better to start from the beginning.

For those who haven't played the game, a little context for what follows below.

A few months before the game was released, Naughty Dog was targeted by hackers, and parts of the game's story were leaked, leading to a decontextualization of Abby, where many people thought she was transgender due to her more masculine appearance (unlike in the series), and right there the game faced a huge amount of hate for being 'woke'. It got worse when the game was released and it was discovered that she killed Joel at the beginning of it, and on top of that, the 'upset' of having to play as her afterward...

Anyway, it was a shit show, but taking the haters aside, it’s a fantastic game with a very good story that, unlike the first game, would always be much more difficult to translate to the big screen due to the way the game is constructed in terms of narrative, because it makes you play both sides of the coin, Ellie’s side and Abby’s side, in my opinion.

In my opinion, that is the beauty of the game's narrative; nothing is black and white, and what you think is wrong and bad is not always really like that. It is precisely at this point that the series starts to lose points.

In the series, the viewer knows right from the first minute why Abby wants to kill and has managed to kill Joel, while in the game there is this enigma until the moment that will be in the next season of the series where you meet Abby.

One of the things that the series also suffered from is the fact that Craig Mazin was more involved than Neil Druckmann in this season because Neil is working on Intergalactic at Naughty Dog, and this is very noticeable in the series' narrative (it is not by chance that the best episode of the series is the episode written and directed by Neil (the flashback episode)), especially regarding Ellie’s character, who in the game, as I mentioned earlier, is psychologically affected by having witnessed Joel's death and only wants to kill Abby at all costs, not caring at all about the means to achieve it.

From beating Nora, to killing dogs (which doesn't happen in the series) and ultimately killing not by accident but on purpose, Mel, and then discovering that she is pregnant, but unlike in the series, she doesn't cry or feel pity, she just goes into shock. The Ellie in the series is a wimp who only remembers that she is there to avenge Joel when she thinks of it, she is more concerned about Dina than actually avenging Joel and killing Abby, which brings me to another character who, in my opinion, has a huge spotlight in the series and who in the game is nothing more than a side character, Dina. I understand the intention to give a little more emphasis to the character in the series but it is completely off-base, actually many times the motivation I saw in Dina was the motivation that Ellie should have and never the other way around, as I mentioned before, sometimes Ellie seemed to be on a leisurely stroll through Seattle and Dina was the character saying 'no, we are here and we need to move forward because they killed Joel,' completely the opposite.

With this, I don't mean to say that Bella Ramsey isn't a good actress; when she's supposed to be cold and vengeful, she manages to be so (like in Nora's death). However, Craig, when he wrote her into the series, either didn't understand Ellie from the second game or wanted to create a softer Ellie for the audience to sympathize with. I don't know, but I do know that written this way, she is neither captivating nor competent enough to carry the series unfortunately

 On the opposite side, you have Kaitlyn Dever, who, although not as masculine as Abby from the game, managed to capture the character perfectly. That final scene of the season, as well as Joel's death, is fantastic, and I have no doubt that the third season will be great with her, always depending on the writing.

As for the rest of the season, I liked it; there were some changes here and there, as I mentioned earlier (Tommy being in Dina's place during Joel's death, for example), and some things that are a bit unnecessary, like the attack on Jackson, which I understand its inclusion, although it leads to a waste of time in that meeting to see what they were going to do, but then you have the payoff of Jessie telling Ellie that he voted against it.

The introduction of the spores was very well done, but it should have been done in the first season but I have read that it was due to budget issues at the time.