There’s a scene near the end of The Last of Us Part II in which Dina, the girlfriend and baby mama of protagonist Ellie, begs her to let her inane revenge quest go. She has a family and a life here on their farm in Jackson, and that is something precious in this post-apocalyptic world. Fist-fighting your sworn enemy can’t be more important than that, right? Nevertheless, Ellie leaves her idyllic farm life and ventures across state lines once more to see if this time, it will make her feel something. It’s been five years since that game came out, and lately I feel like I’ve been caught in that same cycle of violence, cutting away at my own sanity to spite an assembly line that will not let one of my favorite games of all time rest. I spent weeks dragging HBO’s live-action adaptation through the mud, and now I’m back on my bullshit because Naughty Dog is releasing a “Chronological Experience” update for The Last of Us Part II Remastered, allowing you to play the game in chronological order, rather than the non-linear one the game was written to be experienced in.
“But Ken,” you say. “Is it really that big of a deal if some people play The Last of Us Part II with all its moments presented in chronological order? That doesn’t detract from the original experience, nor does it make it any less the ‘canonical’ version of the story.” Sure, disembodied voice. Devoid of all other context surrounding this game and franchise, it just sounds like a neat way to experience a story the second time around. If it were an unlockable mode that becomes available after you finish the game for the first time, maybe I could buy into that. People have made YouTube videos based on this very idea. However, the Chronological Experience didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. It exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before it.
To call The Last of Us Part II a divisive game would be a massive understatement, but a core part of what made it such a prickly game for some folks was the way it walled off the player from certain vital context until a deliberate moment. This is why the flashback-heavy format is so crucial to the story it tells, and is one of the many reasons HBO’s show feels like a fundamental misunderstanding of the story it’s adapting. Denying the player cathartic, easy answers is a core part of The Last of Us Part II, and laying out its story in the most straightforward, literal way feels like capitulating to an audience that already didn’t like the story you told in the first place, whether they knew why Abby killed Joel early on or not. There are plenty of criticisms to be thrown at Part II, but you can’t say it wasn’t deliberate in the experience it was trying to convey. I’m going to quote a guy who has written about this series extensively over the years (it’s me), who wrote this about the show in one of his episodic recaps when talking about how HBO re-arranged parts of the narrative in what felt like an attempt to avoid some of the blowback the game received in 2020:
“[HBO’s] The Last of Us is so preoccupied with recounting plot points like a Wikipedia summary that it lacks any real insight into why those events were arranged in a way that made them meaningful to play through.”
The Last of Us Part II remains one of the boldest games in the AAA space, and that boldness has been categorically undermined at nearly every turn by Sony, Naughty Dog, and HBO ever since. But hey, at least you’ll be able to play as Joel and Tommy dressed as Uncharted characters in the No Return mode once you beat the game in chronological order, right?