[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by bax

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the gameplay in the first game, if you played it.

After playing part 1 and part 2 back to back I feel really strongly that the sequel surpasses the original in everything gameplay related.

Divisive game no doubt, but I can easily see why so many people gave it a 10/10. This game pushes the genre forward and will talked about for years to come. I didn’t find it anywhere near as bleak as you did either. There was plenty of touching moments and even humor to properly balance and pace the game.

I wonder if the “completionist” style of gameplay might have slowed things down for you? I took my time, but didn’t search every nook and cranny and found it moved at a great pace.

The enemy encounters have a ton of variety based on how you want to play the game too. The combat was extremely varied from my perspective and the encounters are often broken up by story, platforming, mild puzzle solving, or big action set pieces.

That’s video games, it’s cool to see how we had such different experiences with the same game. Easily my game of the year so far.

I tried Days Gone, but couldn’t push through it as I found it extremely repetitive and similar to most open world games except with blah characters and weak writing.

The thing about the first game is that it was the first experience in this universe. Joel and Ellie were extremely compelling characters trying to navigate through this new world of clickers, runners and people surviving in a post apocalyptic world. Also I don't think gameplay was ever a strong suit of the original as it was polished and just good enough to be a vessel for the story. You wanted to keep going to see if Joel and Ellie could make a go of it in this world together.

This sequel didn't bring much new to the gameplay which as I stated before was not the strength of the first game so you are left with this bitter revenge story featuring unlikeable characters (I think someone noted in previous posts the only likeable character was Dina to which I agree) that you don't really care about unlike the first game where Joel and Ellie were dear to our hearts. The first half of the game was not as good as the original but still very good until the halfway mark where things take a turn for the worse.

Spoiler!

The wheels really fall off with the jarring switch to the Abby storyline at the climax of Ellie's playthrough. It was bad enough that they gave her a totally distracting woman on steroids physique but worse was that it was extremely difficult to get into her storyline. It got to the point where I just didn't want to play anymore as the joy had been sucked out of whatever was left from the original game. While I did come around to feeling sympathetic for her character and why she killed Joel, she still didn't come off as a likeable character that I wanted to play. The part where you have to play her trying to kill Ellie was preposterous to me as nobody wants to play this character trying to kill Ellie but we have to because the writers are forcing their heavy handed story about the circle of revenge and people being inherently bad. At the end of the game you are left with this empty feeling that Joel is dead, Ellie has lost everything (Joel and Dina), and a thoroughly beat down Abby & Lev sailing away to their next life and death encounter with evil people trying to kill them because in Naughty Dog's post apocalyptic world murder is second nature for all humans. As I said before if this was the outcome of Joel saving Ellie from the surgery then it simply wasn't worth it because the outcome was disappointing all around.

Another note is that Naughty Dog really needs to get away from the time shifting thing that's starting to creep into their games. There were several times in this game where they abruptly go back in time and those moments largely don't work because you know the future already and you just want to power through to get back to the main storyline.