Speaking of, I’d give the game a lot more credit had druckmann and crew gone for a full-on gay male coupling and included sweaty, lusty man sex. The Lesbian couplings of the lead character are much more normalized and nobody really gives much of a shit except for Karen’s wanting to make everything all about them, on any end of the sexuality spectrum. Hell, go further and try a non-parody bear and cool young dude style coupling, really aim for the stars.
Instead, the game we have feels mostly pandering. It was asked above what is really so bad about the game and that’s a part of it, pretending you’re some transcendental barrier-breaking juggernaut, when the reality is you told some superficially-progressive revenge yarn where the direction, pacing and scripting are all shit built on a foundation of pretty poor writing. Anything related to pacing and writing in games aren’t normally the biggest problems for me when paired with gameplay I generally enjoy (else I’d have a much harder time with most RPG’s), but if your game experience leans this heavily on the scripted narrative you want to tell, it damn well needs the writing and direction to back it up.
Last of Us 2 was Druckmann playing at being an auteur with unlimited budget and scope to make his masterpiece, only to instead give us an overly long junior high-school production play with really decent set design and messaging more surface-level than teenage angst in a Linkin Park song.
