![]() It’s a basic, less cosmic motivation for her actions, and it again speaks to the game’s prioritization of human relationships over epic stories involving miracle cures that can save the world. The doctor who was killed was her father. The lack of a cure is a huge consequence of Joel’s actions, shared by all the survivors, but Abby can’t even see that far. Image: Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment America We have no reason to believe he wasn’t an honorable, selfless character whose medical skills were all the more necessary in a world where such experts have to be rare.Įllie is creating a world of pain, not hope. He even pleaded with Joel to let him finish the job, not to spare his life. The doctor wasn’t cruel or selfish his greatest sin was his willingness to sacrifice one person’s life in the hope of saving the world. It’s impossible to complete the first game without killing the doctor, which is part of what made that scene so memorable. The Last of Us Part 2 weaponizes his death. There was nothing to indicate that doctor would ever be an important character, and maybe he wasn’t meant to be at the time. Joel wasn’t willing to trade Ellie’s life for the survival of humanity, so he grabbed Ellie and killed everyone who tried to stop them from leaving, including the doctor that may or may not have even had a name in the first game. Finding that cure, or even attempting to, would have meant that Ellie would be killed. The events of The Last of Us Part 2 are a ripple caused by Joel’s murder of a relatively minor character in the first game: the doctor who was attempting to find a cure for the fungus that turns people into the zombies that now dominate vast swaths of the land. That’s maybe part of the reason that The Last of Us Part 2 is so rarely fun it’s meant to be a didactic experience, not a purely enjoyable one. And, in so doing, the audience gains insight into the characters themselves, for good or ill. ![]() This is an important distinction: Both The Last of Us games leave crucial decisions out of the player’s hands, so they can’t be blamed for them. The Last of Us Part 2 interrogates those assumptions after you’ve made them, and the sequel itself is very much a criticism of how characters acted in the first game, including decisions that never involved the player at all. The Last of Us Part 2 review: We’re better than this Other art forms do this to different degrees, of course, but video games make you pull the trigger yourself. Games teach us that people who stand in our way can easily be dismissed as simple obstacles, not real people with their own internal lives. (If you’re not already wearing a mask every time you leave the house, you should be.)īut that doesn’t dull the horror of The Last of Us Part 2, as Naughty Dog backgrounds the details of a fallen world while focusing on the deadly results of dehumanizing our enemies. We speak of the infected, and those we’ve lost in our own lives, every day. Players have become numb to zombies and horror we are literally living through a pandemic that’s raging across a world that feels broken. Let this also serve as your warning to stop reading now if you don’t want the game spoiled for you. This piece, then, is not exactly our definitive review - that ground has already been covered - but is a second critical pass at the game, now that the story can be discussed without having to avoid spoilers. It all depends on the story being told, and which characters we get to witness, and spend time with, between battles. ![]() Naughty Dog has shown us just how thin that delineation can be in The Last of Us Part 2 and how little it takes to snap it and trade places with the enemy. ![]() In their story, the one that exists in their head, the only one they know, we have become the villain. We live in our heads, so we know better than anyone else that we’re one of the good ones, and we would never do such a thing intentionally.īut perhaps our actions are sometimes so wicked that we didn’t just make a mistake, we become someone’s enemy. We are often shocked when we realize we said or did something hurtful, offensive, or wrong. We see the world from the first-person narration we tell ourselves, and almost every action we take is one we believe is right.
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