I Now Understand The Last of Us Part Two

One of the games of all time

This game has the most realistic rope physics I’ve ever seen.

I love how The Last of Us pt 1 shows us what love can do to someone 😊 and The Last of Us pt 2 shows us what love can do to someone 😢

The fact that people STILL misinterpret the story when the opening line of the song that Joel sings to Ellie in the opening details the main thematic throughline of the narrative baffles me "If I ever were to lose you, I'd surely lose myself"

Easily one of the most traumatic games I have ever played, the whole ending from Ellie’s Farm to the final showdown with Abbie is just pure emotion and catharsis.

Goddamn that last edit with Ellie playing the guitar hits hard. She lost him, and in her vengeance she lost herself :'(

Playing this remaster recently, hits hard when you realize the opening of the game, the last time we play as Joel is literally him riding off into the sunset.

Graphically it is still the best looking game of all time.

In the first game, when Ellie gives him the picture of him and Sara, Joel says, “Well, no matter how hard you try, you can’t escape your past.”

Actually, the real reason why Ellie spared Abby was because Abby still owed her a pizza

I like your take on it but I disagree with Joel getting some time to shine before his death. I believe that the shock of it is what makes you hate Abby just as much as Ellie did. As the game progressed your own emotional connections to each character changes to the point where you understand Abby's perspective and why she did it. In the end you just want the revenge killing to stop. I think that was the intent of the writers.

Last of us 2 was supposed to make you hate it but then make you realize that wow this game is a masterpiece

Ellie and Abbie were in a perpetual circle of revenge. Abby killed joel, ellie killed everyone abby care for. Ultimately abby realized it wasnt worth it anymore and tried to walk away. Ellie couldnt let go of the hurt of losing joel. Ultimately that hatred cost ellie the family she was building. Its a rough story and one that took me a bit to fully understand.

This game has more emotional layers than any media I have ever consumed. Loved every second, and couldn't stop thinking about it when it was over. I know it's subjective, but to me, it is perfect.

seriously one of the greatest games ever created. nobody can tell me otherwise, it hurts so good.

It’s brutal and I loved it.

I think you pretty much nailed it for the most part, but I'd add a couple of bits to the part about why Ellie lets Abby go at the end. 1. The last thing Ellie says to Joel in that scene she flashes back to is "I don't know if I can forgive you, but I'd like to try". At that last good moment with Joel, she was a person willing to forgive. The entire narrative of her side of the game is her working through her grief at having been denied that opportunity to arrive at the point where she can be that person again. 2. That scene is a nearly exact parallel to the end of her first confrontation with Abby. After Abby wins that fight, she threatens a now helpless Dina, after which she certainly would have killed Ellie, but Lev gives her that look of horror, she relents and spares them, a symbolic act of forgiveness. Ellie threatens a helpless Lev as a prelude to attempting to kill Abby, then relents at the last moment, a symbolic act of forgiveness, or at least a first step in that direction. 3. Ellie isn't aware of this, or at least not consciously aware of it because she doesn't hear anything after the moment of Joel's death, but that is the second time Abby spared her. Some of the others want to kill Ellie and Tommy, and Abby is against this. She wasn't out solely for revenge; she wanted what she saw as justice. Killing the man who killed her father, her friends, and the friends and families of her current group of allies is, seen through their eyes (and I happen to agree with them), justice. Killing Tommy, who they know is Joel's brother, and Ellie, whom they may or may not know is the girl he killed for, was outside of Abby's plan. Killing witnesses to keep them from talking isn't justice, it's just murder. This is what the flashback to Joel's death from Abby's perspective is supposed to show us. It was revenge, but it was also (from the POV of the surviving Fireflies) justice. Take all this together, and you have Abby as a person who could have killed Ellie, but spared her, twice. The flashback shows us that Ellie wants to be the kind of person who forgives, even when the harm she feels she's suffered is enormous. My main gripe with the ending is that I didn't think the boss fight was necessary. I get that it's a nice parallel - Abby wins the first boss fight and spares Ellie, then Ellie wins the second one and spares Abby, with each one having the helpless companion character being threatened and also spared. But I don't think it was necessary. It would have worked better had she had the flashback after threatening Lev, and just let them go without the fight. I mean, ideally, I'd have had the farm sequence be the end, with Ellie blowing off Tommy and staying with Dina, but I can see that giving Ellie a happy ever after doesn't really fit with the games themes. I loved this game, went into it blind, and it hit me emotionally exactly as intended. I was heartbroken for Ellie at Joel's death, wanted her to get revenge, then became increasingly disapproving of her actions as she went about it. I wanted her to find and kill Abby. Then when Abby's part of the game was about saving a couple of innocent kids, risking her life and turning against "her people" to do so, I was gradually won over to liking her more and more. When Lev says "You killed your own people" and she tells him, "You're my people", I was fully on board. I was rooting for both Ellie AND Abby to get a good ending by the last part.

Why are all of the overly brutal death scenes in the operating room so funny?! The flame thrower almost made me spit my coffee out.

One counter argument: The player never actually has a choice, and the game never pretends to either. Everything Ellie does is her choice, the player merely serves as an actor. The weight of things that Ellie does are on her, we just experience her story in a more personal way.

For me, the moment that hits is Abby having this reoccurring nightmare of finding her father dead, until she saves Lev, and she finds him alive. Vengeance did not bring her the closer she was seeking. She turned herself into a literally machine, built for one purpose, revenge. She sacrificed her relationship with Owen, and lost herself in the process. Only to learn that vengeance was never going to bring her the closure she sought. Self-sacrifice did. When she says to Lev: "You, are my people", it gets me every single time