The wait for The Last of Us Part II is finally over, and some players have been hearing mixed things about how much time is spent playing Abby, a character that was technically in the first game, but not introduced officially until now. This is important to know, because not all players enjoy when sequels introduce major new characters for too much of the overall game, and in the case of Abby, this amounts to roughly the entire last half of the game.

How long one takes to play the game on a first playthrough is mostly affected by whether one employs stealth or brute force while progressing through the story. As a result, playtime can vary between an average of 24-30 hours, meaning that players will control Abby from 12-15 hours. Is roughly half the game playing as a character other than Ellie a problem? It depends on who you ask, though it is essential given the overall themes of the sequel. Fair warning, there be spoilers ahead.

To understand why Abby takes up such a significant amount of playtime in the sequel, we need to look at her role in the story, which technically begins at the end of the first game when Joel makes the decision not to hand Ellie over to the Fireflies, which meant needing to murder virtually everyone in order for the pair to escape.

Abby’s father was among those that Joel killed, and as we see in the sequel, this served as a truly traumatic experience that left her with nothing more than an ongoing desire for revenge. When finally, Abby gets her revenge, it is borne of an intense hatred. However, player reactions to playing as the new character for such an extended period of time have been mixed precisely because she is new, and we have not been on the same journey as the first game, to empathize with her experience in the same way.

Therein lies a key theme in the game, where all this violence only leads to more violence in an endless cycle, and every time someone is brutally killed in the game, which is far too often, we can imagine a new hatred sprouting in the minds of surviving loved ones bent on exacting revenge.

When one considers Abby in the construction of that theme, her playthrough feels markedly different, and well done, even if players were not expecting such a twist in who they would be playing as.

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