The Last of Us | The Ultimate Commentary - Luke Stephens

what can I say about the last of us that hasn't already been said this game has been out for four years now and has received its own remaster in addition to hundreds of awards for all elements of its construction and it is getting a sequel sometime in the near future now while I cover a lot of older games on this channel none of them are held in such high esteem as The Last of Us and so I've been battling myself on how exactly I should approach this video on the one hand if I do a straightforward critique of narrative and gameplay systems I'll be criticized for reiterating what someone else said years ago and for being unoriginal but on the other hand I could simply analyze the game's story and try to provide some meaningful commentary on what many people consider to be a masterpiece and so being that I'm very non-committal I've decided to do both I'm going to go through the narrative very carefully from beginning to end and I will also critique the gameplay without holding back and don't worry timestamps will be included in the description for those of you who like to watch these longer videos and parts I have also uploaded this video to SoundCloud in case you want to listen to these long-form videos like a podcast as I do again links to all of this in the description before we get started I'll just quickly clarified that I've played the last was five times now twice on my own once with my girlfriend and twice for this video specifically one of those times on the ground did difficulty which is the hardest one there is an in full disclosure I do consider the Last of Us to be one of the greatest games ever made especially from a narrative perspective and will explain why I think that as we go through but with that said let's get started [Music] as usual I would like to thank the people over at the Last of Us wiki for compiling so much useful information they really helped out with the making of this video and I'm gonna use certain excerpts from that wiki so if you're interested in the lore the world and weird details about the Last of Us as a video game I highly recommend that you go over there and check it out I will also be referencing and clipping certain segments of a documentary called grounded the making of the Last of Us many times throughout this video so if you see clips or background filler footage of people in a weird suit performing scenes from the game then that's what that is its actual behind-the-scenes footage from the making of the game as we go through the narrative I'm gonna be pulling from this documentary as well so that you can hear what the actors actually were saying what the creative director was saying about the scene when they were creating it to give you the complete look at what exactly made the last of us so uniquely amazing and as I'm sure you could have guessed a link to the full version will be in the description below the game opens up by introducing the player to the protagonist of the game Joel a single father living near Austin Texas with his only daughter Sarah he comes home late one night talking on the phone with his brother Tommy Sarah's uncle and he finds Sarah asleep on the couch and after waking her up she gives him a brand new wristwatch because it is after all his birthday they both crack a few jokes but soon after Sarah falls asleep and Joel takes her up to her bed and tucks her in a few hours later Sarah is awoken by frantic phone calls from her uncle Tommy the same guy Joel was on the phone with earlier he happens to be looking for Joel but the call gets disconnected in the middle of their conversation so naturally Sarah gets up and this is the first time the player gets control of any character in the game now the opening of any story whether you're talking about a video game or a novel or a film is very very important it sets the mood and it sets the standard for the rest of the story moving forward the choice to give the player control of sera before we give the player control of Joel or le or any other character is very very interesting and I think it's probably meant purely to make you connected with Sarah so that the coming moment becomes much more hard-hitting because if you play as a character chances are you going to be more attached to them than if you just so happen to see them in a couple short cutscenes now the entire point of this opening sequence is to show how close Joel and Sarah actually are and this is meant to give you even more reason to be upset in the coming scenes when something bad happens and we'll get there in a moment but this is even seen in a little card that you can find on Sarah's nightstand if you happen to walk over there this was the card she was going to give to her dad but she forgot to and it's just so freaking sweet I don't even know what to say about it it makes you really sense the love between these two and it's very well done the game uh sure's you into Joel's bedroom at which point you can see a newscast on the television the lady on the TV is talking about some sort of outbreak at the hospital there's all sorts of issues going on and it's clear that some sort of serious situation is developing wherever she happens to be and it's at this moment the Naughty Dog implemented one of the coolest narrative and visual tricks I've ever seen in a game honestly this was so simple but so cool to me the first time I saw it what happens is there's an explosion on the newscast now if you just saw this in a video or in a cutscene from picking up some sort of item kind of like they have in la noir where you pick up a newspaper they can get a flashback it wouldn't have much weight it wouldn't have much severity because you would just say oh well that's somewhere else that's something else it doesn't necessarily relate to directly what I'm doing however in the window you see the explosion at the same exact time showing you that this situation that she's referring to on the TV is very very close to home literally and you should be worried it's very very simple but I honestly just loved this moment you go down stairs and after you enter Joel's study you see him run in and he's loading a handgun clearly something is a little off at which point the neighbor breaks through the sliding glass door and attacks them both at which point Joel shoots and kills the man dead now initially I thought this was just to show that the zombies or the infected as they call them in the last of us are a very serious threat and our violent however the more I thought about it the more I think that this holds a much more contextual significance specifically with regards to the rest of the story as a whole what I mean is that when we see Joel in the later sequences specifically 20 years after all of this has happened we see Joel as a character who has very very few moral lines left across he's done very very bad things in his past and taking a life is no strange activity to him he's done it before and he will do it again with great ease this scene with Sarah is as far as the player knows the first time Joel has ever taken a life and you can see how visibly shaken his bite how terrified he is by it and Sarah is also just as terrified they are not hardened at this point and he's just a normal guy so again it's a small detail but you don't see Joel killing anybody else throughout the rest of this entire opening prologue to the game it's only at this moment the Joel kills someone and I think it's important because he gives context to his character later on to see how far he's come or fallen however you look at it at this point Tommy arrives and they run out of the house and hop in the car to drive away and flee the house they have a getaway plan but once they arrived there it turns out that everyone else and their mother had the same exact idea and it's at this point that you see some zombies and what I can only assume our hospital gowns jump out and start attacking people they've broken out of the hospital nearby and they're going savage we break through the city at which point we get t-boned and crash and at this point Sarah hurts her leg to the point where Joel needs to carry her now this is something that's going to be very important later on so I want you to remember this moment the first time we get to control joël as a character he's carrying his daughter Sarah remember that we're gonna come back to it we run through the city with Sarah to try to get away and escape maybe get to where the military are hanging out somewhere where we can find shelter we see people burning we see people dying getting eaten alive it's all terrible and horrible and at one point we get pinned up in a bar and Tommy our brother offers to hold them back while we get Sarah to safety so you run down this little Valley then you climb back up and we get a cutscene which is going to offer the first real clear example of the emotional tone that this game is going to take dole asks the soldier for help the soldier radios into his officer and then this happens we're not we've just been through hell [Music] Sarah baby don't do this to me [Music] [Music] we're not even half an hour into the game and already an innocent sweet child has died in the arms of her father and you had to watch it the entire time many other games or stories or films or TV shows whatever pick your poison they wouldn't show this they'd cut to black or they show that oh she was shot and then they'd leave it up to your imagination and maybe jump right ahead but no the Last of Us shows you every detail every squeal every murmur every groan as the life leaves her body you have to listen to and watch it's meant to be disturbing it's meant to be terrifying just as much as it is for Joel now already the quality of the acting which I think I should address here is very very good in most games in the modern day even back in 2013 which wasn't that long ago the acting in your average triple-a game especially a naughty dog narrative type game was very very good however the Last of Us seems to take it to a whole new level this scene especially is incredibly well done however it didn't come naturally that way and the main characters had a real hard time getting this scene just right now in addition to doing YouTube and going to school full time as a business student I also happen to work part time as an actor with many local theatre companies performing plays and all sorts of fun stuff like that so I can relate to these actors describing how difficult these scenes can be I was in one particular play called a bright new Boise written by Samuel hunter a brilliant play if you like plays you should definitely read it and I was playing a character named Alex who has panic attacks on stage and we were performing in the round there were moments where Alex needed to be writhing on the floor in anxious agony in front of an entire audience and it's very very difficult to do that in order to do that you need to put yourself in a mental space which is incredibly draining and exhausting and this is exactly what's described in the documentary describing the creation of this scene Troy Baker the individual who plays Joel in the Last of Us spoke to this saying specifically that when scene came up he asked the director Neil druckmann to give him a big heads up so that he could have time to prepare mentally for this scene because it was going to be so draining I'm gonna show you in its entirety the initial performance the very first take of this scene and I want you to see how far the last scene came and specifically how this one is different I started recalling all those memories and starting pulling up all those feelings and they're just right right underneath the surface and when I walk back again everyone realized that something was differently kind of like calm down you could feel the energy just like the soundstage was deathly still that was the first take and I felt really good about it as like Neil said okay let's do it again so you do it again an automatic that you feel like you're manufacturing because you're trying to go back to that place and you know you've you you're in that actor nightmare of you know trying to get back to that reality as you can see it's much more dramatic melodramatic even it's very very animated and loud and and it's very very tense and it gets that point across but it's almost try hard and Neil druckmann the creative director and individual who's never directed any narrative any plays any films any TV any games even before the Last of Us was willing to work on this repeatedly do multiple takes and even two weeks later reshoot the entire scene Neil druckmann recognized that this scene was not about being a very loud melodramatic actor who could show everyone how an incredible actor is needed for this role but rather he recognized that it was very simple it was about hitting certain beats and giving the scene what it needed which was a balanced slow accurate portrayal of the emotions going through Joel's head instead of screaming to God asking him how he could have taken his one and only daughter Jolene's very quietly whispers and says please no please no and that's all he needs to do Troy's very delicate and very precise in his portrayal in these final takes that we see in the game it's absolutely brilliant I have to commend him and Neil druckmann for this and this quality of directing and acting is going to be seen throughout the rest of the game as you go through we then cut to the game's opening credits sequence with various news reports playing in the background about some sort of infection spreading throughout the United States and ultimately the entire world it briefly outlines how the military began to place people in quarantine zones under martial law and then a militia group known as the fireflies was set up to fight against them but they weren't very successful it ends with the leader of the fireflies Marlene stating that everyone should quote look for the light and quote believe in the fireflies we then get cut to joel waking up out of a dream seemingly a nightmare recounting the events that we just saw 20 years after those events Joel now lives in a Boston quarantine zone and makes his living as a smuggler getting people items and weapons through the zones walls and he appears to have built up a ruthless and fearsome reputation for himself though less fearsome and respected than his partner in crime tests speaking of whom tes then comes into the apartment and says that she was attacked by quote/unquote Roberts men it's not clear who this Robert guy is but he seems to be a former business partner who turned on them and is causing them trouble they decide to confront him at his warehouse even though this seemingly is an incredibly stupid thing to do considering that he has a huge number of employees mercenaries who are heavily armed and are ordered to shoot them on sight but this game needs a tutorial sequence so I guess this will do I'm honestly not that intrigued by this opening sequence they really heavy loaded the initial opening prologue but this sequence doesn't make a a lot of sense especially for the reason that I just outlined Robert is a business partner who was in debt to Joel and tests in some way or another and they decide they need to reclaim this debt and the way they're gonna do that is by going and quote-unquote confronting him about it but this doesn't make any sense at all considering that he seems to be more powerful than they are being able to employ all these countless dozens of men to defend him but again as I said the game needs a tutorial sequence and so this is what we get at the very least this opening sequence on the way to meet Robert you see the world that this infection has bred you see houses that are collapsing with spores where you learn that you need to use a gas mask otherwise you can become infected by breathing these spores and you also see people executed in the streets for testing positive for whatever this infection is and even while going through a checkpoint you see a truck a military truck get blown up seemingly by the fireflies again I get the vibe that we're supposed to think the fireflies are these patriotic heroes who are the people we should be rooting for but in reality they resemble terrorists much more than they resemble heroic people who are just out to save lives and everything they're just blowing stuff up because they can apparently and it's a little weird but the fact that I'm not sure what they want me to think about them I think is ok because it means they aren't heavy handing something and shoving it down my throat nonetheless we get through this sequence after doing whole shooting galleries fighting Roberts Minh we eventually find him talk with him he says that he sold their guns to the fireflies and that he can't get them back but he's willing to help but at this point in test shoots him in the face killing him instantly initially I thought that this was meant to show how cold and cruel the world now was with this infection but if they were going to try and get that point across I would think that they would show some clear example with Robert dying of the infection or perhaps getting bitten or maybe they throw him out and he gets eaten alive by zombies or something in the no-go zones something like that but no she just shoots him in the head which made me think that the point of this is more to show that Tess is just insane and shouldn't be trusted and maybe is a very morally grey individual Joel at least seems to see the necessary nature of this action but Tess very quickly dismisses him and then we meet Marlene now Marlene is the head of the fireflies she's supposedly a very powerful woman in charge of a lot of people but the fireflies are slowly collapsing underneath her leadership and indeed the first time we see her she's injured now this is the first example of something I'm gonna bring up repeatedly as we go through the last of us especially near the ending when we get into the debate as to what the ending actually means the fireflies are supposedly this very righteous group that are doing God's work they're saving humanity when the military has practically given up on trying to save humanity even though we never actually hear the military side of things but they seem really really incompetent their leader gets shot constantly apparently and they aren't able to even organize truck bombing without major hiccups and other bombs being set off in their own camps for instance when we're going through seeing and fighting all of Roberts men we see dead bodies of a bunch of formerly I suppose fireflies that used to work with Marlene but they were shot because they're so incompetent the fireflies in essence just seemed to be a group of really stupid people who don't have enough time on their hands we'll get into this more as we go through but every example I'm gonna give you from here on out it's gonna be an example of how incompetent and desperate they are and why they shouldn't actually be trusted with the savior of human Marlene offers to give Joel and test the quote-unquote guns in essence just a lot of crap that will make them effectively very rich for the time being in exchange for smuggling a package quote-unquote out of the city Marlene takes you back to a central location and introduces you to this package who happens to be a 14 year old girl after some arguments and reasonable objections to the plan Joel agrees and test goes off with Marlene to see the guns before they agree to do a deal in exchange for them this is the first interaction between Joel and Ellie directly and this is the moment when we first see a reference to the watch and it's not a subtle one I'm Ellie actually directly calls out the watch and says that it's broken but it is an interesting thing that they're initially calling attention to it and as we go through the story Ellie is going to remind Joel more and more of that watch Marlene and tests come back after a short while test saying that the guns are there and they are numerous and that they should go through with this steel at which point we head out to smuggle Ellie out of the city now at this point in the story Joel and Tess have no idea who Ellie is and Ellie is very tight-lipped about it because seemingly Marlene told her not to tell anybody that she was immune because after all who would believe her they see a bite on her arm why should they believe that she's immune Jolin tests both make guesses as to who she actually is and they seemed to settle at least temporarily on the idea that she is quote some bigwigs daughter and quote which is to be fair a reasonable assumption so the trio then escapes through a bunch of tunnels that Joel and Tess have been using to smuggle for a long while at this point they get out to the border at which point Ellie makes it clear that this is the first time she's ever been outside the wall again just to give context to her character and remind the player that this is not somebody who has a lot of experience outside of the city Joel Tess and Ellie then continue on their way climbing up through a broken-down truck at which point Joel and everyone else are surprised by a soldier who detains them and then the trio is captured one particular soldier orders her subordinate to scan the three for traces of infection just like the people we saw earlier in the streets who were shot once their tests came back positive test gives it the good old college try and tries to bribe them but she's told to shut up and then Ellie out of nowhere stabs the soldier that was scanning her and this creates a whole brawl point being all of the soldiers get killed very quickly Joel and Tess seem to know what they're doing but after they seemingly are safe they look down at the scanner and see the Ellie comes back as positive this is at this point that we learned that Ellie is immune to whatever this infection is she claims that this bite on her arm happened three weeks prior and this is actually an event we get to see during the dlc of the last of us something I will cover in another video if you're interested leave those comments down below but we see that this clearly means that she is immune because I would typically turn the victim into a runner class of zombie within two days at the very very most Joel however isn't buying any of it and he still insists that Marlene set them up for whatever reason but before he can actually act on this and speak his full piece more soldiers show up so the three have to get out of there and can't argue any further this is another example of practical application of heavy pacing during a narrative the writer of this game Neil druckmann realized at this point that if he left the characters to just talk about this possibly Ellie would have just been sent back to Marlene they would have turned back around it would have been a 5-10 minute turnaround and it would have been fine they would have just left her alone they wouldn't have taken the risk of smuggling an infected girl or seemingly infected girl across the no-go zone it's already risky enough and to smuggle an infected girl is just too crazy so instead they break it up by having a combat sequence or by throwing in some enemies that you at the very least have to run from or sneak through it breaks up the tension and the dialogue so all of a sudden you aren't thinking about Ellie potentially being a zombie you're just trying not to die earlier in the game right after Sarah's death originally as described in that documentary we've been talking about Neil druckmann said they initially went right into Joel waking up 20 years later they didn't have an opening credits sequence but they added it in later because the player tended to be still stuck on Sarah's death they needed time to recover and sort of collect themselves before they went on playing the rest of the game so this awareness of pacing is something that Naughty Dog does very very well specifically Neil druckmann and it's something that the Last of Us especially does very very well so the three escape all the soldiers and they finally get time to think and Joel and test then discuss their options here Ellie explains that her immunity to this virus could eventually lead to a cure which is why Marlene is so interested in her Joel is much more hardened and is not having any of it he doesn't want to risk their lives if it means saving this potential cure to humanity it doesn't matter to him he is only concerned about him and his own this is a reflection and a natural reaction to the immense loss that he experienced twenty years prior so it's understandable but it also serves to act as a contrasting position when we see how Joel evolves as a character later on in the story and so you continue on your way to the Capitol building which is where Marlene asked you to smuggle Ellie to we then continue through the city going through multiple broken-down buildings and slowly collapsing skyscraper something which was very visually impressive especially at the time we also get introduced for the first time to clickers a new class of infected that have been brewing in their infestation for a longer period and their faces are all torn apart they can see through echolocation meaning that their eyes are totally gone they're long gone they've been overrun by this fungus but instead they make clicking noises and then listen to that to sort of act as radar to figure out where you are and this leads to some cool gameplay elements where you're in a really dark space but you can use your flashlight because they can't see light anyways it's just a matter of sound clickers also happen to be a little tougher than the typical runners that you're gonna run into no pun intended so you're gonna need SHIVs or specifically some type of ammo with headshots or a melee weapon to take them down you can't kill these purely with your fists you eventually find your way into a subway station where once again you find a bunch of dead fireflies and you get your first Molotov cocktail which is personally one of my favorite zombie killing methods in the entire game you can also find a note which actually specifies that this is not the group of fireflies that you were supposed to be meeting at the capital building which is a nice detail because if you were thinking very actively about everything you see in the world you might consider that this is the group you were supposed to meet up with and that you should just turn back around but no they thought of that and they include a note to tell you that you know you're okay continue on to the Capitol building it's a nice touch we then go through a couple other buildings and fighting sequences again this is more filler it's nothing too engaging but it does let you get some practice with the combat in general especially when dealing with teammates and it allows you to figure out how exactly clickers work especially in groups we then end up on a roof where we get to talk with Ellie once again and this is the first moment where we see Joel glance at his watch in this short cutscene so is that everything you hope for jury's still out man Yan tonight Ivo mom this way hey let's pick it up [Music] we're almost done stay focused yes ma'am after this Joel Tessa Nellie finally reached the Capitol building which is slightly flooded and dilapidated but nonetheless is still there but upon entering they find a bunch of dead fireflies Tests frantically searches the bodies for a map or directions to whatever lab Ellie was supposed to go to but Joel argues that they are taking this too far that they should just go back home and give up they tried their best they took her where she was supposed to go and that's it they did their end of the bargain it's not their fault that the fireflies are incompetent why should they have to go and do their job for them which to be fair is a perfectly reasonable point however at this point Tess reveals that she was bitten and she unlike Ellie is not immune to the virus she shows Joel her wound and remarks that it is already worse than Ellie's although she was only bitten an hour ago while Ellie's is three weeks old Tess then begs Joel to take Ellie to Tommy because he will note where the Firefly lab is located Joel argues and doesn't want to do it but Tess asks him to do it for her saying quote there's enough here that you have to feel some sort of obligation to me and quote effectively guilt-tripping Joel into taking Ellie halfway across the country once again the story's pacing comes into effect and before Joel can even answer test directly the military shows up once again and tests sacrifices herself to give Joel and Ellie some time to escape into the subway station outside of the Capitol building and as you leave the room and make your way to that subway station you can hear tests fighting and shooting these guys and once you get up to the top you can see her dead body on the floor as the soldiers come in then we move into the subway station where we get our first two person sort of coop sections where we have to come up with rafts and ways of getting Ellie around it's the first sign that we're gonna be doing this a lot so if you don't like this section you probably aren't gonna like much of the rest of the game but after this point we get out of Boston and we're on our way to find Tommy Joel and Ellie head into the woods and the outskirts of the town of Lincoln where Joel knows a friend who owes him a bunch of favors which he could potentially cash in to get access to a car which would greatly reduce the time that it would take them to get Ellie to the lab you play through some very very basic puzzling sections and then you eventually find your way into the town or at the very least the outskirts of the town and this is when you first encounter a bunch of bills traps bill is Joel's friend who owes Joel a lot of favors again it's never clarified what exactly Joel did for bill but whatever it is they are significant enough favors that bill has to come out and provide them with a car one of the most valuable items a survivor could get their hands on now Joel warns Ellie that bill is a good guy but he is completely out of his mind and paranoid to the point where he's willing to kill strangers simply because he doesn't recognize them he has rules that he lives by and he sticks to them to a tee he stresses that when they find bill it's important that she let Joel do the talking and not try to intervene no matter how crazy bill might seem now I think it's also important to stress that all through these sections there's small moments going on between Joel and Ellie trying to slowly build trust and make sure that Ellie is slowly becoming more and more comfortable around Joel right after Marlene sends Ellie off with Joel and tests Ellie's entire posture is very changed she's keeping her arms down lows she's got her arms crossed she's very uncomfortable and unsure of these strangers that are taking her and smuggling her outside of the city essentially doing something so incredibly dangerous that they could die at any moment naturally she's a little reserved by the end of the game she's super comfortable with Joel they break down in front of each other they can be completely honest with each other they ride the same horse it's all very very close and tight-knit and that's the entire point of the Last of Us this story arc between Joel and Ellie it's not even so much about the zombies it's about the bonding that takes place between these two there's one moment in particular in this chapter of the story that many people have pointed to as one of the more delicate examples of this bonding while you're looking for bill you come into a record store where naturally there are hundreds it perhaps even thousands of records all lined up exactly where they were 20 years prior inside of this record store and as Joel or the player is looking for supplies Ellie starts thumbing through these albums and she makes a comment what is all this music that's just sitting here it's not super significant and the game doesn't even draw much attention to it but the game is filled with the small statements these small interactions which show Ellie slowly opening up to Joel and when you play through the game as a whole you see this blossom slowly but surely you work your way through the town until you eventually get to a small warehouse where Joel gets strung up in one of Bill's traps and he's left hanging and so all of sudden you have to do a huge shooting gallery sequence hanging upside down the game does give you infinite ammo here so it's a little less difficult than it could be if you still had to manage your limited inventory but still this hanging sequence is really clunky and weird and I'm not even really sure if I like it at the very least it breaks up the monotony of the same-old same-old shooting gallery sequences and stealth sequences that the last of us parades in but at the worst it's a weird attempt at shaking things up that doesn't quite pan out but nonetheless bill appears and helps you escape but once you get out of harm way he immediately handcuffs le to a pipe on the wall and then has Joel get down on his knees while he inspects him for bites realizing the bill would not hesitate to shoot Ellie in the face once he realized that she had the bite on her arm Ellie gets involved and pulls the pipe off the wall hitting him in the arm this doesn't make Bill happy but at the very least it seems to distract him to the point where he doesn't check her Joel explains that they need a car of some sort at least the pieces for one and then if bill can help him find him then all of the favors that bill owes Joel will be paid for bill says that there's a working car battery in a truck that crashed into the school on the other side of town this is apparently the one item he needs in order to get the vehicles running because after all they've been sitting out in the weather for twenty years and so the newfound Three Musketeers go out on their way to try and hunt down this car battery and so we work our way through the town through the alleyways and houses until we eventually come to the school where there is a horde of zombies that we need to get around we find the truck that bill was referring to but it's at this point we realized that somebody has already taken the battery and that we're screwed and of course at this precise moment another horde of zombies comes our way we run into the school and try to find a way out you eventually find your way into the gymnasium of the school where you get a mini arena for what is effectively a boss battle where you are introduced to the bloater enemy type which are basically infected that have been infected so long that they've bloated up they if all these fungal plates on their skin and it's super gross but they're very very powerful and you really have to use and employ Molotov cocktails if you want to have an easy time with them we eventually break our way out and find ourselves in the back alley with a bunch of houses we go through these houses and we find ourselves in a home with a man that's hung himself in the family room after speaking with bill it's revealed that this is the partner that bill used to have and was very very close to and this is one of those moments where if you aren't thinking too much about what he's saying or what he said earlier you might not realize who this individual was to bill in an earlier sequence bill said that he used to have a partner somebody that he cared for deeply but that they held him back and were more of a nuisance than anything else but he sounds very very bitter about the whole thing in this sequence when we find this man's body somebody who was bitten and decided to take his own life before he turned into an infected it's weird because bill speaks of him harshly but in a sort of fond harshness it's a little bizarre but it's something that you hear a bunch of old couples talking to each other like it's kind of cute but also sad at the same time because it's clear that they've lost something they used to have long story short bill is gay and this individual that decided to take his own life was his partner for some period of time that's not exactly clarified or clearly stated now I'm somebody who personally doesn't give a crap if there is a gay character in a video game that I'm playing I really couldn't care less if it doesn't affect the writing or the narrative or the gameplay of the game I'm playing I really couldn't care less it's just it doesn't affect me why would I give a crap however the times when I do give a crap is when that becomes the defining characteristic of a given character if the only thing we knew about Bill after this entire chapter interacting with him was the fact that he preferred sausage over a ham sandwich that would be a problem because it's his defining characteristic it means that his writing was so poor that he didn't have any other redeeming or likable traits it was purely the fact that he happened to prefer one sexual activity over the other unfortunately in most types of entertainment content that tend to tread in this type of subject matter the characters that express these sort of sexual preferences tend to be written with the sole characteristic of their character being the fact that they are gay that they're lesbian that they're transsexual whatever it's their defining character and trade the first thing and the last thing you know about them is that very reality and its really disappointing because I just want good characters I don't care how you like it point being The Last of Us seems to do it very very well delicately enough that both people whether you agree with a particular lifestyle or not for religious reasons whatever your personal preference or opinions maybe you can look at this and at least feel as though your own opinion is respected and that you're not being preached to which I can at least appreciate and respect regardless we make our way to the garage of this building and we find the truck and it turns out that this guy that used to be bills partner happened to take the car battery in spite of bills best wishes tried to put it in his own car to escape but once he was bitten he realized the doom was inevitable and so he took his own life instead of taking the car and dying somewhere on the highway the trio takes this pickup and they drive it right outside of town and at this point bill says his piece and they go their separate ways and then Joel and Ellie have a car that they can drive to get to Tommy's now in this car we get one of the most lighthearted sequences of the entire game an entire story typically the Last of Us is very down in the dirt very dark and as the creators call it grounded in reality it doesn't try to be a light-hearted narrative experience so this is a really much needed moment of levity and it's really really fun and cute and I'm just gonna let it play [Music] oh hey what happened to sleeping okay I know it doesn't look like it but this here is not a bad read only one problem right there to be continued hey cliff piers where did you get that uh Maggie bills I mean all this stuff was just lying there what else did you get well here let's make you all nostalgic you know that is actually before my time that is winter though well better than nothing oh I'm sure your friend will be missing this tonight light on the reading but it's got some interesting photos yeah Ellie that ain't for kids whoa how how the hell could even walk around with that thing get rid of that hold your horses I want to see what all the fuss is about Oh Barney's all stuck together just [ __ ] with you [Music] you know what this isn't that bad what's he trying to get me we're like I'm tired so after that little terse exchange they go about their way Joel's driving while Ellie sleeps and he sees that the highway pass up in front of them is all blocked off and instead of going back and rerouting and going about some other way Joel decides to try and take a shortcut down the exit despite his best judgment and at this point a bunch of Raiders happened to jump on them turns out it's a trap and they crashed their car and have to make their way out of this city this section isn't too interesting basically you're stuck in a province of a group of Raiders that happen to be cutthroat killers who are purely interested in killing and collecting that's all they're doing the one interesting thing we do learn during this sequence however is that Joel says it would be on both sides so as we learn in this short scene joel has done some things in the past that he isn't exactly proud of we as the players don't actually get to see the 20-year period between the opening and when the game actually starts it's left up to our imagination but we get little hints like this one or the conversation joel has later with Tommy discussing the terrible things that they had to do in order to survive now some people will point to these instances as examples of Joel's immorality an example of why he is a morally repugnant individual who isn't actually a hero but is a self-centered selfish curmudgeonly old man we'll talk about this more especially once we get to the finale but as of right now I just want you to be aware that Joel has done some messed-up stuff in his past in order to survive and even thrive in this dystopian world now after killing all of these individuals and escaping you find your way to the hotel grand and after going through some stealth sequences you find yourself climbing up into an elevator shaft to try and get to a bridge on the other side of town in order to escape this group however right after you boost Ellie the elevator falls and Joel lands on the bottom and at this point Joel is separated from Ellie for a short period you fight your way out of the basement and then once you get back to the main floor you're going to find Ellie when you're ambushed by another cutthroat you struggle with this guy through a QuickTime event but then all of a sudden Ellie shows up pulls the gun out and shoots the guy in the head saving Joel's life now right after this Joel is a little too pigheaded to admit that a kid just saved him he's also very very weary of letting Ellie get in close to him so at first he acts like a real Butthead about this saying that he's not glad that she saved him but rather I'm glad I didn't get my head blown off by goddamn kid here Joel is absolutely treating Ellie like a child but not in the affectionate way in the demeaning way when he says stay put he means stay put when he says don't come and try to help me he means don't come and try to help me when he says these things he means it he's trying to maintain control of not just le but of himself and his own emotions and le in her own sort of comedic way lets him know how ridiculous this is by being just as passive aggressive as joel has been but after climbing through some rooms you come out onto a scaffolding area at which point joel shows his first sign of trust to le he seems to have changed his mind and he gives her a rifle asking her to give him cover while he goes down and tries to break through the other large crowd of cutthroats you go down fight through the sequence le laying down suppressive fire which actually can be fairly useful especially on the higher difficulties and then once you get back down joel gives le a 9-millimeter pistol insisting that it is quote for emergencies only but this has much greater significance in that he's showing his first sign of trust in her and she's going to be very involved in all the combat sections especially here on out this is something that apparently was not initially planned for the game initially le was going to sit on the sidelines during most of the combat sections letting the player and joel intern deal with most of the issues but once they got into the motion capture studio Ashley Johnson the actress who plays Ellie expressed a little frustration with the way that the game was currently planned and I'll let this clip play out I think the most important thing that actually brought is a sense of capability to Ellie's character there wasn't there in the beginning the very first thing we shot involved her being pulled out of a car and attacked and Joel is supposed to go save her it was written that Ellie sort of was just kind of watching on the side just waiting till he was done and I was a little frustrated because I was like well I like this were real life I would do something we did a couple takes at some point she walked up to me and she said I feel like I had hit him so we added in a part like you know right there off the bat she's not just this damsel in distress right there she wanted to fight back from her very first day of shooting we didn't have a right to initiate she needs to be more capable than initially we thought she would be and actually that made us go back and rethink combat and we think of all the areas in the game and now she was gonna take a much more active part it just goes to show you how much more fluid game development is and can be especially in comparison to the way most people perceive of games being planned and made most people would think that they have a single plan that they have in their head and then they script it out and then they turned that into the game but rather they were changing things on the go while performing the script they were editing the script live on set in order to make it make more sense and the Neil druckmann would go back home and rewrite sections to make him make more sense they would add new gameplay elements and functions based on what some of the actors were doing during the shoots it's much more involved and communal than I think most development of games typically would be but again I I don't know firsthand so this is purely conjecture anyways the duo continues through the financial district of the city and eventually finds themselves confronted by what looks to be a military Humvee with some sort of turret on its top you run away from it and eventually crawl into a building from a Ledge overlooking the Humvee at which point joel is grabbed from behind by some stranger after a quick scuffle you are introduced to each other apparently this individual thought that you were another one of those cutthroats just as you thought they were as well but it is very apparent that these two in addition to you two are not one of these cutthroats rather you are people that got stuck in the city and are trying to get out you introduce yourselves and it turns out that this is Henry and this is Sam and their two brothers who are survivors from a larger group that's set to meet at some radio tower just outside of one of the suburban areas of the city so after a short discussion joel and henry decide to stick together and find a way out of the city working in tandem you go back to their hideout where Ellie and Sam do some quick bonding over some berries and then once it gets to be night time you head out for the main bridge which is how you're gonna escape you go through a quick stealth section although I don't think that this section is completely beatable while just stealth thing I've played this game many times as I previously stated and I've never been able to get through it using just stealth it seems somebody always will spot you even if they're on the complete other side of the arena looking the other way they'll always spot you which I guess makes sense because this military Humvee that shows up right after needs some reason to show up and be suspicious but in either way it was a little frustrating maybe I just suck at the stealth and that's why but I thought I'd mention it anyways like I said the military Humvee that was bugging us earlier also shows up at which point we rushed through the gate and try to make our way to the bridge but we have to climb over a semi container and as we're climbing up at the ladder breaks the Humvee is breaking in and Henry and Sam abandon us leaving Ellie to jump down to stick it out with Joel once again this is a small moment but the fact that she was willing to jump down from safety in order to help Joel I think says something significant and it gives the player and Joel a reason to trust her even more the to run away and try to find an escape route but end up at the end of a bridge that's broken in half with nowhere to go other than down into the water of the river now as Ellie previously stated she can't swim which is how the game gets away with doing so many weird puzzle platforming activities but that also means that in this section she's jumping into a river incapable of swimming which seems incredibly stupid but at this point they don't have much other option Ellie jumps in and Joel is forced to go after her the to wash up on a beach where Joel wakes up to Henry and Sam helping Ellie out and having just found Joel Henry tries to pass it off as just a joking situation that wasn't that big of a deal Joel is very upset however that the two left them to die but after Henry asks him if he would honestly have done anything differently Joel lets him go about his way and they continue on their path to the radio tower the four then look around for some new paths and a way to get off the beach in order to access the radio tower at which point you find a sewer grate you lift it up you climb inside and you start going through the sewer we go through the sewers with some weird again water platforming sequences these get really repetitive by the end of the game and I wish they were shaken up with some other puzzling sections like we see in other Naughty Dog titles but regardless it's something to do and I guess it lengthens this section but it is a little frustrating ly mundane and repetitive we eventually find our way to a large set of doors with a castle painted on the walls around it it's very kitty and when I first saw it I thought that this was some crazy person who had completely lost their mind and thought that they were some sort of Prince or maybe beast from Beauty and the B as something like that which could have been really really cool to be honest but what we get instead is also good however tragic it may be this turns out to have been some sort of settlement for a group of survivors that were in large families that happen to have a lot of kids hence the very cartoony drawings and all the toys that are littered throughout this entire sequence it's not clear exactly how long ago people inhabited this area because once again we do see that there are clickers in the area but it's not clear in the game's lore exactly how long it takes for somebody to be a clicker and once they are a clicker how long they remain a clicker before becoming a bloater so it's not clear but at the very least it's been a few years since these individuals lived here everything in this section is really well all planned and laid out there's a large opening with water draining where it can rain directly on it and they happen to have the wash bin for all the clothes right next to it and at the very least shows an attention to detail in the environment designers at Naughty Dog that they thought to include the laundry area right next to where all the water would be coming in to be more efficient and it's a small detail but this entire game is filled with small details that add up into really impressive attention to detail which I'm really pleased with at one point Elian sand play with a soccer ball it's another moment of levity but instead of letting it slide or participating in it like Joel does with Ellie rather we see Henry very quickly shutting Sam down telling him to keep it down again this echoes this attitude that many survivors have where they don't think fun is something that you can have in this world and that's a very reasonable thing to expect and to demand of each other because after all it is a very deadly cutthroat world that the last of us is in the difficulty being as we will learn later when we hear Sam talk about his brother and what his brother is having him do and what he thinks his brother thinks of him Sam doesn't feel as though he can do anything right whenever he tries to have a light moment or perhaps right here where he tries to pick up a toy his brother immediately shoots him down and acts like he is in being a good survivor because he's trying to be a kid I'm not saying Henry is a bad person or that Joel is a bad person because they're more harsh on these kids but I just want to point it out that there is this conflict constantly going on between Sam and Henry in between Ellie and Joel because Sam and Ellie are both young their children still effectively and so they want to be children just biologically genetically but they can they're forced into this world that demands more of them Ellie seems to have matured to the point where she can accept that and doesn't tend to mess around when the going gets tough only in sections when everything closes down and slows down moments like in a moment when we'll see them sitting down and having dinner or in the car scene that we watched a few moments ago she's mature enough to separate those out Sam is apparently a little bit younger than Ellie - which can also not help with this maturity issue but nonetheless I thought had pointed out and I'm probably reading far too much into this but I thought I would just discuss it briefly you fight your way through the settlement you eventually can find a room that has multiple dead bodies in it a group of dead bodies that are very very young and small looking next to a full-grown man's dead body and you can find a note scrawled on the floor which says they didn't suffer and once you read the note it reveals that one of these adult caretakers or perhaps their father or someone like that had killed these children in order to avoid the possibility of them becoming zombies and infected just like all the rest they didn't want them to suffer so they very quickly ended their lives it's absolutely horrible and dark and once again it shows how even this very well-planned out thought out and cute settlement that they had built for their families and children even that could come crashing down and end in such a horrible and dark way you eventually find your way out of the sewer system and then go through a small neighborhood area where you fight your way through and eventually they get split up and Joel tries to take down a sniper from afar ways away you fight through this section you take down the sniper and then you try to provide cover fire for the other three individuals as they're coming to you at which point the previously seen military Humvee shows up and starts laying down suppressive fire on Ellie Henry and Sam you can try shooting at it it won't do much you have to wait until a character pops up with a Molotov cocktail and shoot him while he's holding it and then he'll drop it inside the car making it explode lighting everyone inside the car on fire at which point they drive crash into another houses patio the roof collapses on the patio and things seems to be fine but the noise created by this crash calls a bunch of clickers and runners in you try to protect le Henry and Sam from this but eventually two of them will be tackled specifically Henry and Sam and it seems as though and perhaps you have a choice here as to which to save but either way if you shoot one of the zombies that's tackled the other it doesn't matter what you do the other one will die and the same cutscene will play in the next scene so there's no way to change it everyone will have the same outcome I'm not sure why they felt they needed to do this maybe to make you think or regret a decision but on subsequent playthroughs you see that there's not much to this you basically just have to shoot one and then everything's okay the quartet escapes out the back of the house and find their way to the radio tower or at least a house nearby to it while they wait for the rest of Henry and Sam's group to arrive Henry and Joel bond over stories of Joel and Tommy renting a pair of Harley Davidsons to drive across the country however none of this is interesting to Ellie in the slightest so she excuses herself to go and visit with Sam in the next room who is actually taking inventory of all of the food that they had discovered that day now when I first played the game I knew something was up immediately once Allie and Sam started talking there should be a moment of reprieve there's no imminent danger they're just sitting there waiting and eating and having a good time but instead everything is very gloomy and dark at least once Ellie gets in the room with Sam this should immediately set off some red flags to tell you something isn't quite right about Sam's situation sam asks Ellie deep questions like where she thinks those people go when they stop being people and become infected or zombies she says that she doesn't really know but sam says that his brother mentioned that they go to heaven with their families but he doesn't buy it and then Ellie tries to encourage him either way that they made it there okay and everything's gonna be okay it's very strange and it's like you're talking with somebody severely depressed but there's no reason Sam should be depressed in this moment which again should send up those red flags le however doesn't seem to see the warning signs but still tries to encourage him by giving him a toy that he actually asked Henry if he could have way back when we first encountered them as a duo now I actually got footage of this after Henry says that he can't have it because they need to only carry what is absolutely essential Ellie goes back over where the toy was set down on the ground and this isn't in a cutscene this is just during gameplay but the doll action figure thing whatever is on the floor right there and Ellie stands by it and then at one point she crouches down like she's hiding from gunfire but when she stands back up the toy is gone so the animators even thought to include a quirky really clunky little way of showing that Ellie went over there pretended like she crouched down for something when in reality she was grabbing the toy putting an inner bag so that she could have eventually and later give it to Sam Sam accepts the toy Ellie leaves but then he gets upset throws it on the floor and he rolls up his pant leg to show the player that he's been bitten at some point in the near past now people typically turn into runners within 24 hours to two days of being bitten when we saw earlier tests well after she was bitten it wasn't even a day old and it was already way worse than Ellie's this bite I can't judge too much from it how bad it was but it does look very recent and fresh but it's also possible that bites tend to affect individuals much quicker if they're younger and they aren't as big as a fully grown adult male for instance so that could also be why the very next morning when Ellie goes out to meet Sam and to ask him to come in for breakfast he attacks her and he's already turned it's at this moment that Sam tackles Ellie and tries to claw her to death at which point Joel rushes over to find a gun in his bag to shoot the newly infected individual but Henry shoots the gun out of Joel's hand and says that that's his brother you can't kill my brother but Jill says I don't give a crap reaches for the gun again at which point Henry shoots his own brother killing him instantly and saving Ellie Henry is terrified at what he's just done he insists that it is quote your fault it's not clear if he's referring to Joel or to himself in the third person whichever it is he's so overwrought with guilt and with sorrow that he takes his own life the camera doesn't show it directly but Joel sees the entire thing as does Ellie and it's it's very dark once again this just goes to show that the Last of Us can't even have one moment of reprieve or relaxation without everything going to crap at this point the camera goes black and we transition into the second large chapter or act perhaps of the game fall now at this point I'll just let you know that while I'm recording this there's a massive thunderstorm going on outside it's like borderline flooding my neighborhood so if you hear loud clangs and booms that's the thunder and lightning just full disclosure that's not a sound effect that's actually coming right outside my house so that's why you might hear that fall opens up with Joel and Ellie walking along a river heading to Tommy's group they're not exactly sure where they are but they do know somewhere in this area within wyoming they're going to find Joel's brother who used to run with the fireflies and therefore will know where to send Joel and Ellie to find the fireflies where they currently would be so that they can help create a cure bla bla bla recapping the story bullcrap now we just witnessed a suicide so obviously the player is still going to be a little shaken up and so are Joel and Ellie but it's much more delicate as to how they approach it in fact they don't even directly mention what happened until you go off on an optional little branch and you go over and you find a child's grave off to the left of the path that you are asked to take you have to be looking out for this but if you find it and go off to the left area you'll find this grave an element to comment forgot to leave that stupid robot on his grave what should I do with it I mean what I want to talk about it no why not how many times do we need to go over this things happen and we move on it's just that's enough all right I'm sorry let's get the Tommies you can't really blame Joel and Ellie for taking this stance on tragic events this is a world that's incredibly harsh and where things like this I'm sure happened all the damn time once you get close to someone the risk of them dying becomes just as high as it was before but the risk of that impacting you severely is also much higher so you constantly have to keep people at arm's length and if you don't you risk making irrational choices as we'll see near the end of the game perhaps based on that preference that preference of course being that you hold those close to you much higher than the average person that you would see on the street it's a human response but it's one that's very dangerous especially in a world where if that person is bitten they could turn into a zombie endangering not just themselves but you and everyone else around you at which point you would need to take them out and shoot them you know pull an Old Yeller even though you might have loved that person at some point you have to recognize the difficulty of the situation and and that problem before it even really starts and begins to metastasize itself I've seen some videos online saying that Joel is an evil character because he refuses to even consider his emotions and terrible things that happened to him what I think is that is absolutely ridiculous I mean you're talking about a situation which is horrible it's only human to want to forget about it and simply move on anyways we continue on our way and after a short sequence of walking through the forested area and going through another friggin water puzzling section we find a dam and all of a sudden tommy appears turns out his group has taken over this dam and they're using it to generate electricity to power a town that we're gonna actually see in person at the very end of the game this is the very closest we ever get to true human civilization in the entirety of the last of us it's a group of people who are working together they have energy they have lights they have power they have food they have warmth they have housing they have protection from the elements and from not just Raiders but also the infected it really is a sweet setup and it's all thanks to this dam and to Tommy's leadership after a quick reunion you meet Maria who is Tommy's wife and you'd get a quick tour of the facilities and then you go off and you speak with Tommy directly it's at this point that Tommy can offer you a picture of Joel and Sarah together that he actually found back at their house when he returned to Texas years after the initial events unfolded joel looks at it but he can't even take it it's too much for him too much emotionally and I think it's meant purely to serve as yet another reminder of just how damaged Joel is we're about halfway through the game and at this point it's very easy to forget where Joel came from and to just be thinking about him and Ellie but I think they wanted to remind everybody that Ellie is always in his mind referencing back to his actual daughter to Sarah and as much as he might be trying to avoid it Ellie is slowly becoming closer and closer to that daughter figure than he ever expected or then the player perhaps even expected and so as the game progresses this bond is building and building and building and this picture just serves as a reminder of that this picture also I think heavily impacts what Joel says to Tommy right after this which is that Joel tells Tommy about Ellie's immunity to the virus that she can breathe in all sorts of spores and she's fine but he specifically asks Tommy to bring her to the fireflies instead of asking Tommy where the fireflies are so that he can take her Tommy refuses this offer though since he is now responsible for all of the people of this giant community that he's built now very angry Joel shoves him as the bigger brother and calls him ungrateful for all of the years that he kept him and his brother alive but Tommy replies with a very sharp response I got nothing but nightmares from those years you survived because of me it wasn't worth it I bring you the cure from mankind you want to play the pissy little brother we ain't back in Boston you lay your hands on me again it won't end well for you the hell is that we're under attack but right after he says this plant is attacked by some sort of bandits that apparently are very common in this area they're coming for the dam they want the energy they want the town they want all the resources they're in it's a natural huge target no I'm a little baffled as to how they immediately got into one of the deeper areas of the factory there's probably some roundabout way they got in so that you can immediately start shooting them in a big shooting gallery I guess but I don't know I think it's meant just to offer a little bit of combat and a chance to break up this conversation again going back to the pacing that we talked about earlier now after taking out all of the bandits Tommy sees Joel and Ellie interact and sees how close they actually are and after this he speaks with Maria and tells her that he has to do this that he has to take Ellie to find the fireflies because she is after all the potential cure for Humanity and he has now a responsibility to all of the human race not just to his town however Ellie is incredibly intelligent in spots this a mile away and rides on a horse that she steals all the way outside of town to a small ranch house way out yonder way you chase after her and you go through some shooting sections which don't make a lot of logical sense in that Ellie would have to ride straight through these without getting shot at all or perhaps she found a roundabout way but then why couldn't you take that and avoid combat altogether it's a little Fugazi but at the very least again it's a chance to offer the player something to do violently in order to shake up this pier narrative section this is something the last of us does repeatedly where they feel as though they need to offer the player something to do other than just riding a horse and pursuing a narrative plot point however I think the narrative is so engaging that most people will be able to just pursue Ellie because they want to talk with her because they want to resolve the situation you could have had massive set pieces and purely just look at them like that section in uncharted 4 right after you speak with Elena on that elevator you hop in the car and you have a very moving image and and scene as you ride through this very beautiful set piece and the music takes over I don't see any reason why something like that couldn't have worked in this situation where they simply let the narrative take over and don't try to force a shooting section in between it's really clunky this arena is really small and cramped anyways I don't gain anything from this combat section other than a little bit of confusion or perhaps a memory or or a reminder that the bandits are very close to this area where Ellie is going to end up so there's a reason for them to show up in like three minutes into their conversation either way it's a little weird and a little distracting I don't know why this had to be here but nonetheless it is you find a ranch house you go inside and you find Ellie at which point she's sitting on a windowsill reading the diary of a girl that used to live there now this scene is perhaps the most important in the entire story arc of the Last of Us this is the peak of that story arc where Joel decides to commit to Ellie and vice versa and it's not necessarily during this conversation but this is the catalyst that makes Joel realize he needs to stick with Ellie and Ellie realizes she needs to stick with Joel is this really all they had to worry about boys movies deciding which shirt goes with which skirts it's bizarre it up we're leaving and if I say no do you even realize what your life means huh running off like that putting yourself at risk it's pretty goddamn stupid well I guess we're both disappointed with each other then what do you want from me admit that you wanted to get rid of me the whole time Tommy knows this area well I'm sorry I trust him better than I trust myself stop with the [ __ ] what are you so afraid of that I'm gonna end up like Sam I can't get infected I can take care of my family close calls have we had well we seem to be doing all right so far and now you'll be doing even better with Tommy not her you know what Maria told me about Sarah Ellie [Music] you're treading on some mighty thin ice here I'm sorry about your daughter Joel but I have lost people too you have no idea what loss is everyone I have cared for has either died or left me everyone [ __ ] except for you so don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else because the truth is I would just be more scared [Music] you're not my daughter and I sure as hell ain't your dad we are going our separate ways get it together not alone once again a deep compelling moment gets broken up by some combat again because if they let this fester and boil the resulting things that would be said would perhaps be a little too damaging to be able to recover from so they break it up with a little combat sequence which is very very brief you end it you hop on your horses at which point you end up overlooking the town which is again something we're gonna come back to later at which point Joel tells Ellie to give Tommy back his horse and to hop on his he's going with Ellie he's not sending her off with Tommy they're gonna stick it out and go there together Joel has officially committed to Ellie that he's going to be there for her and then she is going to be with him it's a beautiful moment and this is when we really start to see Joel accepting Ellie as the person that she is and for the role that she's starting to play in his life Tommy tells Joel that the fireflies are going to be at the University of Eastern Colorado in the science building that happens to look like a giant mirror and he says that you can't miss it it's very easy to spot and so Joel and Ellie head off on their horse to the University of Eastern Colorado we then jump to Joel and Ellie riding on the horse that Ellie has just named Calais because Joel forgot to ask Tommy what the horse's name actually was and there's actually some cute and witty dialogue between the two on the topic of the horse's name but nonetheless they arrive at the University discussing how football is played Ellie totally doesn't get it but again it's a cute moment that shows how bonded they actually are becoming and it's it's chemical you go through the university you get access to a new weapon the flame thrower which is gonna be very useful as the game now is gonna start throwing hordes of enemies at you rather than just a few strategically placed enemies in certain spots so you get this massive flamethrower which will also justify them throwing two or three bloaters at you at a time because they are so weak too fire damage that this flamethrower basically nerfs of them you go through the University and as you go through all the rooms something is very very evident there is no one here it's very quiet and if there were a large network of fireflies here you would expect to find at least one person patrolling or keeping an eye out for potential Raiders or looters or the military someone so it's very very strange that no one is around and very quickly especially as you get to get further and further into the university it's clear that something strange is going on and that the fireflies are probably long gone and once again the player realizes that this probably isn't the finale eventually you find your way to the science building and as you enter the science building Joel and Ellie realized that the fireflies have for sure left in a very quick hurry everything is left where it was they didn't pack all of their equipment up they left much of it right where it was Joel can actually find a recorder near the corpse of a firefly scientist at which point he can learn that they were using monkeys as test subjects trying to study the effects of that cordyceps brain infection that leads to the infection disease that basically creates all of these zombies the scientist had actually been instructed to kill all of these infected monkeys but instead believe that they deserve to be free a typical sort of hippie again I live in Colorado this is a very common thing oh no the monkeys have this infection they're zombies we should let them go free like it's not like they could potentially bite us or anything which is exactly what happens they let the monkey go free and then the monkeys turn around and bite the dude and all of a sudden the guy is infected with the cordyceps virus because he wanted to set monkeys free it's it's probably supposed to be super serious but again this I think this echoes the idea that many of these Firefly guys are idiots and we'll talk about that later but damn at the very end of this sequence you listen to another scientists recorder and you learned that the fireflies have gone to Salt Lake City in Utah to continue their research and as soon as Joel and Ellie discover this a group of looters that will later learn are called the cannibals ambushed them Joel and Ellie make their way through the building trying to attack all of these people as they go but eventually Joel is caught by surprise by one of them and during a QuickTime event you're mashing whatever button it is and you find yourself all over the ledge and get impaled by some rebar now the first time I played The Last of Us and this happened I thought that I had just failed the QuickTime event and that it was just a death animation so I sat down the control area and went to my mini-fridge to grab a ginger ale but it turns out that this actually happens this is canonical and so I frantically set up the controller or picked up the controller as I realized that the animation which was getting longer and longer and longer wasn't actually a death animation it was an actual event that was occurring and the more I thought about it the more I disagree with the choice to put in a QuickTime event here I understand what Naughty Dog was trying to do they have Joel in a very desperate situation and they want the player frantically mashing buttons along with Joel they want them to be participating in the frantic terror that I'm sure accompanies somebody being pushed over a railing but I think it does more harm than good specifically in that exact situation that I just described which didn't just happen with me but has happened to everybody I've ever asked about this sequence everybody I've ever talked to thought that this was just a failed QuickTime event and didn't think much of it but then realized that it was an actual event that had happened perhaps is meant to make you feel as though the the world is so harsh that not even your gameplay can save it or maybe they honestly just thought that a QuickTime event would be fun here I don't know but either way I think I disagree with it I think a dedicated cutscene would have served this sequence much much better but anyway Joel is impaled and so Ellie jumps down saves him and then pulls him up off the rebar at which point it's very clear he is severely severely injured and at this moment you get to control Joel as you would expect but all of the controls are wonky the vision is a little Fugazi and is shifting and wobbly and it makes you feel as though you actually are severely injured you try to walk to the door but you're collapsing you try to climb through a little window sill but you fall on the ground you are very very hurt and this is something that the game really tries to do when prides itself on so much so that it's a dedicated difficulty level it tries to be grounded this is even the name of the documentary on the making of The Last of Us grounded they want the game to feel real and believable and they pride themselves on that realism this will come back to haunt them however as we go through some of the following scenes what I want you to keep it in mind but this scene is really believable in that Joel is not a superhero even though during gameplay sections you do get shot and you're fine and then you can heal and recover you're absolutely fine in this moment Joel gets impaled it's canon he is very severely injured and it's gonna play out Ellie takes the wheel here or should I say gun I guess and shoots all of the other people you help her out occasionally but your vision is so blurred that you can't do a whole lot she gets at you out to the horse and loads you up on it but after the adrenaline wears off and once you get away from all these people Joel passes out and collapses on to the ground at which point Ellie starts frantically trying to figure out what she's supposed to do kind of panicking justifiable I don't blame her I'd probably be doing the same thing at this point it goes to black and then we move into winter this sequence opens up very very solemnly and quietly they don't try to throw any music in they just let the scenery take over you're in a very snowy forest and Ellie is hunting rabbits with a bow and arrow at which point she spots a deer and begins hunting it down letting you get in a little more practice with your bow and arrow but the big surprise here the many people nowadays forget about is that you can control le in this scene this is the first moment when you get to play as le and actually back when the game was initially being marketed around and shown off at briefs and press conferences the developers all lied about the sequence saying that you could never play as le that it was quote-unquote Joel's story and she was there to help tell his story in the documentary grounded Neil druckmann stresses the importance of this moment saying we couldn't talk about it in fact an interview we've been lying about saying he never plays le because it was so important for that to be a surprise sorry journalist yet another reminder to take all of your gaming journalism with the grain of salt you hunt down the deer and eventually you kill it and it collapses in the middle of a sort of wide open area next to some buildings at which point two individuals David and James come out of nowhere and greet you they say they come from another larger group with women and children that are very very hungry thanks to the unforgiving winter essentially they are offering a trade they're willing to give you whatever you would need in exchange for the deer that you just shot and killed Ellie says she needs medicine which is a very very big relief for anybody who had never played the game before or seen the ending of the game because at this point there's no telling whether or not Joel is alive or dead they purposely don't mention anything they simply show and fall off the horse with a very serious injury and then switched the perspective to Ellie some time later as she's hunting food but at this point she asks for medicine for a friend so the player can put two and two together and realize joel is probably okay but he's still severely hurt david agrees to the trade and sends his right-hand man james back to the town where whoever this group is lives to receive the medicine so that they can make the trade for the deer Ellie is incredibly suspicious of all of this but she's willing to make the trade for the medicine simply because she wants to save Joel she keeps the gun aimed at David throughout this entire sequence which is very interesting because soon after a bunch of zombies come and attack them and at this point a leaves start shooting them and becomes very quickly overwhelmed at which point it's revealed that David has had a gun on him the whole time he had a pistol on his leg or whatever it was and so even though he could have potentially gotten the jump on Ellie he chose not to and this is a trick not just on Ellie but on the player at this point the player has no reason necessarily to distrust David other than all of the other people that we've met in the story so far which is exactly why Ellie would be suspicious of him because people in this world tend to be awful then David and Ellie actually go through an entire fighting sequence defending themselves from waves of zombies and runners and clickers and eventually one bloater all working together and this again as I said is meant to build up the confidence and the faith that you have in David and make you trust him a little more after the last zombie is dead you go back down to where the deer was and build a fire and all sit around at which point David starts to tell a little story now you see I believe and everything happens for a reason sure I do and I can prove it now this winter that's been especially cruel a few weeks back I sent a group of men out a nearby town look for food only a few came back he said that the others had been enough slaughtered by a crazy man and get this he's crazy man traveling a little girl you see everything happens for a reason don't get upset it's not your fault I'm just a kid James lower the gun no way David I'm not gonna let her know her a gun now give her the medicine the others won't be happy about this yeah well that's not your concern with a [ __ ] out of the way won't survive long out there I can't protect you and so Ellie runs off back to Joel without thinking too much about the fact that she could very easily be tracked through this snow which she is she wakes up the next morning very early and realizes that David's men have tracked her down now luckily the night prior right as she arrived home after running away from David she had enough time to inject Joel with whatever medicine and antibiotics she was provided by David I won't address this too specifically right now I will in just a moment though but I do just want to say that all she does is pull it out of the bottle and then stick it directly into the wound and that's expected to heal him completely and so she goes about her way and the sequence continues she races out hops on Calais the same horse that we rode through the university on you ride it away but eventually the horse gets shot in the head dies falls down the hill and you have to make your way out trying to escape to get back to Joel in order to get away from David and all of these crazy people you go through some more fighting sequences where it's gonna be very very very important to maintain stealth especially on the higher difficulty levels Ellie is much smaller than Joel not to mention that you're not going to be equipped with Joel's typical loadout that you've been upgraded throughout the entire game so you're dealing with much much lower levels of inventory and you need to fight a lot smarter you eventually fight your way into the lakeside resort you'll find your way to the front door you head out it but at that point David comes up surprises you in captures Ellie at this point the perspective once again shifts back to Joel who just woke up apparently whatever drug Ellie injected him with is a miracle drug and he's right as rain and he's able to walk he stumbles initially but by the end of this little sequence when we get to control Joel he's walking just fine and there's no issue which he said I wanted to talk about this which I guess this is as good a time as any the last of us prides itself on its realism even the cordyceps fungus which is the basis for the entire infection and all of the infected enemies is believable it's based on an actual phenomenon so they pride themselves on this but this is the first moment while playing The Last of Us and really the only one I could think of where I'm caught saying okay really like really that's what we're gonna do Ellie injected Joel with this serum not 12 hours prior to him being able to walk around and fight just like he normally would I wouldn't have an issue with this if for the rest of the winter sequence Joel was impaired he couldn't sprint perhaps he was sluggish maybe his aim was a little off and his view was a little fade II and was blurry maybe that would work and I'd be willing to forgive it because at least they're willing to admit that he's handicapped however that's not quite what they do they instead completely ignore it and simply expect you to accept that he's completely recovered thanks to a quick injection into his gut this is the only example in the entirety of the Last of Us where this is an issue it's not an issue anywhere else and they do a very very good job of committing to realism throughout the entire game this is simply one event that the player has to simply accept and move on from if they want to enjoy the game but nonetheless Joel gets up collects his gear and goes outside where he notices the horse is gone very quickly realizing something is off he goes outside to look for Ellie where he spots a group of remaining bandits and they all start shooting out him at which point you know you get out and once again shoot them all at the very end of this shooting gallery you capture two individuals and then torture them to acquire Ellie's whereabouts now I'm gonna actually play this torture sequence not because I like torture but rather because I think it shows something important about Joel you're gonna mark it on the map and it better be the same exact spot your buddy points to [ __ ] you man told you she wanted my [ __ ] that's alright I believe it now something they talked about in the grounded documentary is the fact that in the initial casting pamphlet that they handed out at the auditions for Joel Neil druckmann had written under the character description for Joel that Joel had very few moral lines left to cross and that's actually what Troy Baker made the defining element of Joel's character in his performance this is an conjecture this is coming from their mouths this is what they say with that being said I think this scene is incredibly important because it shows Joel and his willingness to cross that moral line or perhaps vault clear over it and run a mile into the next town over in order to save those that he cares about he's willing to do messed-up stuff if it means saving the ones that he loves pride to this we haven't seen Joel really act in any particular way directly in response to Ellie being in danger he does defend her in certain circumstances or gameplay sequences but nothing directly in the overarching narrative they're more just a duo the goes through the world but he's never been challenged on it until this moment she's in danger she's missing she's been captured and he's going to do whatever it takes to find her we then switch perspective once again and go back to Ellie who wakes up in a cage she looks over and sees James cut off a corpses limbs for his group to eat and it's very very subtly revealed at this point that David's group has completely and utterly resorted to cannibalism now it's not exactly clear how this cannibalism started who instigated it and how long it's been going along however you can find note which would suggest that the cannibals have been doing this for about a year David does say that this winter has been particularly harsh in one of his dialogue sections so perhaps this winter has just exacerbated the entire situation and they're eating and relying on human meat more than ever but at the very least you do walk through in a room full of dead bodies that have had their throats slit and are being drained of their blood it's really messed up but it just goes to show how quickly things can devolve now at this point James leaves and David comes in and says that he doesn't want to kill Ellie but rather he only wishes for her to join them he takes her hand and at this point Ellie realizes what he's actually talking about as one of David's own followers will later say during one of Joel's sequences David wants Ellie to be his newest pet in other words David wants to be intimate with Ellie and wants her to be his new servant in more ways than one as I'm sure you could imagine Ellie refuses to cooperate instead breaking his fingers and making a grab for his keys which is a very Ellie thing to do soon after that David and James get fed up with her and then they pick her up and throw her down onto the table to kill her for food they grab the knife that we previously saw James cutting up bodies with at which point Ellie tells them that she's infected and having just bitten David's hand David takes this very very seriously they roll up her sleeve and see the bite on her arm at which point they start to freak out taking advantage of this split moment of confusion Ellie grabs David's knife kills James and then runs out into the snowstorm which is blistering outside you only have your switchblade at this point which you find nearby so you have to focus really only on stealth during this entire sequence and as you fight your way through all of these enemies you can use the snow to hide it actually reduces all of the enemies draw distance and how they can be seen and how they see you so it makes a little bit easier but nonetheless it is a very stealth focus section you eventually find your way to an abandoned restaurant and David shows up as well and you start what is essentially a boss encounter David starts trying to track her and you'll notice that there's a bunch of broken plates on the floor and if you step on top of these they make a noise that David can hear at which point he'll race over to that location so you have to keep an eye on the floor to avoid all of those plates but you can also listen to those plates to find David in the second phase of this fight it's pretty straightforward you just sneak around and stab David in the back whenever you get the chance after stabbing him multiple times you go to attack him once more at which point he flings you down and you both are knocked unconscious at this point we switch perspectives back to joel who goes through a very very very short combat sequence and you find your way to that very same diner that Ellie and David are in and you can actually see it on fire just as David set it up we switch perspective back to Ellie who just wakes up first barely and starts to crawl and make her way to the machete however just as Ellie gets close David wakes up and rushes over and kicks her taunting her that she should simply give up and he'll make her death quick however you continue to push on reaching for the machete he continues to hit her and eventually pinned you down nearly strangling her and at this point I will let this scene play out [Music] [Music] a couple things I want you to take note of in this final scene this is the first time that jewel directly refers to Elly as baby girl which is also the exact term that he refers to Sarah as as she's dying not to mention that this is a moment of pure unadulterated vulnerability on Ellie's part she's just nearly been killed by a maniac cannibal and so Joel takes her into his embrace and comforts her the voices fade away and were left with just the music as the lights fade and we shift into spring now save for a few interesting moments the final portion of the Last of Us doesn't do a lot that's different or unique or really interesting in comparison to the rest of the game there aren't any major guest characters like we saw with bill or with Henry and Sam or with David instead we focused purely on Joel and Ellie as we prepare for the finale now right as we start the chapter it's very clear that something's off with Ellie and Joel Joel is opened up to Ellie much more to the point where he's even offering to teach her how to play the guitar but Ellie is pretty closed off she's distant and distracted obviously thinking about what's gonna come next now keep in mind that Joel and Ellie at this point don't even know if the fireflies are going to be here they could end up with another situation like the University where they've moved or perhaps they've all been wiped out it's very very possible and so there's this solemn caution that they both exude during this entire chapter there are two really fun and interesting moments in this chapter however that I would like to point out the first is probably the most visually memorable sequence in the entirety of the Last of Us which is of course the sequence with the giraffes these animals broke out of the zoo way back when and they're now thriving walking around freely in many ways Nature has reclaimed the city that humanity had once claimed and it's a really subtle way of saying that this world is after all worth saving the game lets you just stand here and overlook watching the drought for as long as you want you don't need to go anywhere it's not gonna automatically boot you out it only ends this scene once you choose to hit a button or move the joystick which is really nice the first time I got here I sat here for a good three four minutes just taking it in enjoying it because both the player angel' and le know that this is probably going to be one of the last calm moments of this entire journey after this you continue on your way and you eventually come to a bunch of medical tents where Joel starts lamenting and discussing what happened before the infection had fully spread now this isn't simply to talk about a subject and fill a certain empty portion this is meant to recall to the player moments early on in the game when the infection was first spreading and it's doing that for Joel as well then right after this Ellie actually gives him the picture of Joel and Sarah that initially Tommy had offered him she apparently stole it from Maria back at the dam the difference is this time he doesn't reject it he actually accepts it and thanks Ellie for it and then he goes about his way as if nothing major just happened he's actually matured and come to grips with what happened 20 years ago and accepted Ellie's role in his life but anyway you continue on your way again the city is incredibly empty at this point which i think is just meant to keep you guessing and make you think maybe the fireflies aren't here and this isn't the end of the game but as you're going through a tunnel you eventually reach a flooded area after fighting huge swarms of infected and bloaters this is the point I was talking about earlier when your flamethrower comes in real handy and at this point the bus collapses and you both fall into the water Ellie who can't swim of course gets knocked out and nearly drowns as Joel pulls her out of the water and begins giving her CPR a Firefly soldier comes along tells him to put his hands in the air for some reason even though he's trying to resuscitate someone apparently that's protocol and he knocks Joel out we then immediately wake up in a hospital bed with Marleen from early in the game well him to the fireflies now it's at this point that Marlene explains what's going to happen Joel asks to see Ellie because again the last time he saw her she was drowning and Marlene absolutely refuses and says that she's okay but that she's being prepped for surgery Marlene explains at this point that the cordyceps fungus that is the cause of the infection is inside Ellie's brain but it's somehow mutated at least according to the fireflies doctors this is apparently the cause for her immunity now apparently this could be used in the sequel because the fungus is still growing inside of Ellie's brain but it's mutated so it shifted and it's changed but it could still potentially affect her behavior and her perception which could lead to some cool gameplay mechanics in the future regardless Marlene says that the scientists need to study her brain and that would allow them to reverse-engineer a vaccine that does the same mutation that Ellie is able to do naturally however Joel puts two and two together and realize is that open brain surgery is not a surgery especially in this time and place that an average person would survive and it's very very subtly indicated that Ellie would be killed over the course of this surgery Marlene apparently saw this coming however and so she orders a guard to escort him out of the hospital and to kill him if he tries to do anything but of course this doesn't work Joel is able to spin around shoot the guy grab his backpack and then you get to go through her stealth in a bunch of combat sections while you find your way to Ellie now while going through these combat sections we actually get to find a few recorders that help us explain Joel's decision at the very end of the game which we'll get to in a second essentially what these recordings explain are for instance in the first one that you can find it's a description of Ellie's immunity it's a doctor recording what exactly is going on inside of Ellie's brain and it's pretty straightforward because what it says is that the surgeon has never seen any infection like this truly le is unique and he hasn't seen this type of immunity before however he does mention quote past cases and quote which could imply that they've tried to do this surgery on other people who had potentially similar immunities before which could potentially justify Joel's decision at the very end however it's not clear if these past cases were cases of slight immunity or partial immunity or if they were just individuals who were infected with the virus at that particular time regardless it's made very clear that Ellie's infection is like none they've ever seen and her immunity is like none they've ever seen and so either way it would stand to reason that Ellie if she had undergone this surgery could have potentially provided a cure there's also two other recordings that you can find one describes Marlene's and decision as to what exactly to do and then the other also describes the fact that she didn't really want to kill Ellie in order to do this that she does like Ellie and but potentially even loved Ellie but she decided that this is for the good of humanity and to sacrifice one for the good of all of humanity was a worthy trade so after you fight through this big section lots of stealth lots of guys with these assault rifles which is actually the first and only time you get access to these in the entire game but because all the guards have it doesn't do you a lot of good and they're very very loud so using them openly it's probably not the best idea especially on higher difficulties it's a much better idea to utilize smoke bombs and nail bombs and all that to get through stealthily create distractions and so on but you eventually find your way to the operation room where Ellie is on the table and there are several doctors standing around her the person we can only assume is the head surgeon who made the recording earlier holds up a scalpel and is not gonna let Joel through unless Jill does something this is not optional once you approach the surgeon they will get killed Joel will grab the scalpel stab it into the guy's throat however the other two doctors you can optionally kill or let live completely up to you I happen to shoot them but it really makes no difference you grab Elly and you start to run out of the hospital somehow not getting shot now apparently I guess you could say this is because they didn't want to shoot the one and only specimen that is potentially holding the cure for Humanity however they start shooting right after that once you get to the elevator so I guess they only thought that far for like 30 seconds and then changed their minds and just said kill them either way it's a little weird it is meant to be cinematic but you do sprint like within ten feet of somebody and they don't even bother tackling you or hitting you and again if Elly's going to be killed during the surgery I don't understand why they can't just open fire and then take her back in there and cut her open I don't really understand that perhaps she has to be alive during the surgery keep blood flowing and maybe that impacts it either way I don't think it's explained if it is please let me know in the comments but this is another element of the Last of Us where it's meant to be more cinematic you're not supposed to think about it too much you're just supposed to hold down l1 and race through get to the elevator and start the cutscene now at the very beginning of the game I wanted you to remember that the first time you get control of Joel you're actually carrying your daughter and the last time you get control of Joel in this sequence is actually when you're carrying Ellie effectively your new daughter now I think that this obviously is intentional it's kind of cool I thought I would mention it so you get to the elevator and as you go down Marleen appears holding a gun but she tries to talk to all out of it telling him that this is what Ellie would want she would want to save humanity and give herself up Marleen then offers to allow him to live if only he gives Ellie back to the fireflies for them to operate on her he feigns thinking about it for a second but then turns and shoots her she drops to the floor Joel puts Ellie in a car that is in the parking garage there and turns back to Marlene Marlene is on the floor all bloodied and she's begging Joel to let her live and to let her go but Joel just says wait let me go please you just come after her now at the very end in the car Joel tells Ellie his version of what happened and all that let that play out and then we'll discuss it turns out there's a whole lot more like you really people that are immune as dozens actually ain't I'm a damn bit of good near if exes if stopped looking for a cure I'm taking this home I'm sorry now many people debate back and forth as to whether or not joel is intentionally lying here if he misunderstood one of the recordings where as I said the doctor mentions past patients and subjects but to me it seems pretty clear that he's aware that they have not had dozens of people quote just like Ellie and Ellie was the first of her kind and that he chose to save Ellie in a sort of selfish way because he wasn't ready to give up his newfound daughter even at the expense of all of humanity the one problem with that line of logic though echoes back to something I've been saying throughout the entire video whenever we encounter the fireflies it's assuming that the fireflies would be able to not just find a cure and develop it and produce it on a large scale but that they'd be able to distribute it accurately without being completely incompetent losing it doing something like that now after I browsed reddit for a little while this actually seems to be the prevailing theory which is that Joel was thinking about the competence of the fireflies when he looks at them he'll even the first time they interact with them in Salt Lake City he's giving a young girl a child CPR to try to save her life at which point they hit him in the head with a gun that's apparently their protocol these people are so stupid that their leader the first time you meet her is shot and injured and then as you go through first interacting with her you see other people that she's headed up are all being killed and apparently her leadership is causing the collapse of the fireflies even the catalyst for the entire game the idea that marlene needs you to get Ellie to the Capitol building and then the idea that you need to get Ellie to the fireflies in Salt Lake City that all spawns from the idea that Marlene didn't even have someone else qualified to smuggle this girl to the Capitol building much less all the way to Salt Lake City Utah I understand that many of her people were under attack and that she was suffering losses but she really had to entrust the help of a couple of smugglers who just wanted guns as payment in order to escort the cure for all of humanity it seems really really desperate and if they're that desperate perhaps they aren't that capable of actually distributing the cure perhaps if Joel actually wanted to save humanity and cure all of humanity he was going to get away from the fireflies and eventually take Ellie to the military who at least seems capable enough to maintain checkpoints and to wipe out the fireflies and that's one of my biggest problems with the last visits that we never actually get to interact with the military on anywhere near the same level that we get to interact with the fireflies on we apparently get to know the fireflies and their motivations pretty well but we never actually get to see or interact with the military and hear them explain what's going on from their perspective my guess is we'll get to hear lots more about this in the sequel where we're gonna look at primarily the military and this foe government ruling by martial law and we're gonna start to hopefully ignore the fireflies or perhaps they get new leadership after Marlene's death regardless we approach Tommy's town in Jackson at the very very end of the game the last sequence this time we're playing as Ellie so we start the game playing as Jill's daughter we end the game playing as effectively Joel's new daughter which is a nice touch and you walk towards this cliff where you're overlooking the city looks very similar to the place where we left Tommy and his horse and they discuss everything that's just happened and Ellie asks Jill a very simple question and all at that play [Music] come on hey wait back in Boston back when I was bitten I wasn't alone my best friend was there and she got bit too we didn't know what to do so she says let's just wait it out you know we can be all poetic and just lose our minds together I'm still waiting for my turn Elly her name was Riley and she was the first to die and then it was tests done Sam none of that is on you you don't understand I struggled for a long time with surviving and no matter what you keep finding something to fight for now I know that's not what you want to hear right swear to me swear to me that everything that you've said about the fireflies is true I swear [Music] okay now this ending to the game is very simple and very very subtle but it does spark a lot of debate and usually when people first play this game they don't really understand what it's discussing but as they think and ruminate on it more they end up liking it or hating it to the extreme Ellie has a very simple request for Joel she already has a BS meter going off when he initially told them this you can see it on her face as she lays down in the car but as she asks Joel this question he hesitates and then he says I swear and at that moment I personally see in Ellie's eyes at least the way that she says this last line it's not that she believes him but it's that she's accepting that this is where they are this is what he's saying to her this is what their truth is she knows she'll probably never learn the direct or inalienable truth that is what actually happened but rather she's accepting what Joel has told her so that they can move on in their lives that now is going to be set up at Tommy's very straightforward they're done with their adventure and they can just relax and go about their way now this obviously begs the question is Joel a bad person for saying all of this and for lying to Ellie and saying that everything he said is true when it isn't and I'm not sure if that's exactly fair the Last of Us is filled with all sorts of morally gray areas and this is just another one this is a moment when Joel is trying to save their relationship he loves Ellie as his daughter now and he's willing to do whatever it takes to save that relationship if he were to go and tell her the truth the all-out truth is she would potentially be very upset or disown him or something very very negative he's trying to do what's best for her which is to let her move on realize that her infection and her immunity isn't something crazy unique and she doesn't need to feel this obligation to give up her life for the rest of humanity there are however many differing opinions of this ending and I'm sure you have your own feel free to leave it down below and we can all talk about it that's one of the great things about this ending is that it's gray enough that you can debate it but it's clear enough that there's something to go off of and with that the credits roll and we're done with the last of us now as for gameplay we've gone through some of the gameplay elements as we went through the narrative it's kind of hard not to after all we just spent two hours and five minutes going through all of that so naturally we covered some of the stuff but the big thing I want to talk about is difficulty and the way that the Last of Us distributes items and ammo The Last of Us approaches ammo distribution dynamically and what that means is that it's never going to be the exact same for each person now of course some items are always going to be in the same place for every single player those would be recorders notes important items such as the first time you find the flamethrower that's always going to be there for every single player the things I'm talking about that are dynamically adjusted are specifically things such as ammo drops or the crafting materials that you need to use these are all going to be changed dynamically based on well first of all your difficulty level that you've selected and also what's already in your inventory and where you are in the game the game works off of an encounter system which basically means that there's certain points in the game where based on your difficulty level the game is going to have provided you potentially with a certain amount of ammo so if you're scouring everything and everywhere you will have exactly the right out of ammo for the encounter that you're about to hit based on what the developer thought was an appropriate amount of ammo and materials to have for that encounter based on the difficulty you selected when you get to the higher up difficulty levels of course items become much much rarer and harder to find you can't go spamming with your 9-millimeter you have to very carefully aim for headshots you have to consider the fact that stealth can be more effective than actually using a gun in many cases and you have to start approaching it as an actual survivor and this means that if you can through an encounter without killing everybody this could actually end up being more beneficial to you in the long run because you will have saved ammo time resources SHIVs things like that that you could potentially need in an upcoming event now a lot of games offer this sort of masochistic Manichean self-flagellating difficulty level just for the hardcore gamers who want to push themselves and go for a platinum trophy or something like that now a lot of people look at these difficulty settings as just something for a very small percentage of gamers who like hard stuff but I don't think that that's what it's meant for I think that this difficulty setting specifically in the last of us it's called grounded is meant to do just that it's meant to ground you in the world of the Last of Us when you are going through the world and you only have five bullets in your gun but you see 20 zombies in front of you that moment of panic asking yourself how the hell am I going to get through this is exactly what they want you to feel in the grounded documentary that we've referenced this entire video they actually addressed this specifically saying that through gameplay they want to communicate similar emotions and feelings to the player as the ones that are being expressed by Joel and Ellie within the game what this means is that obviously in a zombie apocalypse there's going to be a scarcity of resources and you're gonna have trouble getting through and surviving it's not supposed to be easy to actually experiment with this I went through the game with my girlfriend and we actually changed the difficulty down to the lowest one the introductory beginner player difficulty to see how much of a difference it made I had just played through the game again we're on the hardest difficulty on the ground a difficulty it took me probably three times as long as my first run-through gave there it took me but it was a great experience and once we played through on the easier difficulty I found and realized how relaxed we were both able to play through the games my girlfriend was able to just sit there and when we got to an encounter she wasn't worried about the ammo that she was potentially running out of she had 20 bullets for a particular weapon and she was ready to go not too concerned but when you play I'm grounded you're dealing with miniscule amounts of ammo you don't have enough items to even go and take out all the clickers in the room you don't have a health kit so you have to go and try to sneak around all of them while looking for elements for a health kit and that moment of panic that consistent experience of panic is exactly what they're trying to make you feel now of course there's other gameplay elements in the last of us whether it's the crafting system which is simple but robust enough that you can have a good time with it and it's believable enough that you can buy it and there's of course other elements such as the shooting mechanics the steet and sneak and stealth mechanics all of those I could address but as far as I see it there's two types of people that are going to be watching this video and certainly two types of people that will have watched it through to this point odds are either you are somebody who has played The Last of Us and are such a fan that you just like to go through videos like these and kind of relive the experience that's personally where I am when I watch Last of Us 2 you know theory videos and all that I just love the franchise I love the IP I love the story in the world that they gave us the other type of person is probably the ones who are not able to play The Last of Us because they just haven't gotten around to it or they don't have a Playstation 4 or 3 in order to play it and this is their way of seeing what all the fuss is about either way nitpicking over each and every detail of the gameplay probably isn't worth my time or yours but I will address some of the big ones now one of the gameplay systems that I think is probably one of the most overlooked ones in any game much less The Last of Us is specifically the inventory menu lling system how you switch between weapons how you equip bow when you've been using a pistol how you go when you equip your melee weapon all of that in many games and shooters when you want to swap between weapons it's as simple as tapping triangle or Y or whatever it is on your keyboard and quickly swapping between your rifle or your sidearm it's pretty straightforward it's quick or you pull up a menu if you're playing an RPG typically and the game pauses and you go through you pick which weapon you want to swap to and equip and then you hop right back in the ax and everything is just fine and dandy the last of us once again however is trying to make you feel grounded again that's the consistent word throughout all of this that's the one word which I would use to define most of the design decisions they made while making the last of us grounded the idea is that when you want to pull something out of your backpack for Joel and Ellie the world wouldn't pause so why should it for you so if you want to go and craft a medkit you can't freeze time and do it you actually have to sit down you open up your backpack and then you do it if you want to apply that med kit you have to scratch down and wrap it around your arm it's not a freeze time and do it the game never pauses when you go into those moments which I actually really enjoy and it's something that you wouldn't think makes that big of a difference on gameplay in combat but it really really does instead of just rushing into combat knowing that I can pause and then heal up and then continue on with the fight I always found myself checking my health bar checking what materials I had if I had already crafted a med kit if I was able to and if I couldn't then I would check what materials I needed to craft a med kit that way I could look for those specifically while I went through whatever arena I was in the one gameplay mechanic however that got really really old and really stale by the end of the game especially after multiple playthroughs is of course the typical puzzling systems with the water platforms moving a ladder or a plank board or something they get very very old very quickly initially they seem like filler by the end I guess you could justify them by saying they're meant to make you rely on Ellie because you need her and you have to boost her up and so it's this tame dynamic and maybe that's accurate and if those elements weren't there I wouldn't feel as attached to Ellie by the end of the game that's very very possible all I know is that they got really really dry by the end of the game and it's something that I would at least like to have seen more variety in and lastly I'll address the AI with all of the enemy types whether you're talking about the cannibals that we encountered in winter or if we're talking about the clickers that were sneaking around throughout the entire game now the last game I critiqued before this one was of course Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag which actually launched the same year as The Last of Us on PlayStation 3 now i heavily heavily criticized the AI in black flag assuming that it was probably a result of the large-scale maps that they had the big weapon in combat systems they had with the naval boats and everything and then of course all the fact that it's a cross platform you typically are lowered down by the lowest common denominator however the last of us as with most Naughty Dog titles tends to buck the trend especially when you're talking about hardware capabilities they seem to be able to do things on consoles that you shouldn't be able to do hon consoles just look at uncharted 4 it's unholy what they're able to get away with and what they can make appear on the screen in real time now with the Last of Us the AI in my opinion isn't much different I never had any real issue with the AI like I had in Black Flag or like I've had in other stealth based games kind of in the third-person perspective the enemies in the Last of Us are pretty straightforward they walk around they have a path that they follow and if you figure out that path you can sneak past them when they go back the other way and if they happen to hear you if you're within a certain radius of them and you make noise or do something that would call attention to yourself they will see you they'll fight you and if that person yells out and does something then they call their buddies and then those buddies come in and get you as well now the most difficult AI to program at least as far as I understand it would of course be the human AI because you're dealing with a cognizant and intelligent being who's capable of flanking who's capable of observing things from a far distance whereas if you're dealing with clickers you're dealing with a creature that has had its brain rotted out of its skull they can get away with being a little stupider now while we do fight some groups of humans throughout the game actually a fair number I would argue we don't tend to fight them as consistently as the zombies come in packs so and even when we do encounter those humans they tend to be fairly spread out they don't come in in tight groups until the very end of the game which is by far the hardest I know I say this a lot but the AI for the enemies gets the job done it's good enough that I can play through the game and at least be immersed in the enemy's AI now the one place where the AI really collapses and shows how stupid it is is with the partners and the companions when we're going through and fighting there's certain elements for instance this shot with Henry where he walks right in front of an opponent but the opponent and the the cutthroat doesn't seem to notice him at all it just keeps walking now this isn't necessarily a moment of stupidity on the ai's part to be fair this is likely a result of the game design choice to have your companions be invisible to these enemy vision and enemy senses and that makes sense because after all it would be pretty lame if your companions a I screwed up and got noticed and then you have to go and fight so as a result of a system in the games mistake you now have to pay the price I can understand why they would turn that off but when it does happen and when you spot it happen it could be really immersion braking but that's about all I have to say thank you so much for watching this video if you made it to the end you are scholar and to saint this video has been two or three weeks of consistent work non-stop so I really appreciate it if you hit the like if you enjoyed it and comment down below or share it with your friends that means more than anything also if you would like to see the Last of Us as DLC left behind get its own mini critique I'd be happy to make it just let me know down in the comments section below and I'll start working on it I just need to see the desires there because these videos are very very time intensive but with that said thank you for watching I love you all and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 616,757

Keywords: luke stephens

Id: IVrmHUroSf4

Length: 138min 23sec (8303 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2020