Just the part about the ending (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, June 25, 2020, 11:21 (1610 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I keep seeing people saying the game is "bad writing". Folks are even trying to dethrone D.B. Weiss and David Benioff as the first thing you see when you google "Bad Writers".

I dunno, it seems like most of the actual criticisms are petty, and amount to the narrative simply not matching their own head canon.

Like obviously people flip their shit about the ending, but the idea of it isn't really that bad. It's just the execution and motivation. I simply don't think Ellie would have had the change of heart, as there wasn't really much change or self reflection upon the journey. The huge missed opportunity was of course to have Ellie discover that Abby's dad was killed by Joel. Remember that only we know that. Ellie doesn't.

Finding that out, and having her imagine that loss, which she herself experienced when Abby took Joel from her, realizing they are essentially even, seeing Lev depend on Abby like Ellie depended on Joel, would actually make this course of action believable.

All the pieces were there. But the game never put them together. Strip out all the Abby sections from the game, and discard them from your mind. You now know what Ellie knows. And so do you think Ellie would spare her? Do you think the story would have changed Ellie? I don't.

I remember mentioning that the Naughty Dog formula was to never show the player something the character doesn't know. Your perspectives are the same in say, Uncharted or the original Last of Us as that of the main character. Uncharted 2 breaks that rule, but I think forgets that the characters don't know what we know. We as the player might have had an arc, but Ellie has not. Unless she learns what we know.

I'm willing to accept that some people who played the game came around to Abby. But not that Ellie did.