Instead, it seems to only make her more angry and broken. She channels that rage into purpose, seemingly in the hopes that avenging Joel’s death will help her find some sense of closure. Joel’s death was the next time she saw him.Īs simple as it might seem, Joel’s murder gives Ellie direction. He had finally come clean about what happened in the first game, and they were slowly working back toward finding trust. That backstory is slowly filled in with flashbacks, as we eventually see that the night before Joel’s death, Ellie had gone to see him, and was slowly opening the door to forgiveness. She’s understandably angry at Joel for taking away her agency to make that sacrifice, robbing her of a way to give her life meaning, even if it would have come in death. We see a game’s worth of that fallout here, with Ellie listless and directionless in this life Joel fought so hard to preserve, slowly piecing the truth together along the way. He then lies to young Ellie, telling her the vaccine wouldn’t have worked anyway, so they just left while she was unconscious. The first game dealt a messy end, with Joel - unable to sacrifice Ellie after losing his own daughter at the beginning of the outbreak - chooses her life over a potential future for humanity itself. It’s a risky twist, and one that has proven a bit controversial among a contingent of fans who came into The Last of Us Part II expecting to play out Ellie’s full-fledged adventure.īut The Last of Us isn’t a franchise built on safe choices. You get to know Abby as a person, as she turns against her own people to try and save two young siblings from a rival group. You get to know her friends, the same ones that you hunted down and killed in the first half of the game.
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Playing through the next half of the game as Abby, you get to know her father via flashbacks and see firsthand how his death affected her and still haunts her. So Joel killed them all and rescued Ellie, saving her life but effectively destroying any chance at a vaccine to the virus that has ravaged humanity. Abby’s father was the doctor trying to develop a vaccine from Ellie’s immunity, but the process would have killed Ellie. The narrative here fills in the gaps as to why Abby traveled so far to kill Joel, as we learn Joel actually killed her father in the climax of the first Last of Us seven years ago. This sets up the next half of the action, which finds Ellie working her way through a hit list of sorts, once she’s tracked down the group that traveled from Seattle to Washington to kill Joel.Įllie’s quest finally comes to a head when her target Abby gets the drop on her, gun drawn.Īt this point, the game resets, in a sense, and you once more play the events of the past few days, but from Abby’s perspective - essentially turning the young woman you’ve been hunting the past 13 or so hours into the game’s second protagonist. Joel’s brother Tommy does the same, with Ellie and her girlfriend Dina close behind. In the sequel, fresh off Joel’s death, the game shifts to a tale of revenge, with Joel’s surrogate daughter of sorts, Ellie, setting off across the country to exact vengeance. Video games have increasingly been a venue for complex, admirable storytelling - and few titles have done so much to elevate it as a whole as The Last of Us franchise. Instead, we got to watch the first game’s main protagonist, Joel, be brutally murdered in the game’s opening prologue - and that was just the first surprise of many. **Spoilers ahead for The Last of Us Part II.**Ĭonsidering the first game has sold more than 20 million copies and counting, it wouldn’t have been a surprise for developer Naughty Dog and director Neil Druckmann to return to this world with a bigger, louder sequel focused on the same fan-favorite characters that made Part I such a hit.
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But, it was only a precursor to the kind of complicated story to come in the recently released sequel, The Last of Us Part II.
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It was textured, nuanced, and unflinchingly brutal.
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When The Last of Us came out for the PlayStation 3 seven years ago, it told an ambitious story set against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic America.