The Tragic Beauty of The Last of Us
This Article Contains Spoilers of The Last of Us Part 1 and Part 2
This article will be about my opinion of why both of the games, The Last of Us part 1 and part 2, were received the way they were and present my opinion and point of view of the game which I like to say to be the tragic beauty of The Last of Us.
There are two main reasons why I think The Last of Us part 1 was so well received. The first one is because of how the game feels like. When you are playing The Last of Us part I, you know that the world is cold and merciless, but the relationship of Joel and Ellie is there to warm it up. So, every time that something sad and depressing happens, the cheesy jokes of Ellie and the absence of commentaries of Joel are there to cheer you up. These moments are highlighted because of the dreadful world. “How can there be a relation so nice in a world like this one?” And that is the reason why the bond of those characters grows in us, the players.
The other part is the end. The ending in The Last of Us part 1 can be very confusing and it is subjective if it is good or bad. But either being good or bad, it still ends up being very thought-provoking and very meaningful. Let me explain: The bad ending point of view would be that Joel was the villain all along when you thought he was the good guy. The good ending would be that Joel was never the villain because there is no hero or villain in the game. They are all humans capable of doing bad things. They are both understandable and still make the game well received. But I think there is another reason why the end is so good.
In my opinion, the ending of the first game is so good because it tricks the player to think that the game is just a fantasy game about these two characters, but in reality, it wants to pass a very deep massage. In my opinion, the message of the game is about the love of a father towards his daughter. It is about the worst thing a father would do just because he doesn’t want to lose his daughter. This is made in a very clever way because Joel already knows what it is to lose a daughter. So, the game expresses to the player that losing a daughter is so bad that it would drive a man to act selfishly, and prevent the cure of the infection just so he can save himself from losing her. There is a video in youtube called “The Last of Us Changed My Life: In Depth Analysis and Dissection” created by “Grant Voegtle” where, at 16:13, he says “With the amount of loss and suffering that [Joel] has experienced in the past, he’ll do anything to prevent it from happening again. Even damning the rest of the world because Ellie, quite literally, means the world to him.” Therefore, the game surprises the player by showing that even though the story is fiction, the message is very much real.
The major reason why the second part of the game wasn’t as well-received as the first one is because of expectations. The player spent years waiting for a game that would reignite that feeling found in the first one, but Naughty Dog had a different idea. They wanted to tell a different story with a different, but in a way very similar, message.
In “Last of Us 2 Spoilercast w/ Neil Druckmann, Ashley Johnson, Troy Baker — Gamescast Ep.26” at 46:25 Neil Druckmann said: “When we first started talking about [The Last of Us part II], I said, you know, the first game is about love and the second is about hate. That’s not true. Both games are about love.” My understanding of this is that the first game is about love because it expresses the love of a parent towards his child, while the second part is about the love of a child towards their parents.
All the terrible things that happen in part 2 are because of the love of a child for their dead parents. In the beginning, Ellie wants revenge because she is very angry with Abby for killing Joel, the father she loved. While the reason why Abby kills Joel is that Joel killed her beloved father. After Ellie gets over her revenge, she tries to live a normal life with Dina. Then, she discovers that she can’t because she has PTSD and depression. You know this because in her book she explains the symptoms of depression, such as her skin hurts when she thinks of him (Joel). PTSD is shown in the barn when she experiences an intrusive memory of her being unable to save Joel. So, it can be inferred that the reason she goes after Abby for the last time, is not because of revenge but of redemption for the way she feels because of her loss of Joel.
One of the things that I really appreciate is that both of the games are bipolar to one another. One is the extreme of the other. The first one shows how these two characters, Joel and Ellie, make the cold world of The Last of Us nice and beautiful, while the other shows how the absence of Joel and the rapture of their bond unveils the world how it really is by Ellie's point of view: Cold and agonizing. The first one is about how strong a bond of a parent towards their daughter can be, and the second shows how strong of a bond of a daughter towards their parents can be, by expressing the emotional disorders of the daughters because of the loss of their beloved parents.
