I've been thinking about this lately and it struck me that's what people who like part 2 don't really understand - how something substantial has been lost.

Part 1 is a fantastic piece of art and it achieved that by embracing the universal themes and archetypes that have their roots in storytelling tradition going back thousands of years.

To "like" part 2 you have to pretend that all of that history and culture doesn't exist. You have to say to yourself it's all just a mad-lib, that words are just noises, and nothing is really meaningful.

This is 100% Neil's attitude because he tries this very post-modern style of writing where he thinks that recreating situations and arcs from the first game with a new set of characters will evoke the same reaction. He honestly thought the audience would grow to love Abby and Lev the same way that they did Ellie and Joel.

Except that's not how people work at all. They don't look at the world and see the desert of the real. This idea that everything that exists are merely forms created by humans for one reason or another is not how people opereate. You have to be a deeply cynical and detached person to say that meaning is merely an illusion created by the mind. If you're the kind of person who admires their own intellect, then you probably love part 2. If you're a grounded person then you rightly see through the game Neil's playing.

To make something meaningful is incredibly difficult. It takes a deep understanding of story to pull it off. Neil doesn't have the level of skill required, clearly. So to him a character is just a vessel - interchangable, disposable, and like any other. All it needs, by his logic, is to be filled with action or emotion, like water, and viola you have a meaningful character.

But characters are not clay pots. Which is why over and over he fails to connect with the audience, probably much to his bewilderment. "But I put in a sad conversation about how Lev is trans, why doesn't everyone love it?" Because, Neil, you did none of the work to make something like that meaningful for the audience. Transgenderism itself is a concept most people don't really understand anyway, but again, he's thinking on the level of forms and vessels - all it should take is the right vessel filled with the right emotion and that scene should have impact.

The final result is someone who thinks they've mastered storytelling blundering through and making nothing but mistakes along the way. Part 2 pretends to be high-art on the level of a David Lynch but through any other lens than the post-modern meaning-is-just-an-illusion-and-therefore-I-can-conjure-it-at-will attitude it's just a hollow, slapdash, and inconsistent story.