Elden Ringhas no shortage of beats that are all tremendously fun to experience with a community of players. This is still the case years after a FromSoftware Soulslike has been released, but it’s especially true of launch week, when everyone is coldly progressing through the game and coming across its oftentimes convoluted and clandestine discoveries. It’s wildly unprecedented to first descend intoElden Ring’s Siofra River Well, for example, and be taken aback by how deep underground the lift takes players before looking upon an astonishing purple sky full of stars.
Unfortunately,The Last of Us Part 2didn’t have the chance to surprise everyone with its most devastating reveal because Joel’s death had already been leaked before launch. Still, whileThe Last of Us Part 2may not be an open-world action-RPG with hundreds of hours of content (even more now thanks to its feature-length-sized Shadow of the Erdtree DLC), its character-driven story is undoubtedly packed with gut-wrenching moments, as well as one bombshell moment in particular where the size of the sequel is made shockingly apparent thatPart 1players may not have predicted.
Ellie’s Seattle Journey in The Last of Us Part 2 is Long Enough to Be Its Own Game
The Last of Us Part 1isn’t long by any stretch of the imagination and is paced fairly quickly between each of its seasonal chapters. It’s also a far simpler story, following Joel and Ellie’s cross-country trek to reach the Fireflies. Its sequel, on the other hand, tells two stories that parallel and mirror one another, requiring players to swap between Ellie and Abby. Considering how much happens between when Joel is killed by Abby and when Ellie battles Abby in Santa Barbara, it’s not at all surprising thatPart 2is at least double the length ofPart 1.
Funny enough,HBO’sThe Last of Usis making a point of how long and story-richPart 2is by splitting its adaptation of the sequel into two seasons.
Ellie’s three-day rampage throughout Seattle is quite dense with encounters against the infected (includingshamblers,The Last of Us Part 2’s brand-new infected type), the Washington Liberation Front, and the Seraphites. That’s why, when Abby becomes playable again after a cut-to-black cliffhanger in the theater,Part 2earns itsElden Ringmoment.
Abby and Santa Barbara Make Up a Half and Then Some of The Last of Us Part 2
Elden Ringmay only seem so large when Limgrave alone is represented on players’ maps, but being whisked away to Leyndell by a teleporter chest in the Weeping Peninsula and seeing how far away players have been taken is a sobering promise that that they have no clue how to predict the game’s sheer scale. Abby is playable in a couple of brief sequences before she kills Joel, and the fact that Ellie is then playable for the following ~10–15 hours allows her surprise deuteragonist reveal in the latter half ofPart 2to land so strongly.
Here, players not only grasp that they are back in Seattle Day 1 but that Abby has her own series of upgrade branches. This results in the revelation that there’s a whole half of the game left as there must be enough time allotted to playing as Abby in order for players to actually spend supplements on these upgrades, and they’ll be doing so during the same three days that they had just previously spent with Ellie.
The Last of Us Part 3 Can Be as Short or as Long as It Wishes
Now, it’ll be interesting to see ifa possibleLast of Us Part 3chooses to be shorter likePart 1or longer likePart 2. Regardless, its length will hopefully yet again be dictated by how straightforward or complicated its storytelling structure is.
A shorter game might not be capable of withholding and revealing its length in a startling and subverted way, but any secrets the series may be harboring would be a worthwhile hand to play since there might not be a terribly long shelf life for the franchise left. But ifThe Last of Us’Elden Ringmoment has already been achieved, maybe Naughty Dog’sIntergalactic: The Heretic Prophetcan do so now as a novel IP with no preconceived notions.
