The approach on violence, which almost revels in the carnage, in The Last of Us Part 2 has been a bit of a sticking point for some fans, with some pointing out that the game can get carried away and miss the mark on its messages of revenge and consequences. However, critiques aside, when looking at the fighting itself, from combat techniques to characters' preferred tools, it is clear that some of the smaller details really bring the protagonists to life.
Discussing the main characters will certainly spill into Minor Story Spoiler territory, especially considering how well Naughty Dog disguised the story in the marketing leading up to release. Specifically, we'll have to delve into the secondary protagonist of The Last of Us Part 2, Abby, who's combat style is something completely new for the series, and how it differs from the familiar style of Ellie.
Naughty Dog masters the art of writing through gameplay in The Last of Us Part 2, a skill and technique that some small circles of gaming culture have dubbed, ludotography. Essentially, this means that the story is told, not only through dialogue and cinematics, something Naughty Dog also excels at, but through small, world building details and the way a game plays in order to put the player in the characters shoes. This is best expressed with the way Ellie has to often fight desperately against human and zombie enemies in a way that doesn't give the player a power fantasy, but places them perfectly into the shows of someone fighting for their life.
Ellie: Desperate Killer
One of the heaviest critiques levied against The Last of Us Part 2 is the way that Ellie shifts so suddenly from fighting only to protect herself and her loved ones to going on a murder spree through Seattle on a hunt for revenge. Essentially, the argument is that throwing her up against tons of enemies and filling the game with enough encounters to fit the medium on a design level, undermines the narrative that is being told throughout the series. That narrative tends to attempt to display Ellie as both a sympathetic character, but also as a desperate fighter, flailing wildly in order to stay alive.
In The Last of Us Part 2, Ellie's use of her switchblade hasn't evolved much from the way she used it to fight off humans and cordyceps zombies back in the original The Last of Us. Her attacks are wild and she swings with her whole body, using her knife the same way that someone would use a burning torch to bat away a wild animal. Nothing about the way she fights suggests that she's received any kind of combat training, but that her desperate will to survive, and expertise with guns, is what's been keeping her alive so long.
The above gif by @SunhiLegend displays Ellie's fighting style perfectly, complete with her wildly flailing her knife around and never really being at a clear advantage over her enemy. Even as the player dodges every attack perfectly and eventually takes on Stalker Boris, on of many missable details in the game, without ever getting hit, the fight never looks like it's going in Ellie's favor from start to finish. This creates a stark disconnection between herself and the secondary protagonist, Abby, who takes a lifetime of combat training into the field with her.
Abby: Combat Specialist
Another skillfully captured gif from The Last of Us 2 by @SunhiLegend shows off Abby's preferred combat style, who forgoes a switchblade or combat knife and dives into combat with her fists. Everything about her character is centered around her physical strength and brutality, with character's in the game even labeling her as the WLF's #1 Scar killer. Abby certainly earns that title throughout the time players control her, essentially carving through a path of Seraphites from beginning to end, using her combat training to overpower her enemies.
Abby's attacks are nowhere near as wild as Ellie's are, instead she takes a measured defensive stance while idol and makes powerful, targeted strikes with every blow. As much as The Last of Us Part 2's narrative wants to draw comparisons between the two protagonists, with both losing father figures and eventually losing themselves to the hunt for revenge over that loss, the combat draws the devide. Even when Abby has a weapon, she continues to fight differently, with her combat animations feeding into her training with the Fireflies and WLF.
While Naughty Dog could have easily given Abby a combat knife and reused a lot of the same animations between the two characters, it wouldn't fit her personality. Abby is vicious and brutal, choosing to fight with her bare hands and raw strength in most combat encounters. This is the type of writing through play that transports the player directly into the setting of The Last of Us Part 2, no matter how outlandish a post-apocalypse caused by a fungus might sound.
The Bosses Reflect the Characters
Looking at how the game likes to make characters build on or reflect each other, The Last of Us Part 2 also takes some inverted looks at characters by the mini-bosses they face. These aren't necessarily bosses in a traditional sense, but encounters like Stalker Boris and the Backpack Brute Scar have a more grounded space in the narrative over the regular enemies roaming around the map. For one, these fight generally lead to new weapons or recovering weapons, and come at the end of larger encounters.
However, looking at the enemies that each player has to fight as a "boss encounter" is a reflection on them, with Ellie being put up against a bow wielding Stalker and familiar enemies like Bloaters, and Abby fighting brutes and the brand new Rat King. In most cases, Abby is forced to fight enemies that are either as stronger as her or stronger, taking away her own advantage in order to heighten the tension, with the opposite being true for Ellie and her quicker, more wild combat. It's the little details that players may have missed in combat that feeds into these characters, and continues to build the world of The Last of Us Part 2.
The Last of Us Part 2 is available now for PS4.