SPOILER: The Last of Us 2’s other playable character is boring

For the first few hours of The Last of Us 2, I enjoyed almost every minute of gameplay and every story beat the narrative hit me with as Ellie set out for revenge against a group that took something from her she held most dear.

Following a confrontation with members of that group and a meet up with her friends she is faced with the fact she has to go home now, leaving the main antagonist alive, or risk losing even more. Just before that is about to happen the games main antagonist, Abby, shows up at the groups hide out and has Ellie and her friends backed into a corner at gunpoint.

You see Abby had killed Spoiler Alert, Joel, the protagonist from the first game ,after he killed her father, who was one of the doctors killed as Joel saved Ellie at the end of that game. A pretty clear and relatable motivation that made me both understand and hate her. She felt like a great antagonist especially because her motivations closely match those of Ellie.

Instead of resolving the confrontation between Ellie and Abby right away, the game flashes back for the next few hours of gameplay where you play as Abby mostly during the past three days that had seen Ellie and her friends arrive in Seattle to hunt down Abby and all of those involved in Joel’s death. An interesting concept, but so far I feel it has been poorly executed.

Before I go any further I think it’s important to note that my issue with playing as Abby has nothing to with her being a muscular woman, I think that actually makes sense in the large narrative as she seemed to have one goal over the last four years since her dad died. Kill Joel. My complaints are only about the story I am experiencing as her.

To be frank it feels pointless. Your first goal is to find Owen, a friend and ex-lover of Abby who has gone missing out in Seattle. Also an important spoilery note at this point in the game we know that Ellie will go on to kill Owen. So we spend a few hours heading out to find Owen. Even this just feels pointless, I know Owen is going to die and the main reason she is looking for him is to make sure he is ok.

While ultimately she reaches him and finds out he is ok, her progress towards him is slowed along the way by the group mostly referred to as the Scars. At this point in the game I don’t really understand anything about the Scars other than that they mirror most post apocalyptic cults we see in video games. I had hoped her capture would shed some light on like anything about their origins or motivations, but it didn’t. She is rescued by two young ex-Scars, who were kicked out because one of them shaved his head. One of them is left with a horrible broken arm and you help them find safety eventually.

After that you reach Owen who seems to want to leave the big militia group you are in. So I ask what was the point of this? Of course he wouldn’t be dead and the fact that he doesn’t want to be in the group anymore becomes irrelevant when he dies in a couple days. I think the developers want us to become sympathetic to her, which I am to an extent.

Her loss of her father is much like Ellie’s loss of Joel. I think that sympathy was felt after the short flashback we got to Abby learning of the surgery that would kill Ellie and later her father’s death. I didn’t need another few hours exploring as her with an unclear and uninteresting goal of finding a friend who I know will die and help two random ex-cult members.

As I write this I still haven’t finished the part where you play as her, so I may have egg on my face at some point, but right now this chunk of the game feels irrelevant to the larger narrative.