Well, this is gonna be really unpopular but it's an honest opinion with no ill or elitism intent. I have been playing The Last of Us Part II for the past week and as usual i always start a new game i'm unfamiliar at the default difficulty setting, which always bothers me when it isn't called "normal" because i want to know what the intended experience is, they went for Moderate in this one.
As game the goes by, doesn't take long to realize that the Moderate setting is too fucking easy, but i still persist for some time before changing it to Hard. Hard felt as the "normal" setting, it was still pretty forgiving with Ellie getting away with a lot of bullshit. Finally, i put in Survival, the hardest option you can change mid game i suppose because i didn't see Grounded on the menu, and for the first time the game started making sense.
What Naughty Dog achieved in terms of writing, voice acting, animations and everything else to make you immersed in this world and story is unprecedented in the media, but the dissonance between the intensity of the narrative and the easier difficulty settings puts everything at risk, how can you buy Ellie's emotions and struggles when she's a superhero who can take bullets, arrows and whatever else? Going full Lara Croft mode in this game ruins its tone and makes it a significantly inferior experience.
At some point i thought Souls games should have an easy mode, but this game made me change my mind, people judge what they play and the developer should not provide an inferior experience because gamers think they want one, and this has nothing to do with accessibility, which i'm all for and TLoU 2 should be applauded for the excepcional effort in this area.
TL;DR: Started the game at the moderate setting which was too easy and ruined the tone of the game.
