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BEL2026 Video Game Madness - West Region 2nd Round: 10 The Last of Us Part II vs. 2 Red Dead Redemption 2
2026 Video Game Madness - West Region 2nd Round
West Region Round of 32 Matchup Preview: 10 The Last of Us Part II vs. 2 Red Dead Redemption 2
The Most Divisive Game of Its Year Against the Most Expensive Game Ever Made
The Last of Us Part II beat Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in the Round of 64 by a score of 3-1, and the result was one of the more striking upsets of the West bracket's first round.
Sekiro won the 2019 Game of the Year at The Game Awards. It is FromSoftware at their most singular, a game about a combat system so specific and so demanding that the players who mastered it still talk about it as a physical memory rather than a game memory. The posture system. The deflections. The way the game punishes evasion and rewards aggression in a way that produces a feeling of mastery unlike anything else in action gaming. Its fanbase came to vote for it. They came in smaller numbers than the Last of Us Part II's fanbase, and the result was 3-1.
The Last of Us Part II is one of the most divisive games of the VGM era, and understanding that division is essential to understanding why it is still here and what it might be capable of in the rounds ahead. The game came out in June 2020 from Naughty Dog and it won the 2020 Game of the Year at The Game Awards and scored a 93 on Metacritic. It also generated a volume of negative player reaction that was, at the time of its release, extraordinary in its intensity. The story decisions Naughty Dog made challenged the relationship between player and protagonist in ways that a significant portion of the player base found genuinely upsetting.
What is not in dispute is the craft. The combat is the most mechanically sophisticated in the series. The world is rendered with extraordinary detail. The performances are career-best work from the entire cast. The game asks its players to inhabit perspectives that are genuinely uncomfortable, to experience events from multiple points of view that do not align neatly with conventional moral frameworks. Neil Druckmann and his team were attempting something ambitious and divisive, and the critical consensus that the attempt was successful coexisted with a substantial portion of the player base that felt the game had wronged them.
The fans who loved it, who understood what it was trying to do and felt it succeed, are among the most committed advocates of any game in this tournament. They are the ones who are still here after the Round of 64, having beaten a 91-rated GOTY winner by two votes, and they are going to need every vote they have in this round.
Red Dead Redemption 2 beat Control in the Round of 64 by a score of 3-1, a comfortable result for the West's 2 seed that demonstrated Rockstar's game retains its audience eight years after release. Control is one of the most original action games of the era, a game with an 83 Metacritic that understates its cult status significantly. Red Dead 2 beat it by two votes without drama.
The game is set in 1899, in the twilight of the American frontier, following Arthur Morgan, an outlaw in the Van der Linde gang who is watching the world he has always known collapse around him. It scored a 97 on Metacritic with 127 critic reviews and sold over 63 million copies. It won virtually every Game of the Year award in 2018 with the exception of The Game Awards, which went to God of War. It is one of the most technically and artistically ambitious games ever made, a game rich enough to support multiple approaches and dense enough that no single playstyle exhausts what it has to offer.
The story of Arthur Morgan's arc across the game's eight chapters is one of the finest narratives in gaming, a meditation on loyalty and mortality and the impossibility of escape from the choices you have made. The world Rockstar built rewards patience and observation in ways that few open-world games have the ambition to attempt. It is slow by design, and that slowness is the point. You are not allowed to rush through the end of an era.
A 97-rated game that sold 63 million copies against a 93-rated game whose fanbase carries it with the intensity of people who feel it was made specifically for them and was never given the credit it deserved. Both of them are extraordinary. The West bracket continues March 21. 12PM.
