Hey, guys. I have James here again. Have any of you guys ever watched our video? Two years? I don't know. Oh, about a year and a bit now? When we talked about the long night from Game of Thrones and how clearly no one had ever done any sort of strategy gameplay or played any sort of board game at all. So now we're doing something a bit different. We're going to be talking about The Last of Us 2. This is something that you and I have wanted to do for the last little while, especially since we just finished it. This video is going to have spoilers. We're going to do a pretty big breakdown. We're going to go through presentation. We're going to go through gameplay. Then we're going to go obviously into the narrative, which a lot of people are obviously talking about. We're just going to give our two cents about the game. I think we have a lot of similar views and some things we might have a little bit of a different note about. It'll be a fun time. Yeah, I'm not going to play Devil's Advocate on this one. I got thoughts. So let's start with presentation. I will say that this is by far one of the most beautiful looking games I've ever seen in terms of its photo realism, its attention to detail in terms of the environments. But also, again, I'm not a PlayStation 4 player, but the fact that the cinematics and the gameplay are the same engine. It's seamless. Yeah, it's not a cut to black from the prettier looking thing to the now gameplay. It's all one, and that probably justifies the 150 gigabyte install for this game. Out of curiosity, did you play it on a regular PS4 or the PS4 Pro? I played it on a PS4 Pro. Is there a difference? Apparently, yeah, it's stronger and probably louder per a hummingbird. Oh, the PS4 didn't sound like, I don't know, I didn't hear it. Everyone was telling me that on the Pro it sounds really, really loud, but... Oh, it's kind of like how it did for Red Dead. I just played on a regular PS4, but I was impressed that this was a console game. Honestly, this could be PC game graphics. I'll be curious to see if they ever port it to PC, but... Yeah, no, I thought it was amazing. Then some of the absolute insanity in terms of the level of detail in the environments, like when you're coming into Seattle, you're passing through a forest. That means nothing, essentially, but it goes on for about a minute. And it's just the whole time I'm thinking, this isn't gameplay related. This is literally for immersion's sake. And that frame rate is steady. Yeah, it doesn't jump around or anything. Yeah, that was... I was impressed the whole time just looking at the characters, looking at the environments whenever rain or any sort of... Blood effects. Blood effects. Just the way blood works in this game, it's really impressive. Just the way it sprays or the way it comes out of bodies and little puddles. And the animations, too. The animations are phenomenal. For instance, I admittedly, whenever I would come around a human and stealth kill them, I would try to turn the camera around as quickly as possible to see their animations. Because they kept on saying stuff about who are going to feel bad for killing people. And admittedly, they do have quite a bit of reactions in their face. They're not just like... I'm pretty sure every NPC has a different name. Oh, that's what some people said, too. And yeah, there are a few that you come across that are like, Bill, Derek, and I remember that that was something that some people have commented on saying that makes you feel bad for these people. And I thought, is no one ever played the Spec Ops the line? Because that's essentially what that kind of feel bad about what you're doing. That game did what this game was trying to do so much better. Exactly, that's what some people... I'm amazed that no one has brought that game up in terms of... Once we go onto the narrative part, that's something that we'll definitely be talking about that whole making you feel bad thing. I can't think of a single part where I ever had any issues with the graphics whatsoever. It was cool to walk through Seattle. I could talk about just Seattle not non-stop on this one. When we were walking through it, I kind of made the comment. I was like, I wonder what... I wonder how close this is going to be realistic to the hall. And when you fell into the hall, it was like, it's not exactly like this, but you know, whatever. It's not like the biggest thing. But the locations of the building were where they're supposed to be. The music store you go into is an actual music store. Like it's not the same name, but again, there is a music store there. What does someone say that the Cheesecake Factory isn't on Pike Street? So it's zero out of ten. Everything about this was very, very impressive. Part that I thought that was so crazy too is the ending of the game, Santa Barbara, which is this ending that's tacked on to the ending. And you're only there for about three hours of gameplay. And that also just visually cool. I wanted to stay there. I wanted more of that area. Actually, there's that initial part when you're going over the hill, when you're still in, what is it, Montana or whatever? I don't remember exactly where you start the game. And it's just you're going through that golden grass field. And at that moment, I was like, okay, when people are talking about the graphics of this game. Well, that's the beginning when Joel and Tommy are on the horses. Yeah, at the very, very beginning. Oh, so good. And that's something that I'll say, I guess right now, is for people who are review bombing the game, you guys can have your issues with the story all you want. They hadn't played it. Oh, yeah. Someone made that comment. There's like 200,000 user reviews for it on Metacritic, yet there's only 50,000 for Spider-Man. So you know there's some review bombing happening. But you can't give this game a zero just for the visuals alone. The visuals, these artists put painstaking work into this game. The amount of attention to detail is absolutely phenomenal. You can't trash what they've done. These guys worked through horrible crunch hours. They worked their asses off to make this game as visually impressive as it has. And I think it sets a precedent too. I agree, one out of 10. I guess I thought at first maybe Rockstar had set a little bit of a precedent with Red Dead Redemption 2's engine and just the visual style, as well as the size, like, you know, it's a hundred and something odd with its install. But that also game has online, which this game does not. The fact that this is a 150 gigabyte single player game that people bought and has been successful, that possibly gives me hope that they will put more attention to detail, more, they'll have more limitation or more lack of limitations in terms of size and visual grandeur and just scope, I guess, for games in the future. So now we're going to talk about the gameplay. Maybe we'll talk about the positive fun first. Is the accessibility. This is something you've had in it. Like, you mentioned something about Uncharted 4 as a lack of accessibility being an issue. And it seems that Last of Us 2 just took all the notes that everyone's always had about that and they made it and then they took it and made a mountain of it. So, one of my biggest issues of the Uncharted series is, or really any Naughty Dog game, is the controls and the inputs are not the best. One of my biggest issues with console gaming is the controls and the inputs are never optimized. So just button mapping in this game made me happy. That doesn't even, like, they've made it so you can be legally blind and one-handed and still beat this game. Everything from colorblind options to auto pickup to text-to-speech. I have never seen this many accessibility options in anything, PC console, like anything. It's amazing. I'll admit, that's something that I've seen a lot of people do say as well as people with visual impairments have been able to play this game. And I think the first thing I thought of was when you went through the difficulty options in custom, you could change how much damage you would get, how much the, how good the enemies were, how much stealth was relying. Yeah, how many supplies drop or... And at first I thought, okay, that's cool. And then I went to accessibility and that's when like the, whoa! I found like the whole treasure trove, like you said, auto pickup, text-to-speech, color optimization, color of button mapping. And I'm not a trophy hunter, but none of the trophies are attached to difficulty. No. So like again, like that's an improvement from the first game too. Well, and all the online trophies in the first one too. Oh yeah. I finished the first one, the original copy of it about a month or two ago. And I noticed that there was eight achievements for beat the game on normal, beat the game on normal plus, beat the game on hard, beat the game on harder plus. I was like, whoa, what? And it seems that last of us two definitely, like I think there's only one, it's just beat the game. Yep. I really hope that this amount of optimization is available in the future. Mentally, there's a lot of coding that goes into this. There's a lot of back work for it. But I heard that you could, it's becoming more of a regular thing. I've heard people say for Doom Eternal, they were able to map the controllers to make them basically a god. So for this, like, what, like, I guess if you had an example of buttons that you changed in terms of controls, what did you change? I'm trying to think of like, like, I don't know, things like swapping your weapons just being mapped to like, one of the bumpers was awkward sprint. Sprint was the big one. Holding on a bumper to sprint when nothing was really mapped to the left joystick click, like every other game has sprint joystick. Call of Duty has set that like a long time ago and that's kind of like everyone's like click, click, click, click, click. So like, yeah, that was, that was the first thing. I was like, why, why am I running with this? So the auto pickup, admittedly, I actually really did enjoy because something that was really weird is when I went to pick up stuff and I was, I was walking by, I was literally just having like, I have to triangle, I guess, like, are you playing it? Well, you're playing Diablo and sometimes you would even miss it because if you walk past it and the animation, that's something, again, attention to detail. It's like red dead, essentially, you have to wait for them to actually physically grab it and put it into their pocket before you can pick up the next item. So if you've walked past it, it doesn't work. And the auto pickup is a lot more attentive than that. Like the instant, like, you don't have to spam it, you can focus more on like just the immersion of it all. I would definitely say the accessibility is one of the best parts of this game, aside from the visual. That's the, that alone is a reason not to give this a zero. You can talk about the graphics, but the accessibility, like that could change the console gaming landscape. Oh, the gaming landscape. Forever. That warrants it. We're going to have huge changes from this. This is going to be massive. However, I will say in terms of how the game plays, I thought, considering it's been seven years and I was able to be right fresh from playing the first one, it felt like at 1.5 in terms of anything changed. Very little was different from the first one. Very little variancy. For instance, the humans have one new enemy. They had two enemies. There's the dogs. They have the dogs and the big, big people. For the infected, technically there's only one new one, which is the shambler. Sure, there's the thing in the hospital, but really there's one new variant. And I thought that, you know, for that amount of time that maybe there would have been a little bit more, like sure, everything looks different, but in terms of how the game plays, it's very similar. I mean, the seraphites were a cool addition. It's not really a new type of enemy they shoot you, but... Oh, the shamblers? No, the seraphites, the scars. Oh, yes. Yeah, that was a cool addition. No, that was...  Like, that's... Oh, the arrows? Well, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, there's like a few nips here and there that are a little different, but I just thought that I thought there would be a little bit more variancy. I thought there would be more enemy types. I thought that... The only real improvement was the... Like, to me, was the shibs. Like, there's no breakable shibs. Yeah, but I actually... Well, for Abby, Abby does, but that was something else too. As in the first one, I liked it that you had to ration your shibs because you either could use a shib to take down a clicker, or you could use it to get into a safe room, which kind of reminded me of Dead Space where you would have to hold on to nodes, whether to use them for yourself or to use them to get into areas where to get stuff. And the fact that they took that out, I held on to Abby's shibs for a while. So, while we're talking about safes, and I want to go back to accessibility on this, because this is actually one of my favorite features of the game, I didn't need a single save code on a piece of paper for the entire game. You can close your eyes and listen to the game for a click on the safe, and you can open every safe in the game with your ears. Whoa, I didn't know that. I noticed on the first safe, I was like going through with my headphones on, and I got into the actual number with my paper, and I heard a click. I was like, wait, can I just do this on my own? Tried it? For the rest of the game, I was like, even if I had the paper, I was like, I have to at least guess once to see if I can do this. Oh, yeah, no, and how many times were you able to get it? I think there was only one time I screwed up on the first try, got on the second, but it wasn't difficult. You just have to close your eyes and zone it. Whoa, it makes you feel like an actual safe. Yeah, it just kind of taps into that immersion. Probably my favorite addition to this game. That's actually pretty awesome. I did not know that. That's, again, really awesome kind of variance to the immersion. I definitely will give this game points for that, definitely for immersion. I felt that there would be a little bit more considering how much time it's been spent on development and also how long the game is too. I thought there would be just a little more, especially considering there was no multiplayer. So all of the development was put into single player. I think that it just more so went into the narrative design. This is something else that we can talk about in terms of challenge or fun. Abby has the two best missions in the entire game, in my opinion. And that is the hospital and the sniper. The sniper was cool.  I thought I still thought like, you know, when you're going through the streets, I was like, oh, this is okay, this is not hard. And then all of a sudden he starts shooting at the cars like, what's he doing? Oh, and then the infected start coming down the road and you think you've got them and then another wave and another wave. I'm trying to think of like an Abby mission that like, or not Abby mission, an Ellie mission that I really, really liked. It was cool to see an open area at the beginning, but they never really do that again. That's fine. I guess I can understand. I think it, I understand what they're trying to do is like, okay, we can't make this an open world game, but maybe we can make one segment of it an open world game. Well, they did it with Uncharted 4, but they did it in the middle of the game. And I almost prefer that more rather than when it happened with Ellie, I was almost overwhelmed and like, I did everything. I got the achievement for exploring everything, but it was almost like, I want to move on with the story rather than go and explore a bunch of stuff. But that, that's just a personal preference. That's, it comes at like, technically that is the opening of the game, because everything up until then I would technically call the tutorial. Yeah, almost prologous. Yeah, prologue. And I had kind of some fun with it because again, kind of looking at Seattle, seeing how the, just the city had been destroyed by war prior to like during the infection rise stage, and then just what everything happened. Like for instance, I didn't realize like the scars when they're island. Well, like, oh, they're to keep talking about an island. Then I saw the Seattle Tower or the, like, wait, what the fun island? That kind of, maybe like, it makes me want to know more about the world. And that's something I've always found kind of interesting about how there is so little narrative. Like, and there's no, as far as I know, there's one graphic novel. There's no novelization of anything about what happened to the world. It seems like Druckmann's is like, it's just us. We only touch what we want, except for that one graphic novel about Ellie. I don't remember what it was called, but it was essentially what the DLC for the first game was. I never played the DLC for the first game. I still think the game was kind of fun to play. And there's that argument that you are supposed to stretch, like, you know, you find something that's fun, 30 seconds of fun about your game and you stretch it, and definitely stretch it. He also said that, you know, he didn't want the game to be fun. Which it was. Yeah. I get what he's trying to say, but it was still a fun game. Are you able to finish it? And that's like a massive, that's an example that it was fun, that we was enjoyable.  I bought that day one. Same. I got some friends who, like, coursed me into it, and then I bought it.  Having grown up in Seattle or outside of Seattle, one of my, like, the coolest things of this game was there's a part when you're talking about going back with Tommy, and he says we're going to pass through Inam Claw and then go through Falls City on our way back. Falls City is the town I grew up in. Like a very, very small town of a few thousand people. So shout out to Falls City. Super cool. Thank you Naughty Dog for, uh, you're like, I was like, do we get to go to Falls City? No, I couldn't play it if I was going back there. That'd be too much. It's, again, they did a lot of really cool detail, and I found it funny that just with Seattle's history, well, I don't know if you talk about it right now, it seems a bit crazy, but the idea that Seattle's always been more of the, given the impression that it's one of the more peaceful cities in the, um, in the United States, and it is now a complete and utter hellhole, I thought that was kind of a bit of an interesting irony. I, yeah, and what I was fascinated with is, I don't know why I know the statistic, but out of the 50 states, per capital, Washington has the highest number of atheists, and they somehow got semi-taken over in Seattle by a religious cult. That was something I wanted to know more about too, actually, was the, who the woman was. See, it's funny that they spend so much time, you spend a lot of time in this game, you don't know a lot about certain things. Which is cool, I guess. Which, yeah, there's that ambiguity.  Like, they had a huge slave culture. I was like, well, I want to know more about these guys. We going to just jump into the narrative then? Okay, so yeah. I mean, we're probably talking about it. So now we're going to talk about the narrative, and we'll just, we'll get the thing out of the way right off the bat. I guess I can understand why you're upset, because that's kind of what the game is trying to do. But I don't know why people are surprised that Joel dies, considering when they released the teaser two years before the game was released, everyone was kind of getting the rumors like, oh, Joel's dead, he's like a ghost, he's a spectral, he's a navi's man. Yeah, and I mean, out of all of the promotional stuff, the gameplay, the initial trailer, the box art, all Ellie. Yeah, all Ellie. Like, I went into this being like, yeah, Joel probably dies early on in this game. Yeah, I was expecting that. The two things that are about the people who've been complaining about the marketing one, that Abby is completely absent from it. And considering she's such a massive aspect of the game, I think that maybe even the marketing team were like, yo, bro, we can't, we can't talk about her, because there's no way we can't say anything about her without spoiling it. And if the very least, people are going to be thrown off and we're not going to get as much of a reputation, so we can, we just have to focus on Ellie. Another people were also upset that Joel is, was, he wasn't rightfully shown in the trailers. Like, for instance, there's certain scenes where it's flashbacks, but they actually use the older model of him. Or there's another one where they have him saying a line that Jesse says in the game. And I didn't know that until someone pointed that out. Like, oh, so they pulled what Marvel did for the Endgame Infinity War trailers?  And that's essentially what Naughty Dog did, in a sense. Like not on the same level, but I would say that they wanted to really keep their story ambiguous. Sure, it's a bit odd when you do act, like the Jesse part, that part for me was like, I don't know, that's a little weird. But the him being older in things, I didn't mind that, I don't care. But no, you have to do it, that's a marketing strategy. You have to kind of dissuade people, especially when a game like this is entirely single player and a lot of people want to know, like you don't want to spoil the story, but you want to invest them in it, you have to do some form of marketing. So I don't know, that didn't bother me. I think Joel Dying didn't bother me. What did kind of bother me was the pacing. The pacing of this game really bothers me, because it takes the wind out of your sails at least three times. The first time. I'm trying to think of the three times, and I have three times at the top, like just right off the top of my head. What are your three? Well, probably when you first show up in Seattle, I was just overwhelmed and kind of waiting for the story to keep going. The second one is probably the obvious one, is the old switcheroo halfway through the game, because you're basically at the end of the game at that point. You're like, you've played through everything, it's come to its climax with the battle between Ellie and Abby. It's like, oh, by the way, here's a character that you've obviously seen as the bad guy, you have no investment in, and you can play as her now. I have faith that I would grow to like it, but for the first time ever, I was not wanting to play the game, but I didn't have to.  And then the last one for me is probably the first part of, we'll say, the epilogue, when you go to your little barn house, I was like, okay, this is fun, and then as it kind of kept going and going, I was like, oh, there's more games. This game isn't over yet. And there was another solid five hours of gameplay. Yes. The ending on top of the ending on top of the ending. Essentially, mine are the same.   Let me in. Need power for the gate, need gas for the power. Yeah, that was... Jerry can for the gas. Yeah, I didn't care much about that. But then, yeah, right when you switch over to Abby, within the first few minutes, I realized this is not a short romp. This is going to be as long, if not longer, than in Ellie's. And Ellie, I took me longer to get to the part. Ellie's part is longer, I feel, than Abby's. Also, I blammed through Abby's in one day. And one thing I will say is, despite being drawn out of it, I think I like Abby's story more. I think I like the character she interacts with more. I think I like the areas she goes to more. Actually, that's one part of Ellie's story I did like. Is the convention center when you first encountered the stalkers? That was cool. Yeah. But overall, Abby's chunk of the game just made me wish we had a last of us two that was just Abby, and then this big confrontation between the two of them could have been the ending of a trilogy or something. Well, that's what some people have said, is that either there's two different options that they could have done. One is, they would have had the narrative be going back and forth kind of more consistently than just a one time switch. Which I felt like it maybe doesn't give you as much of the narrative impact of showing Abby's perspective. And it would be slightly a bit annoying to go back and forth between the two. And I'd also kind of clued in that the doctor that Joel killed was Abby's father. So if you'd clued in that and you're playing back and forth, it kind of ruins the big reveal. Oh, yeah. Well, I always like, I knew that Abby had a reason as to why. Like there was going to be revenge. And that's something, again, that other people have talked about too, is that their voice, their frustration is they don't understand why Joel has been killed. Joel essentially doomed the human race for his own personal wants. And yeah, you could say that maybe the human race isn't worth saving at this point. I actually think he might have done good at the end of the first game, because the fireflies had the cure and they were the only one to have the cure. Well, that's not good. They're not good guys either. That's kind of like, yeah, Jeremy Johnson said the same thing too. He said that maybe like if you have it, they'll just militarize it. Like when you find it, we make it. And when you find something good, you militarize it. And I feel that maybe that's kind of what could have happened. But we are seeing when we see Abby's intro with her or their father, we're finding that her father is trying to do the better thing. He's trying to do the good thing for humanity. And to have his life be snuffed out. It's not that Joel killed the only means of, it's not that he took away Ellie. It's that he killed the only person who could have made a cure who was Abby's father. So her entire revenge subplot is completely reasonable.  I would almost argue that Abby is the actual good guy or protagonist that she is more justified in her thirst for revenge than Ellie was.  And the fact that that fight was a bit difficult too, like she's smart, like you can't just run at her and the amount of times that I died as Abby. I was like, okay, you know, I've got my, like when she gets killed by Ellie, those are very satisfying deaths. Like she doesn't just die, she really dies. So I think that, you know, that was made, that fight is made to be that brutal. And those deaths are made to be that brutal to kind of justify people's feelings about wanting Abby to die. And then when you finally do beat Ellie and she almost kills Dina. And then Lev is like, no, this isn't the way. Lev, the saving grace of this, this game's story. Oh, Lev and Yara? Yara, yes. The moment I actually think that Abby's story clicked for me is when you're on the high rise and they're kind of introducing, well, reintroducing her fear of heights. And you get your first like taste of that Joel and Ellie relationship that you missed so much from the first game between them. And you see like, they care about each other or even later on when she's like, you are my people, like actually watching her grow in a way that you never got to really watch Ellie grow throughout the entire game. Abby has the arc. Ellie kind of does. And I feel that her resolution at the end of, well, the first time the game ends, when she's at the farm. And I even felt exhausted too. Like when Tommy's coming by, he's like, ah, we found her. He's like, dude, I don't care, man. You know what? She got her, she got her, she got licked and she's done. I thought the game was going to end there. And I was like, oh, cool. Like where we're wrapping it up, Ellie learned her lesson. Cool. Yeah. And like, oh, no, no, got it. Just keep going. Okay. What really bugged me about that. So at the start of the game, Ellie wants to go and get revenge. And Joel's brother is saying, no, let's not. And then he says, okay, I'll go and do it. You stay here. Oh, the staggering, right? Yeah. Tommy goes, Ellie goes, Jesse goes. Who, by the way, I didn't care about Jesse. No, nobody cares about Jesse. But Tommy is actually telling Ellie, like, no, don't do this. And then the negotiation he makes is I'll go and do this for you. But I won't tell you. And then at the end of the game, he comes back. He's like, no, we have to do this. Do you not love Joel?  Yeah. 20 hours ago, you were in the other camp. Less than 20 hours ago, you were, we all agreed. No, let's not. It's done. Yeah. Also, I don't understand how he even survived, because he got shot in the back of the head. Well, he's missing an eyeball. He's missing an eyeball. But I was like, how'd you live? How, who fixed you? Like, it just feels like the, most of my complaints are about the ending. But it just feels like the game ended. And then Dropman was like, wait, what if we ended it this way? And they're like, OK, yeah, sure, whatever you say, boss. And then they end it again. And then he's like, wait, I have a better ending. What if we ended this way? But we already have this ending. Well, put it on top of that. I have this genius idea. What if Abby would die, but Ellie saves her while trying to get revenge? Yeah, no. Cool. I understand the narrative purpose of it, but the fact that so much has happened and so much time has passed that we find out. For instance, I thought what's really strange is that they showed the interaction between Ellie and Dina at the dance right at the end. And I was like, why did you hold off on this for so long? So that's actually where I wish the game ended is the fight between Ellie and Joel. That's the ending that I would have loved for a couple of reasons because that was the first trailer they showed for the game was that cutscene with the kids minus the fight with Joel afterwards. But that fight with Joel afterwards really hits home. Like the last thing you ever said, this is why you want revenge. You wanted purpose. And they really have that purpose. She says, like I'm willing to try and learn to forgive you. I was like, okay, you get that. And then the game goes again. And it's like, okay, we get the idea of forgiveness now. No, the forgiveness was the very last cutscene. Oh, the last cutscene? Yeah, when she's playing the guitar missing the fingers. Oh, and that's when he's holding the coffee mug. Yeah. Oh, and that's why when you go to the house at the very beginning of the game, you can pick up the coffee mug.  I mean, that's a throwback to the first game of Joel wanting coffee. Which I was really hoping they'd bring that back because that's honestly one of the most memorable lines to me of the first game is like, I could really go for some coffee. What's that? Yeah, and I liked that too. When I started the game again and I saw the mug, I was like, oh, this is that one. That's why this is so- Coffee. That's why the significance of this cup. You think that the last interaction between the two is them having a fight, but then really the actual last interaction between the two is her saying that she's willing to forgive him. And I don't know which one of those hurts more, but I'm also a big fan of like, I think I might have even talked about this in our Game of Thrones talk, but I'm a big fan of a narrative starting with a problem or a situation and ending kind of on that same note.  And with the first trailer being that cut scene and me looking forward to the entire game and ending with that cut scene with a little bit more that makes it hurt.  Good ending, Naughty Duh. There's more. And then, yeah, when you come into the final part and you fight, you're forced to fight Abby.   Literally, but I'm going to get in this boat now, bye. I thought it was kind of just like when Abby tries, or sorry, Ellie tries to play the guitar and we get it for the upteenth time that revenge can be bad when she can't finish the song because she doesn't have the two fingers. And then she just walks off into the field and it's like, that's it.  So I have kind of like a theory on that, I guess, or an interpretation where they play that song three different times in the game, that same song. The first time is when Joel plays it for Ellie.   And the last time she has lost to Dina, she has lost Joel, she has lost everything and she can't play the song even. And it's kind of her realizing like, okay, maybe it's time I walk off and try to get something back in the way that Abby lost everything, but still had Lev. That's why Abby didn't want to fight. She was like, I have something. Let me leave with this. Yeah, exactly. When you put the knife to the one thing she has, she's like, fine, I'll fight you. Like don't take things away from me. Yeah, there's a good, like there is a good narrative in here. I think that it's just, it's got way too much fat on it, which is funny to say, considering the first game has, I feel like it's perfect. Well, it's 15 hours versus 25. Yeah, yeah. Like there's no fat. Everything excessive has been trimmed. It's just a very, very well-focused narrative game. And this one, like they wanted to really put, since they didn't have any multiplayer in it, they wanted to put more into the single player. And I can really appreciate that. I can appreciate the amount of really wanting to give you your every bang for your buck in terms of time, length and whatnot. But if you're going to make a game that long, you need to have fun levels in it too.  Yeah, when the game tried to be a horror game for the one time throughout the entire thing, I was, oh, it was, it was like Naughty Dog giving me a horror game. Yeah. And then all of a sudden like you're walking in and then my roommate was watching me play it.  But then going back to the gameplay though, what I thought was interesting, well not interesting, what I thought was kind of a little bit disappointing was that you just shoot the thing. Like at first, I fought it and I was trying to run from it and like try and play like really like, and then I just was like, oh wait, I got the flamethrower. Yeah. Well, the thing I keep saying with that fight is if this was a shooter, this boss would be awesome because the mechanic of a blob breaking off into pieces of more. In fact, I was like once. Yeah. I was like, that's so cool. But I think they probably want to do it more and realize like, hey, our controls, our combat is not our strong point. Like this is not a shooter. This doesn't work that well. You'll be overwhelmed. But like a Doom or a Halo or something like that, that would be an amazing boss. Yeah, no. And that's too, that there isn't really even a, well, yeah. You get one on each side. Ellie has the one in the arcade, which by the way is based off of an actual arcade. Which one was that? I want to say that's probably where GameWorks is located in Seattle, just a bit north of Pike, yeah. Yes. Again, that's another really great attention to detail. Yeah, I feel that. But again, just emptied all the ammo I had and it was done. There was no, like I think it's hard for me not to compare this to the last of us one because this is not the last of us two. This is the last of us part two. That was a conscious effort in a continuation of the story. And I think back to the gymnasium boss fight and how like that was empty as much ammo as you can. Like there was positioning that took, like there were actual mechanics to that fight. And well, that's why like, you know, weak spots, like kind of placeholders, like as ridiculous as Resident Evil 5 is to me, I always remember that game's boss fights because I was like, you know what, these are really funny. You got obviously got to aim for the weak spots. You got to aim for like, you got to... Boulder. Yeah, you got to make... That's seen alone, three out of 10. Oh yes, we talked about it. But at the beginning of the video, Spec Ops. Spec Ops is a game that makes you feel bad subconsciously. It's a massive game about cognitive dissonance and... There's three games that do it so well. And it's that BioShock and the first last of us. And this one kind of surprisingly dropped the ball. Yeah. I thought that was kind of weird that a lot of like, so many people were like, oh, it makes you really feel bad. It's going to make you feel all these emotions. And I was like, okay, well, I'll see.  So let's see what we can do in these kind of games. And yeah, like, Spec Ops just kept coming up in the back of my mind. And at the very end of the game, they're like, do you feel like a hero? And I felt that that's what the last of us too was trying to do is like, do you feel like a good person? Do you feel like what you're doing is justified? And that's Ellie's argument in a nutshell.  Whereas something like BioShock, it forces you to do something only in the end to be like, we forced you to do something. Whereas with Ellie, there's that scene where you're with Jesse and this is when I just completely dropped it. Oh, she's like, I'm going to keep going. After Abby, even though I should be going. We literally just agreed that no, revenge is done. And yeah, no, and that was definitely, I think. I didn't want to do that. And the game made me. And no, I was done with revenge at that point because the game told me I was done with revenge at that point. And there was no reason for me to seek revenge beyond that point. I think that's the first big narrative draw. I think is that yeah, like that.  But yeah, that is essentially the first moment where it's like everyone starts to kind of be like, this isn't Ellie.  I still think that Last of Us 2 is an achievement. It is definitely a visual achievement. It's accessible, gaming controls. It's definitely going to set a benchmark. Like now games for the PS5. Like this is a proper, in terms of its look, in terms of its accessibility, in terms of how you can adjust the difficulty and all the other parameters of this game. This is a true next-gen game from that perspective. And I wonder how much I'd rag on this game or how much I would praise it if this wasn't a sequel to The Last of Us. It's hard for me to like detach that, but it's somehow the worst, most amazing game I've ever played. Because like, I don't know, it feels like I'm eating this fantastic 14-course meal where every other dish is potatoes in room temperature milk with salt. And like, I think I'm done with the meal and they bring up a certain, it's just Pepto-Bismol. No, that's, yeah, it overstays its welcome. Which, and then a lot of people said too that, like, ooh, we didn't want this, we, there shouldn't have been a sequel in the first place. And I kind of agree. And I do as well, but there was also a demand for it. And you can't say that you didn't want it if you... I bought it. Yeah, we all, like, we were all interested in it. But that's, it goes back to just how the first game ended, that complete ambiguity in terms of its ending of does Ellie accept the lie, or does she just say, you know, what doesn't matter? And then actually, yeah, kind of going into the flashbacks. Flashbacks are some of my favorite parts of this game. The first time they give you a flashback with Joel and Ellie out, it was like almost a sigh of relief for us like... A spaceship. Okay, yeah, I was like, that's what this game is missing. The characters connecting, like... It's not that I don't care, I don't care about Jesse, but it's not that I don't care about Ellie and Dina. I just, they have already developed together, whereas the first one made me... Care. Be there as that relationship developed. Yeah, you're getting, you're not getting the proper development, the proper arts that Willie draw you in. They're kind of relying on you to trust these new characters and be with these new characters. Even Ellie is essentially a new character now. It's been only four years, but so much has happened, and we see that distrust between her and Joel, because she realizes what Joel did. I will give one thing I really like though, is that Joel doesn't say anything to her before he dies.  And I think that really helps illustrate that anger, that it envelops you in that rage. And I felt that even though I knew it was coming, and it wasn't as to me as I thought it would be, it's a good motivation. It makes you want to continue. And yeah, it's a little bit weird and jarring, dude, then all of a sudden switched to that character. I wish they almost dropped in more of the PTSD moments. That part was so good. Like that was intense and that was cool. And I was like, oh, this is neat. And Abby has those too, essentially. She keeps on, you keep on going through that doorway, right? And I like that those are interactive. Those are interactive memories. Those are interactive nightmares. I thought those were really cool because it's one thing to watch someone have a PTSD moment, but to act like in a cinematic or whatever, but to be a part of those moments, those character mental issues. I thought that was another really cool immersion moment, if you would. But then I guess the final bit about this, I would have to say is, I guess people can have their opinions, obviously. People can have their negative thoughts. Like you guys can either agree with our thoughts about it or you can disagree.   Like over a voice actor or a vocab actor.  Can we just agree don't do death threats? Yeah, just don't be ever...  Everyone in this is fantastic acting. Everyone does. Except Jesse. No, even Jesse's fine. He's good. He doesn't get enough to really establish anything. Exactly. But everyone is so like giving a lot of heart into this. And I'll give these actors this, like this isn't harder than trying to work on a George Lucas Star Wars Episode III set where nothing's real because not even your clothes are real.  The amount of emotion and intensity and dedication that everyone does.  But he's a... Everyone in this is phenomenal. I thought that... Mind you, I say that a bit about Troy because I've only seen him in a few live movies and he's not given a good character maybe then maybe... I didn't know he did actual acting. He's done a few movies and they're really bad.  It's like, you know what? It's not her script. It's just her playing the character, man. Like what are you going to get out of it?  You're threatening someone's life for nothing. A fictional character? Yeah. I don't know. I feel that Last of Us 2 is definitely not this masterpiece that people are, about. But it's also not a bad game. No, it's fantastic. Some people call it flawed masterpiece. I don't know if that's... It's kind of like a copy and paste sort of thing. I would say that it has excellence amongst its muddied, muddied... Yeah, when it is a masterpiece it is a masterpiece. I would agree that the parts that our masterpieces are, but the parts that aren't, made me want to give up a couple of times. Yeah, no, there was a few times you were telling... We were constantly having conversations via messenger. I was sleep deprived and getting ready for bed, and I didn't realize that there were still five more hours of gameplay. Oh fuck, yeah, yeah. I was like, oh, I thought I was going to wrap this up and go to bed. Eventually, he started the game before I did, but I had to rent it, so I had to blast to it. So I surpassed him. And then when he was where he was, and I was like, okay, so I know what he's going to come into. And so when he was in the hospital, I was like, oh, this is great. And then I was waiting for... I didn't want to spoil anything, so I was waiting for him to get to Santa Barbara. And I was like, hey, did you like that ending on top of the ending on top of the ending? So anyways, I think that it's definitely a game that's going to be talked about for a really long time. I think it's going to... Hopefully the good parts of this game will be carried over into further developments, into further games. I kind of hope that maybe Druckmann gets a little bit of... perspective from this, because if he continues to... I don't know. I think this game really needed Amy. Or Amy Herning. She's the one who wrote the first one, right? No, no. Cormac McCarthy wrote the first one, I believe. Oh, no, that was just the road. The game was blatant. Or is this when they read the cliff notes on... The road? It's like, we're trying to read it today. There's so much dedication.  What's it? There's no single-player games? No, yeah. There's no money in single-player games. Or I don't even know if they're phrased that way, but like...   Yeah, very good. It's cheaper. It's better. Do you want to do numbers or do you not care? I mean, I already said one out of ten. I think I said I gave it like a five out of seven because there's so much and that you can't... Like, the two are the pacing. The two detractors are the pacing and the lack of gameplay variation. But there's so much amazing, like he said in this game, that it has a lot of muddy patches here and there. But I still say that it's... Yeah, it's not a bad game. Just maybe it doesn't have a great story. When I was getting to the ending and it was dragging on, I really wanted to hit it with a three out of seven, but when I finally finished it and I looked back and I saw what I went through in the actual game itself, it's a five out of seven. Like, it's better than good enough. It's a great game, but... And then also like... Two, when you can replay this game through with just all the different things you can do, all the different accessibility, all the changes, I really, really hope that that passes over into new games. Oh, that too! The guitar thing. Every time it let me play guitar for myself, I was like looking up tabs and stuff for all.  Even when I'm playing this game, it still feels like I have three fingers. Well, anyways, guys, that's our talk. I hope you enjoyed it. This was really fun, James. We've been looking forward to doing this for quite some time. Now we just have to wait another, what, like eight years for Last of Us 3. Is there even going to be one? No, they're saying the exact same thing they said after Last of Us 1. We'll think about it. We don't really... It doesn't need a third one. We don't know how we would do a third one. So probably seven years. So maybe... I don't wonder if they'd bring Abby back. Part of me thinks that they're just going to drop her, not just because of the controversy, but also because Abby's story is done. Well, let's wrap up on this note then. If you were to make a sequel, if you were in charge of the sequel, what would you want the story to be? I can't even... Because I think it would be cool to see Ellie encounter Abby again when she goes and looks for the Fireflies and finds out that Abby's now a Firefly and they have to team up, or you have to team up with Lev or something as Ellie. I think that would be cool to... I can... I have like little ideas that Abby would come... Or Ellie would come back to the Sanctuary. Or what was even the town that was at the beginning? Like I keep forgetting the name of it. I don't remember what it was. Tommy Town. I think that she'd come back there and it's been destroyed. It might have like... Everyone's gone and she has to try and find Dina. And then yeah, she maybe interacts with Abby and then... Oh, maybe it would be the fourth circle that she would... They found someone else who could be a little bit kind of... Like that might not work as much, but she would... Given the choice herself, whether she would want to do the surgery. Because as far as they know, like she is the only one who's immune. That was something that was very absent in this game. Dina gets told about it and she kind of just... Like she's like... They bring it up kind of at the end again when they're like, She's bit! Oh yeah, which... She uses that to her advantage, right? Yeah. But I thought that was kind of... Obviously that was the big, big part of the first game and they didn't want to like copy and paste it again, but the fact that people moved on from it so quickly, like Dina moved on from it so quickly and it's never brought up again, aside from when she uses the clicker as a means to get her one on... I've kept calling him dog the bounty hunter. But I feel that that should be something that's brought up in the third game. Like her immunity is something that is at a trigger point now because I feel if there was a part three this would be the point where the earth is literally... Like this is humanity's last opportunity. They're in the final generation. Like there's... I actually almost want to say something about girl with all the gifts. Have you ever seen the film or read the book? I've seen the film. I didn't even know it was a book. Oh, but it's based off of a book which, funny enough, the book came out at the exact same time as last of us did and I kind of was like... And I kind of wondered who copied who. But at the end of the girl with all the gifts, the creatures, the infection, the parasites, they've all started to form into these clusters of trees and they're in those embryos, right? Yeah. Those clusterizations that if they catch fire or if they're damaged, the spores will release. And I feel that that's what should happen. You should have some sort of cataclysmic moment. That's... Like, the Earth is about to go through its second fuckinging and it's going to be the last one if they don't do something about it. And I think that should be... You'd have to really play it careful because you don't want to copy the girl with all the gifts at the same time. It'd be cool. I think that would be an interesting aspect. And again, it adds more variancy to the entire idea of the infection, which I've always found very, very cool. One of the coolest, if not the coolest, post-apocalyptic or zombie universe, I think. I love the idea of using the Cordyceps virus as a post-apocalyptic system. Oh yeah, you can do it a lot better. That was a really good thing. Thank you. Anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. Bye for real this time. Yes, bye for real this time. It was very enjoyable to talk about this with you, James. And I hope you guys stuck around. Yeah, well, if you guys ever want us to talk about something else in the future, down for this, I'd like to do this more than maybe once a year. Go check out our Pokemon Go review. Yeah, I'm the one guy who thought that wasn't fun. And I was 100 miles. I was bored out of my mind. I still thought that game wasn't fun. You can just walk around in 100 miles if you want. It is just something you can do regardless. There was only one street. We need an excuse to walk around, okay? Yes, it's true. All right, guys. That's it. See you later.


The Ravens had the Bengals on the ropes, sans Lamar Jackson, which was crazy, but since he somehow found a way to survive and advance with what is an infamous and unforgettable 24 to 17 wild card weekend win. But the truth is, the Bengals, they have a lot of work to do. They already had a raw deal. The Bengals had no shot at the one seed. They win their division, but almost didn't get to play at home. Now they have to go to Buffalo instead of a coin flip or neutral site, which seems fair and the other teams got, at least were considered, as far as tops in the AFC Ravens included. And the road just got even harder after losing left tackle Jonah Williams last night. If things are as bad as they are feared to be, and they seem pretty bad, the Bengals are going to be down three of their starting five offensive linemen when they head to Buffalo. This offensive line that, at the point this year, through this winning stretch, was better than what it was last year on the road to a Super Bowl against the Rams.


China State Councillor Liu Yandong and other high-ranking officials joined WIPO Director General Francis Gurry and over 700 delegates at today's opening of the diplomatic conference on the protection of audiovisual performances. Delegates from WIPO's 185 member states and over 40 non-governmental organizations are here to conclude negotiations on a treaty that will shore up the rights of performers in their audiovisual performances. Mrs. Yandong opened the conference by underlining the importance of intellectual property to economic growth, cultural development and human progress. Mr. Gurry stressed the importance of the Beijing talks, saying the diplomatic conference represents the success of the multilateral system. He also highlighted the importance of a treaty to audiovisual performers. The opening session also heard from a Chinese opera performer and a Canadian actress. IP is closely connected to the development of the economy and culture and plays an extremely important role in the progress of human civilization. It is necessary on the one hand to find a balance between the interests of the creator and the users. And in enacting international rules and standards on IP protection, we should take into account the specific circumstances of different countries, particularly with respect to developing nations and their different stages of development, histories, cultures and capacities. In the first place, it is an affirmation of the relevance of multilateralism in general and of multilateral rulemaking in the field of intellectual property in particular. Actors and audiovisual performers are fundamental to our capacity to experience the art that is produced by creators and composers and authors. Their performances instruct, they move and they enrich our lives and they are intrinsically worthy of protection. It is particularly appropriate that the value of performers should be recognised in a treaty that is concluded in China, both because of the depth of China's historical association with theatre and with performance and because of the vitality and dynamism of China's contemporary theatre, cinema and television. Theatre, acting and performance in China date back to the Shang dynasty and they enjoy an unbroken historical continuity and development and adaptation leading to the blossoming contemporary culture that saw China producing in 2010 over 500 feature films and China being produced the largest number of television series in the world. Digital technology and the internet offer the promise of a global audience and the unprecedented availability of creative works. At the same time, they make creative works increasingly vulnerable to unfair exploitation. The Beijing Treaty will enable performers to interact with greater confidence with the digital environment. It will remedy a widely perceived injustice of the unequal treatment of audiovisual performers compared to musical performers at the international level. We are very grateful to the government of China for its leadership in providing the platform to address this deficiency. And I urge all delegations to take the final step now to the international recognition of the intrinsic worth of audiovisual performances by concluding the Beijing Treaty in the coming days. Thank you very much. Unfortunately for different reasons, the right of performers have not been given adequate protection and recognition through international instruments. It's time for an international treaty that recognizes that truth, conclude the treaty, recognize the rights of audiovisual performers, give us the tools we need to keep telling our shared stories, to keep being players in this digital revolution and global exchange of ideas. It's the right thing to do. Thank you for this honor.