'The Last of Us Part II' Does Not Solve its Violence Problem (Spoilers)

SPOILERS inevitably are coming. I recommend you not read AT ALL if you do not want to be spoiled.

Violence is increasingly a problem that video games have to deal with. As graphics become more realistic, gamer writers feel their stories must also adhere closer to a realism. The most classic video game idea is a competition between you, the player, and the computer. Whoever survives wins. Now that was no real problem as long the bodies competing were small abstract pixel forms blipping out of existence. Even as technology could produce 3D graphics and recognizably human bodies, it was no real issue. Those weren't people, they were cartoon blobs in a humanoid shape. However, now that video game humans look very convincing, their bodies can be destroyed in disturbingly realistic ways. This issue has reached the point that game devs have reported real psychological trauma while working hard to design all this carnage.

Naughty Dog, the developers of the new video game, The Last of Us Part II, are of course, aware of this contradiction. They have been on the cutting edge of "cinematic" gaming since the PlayStation 3, and have done as much as any studio to craft realistic violence. Even as early as Uncharted 2, our hero, Nathan Drake, was confronted by the final bad guy. This hulking brute of ruthless Russian muscle, Lazarevic could mock Drake (and implicitly the player) by asking "How many men have you killed? How many just today?". This is a good point that the hero was no better than the villain. Naughty Dog kept moving in this direction, making games full of the contraction between hero and monster. Uncharted 4 is very much a game taking Nathan Drake to task for everything he's done. The Last of Us 1 ends on an infamous and brilliant finale where everything you've done through the story may have in fact doomed humanity.

So when The Last of Us Part II is an especially gruesome experience, that's not a massive surprise for this franchise or this developer. They are too self-aware to miss the violence problem. They do not want to be the 2012 reboot of Tomb Raider (which was an Uncharted game in all but name anyway). That game saw the character Lara Croft, transformed from just a gamer pin-up girl to an believable young woman. Then she went from a grounded start as an everywoman to basically the motherfucking Terminator by the end. She murders thousands of people, and the game never notices. It's hilarious. The Last of Us Part II wants to use that contradiction between your apparent heroic goals and the actual results as the apex of its story.

The result though is... let's just say not for me. I don't think The Last of Us II has the solution to the violence problem.

Top 10 May 2020 First Watches

My movie theme for May was Sports Movies. Like last month when I did musicals, I wanted to focus on an aspect of social life that the plague mostly has taken away from us. In an alternate reality, with perhaps a functioning government, I would have seen the New York Yankees play the Mariners this month. Instead, nobody saw the Yankees or the Mariners. We are all poorer for it. But, I think this will be my last wistful theme. I'm getting a bit depressed mourning normal life one entertainment at a time.

Anyway, as genres go, Sports Films have never exactly been a favorite of mine. The stress and excitement of a real sporting event is much more dramatic than a fictionalized version. No screenwriter can replicate the sheer joy I had when the Broncos defense held Tom Brady twice at the goal line in the 2016 AFC Championship. I've never felt worse in my life than back in 2004 when the Yankees blew a 3-0 lead in a playoff series against the Red Sox. I was twelve years old and until then, did not actually know what sadness was. A movie needs a structure, it needs arcs, it needs meaning. Real sports are random statistical noise upon which we add the arcs and meaning. That's what creates the excitement. You can't manufacture that.

So ultimately if you're going to make a great sports movie, it cannot actually be about the sport. I know in the real world there is a selection of people who demand athletes only play ball and then shut up. You can usually find those guys calling in to ESPN radio to complain about Odell Beckham Jr. and they all sound like your racist uncle. But it is really the stories behind the ball-playing that make for good drama. The balls don't matter, the cultural weight we give to the balls matter. Winning and losing is interesting, but not exactly proof of any justice or your worthiness as a person. Robert Kraft owns the Patriots and is a billionaire. He wins every day, and he's a piece of fucking shit.

Interesting humanity does not come from winning or losing. Heroes lose, monsters win and that doesn't make for good fiction. I don't care about the home runs or the triple doubles as an abstract feat of strength. I care about the story behind the home runs and triple doubles. So never shut up and play ball.

Top 10 April 2020 First Watches

I have a perfect 0% record on New Years' resolutions. Every year I make grandiose wishes, like, "this will be the year I finally write that novel" or "this is the year I lose weight" or "this is the year I learn to ride a bicycle". So far I've written nothing, weigh about the same as I did ten years ago, and still can't ride a bike. So for 2020, I figured, let's aim lower. "I want to finally see Hamilton on Broadway". Easy enough challenge, you just need about $300.00 in liquidity at any one time. The only thing that could stop me is something totally insane, like say, the world ending.

And then it did. So another failed resolution. Maybe I'll have more luck in 2021 when I promise I'll finally see the Beetlejuice musical. No way an asshole producer could ruin that, right? Right?

But while plagues can take away live experiences, they can't take away filmed ones. April 2020's movie theme was therefore Musicals. I started the month out with this ambition to see a huge bunch of weird non-traditional things. Then I realized fairly early on, I haven't seen most of the great musical canon. If I haven't seen The Sound of Music, should I really aim for The Apple? I should really try to get some foundation in. So this month was full of squeaky-clean, mostly white people fantasy from the mid-20th century. And it was wonderful.

Obliviously, "'Musicals" is way too big a topic for just one month. I saw about twelve in April and could have easily seen another forty. We'll be back again. I do also want to say that even though there are some very obvious class and wealth issues with many musicals, this genre should not be as obscure as it seems to be. It seems like "movie culture", especially filmbro culture, has a memory that doesn't go back to before 1980. Blockbusters are fine, they're the workhorse of the film industry. But once upon a time, musicals were that workhorse. So many instead of appreciating Darth Vader and Batman so often, we could take some time to appreciate Gene Kelly and Barbra Streisand? You can do both. We all have plenty of time now.

Ranking the Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind Superbosses

I actually wrote this post back in February. Like many projects in my life, it has sat unfinished in a forgotten place, becoming more and more forgotten. So for whatever reason, it is being released now. Dusted off with a new intro. Enjoy.

Kingdom Hearts has never quite gotten the respect it deserves in terms of gameplay. A lot of that comes from the series' generally ease in difficulty. They rarely require you to master them. Kingdom Hearts lets you be a clumsy fool to beat most Heartless. That's fun. I love jamming the Square button and seeing monsters disappear in puffs of particle effects. Sora's combos are pretty automatic and basically solve themselves. But while you can see end credits this way, you're not seeing everything Kingdom Hearts truly is. You're not learning the system, you're sloppily overpowering it. Really learning an action game can't just be easy victories. It takes pain. This is why the ruthless Dark Souls is the most feared and worshiped franchise in gaming today. They are all pain.

Is there pain in Kingdom Hearts? Oh yes. Plenty. That pain hides in the post-game Superbosses. That's when your mashing won't save you. You can't even assume Sora's block will do all the work and open enemies up. These bosses are terrifyingly fast, they hit hard, and they only forgive a few mistakes. Your HP bar is feeble protection against the blitzkrieg of enemy combos leading into other combos as the fight slips out of your control. They are walls of seemingly impossible brutality. Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts II could kill you in a second. And I absolutely love him for it. Hurt me more, please.

Kingdom Hearts III's original release lacked this extra spice of serious challenge. The Re:Mind DLC fixes that. With the fourteen new Superbosses, you either leave nothing for granted and truly play your ass off, or you watch Sora float limply on the Game Over screen. I beat Kingdom Hearts III last year without much thought. Come January 2020, I needed to learn every skill in Sora's toolset. Kingdom Hearts can be true action games with as much sophistication and difficulty as any of the others. So maybe we should treat this series with more respect?

Here are the fourteen Superbosses that the Re:Mind DLC offers, all ranked in terms how of much I loved them. This is a journey to the heart of Kingdom Hearts III.

Top 10 March 2020 First-Watches

So how about that March, huh?

...Oh, that bad? Well that sucks.

Anyway, let’s ignore all that and talk about movies. I've been tweeting lists every month for awhile now about the five to ten best movies I had recently seen for the first time. I figure, since I'm not currently writing much of anything else, I should make it a whole feature. So here's a run-down the cinematic joys of March for me.

Also, lately I've been getting into Theme Months. This is an exercise in forcing myself to watch more movies. By setting up themes, I organize my massive backlog and give myself a motivation to get through it, chunk by chunk. In February I did Weird SciFi to finally watch things like Stalker and Upstream Color. I have literally thousands of movies I want to see at some point, and this process makes it less overwhelming.

March’s theme was Korean Movies. Once upon a time the biggest film story was Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite sweeping the Oscars. (Which was only a few weeks ago, even if it seems like a different century now. The Oscars are like a relic of a medieval culture we've lost.) To celebrate Joon-ho’s win, I thought, I'd watch all his movies that I haven’t seen before. And in the process go watch like eight other Korean movies I've been meaning to get to. I found some real gems in there, even if, as you'll see, I'm a bit unhappy with my selections.

Anyway, here's ten movies I feel like talking about today: