TLOU2 had all the necessary components to be amazing. The first few hours were awesome and I thought the bad reviews were overblown... until I began to agree with those reviews. It's just the way that Druckmann and Gross packaged and unveiled the game that made it poor and did a major disservice to the developers.
I honestly feel like TLOU2 game might feel a bit less garbled if you literally played all chapters in reverse order starting at the resort and steadily moving back towards the small snowy town. Heck, even swapping the order of two character playthrough would easily improve the whole game at least a full point if not more IMO. The latter half of the game wasn't even experiencing it from a different point of view IMO. It just felt like filler to justify an extremely poorly contrived story exposition.
Druckmann claims TLOU1 was about what you'd do for love. TLOU2 was was what you'd do for justice. The game constantly goes back and forth with inexplicable and completely uneven blows of vindictiveness and retribution. However, if the game was slightly tweaked to go in reverse, then Joel would be the perfect climax vs a completely effect up exposition.
The "woke" elements were fine. I had no issues with that and I'm fine if they add more of that in future games. My frustration was that everything was there and the most minor ordering tweak could have wiped out all the controversy.
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