I have kind of a lot of opinions regarding The Last of Us and I am generally very vocal about them, and even though @Jtwo and @yeso have already voiced a fair amount of my critiques I would like to add my own two cents to the conversation.
About the first game, you can read this whole interaction here which also includes some brief thoughts on the sequel.
Basically, I hate the first The Last of Us. I think it carries all the markers of A Bad Videogame both narratively and mechanically, with the presentation, graphical fidelity and art direction being the only exceptions (the art direction in particular I really enjoy, I think it’s genuinely good). All of those aspects allowed the game to put on the façade of being something else, something more than the rest of videogames. The Last of Us’ prestige production values, marketing campaign and collective hype allowed the game to enact a performance that ultimately has installed it in a space of the videogame collective imaginary and culture that it never deserved.
Playing it today dispels all the illusion its money and quality presentation could have bought at its time and now all that remains is a really mediocre third person action videogame, which is what it really was all along. It’s very ironic that the game that started the modern AAA trend is the one that has become obsolete when compared to modern production style/values. We couldn’t have had RDR2 without TLoU but now we do, all the flaws and seams the game had are hyperexposed via better technology, bigger budgets, extreme crunch and even more photo-realistic super-duper graphics.
Speaking about the sequel I would define The Last of Us 2 as a great videogame despite its worst efforts. The mechanics, level design and rewards systems are firmly in place and allow for a REALLY GOOD John Rambo styled murderbot simulator. Modern Far Cries, which are the most direct comparison to this game have never been this good, and even MGSV, which edges this game in terms of a more complex and layered IA and deeper control scheme loses to it in terms of structure, pacing and interesting level design. The thing is, it tries to double down on its inane nature as a fun videogame as hard as it does with that façade of prestige narrative the first game had, and as @Jtwo put it you can’t have it both ways.
My issues with The Last of Us 2 stem all from the fact that it is a videogame conceived VERY CLEARLY from a “we need to do a mainstream third person shooty videogame because we are a AAA studio” framework first and foremost. Which also wants to have a compelling drama-fueled character-driven TV style narrative.
I doubt this game wasn’t developed under the prerogative of being required to have a shotgun (and a bow) and allowing players to blast the head off of both human beings and zombies so fucking much that almost everything its narrative tries to pull off falls dead at my feet on the spot, killed by that same shotgun blast. The game tries to conceal this fact trying to use violence discourse and violence related themes as an exchange currency to establish some dialog between the very gamey game loop and the narrative, and the results range from mildly credible to seriously disgusting, specially in the “let’s kill dogs and also some pregnant women!” department.
Some of the drama lands, tho. And even a tiny part of it I think is truly great, but let me put it this way: after The Last of Us 2 there are only two ways I’m going to play a Naughty Dog game again (I say play and not buy because honestly, that part is out of the question, sorry). Either they do Crash Bandicoot 5 or Jak 4 or something clearly light-hearted and fun, or they do a fucking videogame without guns (but all the discourse, politics and prestige narrative they feel like). For me it’s one way of the other, but I’m not going to put up with both the same way I did with this game ever again.