Left Behind Spoiler Post!

SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS@@@ SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!SPOILERS!!! SPOILERS!!!

       Quick little spoiler post here. So... I guess Ellie is a lesbian. I'm really conservative about most issues and I believe that homosexuality is morally wrong per the teachings of the Bible. Of coures, I also adhere to Christ's strong commands to love everyone and not judge. So of course I still love Ellie as a character, but I'm also a little upset that what I view as a negative thing is portrayed as one of the only positive things in Ellie's life. I also feel like it kind of takes away from the great hours I spent with Riley in the mall. That felt like such an innocent playtime between two young girls, but the scene in the department store at the end soured that for me a bit (still very enjoyable though. Got a vibe of realism from their conversations and behaviors that I recognize from seeing teenage girls talk and run around malls).

       Ellie still comes off as quite the innocent character, and she's still great. And I still loved this DLC. I just wish Ellie and Riley were friends only. Hopefully I don't draw too much ire for this opinion. It's also a bit weird that this is revealed as a sneak attack in DLC months after the game came out. Very similar to what we learned about a certain character in a certain series of books after they were all published... It seems like nowadays we have to always think about sexuality as a possibilty when two people of the same gender are good friends, which to me is weird. Obviously some people of the same gender become attracted to each other, but there are also really strong, intimate friendships between people of the same gender that don't have any sexual undertone. I hope that kind of friendship can still be portrayed in fiction without people getting the wrong idea or making assumptions. I'm sure it can, I'm just throwing this idea out there. Thank you for listening, please don't send me hate mail :) Of course non-hate mail disagreeing with me is fine :)

      The combat situation I was talking about in the review is the handful of times there are infected and hunters running around in the same area. Throwing bottles at the hunters to make infected attack them is great, as is getting snuck up on by infected while hiding from hunters. Having both after you at once is quite frightening and also opens up room for some interesting tactics, and as far as I remember, there wasn't a scenario like this in the main game.

       I wonder what Naughty Dog is working on now... Hopefully something good.

The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC review

Note: This review contains the mildest of spoilers for the main of The Last of Us.
       I played Left Behind on grounded mode, which you can do if you have purchased grounded mode. It was a lot of fun that way. The final encounter is really epic and took me 15 + tries to complete. When I finally beat it, I felt like such a baller. That's the great thing about super hard modes. Many of the times I failed this scenario were also lots of fun as I tried to adapt when I made a mistake. Sometimes I would make it really far doing really risky stuff. But then, of course, somebody would take me down... It's funny, I found a lot of materials on my playthrough, but never enough to make anything. Then when I played some sections on easy to get trophies, there was stuff everywhere. That's grounded mode for ya.... Anyway....

       Left Behind is a short DLC chapter for The Last of Us. It took me about 3-5 hours on grounded mode. It takes place in and around the events of TLOU. I'll try not to spoil exactly what's going on... You play as Ellie, so you'll be knifing people rather than choking them out or punching them. The action parts are great and tense, and put you in some very interesting combat situations that you don't see in the main game. Now that I've seen these scenarios, it's actually pretty weird that they aren't in the main game. They were a bit of a surprise to me, and I had a great feeling of the gears clicking in my mind when I saw what was going on, so I won't mention exactly what happens so you can hopefully get that feeling too.

       A big part of this DLC involves doing non-combat stuff. And those parts are really fun and really well written. Switching from playing as Clementine in The Walking Dead Season 2 straight back to Ellie is quite jarring and really emphasizes the drastic differences between these two characters that sound almost identical on paper. The story fills in a few interesting blanks, and doesn't feel tacked on at all, especially if you play it some time after playing TLOU proper (although a few of the artifacts you find are kind of dumb, or at least placed in weird places. Some are cool though). I imagine it probably does seem tacked on if you were to play it immediately after beating TLOU. Then again, maybe not, since the ending of TLOU pretty directly leads into some of what you'll experience in Left Behind.

       Left Behind is a great game, tier 2, just like TLOU.