Alright, given how The Last of Us Part I left us, I wondered what was in store for this one.
It’s a game fully centred on grief and revenge. More importantly, on when revenge is useful, and when the cost is too steep to pay.
Someone Ellie loves is taken from her, and she goes after the person who did it. She rallies her friends and they all go out to hunt the people responsible. But as they pick them off one by one, there’s a cost. Most of it is physical, a lot of it is psychological. They have hunted zombies before, and they have killed people who were trying to kill them. But they have never gone out hunting for people before.
Then the game does a twist and makes you play the opposing side, Abby. You get her side of the story, that she is human too, and you watch her find her friends dead after Ellie kills them.
But I did not like having to play as her. Even if the game does this to humanize her, I still thought she was in the wrong. And Abby having more military training and better resources made it feel really unfair.
The ending comes when Abby and Ellie battle it out. And Ellie lets go of her revenge, because she realized the price had been too steep. She’s already lost so much along the way that she can’t risk losing more.
It reminded me of the early God of War games, where Kratos in his blind rage kills every god with no thought for the consequences.
We see that Ellie returns to an empty home and is unable to play the guitar that the person she loved taught her. It’s then when she realizes how steep of a price she has paid for her revenge.
I didn’t like the ending because there wasn’t one. It was all left up to interpretation, with no closure on what happens next for either of them. But it taught me a lot about the price of revenge, how easy it is to get caught up in it, and how easy it is to lose everything you have for it.