I actually really like Abby and her crew. I love that the game manages to humanize both Ellie, Abby, and the Seraphites by proxy through Yara and Lev. I love that the back half of the game re-contextualizes the first half by humanizing all those "nameless" grunts Ellie has been cutting through since her revenge quest began. I get why some people don't like it. It's uncomfortable to think that the "hero" of the story is behaving so much like a "villain." This game takes the adage, "everyone's a hero in their own story" and runs with it." I got into an argument with a coworker, because he hated the game, and thinks it shits on the legacy of the first, while I disagree, and thinks it builds on the narrative of the first in a beautiful way. He says it's just a generic revenge story, and how it beats you over the head with "revenge is bad, blah blah blah," and while I don't disagree, I feel like many of the best stories can be desfiles down to a simple idea. You can layer complexity over it, sure, but at their core, the narrative hook is usually damn straight forward.
the complexity of TLOU2's narrative isn't in the narrative hook, which is quite simple and "generic," it's the characters that add the complexity, and how those character relationships intertwine that make the game complex. I haven't beaten the game, but this next point doesn't require me to:
Like, the story is simple: "After witnessing the murder of her father figure, a young woman embarks on a quest across a war torn Seattle for revenge." Hell, the first game is just as simple: "After losing his daughter in a tragic event 20 years ago, a man finds new purpose when tasked with transporting precious cargo across a dangerous and hostile post apocalyptic America."
The complexity of TLOU is what gives the story its drama, not just the shock death of the father figure:
Ellie and Joel are living peacefully in his Tommy's community, but there are hints that Ellie and Joel aren't on the best of terms due to some unknown event, possibly related to a scuffle of sorts the night before.
While out on patrol, Joel and Tommy come across a young woman named Abby being chased by infected, and they choose to help her. She takes them back to her camp, where she brutally murders Joel in front of Ellie, who had come to find him after he and Tommy fail to check in.
Ellie, stricken with grief and rage, vows to hunt down and kill Abby. She will not let anyone stop her from this goal. Underneath that rage and grief is guilt. Her and Joel hadn't really patched things up, so she no doubt feels horrible that she has been robbed of the chance to "make things right with him."
During her revenge mission, she kills countless numbers of Abby's soldier colleagues, not giving a second thought to who they are, or whether or not they are anything more than obstacles in her way that must be disposed of. In any other story, this is standard fair. The hero is on a righteous quest, and the ends justify the means.
But Abby is the hero of her own story, remember? And at the halfway point of the story, we learn that Abby was a kind, dorky young lady who had a loving relationship with her father. He seemed like a typical dad, and was also a doctor for the massive community of survivors they were a part of. Until her father is killed brutality while attempting to perform an operation that could potentially save humanity from the deadly cordyceps virus. The only thing she knows of his killer is his name: Joel.
So she does exactly what Ellie does; she embarks on a quest to avenge the death of her father, but from what we can tell, she hasn't slaughtered countless individuals on this quest. But where we meet Abby is at the "end" of her revenge journey. She kills the "monster" who took her father away from her. We could get a whole game narrative about her own "heroes journey," and if the man she took revenge against wasn't Joel, we, as an audience, would have gone right along with her in righteous indignation.
So the game asks us this question: What happens when you put two protagonists against each other, each with understandable and justifiable motivations to do the things they do for their goals? That's where the complexity comes in. And that's where the player is challenged
