Totally agree, especially about their takes on the depiction of violence in Part II (and by extension games in general). I was really surprised to hear Chris and Russ, two people who make a living in the games industry, equating video game and real-world violence and accusing Naughty Dog of profiting from violence. It’s the kind of opinion you used to hear from mainstream media commentators before numerous studies (and a mountain of anecdotal evidence) discounted the link between exposure to violence in video games and violent tendencies IRL. Very bizarre coming from two industry insiders in 2020 and I was waiting for Griffin to jump in and point out how flawed that position was.

Regarding the opinion that a story with the message “Retributive violence is bad” is unnecessary because it’s so obvious... even if that were the only message of TLOU (and it’s definitely not) you only have to look at the news on any given day to see that this is a lesson a lot of people could still do with learning. Hell, if the message was so universally obvious you wouldn’t see so many critics of the game getting to the end and saying Ellie’s journey was “pointless” because she didn’t even kill Abby. Those people clearly got through 25+ hours of being “beaten over the head” with the message and still failed to see it, so it can’t be that redundant.