Ellie conveniently has machete next to her right hand when she kills James.
It happens again when she kills David.
lol.
I can go on and on, but TLOU 1 was a good story and people ignored it for obvious reasons. Seems like people are finding reasons not to like certain parts of the game.
Convenient events?
TLOU1 gets a free pass when Joel conveniently crosses the Fireflies when Ellie is about to die from drowning?
Or how Bill conveniently finds them just as they are about to be killed by Clickers?
Man, I love that when people argue against plot holes in a franchise they then try to force plot holes in previous installments that did a better job of it. Not all contrivances are created equal and dismissing plot holes because they didn't bother YOU doesn't mean they don't exist. No one was ever taken out of a story because it made too much sense.
But since you guys mentioned them:
Bill lives in the town and has the entire fucking place rigged. Joel and Ellie set off explosions and traps which would alert Bill that someone is running around his town. Makes sense that he would be running toward the loud collection of infected and shots being fired to see what was happening in his own damn town.
Fireflies showing up when they did was decidedly IN convenient, but again, they were headed towards a firefly base, so they were known to be in the area, Joel and Ellie were making a shit ton of noise, so being found by a patrol after all of that isn't particularly out of sorts.
First off, Ellie was on the butcher's block where they cut up bodies and thus there was a butcher knife lodged in the wood.
David was running around with a machete trying to kill her. She leapt on his back and they struggled. The Machete would be in the area.
Don't get me wrong, TLoU did have a few plot contrivances, I always felt the biggest ones were the appearances of the infected and hunters at the most dramatically appropriate times and dropping from ceilings and the like. Game stuff, but at times it did cause an eye roll, even on my most recent playthrough. The entire end scenario of the fireflies and Ellie is also laughable on its face that the only reason it makes sense at all is that the game did such a good job making the fireflies out to be terrorists with delusions of grandeur that you could buy them rushing forward without doing more than cursory studies of Ellie because they were just that desperate for a win. That and the ending of part 1 didn't hinge on the fireflies actually acting like anything close to a rational actor. It was about the lie at the end, and how far Joel had come, so it didn't actively get in the way of what they intended.
Beyond that even, one or two contrivances tend to be easily ignored, once they stack up on each other is when you have a danger of losing the audience. Kind of like how being saved once from off camera is fine, once it has happened a half dozen times it gets old fast.