, woman, and child. Even when finding out Abigail "Abby" Anderson, his best soldier, is sheltering a Seraphite boy named Lev, Isaac simply attempts to execute both of them.
• Contested Sequel: One of the single greatest examples within the early 2020s. Many fans felt that it was a masterpiece that lived up to the original. Many others consider it an insult to the original due to its extremely controversial story decisions and lack of mechanical innovation. Others felt that it was still a good game, just one that doesn’t live up to the original.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • The Seraphites. A religious, fanatical cult with tribalistic scars across their faces that believes the cordyceps infection was an act of God to "cleanse" the world of sinners, they hunt down any outsiders such as WLF members or apostates, strings them up and guts them alive in what they consider a merciful way to "free" them. They communicate with each other via creepy whistles, and are much more physical to engage with in combat than WLF members, often sporting hammers, machetes and clubs, that is, when they're not simply firing arrows at you with deadly accuracy. Even some of the game's detractors admit to finding the Seraphites' introduction scene and every subsequent section where you face off with the cultists to be among the best parts of the game.
    • Even creepier, the Seraphites might originally have been a smart adaptation to the new world. Guns, ammunition, technology, all the old-world things the WLF, FEDRA, Jackson, etc rely on; it won’t last, and the infrastructure to create more in any quantity is rotting away. Sooner or later the surviving human race will be down to swords and bows and wooden houses and telling legends about where the ‘demons’ came from. There are hints that the Seraphite Prophet saw this coming and tried to give her followers an ideological scaffolding on which to build a sustainable post-Infection human culture, only to have it perverted into to a xenophobic, patriarchal Cult by her power-hungry successors.
  • The Rat King due to its creepy design and its horrifying intro scene.
• Critical Backlash: Many Youtube influencers bashed the game prior to release based solely on the leaked plot, labeling it one of the worst games ever made. Long after release, however, gamers who played the game for themselves found that while some of the criticisms were fair, others were overblown. Which ones were fair or overblown have players split.
• Critical Dissonance:
  • Subject to an extreme case of this in 2020. Professional reviews have been largely positive toward the game, with many giving perfect scores and praising it for its polished combat, its elaborate set pieces, its unflinching darkness and uncompromising subject matter, and its characters. YouTube influencers, on the other hand, were generally more negative for various reasons, such as killing a fan-favorite character, being extremely depressing compared to its more bittersweet and hopeful predecessor, perceived lack of moral ambiguity compared with the first game, and the belief that the game’s writing put more emphasis on inserting shock value and relentless misery into the narrative over telling an effective story with realistic characters. Fans were split among the extremes, with some agreeing with critics, and others agreeing with streamers. Despite the divisiveness, the game still won over a hundred fan-voted awards.
  • This is the case outside of the US as well, as international critics seemed to enjoy the game (with Japan's most popular publication giving it a 39/40 and awarding it "Best Scenario" of 2020), while streamers were more negative.

D-H

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Shamblers, being basically degraded Bloaters, are lethal opponents that can't be taken down stealthily, and they almost never come alone. Your only options are a direct confrontation with at least one mid-level bullet sponge with an "Instant Death" Radius, or a nail-bitingly tense attempt at sneaking past them without alerting their escorts. Anyone considering the latter should know that late-game Shamblers usually appear together with Stalkers, which are their own breed of this trope. If you start cursing every time you hear a Shambler's gurgling roars, no-one will blame you.
  • Stalkers continue their Demonic Spider reputation in this game; they're still annoyingly durable and fast, not to mention smart and quiet. In this game, however, there are far more encounters with them than the two that were in the first game (and one sequence in Left Behind). As an added bonus, they're even more difficult to detect with listen mode, so they will detect you in an area before you can detect them, and not trigger the "alert" music sting when you've been spotted. And that's when they're not bursting out of the walls as they do in a later chapter, alerting every other enemy in the area once they get the jump on you.
  • The Seraphites go down like any other human enemy, but they have archers in their crews that can inflict a Damage Over Time status on the character as long as they have an arrow stuck in them. They also use whistling to communicate, so it's hard to determine what the enemy AI's plans are. They also have one or two Giant Mooks in a group, who are Demonic Spiders themselves.
• Don't Shoot the Message: Even many people who agreed with the game’s anti-violence and anti-revenge messages were critical of the game’s handling of things like Joel’s death and Ellie choosing to spare Abby at the end of the game due to feeling that they were contrived and poorly written.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The game has An Aesop about violence being disturbing and destroying the lives of those involved yet the actual gameplay gets most of its fun from the combat in addition to the Catharsis Factor that comes from other violent acts against certain characters who are violently killed.
• Ending Fatigue: After what could have been the climax, where Ellie and Abby battle each other in Seattle and Abby's motivations are finally revealed, the game continues for another hour or so as it starts a completely new story arc where Ellie tries to live a life in peace but can't so she decides to chase after Abby again. Leading into a section where Ellie tracks Abby all the way to Santa Barbara and has to storm her way through a scavenger stronghold to get to her.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Jesse has received a generally warm reception, even amongst people who otherwise disliked the plot and characters. His role in the game isn't much, but accompanying Ellie in place of Joel on part of her journey and being an all-around Nice Guy causes him to stand out in a rather bleak story. His sudden death at Abby's hands only cements people's appreciation of him.
  • Mel has received some fanfare for calling Abby out for being hypocritical and aptly calling her a piece of shit. Being played by Ashly Burch certainly helps.
• Epileptic Trees: Abby was first shown in the Paris Games Week 2017 trailer, and there was an unusual amount of secrecy surrounding her character for no apparent reason, leading to speculation about who she was. A common theory was that she was Ellie's deceased mother Anna, and that her playable sections in the game would be flashbacks before Ellie was born. Supporting evidence for this included the character's redacted name in Naughty Dog tweets having four letters, some perceived facial resemblance, and the trailer scene in question showing the Seraphite named Emily threatening to stab Abby in the stomach, suggesting Abby was pregnant.
• Evil Is Cool: The Rat King quickly became one of the most well-known and loved enemies of the new game. Fans of Part 2 praised it for its creepy and original design, with many considering its introduction scene one of the scariest parts of the game, it also helps that you fight The Rat King as Abby meaning people that dislike her can watch it kill her.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The incredibly butch Boss in Mook Clothing Seraphite enemy was quickly dubbed Miss. Trunchbull, owing to the NPC's hilariously close resemblance to Pam Ferris' portrayal of the character in Matilda.
  • The rotund Rattler who captures Abby and Lev has come to be known as Fat Geralt, due to both characters sporting a similar hairstyle.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans of the original game have decided to ignore this game's existence for the sake of preserving the original's Bittersweet Ending. Even some of the fans who actually liked the new game tend to ignore Ellie sparing Abby's life, preferring to think she actually ended up killing her to get revenge for Joel's death, or ignore Ellie leaving the farm altogether. Alternatively, many YouTubers have admitted in either videos or comments that they allowed Ellie to kill Abby in the theater sequence and consider that the game's end.
• Fetish Retardant: The sex scene between Abby and Owen has gotten this reaction from some people, with them describing it as more awkward than romantic or sensually appealing.
• Fountain of Memes: Due to Abby's controversial role in the story, many actions or events pertaining to her have become very memetic.
• Fourth Wall Myopia: Part of why Abby is seen unsympathetically by some fans.
  • First, we've played as Joel in the first game and are thus aware of the complexities of his character, and the understandable (albeit selfish) reasons why he killed the Fireflies to save Ellie. From Abby's perspective, however, he'd just be an unrepentant murderer as she only knows that he killed someone she cared about in cold blood. The reality is that she wouldn't be aware of Joel as a person unlike the player, nor would she be aware that Joel came to see Ellie as a daughter. Also, while she was gleefully going to kill the pregnant Dina to avenge the equally pregnant Mel, she had no way to realize nor would have believed that Ellie didn't know that Mel was pregnant.
  • There's also the complaints that Abby being made sympathetic by caring for Lev is "clichè" or "not enough to redeem her", when it's basically the same as Joel having been made sympathetic by caring for Ellie. The difference is that the players didn't hate Joel before he met Ellie, as instead of seeing his horrible acts in the past, we only hear mentions of it: they were enough for Tommy to want to permanently break ties with Joel and had "nothing but nightmares" from what he did to keep them alive, Tess refers to her and Joel as "shitty people" and Joel basically confesses to Ellie that he's killed innocent people before. One can thus only imagine Joel's past dark deeds, while his horrific murder by Abby is shown in clear and gruesome detail, causing far more resistance to empathize with her character despite being portrayed as similar to Joel's past self and how he turned softer by caring for a child.
  • Ellie on the other hand, could have easily been the villain from another perspective. Everything Joel did in the first game was, from Abby’s perspective, a perfect reason to do what she did in the second game. But it inadvertently pushes Ellie to get revenge on everyone involved, crossing the line at some point during her murder quest but definitely before she threatens to kill an unrelated third party in front of a nearly lynched and exhausted Abby. This is only tolerable due to how easy Abby was to hate for some.
• Franchise Original Sin: A lot of the criticism and contention towards this game is directed at aspects that were already seen before in the first game:
  • By far the biggest criticism of the story overall is how unflinchingly dark it is. The first game was also incredibly dark, with Joel and Ellie going through a lot of strife to get to the Fireflies, only for Joel to kill them all to save Ellie from being killed by them for a slim chance to find a vaccine, rendering the entire journey to find them All for Nothing. The reason it wasn't much of a problem then was because despite the darkness, there was still enough hope that players were still able to get invested in the world and its characters without getting turned off by it, with Joel and Ellie's relationship playing a big part in that. This game, however, was criticized for being much darker while also lacking the same ray of hope that the first game and its Bittersweet Ending gave off. Through the game, Ellie is consumed by hatred, and countless people die in her ensuing Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Abby, the character responsible for Joel's death, is a protagonist and playable for half of the game and her sections are nearly as dark as Ellie's. In the end, both women have their lives ruined- Abby's hard-fought organization of the WLF collapses and all her companions save Lev die at Ellie's hands, while Ellie loses her friend Jesse and completely shatters her relationship with Dina leaving her with nothing, not even the ability to play guitar. As a result, the game's story was criticized for its incredibly dark narrative rather than praised for it like the first game.
  • Abby is an infamously divisive character, but her most controversial moment in the story can actually be likened to Joel in the first game. Much like Abby, Joel commits an amoral action for a loved one, but unlike Abby, Joel is actively loved by most of the series' fans. There's a few reasons to explain this, with several of them being described under Unintentionally Unsympathetic, but one of the biggest is timing. Joel's most evil action occurs near the very end of the first game. By that point, players have spent a whole game with him, learning to like and sympathize with the old Anti-Hero, as well as understanding why he made that decision in the first place. In Abby's case, her most unsympathetic deed happens close to the very beginning. By that point, players barely know her, seeing none of the positive aspects of her character that would appear later on. Not to mention, while Joel remained pragmatic and quickly dispatched of the doctor who would have cut Ellie open (as well as not being very happy about his decision), Abby was far more brutal, dragging out her execution of Joel and starting Ellie's desire for revenge. While feelings on a character can change, it's much easier for fans to like a morally dubious character more when their most positive traits are showcased before their most negative ones rather than the other way around. Similarly, in the first game Joel's time post-outbreak is alluded to be decidedly bloody, and it's all but stated he did things on the level of his own brutal death at Abby's hands^note  Justifying to Tommy at one point by saying it was for "survival", and implying to Ellie that he was not dissimilar to a Hunter by his comment of "being on both sides" of an ambush., in her case it's just explicitly shown rather than hinted at like Joel. Discussed early in the game when Dina asks if there is a possibility that Joel did things that Ellie doesn't know about, the latter responds with an almost humorously casual "high".
  • The previous game delved into Grey-and-Grey Morality in a way that most players decided was a success. Joel and Marlene (by extension the Fireflies) are presented on relatively even grounds, both of whom have their reasons for either wanting to kill Ellie to create a cure or save her life. Neither is portrayed as "right" over the other, even though Joel wins the conflict, and the game itself never takes an explicit side. In the end, the player is left to choose who they think is right. Much of this game's critique comes from the fact Abby and Ellie's supposedly grey conflict isn't handled as carefully, with their respective actions and behavior causing a Broken Aesop, an Unintentionally Unsympathetic reception for Abby, and an Unintentionally Sympathetic reception for Ellie. Many players decided Ellie was the one in the right in the conflict. The narrative treats Abby as right and Ellie as wrong. It's for these reasons that an aspect once praised in the first game was instead criticized by some fans in this one.
  • A lot of criticism was thrown at Lev and Abby's relationship, with lots of people and Let's Play viewers finding it to be underdeveloped, inauthentic, and forced. This same kind of bond between Joel and Ellie was the entire crux that made the first game so beloved. It's explicitly meant to parallel Joel and Ellie's relationship in the prior game, but there are several roadblocks that prevented Abby and Lev from being perceived the same way. First, Abby and Lev's relationship is far less prominent, making up barely half of the game's story, and additionally takes place over three days, while the first game made Joel and Ellie's relationship the entirety of the game and occurred over a year. There's far less time for the player to genuinely find attachment to Lev as they did to Ellie, and also so little In-Universe time he spends with Abby that it was hard for many players to believe that she would betray her former WLF allies who she'd known for four years, which is about 1500 days. Second, Lev and even Yara never actually learn about what Abby did to Joel, or to their own former Seraphite companions as she was the top Scar killer in the WLF. By contrast, Ellie figure out that Joel had been responsible for a lot of innocent deaths but chose to look past it, and the ending of this game even showed that she was willing to try to do years after learning about what he did to the Fireflies at the hospital.
• Friendly Fandoms: This game shares a similar fandom with Spec Ops: The Line due to its unflinchingly dark tone and nihilistic story while also taking risks that wasn't common in the genre during the time of its release. Fans found similarities between Spec Ops conveying the theme of War Is Hell perfectly while taking a ballsy risk on the War genre that was never done in any video games, and this game tackling the consequences of Roaring Rampage of Revenge while also taking a ballsy risk.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The WLF's guard dogs. They're not much of a threat in combat, but even one of them being part of an enemy patrol makes the usual stealth approach much more difficult to pull off successfully. As much as it hurts animal-loving gamers, any dog that shows up becomes an instant priority target solely due to this. Thankfully for dog-lovers, they can be thrown off your scent with a thrown bottle or brick.
  • Runners, in a repeat of their Goddamned Bats status from the first game. Easy enough to deal with, but when a situation arises where they’re placed with Clickers and Shamblers, they just make stealth that much harder as they must dealt with first quietly lest they see you and alert all enemies to your location.
  • The Rattlers, a group of slavers that capture Abby and Lev towards the end of the game are human enemies, but they're the only ones with body armor and helmets that stop headshots and one-hit kill body shots with the bow and arrow. There's also a lot of them in any given area. They require a bit more creativity to get around, which thankfully they're stupid enough to keep Runners and Clickers on chains which you can release and have them take out a few.
  • Clickers go through some serious Villain Decay from the last game, from lethal threat to minor irritant. They're armed with a new skill where they echolocate in front of them so stealth kills are harder, and they're still equipped with a One-Hit Kill, but the deck is stacked in favor of the playable characters. Ellie has her switchblade so she doesn't have to use resources to craft a shiv, and she can stealth kill them as opposed to alerting enemies like she did in The Last of Us. Abby has to create shivs, but she learns the skill to deflect a Clicker grab immediately when she learns the Craft Shiv skill as opposed to Joel having to wait until he's collected enough supplements mid-to-late in the first game. And after a certain about of weapon upgrades, they're no problem at all.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The majority of the game being set in a post-apocalyptic Seattle that was the hub of a civil war became this when during and following the game's release, portions of Seattle in real life were cordoned off as part of the country-wide Black Lives Matter protests.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Emily Swallow playing the Seraphite cultist that tries to cut open Abby in the Paris Games Week 2017 trailer is this after the release of The Mandalorian, where she plays the Armorer, the leader of a cult-like group of surviving Mandalorians. Not to mention a tool hammer is prominently weaponized in the trailer, which brings to mind the Armorer's fight scene at the end of Season 1. The connection becomes even funnier when it was announced that Pedro Pascal, the titular Mandalorian himself, would play Joel in the Last of Us series for HBO.
  • One gag early on features Ellie coming across a copy of Smash Brandi’s Cooch, an obvious Shout-Out to Crash Bandicoot, which Naughty Dog also created. Only 3 days after the game came out, Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time was announced for release later in 2020.

I-R

• I Knew It!:
  • Most people assumed that Ellie’s tattoo was a way to cover her bite mark. Head writer Halley Gross confirmed in an Outbreak Day 2019 interview that this was indeed the case. Ellie also explains it to Dina in the game itself.
  • Although ND has a history of making intentionally misleading marketing, it was widely assumed from the very first trailer that Joel was going to die. Some hints included Joel seemingly coming out of nowhere when talking to Ellie and the fact that he was never in any of the promos until very late in production. When the leak happened, no one was really shocked about it happening, only in the manner in which it did.
• Iron Woobie: Lev, despite being rejected and cast out from the Seraphites for being transgender, still holds firmly onto his faith and even impresses and sways Abby at times with his beliefs and words of encouragement.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: A common criticism is that Part II fails to innovate from the first game's core loop of exploration, stealth and open combat. While the game features some improvements such as enhanced crafting, they are not enough to change how the game would be played (such as the prone and jump buttons), with more effort going into the presentation of the game over mechanical refinement.
• Jerkass Woobie: Many of the game's abrasive characters have some level of sympathy to them. Even Seth, the grouchy bigoted bartender has had a hard life. Abby finds a letter during the blizzard outside of Jackson that was written by Seth before he arrived at the town. His wife and eldest son were brutally murdered for their supplies, and his remaining two sons almost starved to death before they finally found the town.
• Karmic Overkill: An argument can be made for Ellie going too far in her pursuit of and revenge against Abby for murdering Joel, but players overall felt that what ultimately happens to her was way too harsh a punishment. By the end, she's lost almost everything important to her — including her ability to play Joel's guitar from losing two fingers, Tommy and Jesse, and her relationship with Dina — and with everyone close to her now either dead or despising her for her actions, Ellie is left completely alone in the world, her worst fear. It really doesn't help that besides not feeling any better for killing Joel and losing some friends to Ellie's rampage, Abby gets off scot-free and is free to achieve her aim of re-uniting with the Fireflies.
• LGBT Fanbase: While already present from those who knew about Ellie from the DLC of the first game, the fact that Sony practically opened their 2018 E3 Press Conference with an on-screen lesbian kiss (and one of the most realistically rendered kisses ever in gaming) during Pride month led to a vocal outpouring of support and interest from Twitter. The game also features an openly trans man character named Lev (who is also played by a trans actor), which was greeted warmly as transgender characters (especially male ones) are few and far between in any media let alone big-budget titles. The game received a considerable amount of praise for being a massive step forward for representation for LGBTQ people.
• Memetic Badass: Tommy quickly ascended to this in II. After striking out on his own and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, he becomes a Cold Sniper Climax Boss and slays the much-maligned Manny. He then gives Abby a vicious fight, which he seems in danger of winning until Yara stabs him and he's bulled off a pier. And despite all of that he still manages to grapple Abby at the theatre before he's shot in the leg and then the head. And even then, even in this game, he survives.
• Memetic Mutation: So many memes have been made of this game that an entire page had to be made.
• Memetic Psychopath: Due to a combination of her controversial role in the story, intimidating appearance, gruff manner, and the fact that the game itself is pretty graphic, Abby very quickly became infamous for scenes of her choking, biting, and murdering people (and for being compared to another violent musclebound video game antagonist).
• Mis-blamed:
  • Being the director and one of the head writers of the game, one of the vice presidents of Naughty Dog, and having made several controversial statements^note Such as the now memetic "we don't use the word 'fun'" quote regarding the both the game and company before and after release, Neil Druckmann has been blamed for everything regarding the game, where actually Halley Gross is the narrative lead and two other writers also were involved in the script.
  • Laura Bailey has been sent death threats for how the character of Abby was written. This is despite her only being the voice actor, and having nothing to do with her character otherwise.
• Narm:
  • The game's cover◊ sparked a lot of mockery due to how it felt overly edgy, being a close up of Ellie grimacing with blood on her face. People began making comparisons with a similar image◊ from Wolfenstein: The New Order, where Nazi-stomping Action Anti-Hero B.J Blazkowicz is making the same expression.
  • The scene where Lev gets knocked out by a Rattler captain was intended as a shocking moment, but seems to have garnered a lot of laughs instead. A well-built grown man skipping in from off-screen to deliver a massive haymaker to a barely pubescent child is one thing, but the force of the blow also sends Lev careening into a garage door, smashing his head against it as he dramatically twirls to the ground. The over-the-topness of the scene quickly catapulted it to meme status.
  • Even in a post-apocalyptic Crapsack World, some players found it far too absurd that Abby and her crew allowed a heavily pregnant doctor to accompany them on their hunting trips. That is, a woman who would struggle to run or climb obstacles, could start giving birth at any time (something to consider in a world where zombies are drawn to loud noises), and is worth her weight in gold simply through the knowledge and expertise she possesses.
  • For some, Abby having the nickname "Abs" combined with her physique — though it is meant as just as a convenient shortening of her name.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Marlene only briefly returns in a flashback, but the revelation that she was extremely reluctant to sacrifice Ellie for the chance of finding a vaccine and questioned the ethics of killing one person for The Needs of the Many adds a lot of depth to her character and makes her death at Joel's hands even more tragic.
  • Although its impact on the main plot is minimal, the Rat King is regarded as one of the most memorable aspects of the game due to its disgustingly freakish design and providing an incredibly tense and challenging boss fight.
  • Despite appearing in the game for less than 5 minutes, the unnamed Rattler commonly referred to as "Fat Geralt" (due to resembling an overweight version of Geralt of Rivia) instantly captivated the players due to the memetic nature of his scenes.
• Padding:
  • One criticism of the game is that many of the flashback sequences don't feel like they are necessary to the main plot, and in fact hurt the game's pacing.
  • Several of Abby's segments of the story have been criticized for this due to how many branch away from the main story and either attempt to focus on a different character or make Abby herself more sympathetic after-the-fact.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • There's one particular weapons bench quite early in the game that spawns a squad of enemies right behind you when you use it. Try and use any other bench after that without getting nervous. Well done, Naughty Dog.
  • The simple fact that Stalkers appear much more often in this game than they did in the first one, coupled with their frequent pairing with other Demonic Spiders like the dreaded Shamblers, can make any mid-to-late game encounter with infected an exercise in keeping your adrenaline level under control. They somehow get even worse later in the game when you encounter some who have grown into the walls...which then pounce on you without warning. Not even seemingly empty rooms will feel safe to you after that.
• Player Punch:
  • Two words: Joel's death. This moment alone contributes to about seventy-five percent of the game's (and Abby's) controversial reputation.
  • Being forced to kill the enemy’s attack dogs can be quite painful if you’re an animal lover.
  • The player being forced to fight Ellie as Abby is highly memorable since the player is fighting to kill Ellie of all people.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: While the game's story has proven to be extremely divisive, even most of those disliking the story and character aspect tend to admit that the gameplay itself lived up to the standards expected from a Naughty Dog game, and even improves on the original in several aspects.^note To name a few improvements: Ellie now has the ability to dodge enemy attacks, the setting is more open-ended to allow for deeper exploration and take breathers, enemy AI can be adjusted to one's liking, and there are new crafting additions (such as being able to craft a makeshift silencer, which makes stealth gameplay much easier). Perhaps anticipating this reaction, after the game is beaten once, the player is given the option to start another playthrough which removes all the cutscenes and exploration segments and simply jumps sequentially through all of the game’s combat sequences. This is especially notable, considering the previous game got the opposite reaction.

S-V

• The Scrappy:
  • While Abby is considered the biggest Base-Breaking Character of the game, she has her fans. The various members of her group like Manny and Nora don't get nearly the same admiration for helping her with the murder of Joel. Unlike her, they get no Character Development after Joel's death and never show any sign of regret for their actions. The fact that most of them use their last moments of life to either insult Joel's memory in front of Ellie or more simply try to kill her only increased the fandom's hate for them.
  • Owen is widely disliked even if he was the only one who protested against Joel's murder for cheating on his pregnant girlfriend with Abby and causing Mel's death by attacking Ellie.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Part II is comparatively more difficult than its predecessor. In addition to scarce resources, your ammo cap is significantly decreased. For example, you were able to carry 18 shotgun shells in the first game, but here, you can only carry 8. Perhaps the biggest challenge comes from the improvements made to the enemies. For one thing, enemy AI is much better this time around; human enemies generally are far more observant of their surroundings, tend to be spread out enough to either unexpectedly flank you or alert others should they discover a fallen ally, and have more annoying or outright deadlier attacks than the human enemies from the first game. There's also the inclusion of enemy dogs, who make stealth gameplay absolutely frustrating since they can pick up your trail almost instantly, and the Seraphites' usage of non-verbal communication which can make predicting their moves nigh-impossible. Even Listen Mode isn't as helpful due to said enemies being represented as faint white glows that can blend into the scenery in lighter areas, compared to the visually distinct outlines from the predecessor. Lastly, the infected themselves get a few boosts of their own; Stalkers appear in greater numbers, Clickers gain a new ability where they can spot you by letting out a scream, and Shamblers are basically faster and deadlier versions of Bloaters. The sequel does offer some quality of life improvements over the first to compensate, the biggest being that you can manually adjust enemy AI to your liking, but even veteran players might find themselves in a pickle over these enemy enhancements.
• Shocking Moments: After three years of waiting since the 2016 reveal teaser, and a whole six years since the first game came out, the 2019 September trailer finally properly revealed Joel and his new look after the five-year time-skip, earning this reaction from pretty much the whole fanbase.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The playable guitar scene lets you create songs you want to cover.
• Signature Scene:
  • Abby killing Joel with an extended beatdown by golf club is easily one of the game's most discussed moments.
  • The flashback to Ellie’s 16th birthday with Joel, due to being the closest the game gets to its predecessor’s hopeful feeling with Joel and Ellie’s bond. Even former fans of the IP have admitted to this being one of its highlights.
  • Both of the fights between Ellie and Abby count. The first one is known for its Player Punch of playing as Abby to fight Ellie. The second one is known for its emotional impact and tense, climactic atmosphere.
  • The fight with The Rat King.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The opening four hours of the game have been criticized for its slow pace compared to the opening of the first game, as large portions of it are spent walking around areas interacting with collectibles while following other characters.
• So Okay, It's Average: Between the rabid defenders and rabid detractors, there is a sizable contingent of people who feel that, while the gameplay is quite fun and the graphics are impressive, the game's controversial narrative decisions and overbearing length hold it back from being worthy of the heaps of praise it received from critics.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The game's startling beauty and rich atmosphere only make the recycled character models stand out all the more, and killing the same mook five times in rapid succession can really take you out of the moment.
  • A couple of times in Seraphite territory, Abby can find and pick up arrows while she's wearing neither a quiver nor her backpack, meaning the arrows float a couple of inches off her back.
  • If you have a silencer on your pistol when playing as Ellie, it will carry over into cutscenes and that will lead to the silencer clipping through characters in cutscenes which looks awkward to say the least.
  • When walking across the Seraphite Island you will come across some trees with pieces of their bark floating a few inches away from the tree.
  • Much like the first game, when characters interact with their backpacks, Molotov-cocktails and bombs are constantly put away with a lit fuse rather than having them light up when being used.
• That One Achievement: Getting all the collectables, namely superhero trading cards and coins while you're playing as Abby. Many of them are somewhat out of the way, in relatively obscure hiding places and/or just before a story scene that won't allow you to backtrack after it's finished. Good luck finding them without a guide.
• That One Boss: When Abby faces off against Ellie in the theatre, in a frightening Call-Back to the boss fight with David in The Last of Us. Ellie is armed with all of her weapons and Abby isn't, so she must use the environment to sneak up and attack. It's easier said than done. She also uses stealth to sneak around, so Listening Mode is almost completely useless since she'll not appear on it most of the time. All through the area are chains and broken glass; running into either alerts Ellie to your location. And once she catches you, or you attack her upfront, it's a gruesome One-Hit Kill. Sneaking behind her is the method to beat her, that is if you don't make noise (which is hard) or she doesn't randomly turn around or turn on a dime (which is often).
• That One Level:
  • In Abby's section of the game, she has to pass through an abandoned building filled to the brim of Infected. It's an extremely tense and ammo-draining affair, and there's Stalkers and Clickers abound, complete with a Bloater towards the end. The Stalkers are worse part as they burst out of walls to grab you, and god help you if they alert anyone other Infected nearby.
  • The last stretch of the game sees Ellie reaching Santa Barbara and going through five enemy sequences, encountering every enemy type in the game except Bloaters and the Rat King boss. You get a sub-machine gun with a silencer to help you, but it's still a long and arduous affair, and the human areas especially have tons of enemies to get through and sneak by, exacerbating the Ending Fatigue players usually feel by the time they get to this part.
  • In No Return, there's the boss encounter with the Rattler Captain. While most other bosses pit you against infected variants or squads of the other enemy factions, the Rattler boss fight pits you against an incredibly well-armed and numerous group of Rattlers. They're ruthlessly efficient, they have a plethora of weapons and tactics to smoke you out, they bring dogs along to make running and hiding an absolute nightmare, and worst of all, they all have at least a little bit of armor. Oh, and they never stop spawning; the only way to win is to kill the captain. As a result, while the other final bosses of No Return can be challenging, the Rattlers can be just plain unfair.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Joel is killed very early in the game by Abby, only appearing in flashbacks from then on. This is one of the biggest criticisms of the game as Ellie and Joel's dynamic was seen as one of the best aspects of the first game.
  • Tommy is shown to be just as motivated to get revenge for Joel's death as Ellie is. However, he is hardly seen at all in the game, with Ellie and Dina following his trail. Some fans saw it as a wasted opportunity to have Tommy and Ellie interact more and share their grief over Joel. The game also drops hints at Tommy's darker past as a Firefly that are never explored. There's also no special interaction between him and the remnants of the Salt Lake Fireflies. Some have even wished they could play as Tommy doing his own revenge quest.
  • Jesse early on is set up to be a source of drama between himself, Ellie, and Dina as part of a love triangle and is one of the few unambiguously good characters in the game. However, Jesse is absent or relegated to the background for the majority of the game, culminating him in being shot in the head by Abby with little fanfare.
  • There's also a feeling that the game wastes the narrative potential that the infected present, since those enemies take a backseat in the story compared to the human conflict, in contrast with the previous game where they were a significant threat, with a decent portion of that story expounding on the spread of the infection.
  • The Seraphites in general. A puritanical religious cult operating in a world that's effectively ended was an interesting new faction to throw into the game's grim setting, but they're treated as interchangeable mooks whose nominal leader lasts about three minutes. The game seems to build up to a proper Seraphite antagonist in Lev and Yara's mother, but she's Killed Offscreen by Lev.
  • The only named Seraphite other than fugitives Lev and Yara is Emily, who's killed very quickly after her introduction despite being an intense, memorable performance from Emily Swallow and her all-over creepy vibe. It would have been interesting to use Emily as a character to not only antagonize the player more frequently but to explore the aforementioned under-developed Seraphites, since as a high-ranking member she'd likely give voice to exactly what their current beliefs, motivations and lifestyle entails.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Abby's encounter with the rat king abomination infected shows just how far the cordyceps infection can evolve, but any potential expansion of the infection's capabilities is completely glossed over in favor of the human story covering the Cycle of Revenge.
  • Abby and Joel's first meeting in the game has him saving her life and helping her escape from the infected. This sets up an opportunity to explore Abby potentially feeling more conflicted about going through with killing Joel; he killed her father, but he also saved her life and he killed her father to save Ellie, with her having to debate with herself about what to do. This never happens; Abby instead brutally kills Joel without a second thought and never expresses feelings of remorse or conflict.
  • A common criticism of Joel's death is that it occurs far too abruptly, and the game at first seems to be building up to a more incremental and significant confrontation: Abby and Owen know that getting to Joel will be difficult and that they'll have to hash out a good strategy to do so—perhaps infiltrating the Jackson base or somehow luring Joel outside another way—and Owen's mounting ambivalence, coupled with logistical concerns, suggests that this is going to be a plot point rife with intrigue. Instead, Joel falls into his soon-to-be murderers' hands by pure luck barely any time after this conversation occurs, conveniently skipping over any such plot and the chances for development and character interaction that could have come from it.
  • The possibility and fallout of Ellie discovering the truth of what Joel did to the Fireflies could have filled up an entire game, and the first game's Sequel Hook certainly seemed to be setting it up that way. However, what instead happened was Ellie finds out the truth in a flashback, after Joel has already died in the present. However, the "only" consequence that happens is that Ellie doesn't talk to Joel for two years. And at the end of the game, we find out in another flashback that Ellie eventually considered forgiving Joel for lying to her. Some players left with the impression that plot thread was completely wasted in favor of Abby's revenge story.
  • Thorgi's Arcade brings up an interesting point in his review: In the middle of Ellie's section of the story, you get jumped by some WLF deserters, which you can learn of through some notes before the encounter. So the situation could've been handled rather peacefully if Ellie just talked to them, even giving the player the option to do so. Not only would this definitely have allowed Ellie a valuable asset in learning what she's dealing with, but she could understand how life under the WLF isn't all roses for some and give her some internal conflict going forward in trying to seek Abby, that the WLF are just people surviving but under questionable methods. Especially since this is before Abby's campaign, which could've drawn some parallels of the deserters point of view from their own words to Abby's when we take control of her. Plus, show that not everyone Ellie encounters in Seattle is so quick to kill just because.
  • Lev being transgender isn't used to its full potential as the focus of his trans status is exploring Abby's response to it and escaping an arranged child marriage because he wanted to be a soldier instead of a wife. Both of these ideas fail to show Lev's personal feelings about nearly being sexually exploited or show his personal struggle with gender dysphoria. The game could have shown or gone into further detail about what type of person Lev was to be married to, how being LGBTQA+ is against Seraphite tradition, show why the Seraphites are against Lev taking part in the war despite volunteering to do so ^note even though, they have female soldiers and are not a patriarchal group that refuses to let women fight , or how Lev discovered his trans status and came to accept it. The handling of Lev's character led to criticism from some in the LGBTQ community.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The main reason for the story’s divisiveness. This is a much more violent and depressing game than its predecessor, which was already pretty dark. Joel's brutal death early on in the game, in particular, is a point where some players stopped caring about what happens in the story, and it doesn't get better from there. In addition to the dark story, observations of the environments and flavor text show that the state of the world appears to be getting worse instead of better. All hope of a cure or vaccine is dead because Joel killed apparently the last brain surgeon in the previous game. Unlike most zombies in fiction, Infected actually get stronger over time by mutating into tougher and deadlier forms, and every attempt at rebuilding civilization is thwarted by either the Infected, warfare or internal strife. Even many critics who gave an overall favourable review of the game agreed that it has an extremely nihilistic and unforgivably bleak story, for better or for worse. There's a reason that all but 4 of the most helpful user reviews on the first page of metacritic are negative.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Downtown Seattle teases the notion of the game having Wide-Open Sandbox hub levels, with you exploring a vast area on horseback with numerous optional areas to explore and a slightly non-linear objective. This goes out the window as soon as you're done, and while the levels do have more optional side areas to explore than the first game, the levels are still largely linear.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Joel ended up being viewed this way, both in this game and in retrospect to the previous one. This game demonizes him as a selfish madman who doomed humanity, but this completely ignores the Fireflies' own excessively antagonistic nature towards him, which was so apparent that it almost got Ellie killed in the tunnel. In addition, the science is entirely on Joel's side. Even ignoring the Artistic License as an Acceptable Break from Reality, it's common knowledge that anyone with immunity must be alive to extract any kind of treatment for the fungus from them, making Joel's decision to save her, while rooted in personal reasons, the only sane and rational choice anyone made in the hospital. Some people also point out how the chances of producing a vaccine, though unlikely for the fungus, would've been extremely difficult for a doctor who doesn't even specialize in that kind of medicine and being able to produce and distribute copies of the vaccine to the entire world wouldn't be likely to happen, so Joel's decision to save Ellie is ultimately without a downside in the long run.
  • Ellie. The narrative seems to consider her quest for revenge to be as bad as, if not worse than, Abby's, but many players side with Ellie and find her to be more understandable. This is a consequence of Abby, her crew, and the Wolves' mooks coming across as highly Unintentionally Unsympathetic when they're not outright Asshole Victims. The other primary reasons, which are not because of Fourth Wall Myopia, are that Ellie was actually forced to witness Joel's death at Abby's hands, and none of the Wolves ever help her, unlike what Joel did with Abby, something that Ellie lampshades to Jessie. A lot of people will also point to Abby and Ellie's respective scenes involving the murder of pregnant women. Ellie kills Mel, and when she sees Mel's baby bump, nearly has a panic attack and clearly wouldn't have done it if she had known Mel was pregnant. On the opposite side, there's Abby who gleefully winds up to slit Dina's throat upon learning that Dina's pregnant, and only stops because Lev is horrified that she would do that. There’s also the ending where Ellie comes back home with two fingers missing and finds Dina has left with JJ, leaving Ellie alone as a consequence for her vendetta against Abby.
  • Tommy is also depicted as bloodthirsty and blinded with rage after Joel's death, to the point of abusing Ellie for not wanting to continue her Roaring Rampage of Revenge. The reaction from a lot of a players was that his behavior is actually totally understandable or even agreeable, given how close the two were before the events of the first game and after they reconciled their differences during the time skip between the two games. Tommy icing Manny with ruthless efficiency is seen as one of the few karmic highlights by these players, in a plot where seemingly few other appropriate moments of justice were able to occur.
  • The WLF crew on the Seraphite Island can be seen as this due to how they end up being betrayed and potentially slaughtered by Abby when she chooses a child in the enemy faction over her own. The WLF had spent four years training, supplying, and feeding her, had given her a comfortable home to live in after the Fireflies had disbanded, and affectionately regarded her as their 'top Scar Killer', only to be repaid with her betrayal during a catastrophic battle on the island. As such, some players were put off by Abby's decision to abandon her loyal comrade in arms in the middle of a warzone in favour of a child she just met and bonded with within two days, especially when before meeting Yara and Lev, Abby had no qualms with going along with the WLF and killing any Scars she comes across. It doesn't help that the vast majority of the WLF soldiers weren't even present during Isaac's confrontation against Abby, which resulted in his death, leaving them genuinely clueless as to why their beloved comrade is now abandoning and even killing them without a shred of hesitation.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Abby.
    • She was portrayed as having undergone redeeming Character Development after brutally murdering Joel as revenge for his killing of her father, realizing it wasn't worth it and thus deservedly gets better off than Ellie who would remain consumed with revenge until the ending. This rang hollow to many due to Abby's continued cruelties such as gleefully attempting to kill Dina after learning she was pregnant stopping only because Lev looked horrified at her while Ellie is guilt ridden after realizing Mel who she killed was pregnant and her other actions and ultimately struggled and chose to break the Cycle of Revenge unlike Abby. Abby's karma of losing her friends and pet dog to Ellie's Roaring Rampage of Revenge was seen by many instead as everyone but Abby suffering for it. To make matters worse, her father's death was partially her fault-he was initially hesitant about performing the operation on Ellie, but she talked him into it-but that's never addressed anywhere.^note  After playing the game, Abby's voice actress Laura Bailey thinks that Abby was intentionally unsympathetic. Her exact words being "You're not supposed to [like her]".
    • Others have said they dislike how Abby killed Joel rather than the deed itself. Specifically, Abby drags her friends miles and miles away from their home, doesn't turn back when one of them turns out to be pregnant, then they near die to the clickers, only to be rescued by Joel and Tommy, then murder Joel anyway while dragging it out as long as while they pin down his adopted daughter and ignore her as she begs them to stop then very nearly murder her too. This made people who would have otherwise understood why Abby did what she did view her as far too cruel and selfish.
  • While the game tries to present Mel and Owen's deaths as the moment Ellie crossed the Moral Event Horizon, fans quickly pointed out she acted in self-defense after Owen tried to grab her gun and Mel attacked her with a knife. The fact that neither Owen nor Mel bothered to point out to Ellie that Mel was pregnant until after she'd already been killed makes it worse.
  • Though the game portrayed Manny as a very nice person from Abby's perspective, the fact that he spat on Joel's corpse was more than enough for a lot of players to hate him and look forward to his death, which came eventually by Joel's brother Tommy's hands with much rejoicing. The fact that he casually tried to kill Ellie in the prologue, while she was pinned to the ground and sobbing, did not help at all.
  • While Dina's decision to leave Ellie is presented as a consequence of Ellie's inability to forgive Joel's killers, most fans criticized her for abandoning her lover since she was clearly suffering as a consequence of her mental traumas and traumatic experiences. And while her anger with Tommy is understandable, it can come across as her disregarding the fact that Abby killed both Joel (Ellie's father-figure and Tommy's brother) and Jesse (Ellie's friend, her ex-boyfriend and her child's father). That is, if this is the case; as the ending doesn't out confirm or deny Ellie and Dina's relationship status, though it is up for interpretation.
  • Abby's friends and associates in general can become this due to Gameplay and Story Segregation. When Ellie attacks them they'll call for help, react with horror when their friends die, and even try to surrender. However, because the game needs you to kill them, attempting to spare them when they beg for mercy or just not attack them in general results in them attacking Ellie all over again, making Ellie's actions comes across as self defense. This is especially egregious with Abby's pet dog which will viciously rip Ellie to shreds if you fail a QTE.
  • Abby's father Jerry is presented as a kind and caring man who was faced with a difficult decision to sacrifice Ellie to acquire the cure, and was cruelly killed by Joel, who objected to the plan, thus giving Abby a seemingly justifiable reason to want to kill Joel. However, some felt that Jerry was very deserving in being killed by Joel for pushing to cut open a child who had no idea that she was going to die for the cure (if it was successful at all), while ignoring Marlene's question about if he would perform the procedure had it been his daughter's life on the line, and not a random child. Not to mention in the scene where Joel kills Jerry, Jerry grabbed a scalpel and promised not to let Joel take Ellie, the implication very clearly being that he'll try to kill Joel if Joel tries to take Ellie, so it's not as if he didn't threaten Joel first.
  • Lev's decision to return to the Seraphite Island is this to some. While some can sympathise with his desire for his mother's acceptance, his decision to steal and boat and return home was seen as highly selfish and foolish, considering that he knows that his people are still out to kill him even during a war between the Seraphites and the WLF. Abby and his recently amputeed sister Yara are then forced to go rescue him, leaving Owen and Mel behind in the aquarium. Shortly after being rescued after accidentally causing their mother's death, Yara would then be shot to death by the WLF during an ambush. Abby and Lev would then return to the aquarium to find Owen and Mel killed by Ellie while they were gone. All in all, had Lev not make the reckless decision to return home during an active battle, Yara and their mother, and Owen and Mel likely would have not died.
  • The Fireflies as a whole, save for Marlene, became this retroactively. The game tries to portray the Fireflies as wholly heroic figures trying to save the world. This fell flat for players of the prior game, where the Fireflies were excessively antagonistic towards Joel. Notes in the Firefly lab even details other failed fatal experiments on other subjects. There's the additional fact that they didn't intend to help Ellie at all until they realized who she was, and even then, never bothered to get her permission to perform the fatal procedure.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Along with the Content Leak that happened in May, there was a misconception that Abby was a trans woman due to her muscular physique (which in itself is an unfortunate implication), but Abby is cisgender but end up with a trans boy as her ward.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The graphics are pretty much the one thing everybody agrees looks absolutely incredible. The first game already boasted fairly high-quality graphics, but the sequel ups the ante by using a more enhanced engine that allows for greater photo-realism. Highlights include more atmospheric lighting, significant attention to detail on the character models and environments, and smoother real-time movements.

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