Warning : Spoilers !!!
It’s been over a year since the sequel to The Last of Us came out and caused a split with fans and critics. Many praised the game for its storytelling and gameplay whilst others shredded it for the direction it took with certain characters and the writing. It had succeeded in being divisive and successful all at once and which have people either defending it or shredding the game to pieces.
In the very first game, we play as Joel, a man living in the post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by the Cordyceps virus (a real virus by the way, look it up!) The first ten minutes of the game is crucial for all players as it gives us the background on Joel and the day that the virus broke out. He is a father trying to keep his teenage daughter safe as the world turns upside-down only to have her killed – not by rampaging zombies- but by the people who were suppose to protect them. When we next see him, it is twenty years later and the world has still not recovered, and neither has Joel. He is grizzled and hardened as he works as a smuggler with his partner Tess in a quarantined Boston. Whilst they are safe from the dead outside, they live with constant food shortages and hostile military rule. There are also the outside influences of The Fireflies, a rebellion group determined to restore order and to confront the military who have citizens living in fear.
This is when we meet Marlene, a Firefly leader who needs Joel and Tess to smuggle something outside of Boston. The package, a teenage girl called Ellie who is immune to the cordyceps virus having been bit but failed to turn.
What happens next is a wild and perilous journey as Joel must do everything to protect Ellie from the dangers of the outside world, not just from the infected but also the humans who have thrived in a land that has no order left.
For players who played the first game, we immediately become attached to the pair and it's really difficult not to. But when he gets Ellie to safety at the Fireflies headquarters, he discovers that the only way for them to make a vaccine is to remove the fungus from her brain, thus killing her. As the player, we must then guide Joel through the hospital, shooting down Fireflies and the doctors who were about to operate on Ellie, who remains unconscious throughout these events. We relive the anguish and heartbreak of the first ten minutes of the game, feeling everything Joel is feeling. He cannot allow someone he has vowed to protect to die again.
When Ellie wakes up, Joel tells her that her immunity means nothing, that there was no hope for a cure. But we always get the sense that Ellie knows far more than she lets Joel thinks. We see the doubt in her eyes as they return to the safety of Joel's brother Tommy as Joel swears to her that he is telling the truth.
When The Last of Us II was announced, people wondered where this meant Joel and Ellie’s relationship had ended up. Joel was missing from trailers and gameplay videos. Then the leaks hit out that Joel dies.
Leak or not, I had a feeling and I think most fans did too, that Joel was going to get his comeuppance in one way or another. In the second game, it came in the form of Abby, the daughter of the doctor that Joel killed to rescue Ellie. Her character caused such a commotion among players from anti-trans slurs to the studio Naughty Dog getting death threats. Here was this brand-new character entering the story, but some fans didn’t want to know her side at all. They just wanted Ellie and Joel back.
I have very mixed feelings about the second game still, but I would be lying If I said that the game didn’t impact me in some way.
Ellie travels to Seattle with her girlfriend Dina to bring back Tommy who has gone to seek revenge against Abby’s group – The WLF - all the while still reeling from the pain of losing Joel and witnessing his murder. And that’s why I cannot bring myself to say that I hate the game, because of the way the writers at Naughty Dog handle Ellie’s grief. We are given flashbacks to Joel and Ellies relationship over the last four years before his death. From celebrating her birthday in an abandoned museum to Ellie finally learning the devastating truth from Joel; that she could have provided the cure the world needed to bring back normality, something which Joel took away from her. There are many fans who still stand by Joel’s decision, that he did the right thing in rescuing Ellie, but that is why Abby’s point of view was necessary. He wasn’t just stealing hope from the world but destroyed so many other lives at the same time. Abby is hardened and is focused only on revenge. She has lost all faith in the idea of the Fireflies as Joel’s actions had caused them to be disbanded. She kills Joel, hoping that it may close a traumatic chapter in her life, but as we learn when we play her side of the story. It doesn’t. And as Ellie kills her way through Seattle just to get to Abby, we see that revenge benefits no-one in the end.
Ellie and Abby must learn to live with their grief and trauma. Ellie must accept what Joel did, that he did what he did to protect her, just as Abby’s father did what he felt he needed to do to make a safer world for his daughter.
HBO will be making a tv series of the games and I hope that, whilst they are loyal to its origins , which I have faith that they will as Neil Druckmann (The creator and writer of the game series) is not only executive producer but one of the writers, I also hope they explore more of the backstories of the characters, not to just bring some uniqueness to the TV show, but to also get to know them more, so that we can understand their actions better than we may have done in the games
In the first game, we see that twenty years have gone by before Joel meets Ellie, and we only hear snippets of his life during those missing decades. Tommy was in the Fireflies but left, as did many other people as the violence only escalated in the end. Joel, on the other hand, is another story. When Ellie and Joel run into a group of hostile scavengers who kill anyone they find and steal their belongings, we learn that Joel at some point, was part of a similar group in those mysterious twenty years. He - like many other people- did what he had to do to survive and without his daughter Sarah, he no longer had his moral compass, or anyone left to protect or care about. Only the writers at Naughty Dog know what Joel did during those years of defending for himself, and hopefully this is where the TV show will come in and shed some light on the subject.
Whatever it was though, it means that he had the will to gun his way through a hospital and kill innocent doctors who had no way to defend themselves
I don’t think Joel is supposed to be a hero, nor do I think he’s a villain. I think he’s a man who became numb after the loss of his daughter, and as a result, became ruthless in a world that was determined to kill him and everyone around him. Ellie opened him up again to the possibilities of a better life, so when Marlene reveals they plan to kill her for the sake of the world, he wasn’t about to let her go.
Which begs the question
What would you do? You are given a young girl to transport across the country. You save each other countless times. You bond and learn to care for one another. But you get told that she will need to die to create a cure. Would you be able to walk away?
Now imagine you are Abby’s dad. You have a teenage daughter who is growing up in a world where death is around every corner. You get told someone is immune to the disease that is ravaging humankind, but to make a vaccine against it, you will have to remove the brain, thus killing them. Countless lives will be saved, and your daughter may have a chance to grow up in a world where she can be safe.
What would you do?
The question The Last of Us series seems to be asking us is, how far will you go to protect somebody you love?
With the first game being remastered and the tv series in development, this is a question that will be asked once again to a wider audience.
Would you kill to save your loved ones, even if it means the end of the world?
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