The Last of Us 2, by the game developer company Naughty Dog, is but just the latest highly controversial game because of the leftist identity politics (purposefully) shoved into the game as a form of political activism.
All human characters in this kind of video game with ultra-realistic graphics is closely modeled after an actual human being, most often a professional actor and/or model. Side-by-side comparisons of many of the female characters in the game shows that these female characters have been noticeably "uglified" compared to their real-life counterparts. The main character is a lesbian, and there's an openly "transsexual" character in a main role as well, as well as many other references to identity politics.
The higher-ups at Naughty Dog have made in interviews it very clear and unambiguous that this is not just an artistic choice, but that these things have been done to the game explicitly and deliberately for the purposes of identity politics, to pander to the social justice ideology, directly influenced by that ideology and by social justice activists like Anita Sarkeesian. This is not a case of barking up the wrong tree, as this is the directly and openly stated motivation by the developers themselves.
Unsurprisingly, the gaming press has been fully behind supporting the game because of this. In Metacritic, out of about 70 or so scores listed by professional reviewers, a whopping 50 of them have given the game a perfect score. It's quite clear why they have done this, given that more neutral reviewers have pointed out that the game is far from perfect (among the criticism is relatively poor AI, boring mandatory side quests that are way too long and tedious, and some gameplay and fighting mechanics issues). Not a bad game per se, but most definitely not deserving a perfect score. Something like 90 out of 100 at most.
Ironically, some reviewers have now started to write more negative reviews about the game. Not "right-wing" anti-SJW reviewers. Leftist SJW reviewers.
What's the problem they have with the game? It's too violent, too graphical, too brutal (especially in its story and cutscenes), too "triggering", especially the last parts of the game leaving the player with a really bad taste in the mouth.
In fact, the ending parts of the game, and the final resolution, are universally hated by pretty much everybody. It seems that none of those game journalists who gave the game a perfect score actually played the game to the end. (I would bet they played it a couple of hours at most.)
It appears that Naughty Dog doesn't know who they are trying to pander to. They try to pander to the SJW ideology with identity politics, but at the same time they haven't considered that SJWs are snowflakes who cannot handle fictional stories that are too brutal and too emotionally damaging.
Sony, the publisher of the game, has also come under heavy criticism by the less-SJW oriented audience for their actions and hypocrisy.
A month or so ago a disgruntled employee leaked significant key parts of the script of the game, with screenshots. These were the parts that showed all the social justice pandering and identity politics in the game. Needless to say, regular gamers didn't really like what Naughty Dog had done to the game, and started commenting on it on social media and video sites.
What did Sony do? They started to issue DMCA takedown notices on all these... even the ones that showed exactly zero content from the game. In other words, the DMCA takedown notices were illegally issued in these cases (because it can only be legally issued if there's actual copyright infringement going on, which cannot be the case when there's zero content owned by the company). Sony broke the law quite egregiously... and got away with it, it seems.
Many have also pointed out the sheer hypocrisy of Sony. For like a year now Sony has been under controversy because they have decided to demand censorship on their platform of anime games with even the slightest amount of eroticism, no matter how little. (Quite ironically, the famously "family-friendly" Nintendo has explicitly stated that they will not demand censorship of these games on the Nintendo Switch.)
Why is this hypocrisy? Well, in The Last of Us 2 there's a very graphically explicit photorealistic sex scene... and it seems that Sony is completely ok with this. No censorship.
Anime characters showing a bit of skin? Banned! A very graphically explicit photorealistic sex scene in their own pet game? Just fine. No problems here.
The sad thing about all this is that regardless of it all, the game will most probably sell quite well. A lot of critics talk the talk, but they will not walk the walk. Regardless of their loud protests they will still buy the game. They will still give their money to Sony and Naughty Dog.
I myself am skipping the game. I don't care if all those perfect scores are actually correct and it's the best video game ever created by humanity. I'm still skipping it, out of principle. Fuck them. They aren't getting a single penny from me.
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