Commentary: The Last of Us Part II

Although I haven't played the game (I watched someone's livestream), I wanted to share my thoughts on the story in The Last of Us Part II, as I loved the first game and I think the second has a lot going on worthy of analysis.

I think TLoU2 is a good game, but has many flaws and deeply unfitting ending. In fact, I think the ending is so bad it makes the entire game worse as a result, and I want to talk about why. These first few paragraphs will be mostly summary of both TLoU and TLoU2, so if you're familiar with both, you can skim a bit if you wish.


For those who don't know, The Last of Us is a video game, released in 2013, set in a post-apocalyptic world where a fungal infection has turned most of the population into mindless zombies (or 'infected' as the game calls them). As with all good zombie fiction, the story is not about the zombies, but how people react to them and each other. The player follows the journey of Joel Miller, a man who lost his teenage daughter on the even of the outbreak--not to infection, but to the bullets of a desperate and paranoid military. The first game picks up twenty years later, when Joel has become a brutal man and is a gang enforcer/muscle-for-hire type. It is then that he meets Ellie, a teenage girl who is revealed to be immune to the infection. Joel wants nothing to do with her at first, but after his partner dies in an effort to help Ellie he is convinced to look after her and escort her across the country to the Fireflies--a group who claims they will be able to use Ellie to generate a vaccine for the infection.

The game, then, is about the relationship between Joel and Ellie. Much has been said about the game's story and how it makes the player care about Ellie--you could call it a 'dad simulator' and be accurate--but the major fact is this: Joel comes to see Ellie as his own throughout the course of the game, and he cares deeply enough that he begins to treat her like a surrogate daughter. The story is relatively simple, but because the player spends hours upon hours with these two and struggles to fight zombies and hostile people along with them, the connection they forge (and that the player forges) with them is stronger and deeper than it could even be were this story told in a different medium. TLoU has been criticized as not having very interesting gameplay, but gameplay was never the point. The substance of the first game was the story, and gameplay was only an excuse to let the player engage with that story on their own terms--you can scour every nook and cranny of the world, and find Joel and Ellie commenting on the sights they see, or you can speed through it and miss most of their dialogue outside of cutscenes--but the effect is the same: the experience feels personal. You care, as Joel must care, for Ellie and her well-being.

Joel about to do a LOT of harm

Which is why, when they do reach the Fireflies, and they inform Joel that Ellie must die for a vaccine to be made, he does not hesitate to gun down everyone who gets in his way to get her back (I suppose you could stealth your way through that section, but I sure didn't). The culminating moment of the game has Ellie's surgeon facing down Joel with a flimsy scalpel until the player kills him. There is no peaceful option. Joel has made the decision to value Ellie's life over all others; over any potential cure for humanity. Throughout the game, Joel wears the wrist-watch his daughter gifted him the last day they were together, and this action shows he still stuck in that time; he cannot let go.

Ellie is unconscious for the rescue (and their arrival at the Fireflies' base), and Joel tells her that she was not needed--that there were dozens of other immune children and none have helped make a cure. The first game ends shortly after, with her asking if he has told her the truth:

Ellie: "Swear to me that everything you said to me about the Fireflies is true."

Joel: "I swear."

Ellie: "Okay."

And credits roll.

The ending is ambiguous, the future uncertain and wide open. Weather Ellie believes Joel or not, she seems to have accepted his answer--or at least that it is all she will ever get from him.

The Last of Us was about the relationship between Joel and Ellie. The Last of Us Part II is about revenge; it is decidedly more bleak, less nuanced, and poorly paced. The characters it introduces are compelling and interesting, but their development is either stretched out too long, cut too short, or else insubstantial. The themes the game introduces work well until they are unraveled by an unnecessary fourth act, and in the end the game leaves us with nothing but a barren house and depressing, pointless violence.

The plot of TLoU2 is, as in the first game, fairly simple. Joel and Ellie are living in a compound near Jackson, Wyoming with Joel's brother Tommy (who they met briefly in the first game). Life is stable, the community burgeoning and cooperative, and overall everyone is happy. We learn that Joel and Ellie have been experiencing some tension in their relationship, but it is left somewhat vague in the beginning.

The townsfolk conduct routine sweeps of the surrounding landscape, and one day, after a run in with a horde of infected, Joel and Tommy take shelter with another group passing through the area. As it turns out, Abby, the leader of that group, is looking for Joel specifically. When they realize who Joel is, he is captured, and Abby savagely beats him in an act of revenge (though we do not learn details until later). Ellie is also out on patrol that day, and, after taking shelter from a snowstorm and realizing Joel is potentially in danger from the weather, goes to look for him. She runs into Abby's group just in time to witness Abby finish her brutal murder of Joel. The group spares the lives of Ellie and Tommy, but the two are not willing to accept what has happened to them. They make plans, first together, then separately, to track down Abby's group (the Washington Liberation Front, as we learn they are called), and seek their own vengeance.

Quite quickly the theme of the work becomes obvious. As Ellie marauds her way through WLF headquarters in Seattle the body count she leaves and the brutality she enacts make her search for justice feel vanishingly righteous--if ever it was. Revenge only perpetuates the cycle of violence, and Ellie's quest is the same as Abby's was when she hunted down Joel.

The game is divided into two parts: first we plays as Ellie as she arrives in Seattle and tries to track down Abby. In the process, Ellie murders several of Abby's friends and eventually meets up with Tommy, who has been waging his own war against the WLF, having left Jackson shortly before her. After they regroup, Abby ambushes them and we cut away from a standoff at gunpoint. The second half of the game is a flashback that follows Abby's perspective over the previous three days as her life falls apart. After being rescued from a local death cult by a pair of escaped children, Yara and Lev, she takes them in and protects them from their former community as well as her fellow WLF. We learn that she is the daughter of the Firefly surgeon Joel killed in first game; he killed her father and she wanted him dead. Through metaphorical dreams, we see Abby still harbors some guilt and remorse, and this is the reason she devotes herself to protecting Lev and Yara. She abandons the WLF, then actively fights against them, and though only Lev survives it's clear she views him as her child by the end. When she finds her friends dead in their private base she is pushed over the edge, and storms off to, once again, get justice for her loss.

We then return to the standoff, and the result is bloodshed: Abby and Ellie fight viciously, Tommy is maimed permanently, and Abby almost murders Ellie's pregnant lover Dina (she's been there the whole time but makes little impact). Abby is only stopped by her new friend/adopted son Lev, who serves as a more moral center for the grieving woman. Abby states she never wants to see Ellie again, and leaves.

We then cut to several months later. Ellie and Dina are living alone in a house (presumably) within riding distance of Jackson, enjoying peace and quiet while raising their child.

The game should have ended there, but I'll cover the last act in a bit. First, some actual analysis.

Abby got them abbs

The parallels between Ellie and Abby are obvious: both lost father figures, both seek revenge as a means to alleviate their pain, and both find their quests ultimately futile. Abby loses all her friends to Ellie's rampage, estranges herself from the WLF in an effort to help Lev, and ultimately realizes that further vengeance wouldn't bring her any peace. Ellie's quest is similar. She loses a friend (Jesse - he also has little plot impact beyond being Dina's baby daddy), is sickened by her own acts of violence, and nearly loses both Tommy and Dina, people she loves dearly. By the end of her brawl with Abby she should reach the same conclusion. Indeed, when she earlier murdered Abby's closest friends (one of whom is herself revealed to be pregnant) the point was made that her quest is futile, and she seems to regret her own actions.

I won't go over every little parallel the game goes out of its way to make between the two--part of the problem is that the game does so much of this that it becomes dull. Abby's entire flashback is, arguably, padding. Although it does successfully make her a sympathetic character, little of what she does is directly related to Ellie or Joel. Lev is, arguably, her new conscious, or her redemption, but getting to that point is at once tedious and too quick. Her interactions with him are meant to be a parallel to that of Joel and Ellie in the first game, but the first game was only about Joel and Ellie. Lev is underdeveloped, and so his relationship to Abby never quite feels as deep as it needed to be for her journey to feel meaningful, even though the intent of her story is obvious.

TLoU is an interactive character study of one relationship between two people. TLoU2 tries to take that formula and spread it across an entire cast of secondary characters, and utterly fails. Abby and Ellie are well developed, interesting, and strong characters. But they only interact through violence, and everyone else they interact with falls short of substance. In Ellie's story: Jesse is one-note and barely present, Dina is sidelined shortly after we learn she's pregnant, and even Tommy feels strangely characterized because we never explore his feeling about his brother's death. In Abby's story: her friends can all be lumped together as the victim's of Tommy/Ellie's rampage. Their characterization doesn't exist beyond a few traits or quirks and we don't spend enough time with them to learn more.

It also doesn't help that we see Ellie kill these people before we get to know them. I'd argue that this was a good choice, it could have created suspense or tragedy to know their fates as we come to be endeared to them, but their simplicity undermines that effect. For comparison, I knew Oberyn Martell was going to die in Game of Thrones, but that did not stop his fight with the Mountain from being any less tense or gut-wrenching; in fact it made it far more suspenseful because of how well he was characterized, and how much I did not want to see him die again. In TLoU2 I just don't really care that much about the people I meet, outside of Abby and Ellie.

Abby herself is a very good character. I think it is remarkable that, by the end of her section, we do understand and empathize with her despite the fact that she starts the game off beating Joel to death with a golf club. The brawl between her and Ellie is notable from a gameplay perspective as well--the player controls Abby during this section, which effectively forces them to agree with her perspective, even if they have not yet been swayed by her own story. Their only other option is to turn the game off and stop playing.

Speaking of gameplay--this game needs less of it. Many people have remarked on the length of the game, and how padded it feels, and I'd go a step further. This story does not benefit from being a shooting game at all. In the first game the violence characterized Joel, but here? Both Abby and Ellie rack up a substantial body count, even if you try to play relatively stealthily, and so the whole theme of the futility of revenge is quickly undermined unless you simply chose to ignore the deaths that take place outside the cutscenes. Cutting out most of the encounters with humans would have helped immensely, both thematically and pacing-wise. As it is, the game is a slaughter with a laughable attempt at a moral about violence.

But! Back to that 'ending.'

Ellie does not like what she sees

Throughout the game, we see several flashbacks of Ellie and Joel. It is revealed that Ellie could not accept Joel's answer at the end of the first game. She traveled back to the Firefly hospital and uncovered the truth herself. Joel finally admits to what he's done, but a rift forms between them. A rift very much unresolved at the time of his murder. Ellie's pain is more than just loss, we now understand. Before leaving Jackson she takes Joel's broken watch: now she is stuck at that moment in time, seeking revenge and unable to let go.

Yet by the end of her adventure in Seattle, the player, and most other characters, understand how futile it was to begin with. Ellie is haunted by visions of Joel's murder, and though Dina is supportive, she still seems stuck on that loss. When Tommy shows up claiming to know Abby's location, Ellie can't let it go. She dons Joel's old jacket, gathers her things, and sets off for Santa Barbara. Dina tells her off before she leaves, begging Ellie to stay if she really loves her.

This last chapter is short and utterly unnecessary. Abby is captured by a local slaver gang, Ellie infiltrates their camp and frees her. Before parting, Ellie challenges Abby to a fight. Abby refuses, already having seen the futility of her actions, but Ellie forces the issue by threatening Lev's life. This last scene is brutal, bleak, and an utter farce. Two bloody and brutalized woman beat the shit out of each other on a foggy beach for no goddamned reason other than to hammer home a point that was firmly made over ten hours earlier. Ellie spares Abby's life, finally having absorbed the very basic theme that has permeated every part of this work: Abby and Ellie seek the same thing, and it can not heal them.

When Ellie returns to her home, it is empty. Dina has left, taking her child and all their things except for what Ellie kept in her room. Ellie sits down with a guitar Joel gave at the start of the game, and tries to play. But she lost two fingers in her fight with Abby, and so is unable to perform as she did before. She sets the guitar down by the window seal, and the camera stares out the window, watching silently as Ellie walks back outside and disappears into the forest. The outside is blurred this whole time; our focus in on the guitar. Ellie has lost everything Joel ever gave her, everyone she has ever cared about, and everything she ever earned. She is ~19 years old.

There is no catharsis in this suffering, no point worth making that was not already made better earlier, and it undermines any good point the game had before. The fight between Abby and Ellie is downright exploitative in its absurd violence, and it is ludicrous to think either woman could survive the injuries they sustain in that fight, let alone believe Ellie made it all the way back to Wyoming. Infection alone should have done both of them in. The whole final chapter feels like a slapped-on after thought, a way for Ellie to re-establish power over Abby by being the one to end it for real.

What makes the ending more frustrating is that the story was already finished. When Abby spared Dina's life and left with Lev, that should have been the end of it. Ellie seemed to already regret her actions: she was willing to turn herself over to Abby to spare Tommy's life, and was visibly disturbed by what she was doing even before their confrontation. That Ellie decides to abandon her peaceful life again runs counter to everything we know about her. And about Joel.

The last flashback we get between Ellie and Joel takes place the day before his murder. Ellie approaches him, and the two start to talk about the Fireflies. Ellie states that she was willing to die for a cure, and that her life would have meant something then. Joel states that he would do what he did all over again. Ellie says she doesn't think she can forgive him for what he did, but that she is ready to try. "Okay," he says. And the two part.

We see this scene after the final fight. I suppose this juxtaposition is an attempt to explain why Ellie couldn't let go, or to show why she was able to forgive, but it really shows how unnecessary the final act truly is. Ellie was already willing to die for a greater good. She was willing to affect change. Joel's biggest trait in the first game was that he can't let go. He is so wounded by the loss of his daughter that he massacres an entire militia to stop it from happening again, even if it means damning humanity. He wears his broken watch until the day he dies, frozen in that moment.

But Ellie should have been able to do what Joel could not. She should have been able to see her actions for what they were, and accept her own loss. When Abby walks away, that was her moment to realize that she must move on. We do not get a substantial exploration of why she can't. We do not understand her rational for abandoning Dina. We do not get any real insight into her mind beyond a single PTSD flashback.

I liked this game up until Ellie decided to go after Abby again. I liked what it did with Abby, and though its secondary characters were simple I like the ways Abby and Ellie's friends can be compared and contrasted (though I don't do that here) and the obvious parallels that were made. The game went out of its way to make a lot of points through imagery and theme, and left them as subtext. Or at least I felt that was the case. After the ending, it puts all the subtlety into question. I won't say it ruins the game entirely, but it does taint the story.

Ellie deserved better. Abby deserved better. This is not a great game, nor is it a bad story, but I hate the ending. It is misanthropic, exploitative, and depressing for no good reason.

The game ends in an empty house, unable to see anything clearly beyond the guitar in front of the camera. There is an entire world out there, but we are stuck inside at the end with nothing. Frozen on that last moment, still focusing on what remains of Joel.

Ellie and Abby are all stuck in this story, deserving better, and it leaves me feeling empty and alone.