With the Last of Us, Naughty Dog created one of my favorite stories of all time. I will never forget how deeply it left its mark on me, especially in those first 15 minutes of the game. Through the eyes of Joel’s 12 year old daughter Sarah, you wake up on the eve of the outbreak, attempt to flee the outskirts of Austin and then switch to Joel’s perspective as you protect Sara from the ensuing chaos around you. It was thrilling and horrifying, but what I was not prepared for was when we get to that heart-breaking moment where Joel loses his daughter. In my entire life, I had never been hit so hard with that level of raw emotion in a game before.

The Last of Us is a narrative masterpiece and a technical achievement in visual storytelling and gameplay. It unabashedly tells its story and whether you agree or not with the choices and violent actions of its protagonists, we all grow to care deeply about the evolving relationship between Joel and Ellie. We care so deeply that we, or at least most of us, don't even second guess when we are asked to pull the trigger on 3 innocent doctors as they attempt to harness a cure that will inevitably kill Ellie. Joel’s actions are violent and selfish, but we are on his side as he lies to Ellie in one of the greatest and shocking endings in video game history.

If this story is about Joel’s path to regaining his humanity and the violent actions he would take to protect those he loves, The Last of Us Part II is about the consequences of those choices.

Headlines will tell you that The Last of Us Part II is a dark game that glorifies violence and gives you very little else. Although violence is absolutely a plot device that has been brought to life in incredible detail by the amazing artists that worked on this game, to only focus on the violence would be to ignore the complexities of the story and how violence is manipulated to tell it. This is not just a story centered on hate, violence and revenge but a reflection of love, empathy, forgiveness and overcoming emotional trauma. This is a story of hope.

Understanding Ellie is crucial to this narrative. Her biggest fear is being left behind, to be alone. Throughout her life, the people closest to Ellie continuously die and she, even after being bitten by an infected, continues to survive. That survivor’s guilt and emotional trauma, along with the need for her life to have meaning after everything she has endured, sets up her journey in the Last of Us Part II in a beautiful and tragic way.

From a young age Ellie has been capable of taking care of herself, she is mature beyond her age and is a fairly accomplished fighter for a child. However, growing up in a boarding school and later in a community in Jackson means she has not had to live in the same harsh and violent reality as Joel did, just to survive. Although Ellie is no stranger to violence, unlike Joel, it is not the life she has had to live but both of them will suffer the consequences of Joel’s life in the most brutal of fashions.

Joel’s death is an iconic moment in this storytelling where the developers achieve the impossible as you share every horrifying moment and gut-wrenching emotional trigger along with Ellie. Personally, I jumped from shock to fear and immediately followed up with feelings of hopelessness, anger, sadness, hatred and disbelief, all in the span of a few minutes. We don’t care who Abby is nor her motivation for killing Joel. That need for revenge is strongly felt and we are determined to find her and make her pay. Through Abby, the storytellers took away someone dear to our hearts in a devastating and violent way. That anger we felt was exactly the motivation we needed to undertake this journey and, in that regard, the developers absolutely nailed it. What wouldn’t we do for those we love?

Ellie is determined to take revenge but her naivety and inexperience shines through. She doesn't care where the group that killed Joel are, how many of them there are or if she has to do it alone, she is determined to find them and make them answer for Joel’s death. Although her motivations are clear, this is unlike the Ellie we have come to know and we can’t help wondering if her determination comes from a single thought, “what would Joel do?” Throughout the game you’ll find many moments that reflect this question as Ellie comes to terms with the actions she needs to take by continuously taking a path that leads to what she envisions Joel would do despite her inexperience. We sympathize with Ellie as she attempts to find Abby by using the violent techniques she has heard in the stories about Joel. In her conversation with Tommy she makes the argument, "If it was us, Joel would be halfway to Seattle by now". During a section involving trip mines, she takes them out with a bottle and points out "Joel showed me how to take care of these" and when Dina and Ellie discover two individuals who were found tortured she points out that, "Joel told me about this, he gets one person to point out a location and gets the other to confirm".

Unlike Joel, who has had a lot of experience getting answers using violent methods, this is new for Ellie. We witness this as she eventually arrives at Abby’s last known location in the aquarium. She finds two of Abby’s companions, Mel and Owen, and attempts to gain Abby’s whereabouts using Joel’s technique. However, she quickly loses control of the situation and ends up killing them both. Ellie's efforts leave her without answers and the blood of two more people on her hands.

These actions have damaging effects on her as she is clearly shaken after torturing Nora for information and later on by killing Mel who she discovers is pregnant. We're watching someone try to be something she's not. Trying to be Joel as if that would honor his memory, but in turn only further damaging herself in ways that will be difficult to recover from. With The Last of Us Part II, we get a perspective we don’t typically see in video games. We see our character’s very human emotional response to the actions happening around them.

Joel has done what he needs to survive and has hurt a lot of people on the way. Eventually this would catch up to him, and karma came in the form of Abby. You see Abby, plays an important part in the Last of Us Part II. Not only as the catalyst that sets the story in motion, but as an important reflection of our characters that will come to play in a very complex way later in the game. We can’t all help but feel like Ellie, pinned down, watching as our favorite character is beaten to death before our eyes. The developer makes a bold statement, this is not the tale you expected.

The story is excellently paced as you work towards finding Abby and playing through flashback sequences that further build the relationship between Joel and Ellie. None are more beautiful than the moment where Joel surprises Ellie on her birthday with a trip to the Museum of Natural History. We see the father-daughter relationship that was established by the end of Part I now in full effect. You can’t help but smile as Ellie’s wish of seeing a dinosaur (which we see for the first time in The Left Behind DLC) is realized.

The loving back-and-forth banter, and the moment where Ellie’s lifelong dream of being an astronaut is brought to life in this creative and emotional scene, further pushes that knife into your gut and makes you want justice for Joel and Ellie even more. You love to see their bond and can’t help shedding a small tear during this moment yet at the same time it shines a light on a question, what could have happened in the years between that moment and up to Joel's death that they’re relationship was now so broken at the end. We are given hints to it at the end of this chapter as we see the firefly logo with the word Liars underneath, a not so subtle expression to Ellies’ own doubts about what really went down at the hospital since her only version is based on what Joel has told her.

As Ellie grows, she is equally becoming more a part of her community and more detached from it. Her struggle with her own existence is only perpetrated more by Joel’s insistence to hide who and what she really is, immune. Hiding her immunity from friends and community members is a subtle nod to any adolescent growing up having to hide something that defines them. How do you exist if the one thing that makes you who you are is hidden from everyone?

This leads her on a path of discovery, taking her back to the St. Mary’s hospital. Ellie discovers the truth and confirms her worst fears through Joel’s confession. A vaccine would have killed her, and Joel stopped that from happening. Our hearts break equally for Ellie as it does for Joel as both their worlds begin to shatter around them. The meaning of Ellie’s life and that which has defined her, had been stolen from her by the one person she trusted the most. Joel is left alone, broken from the consequence once again of his actions and we can’t help believing that Joel died that night, having lost the one person he desperately loved and tried to protect.

It isn’t without a sense of irony that after the heavy loss of Joel, Ellie begins committing many of the same mistakes Joel did. Over the course of 3 days, Ellie is relentless in her pursuit for Abby and even though you have the option to play each scenario with guns blazing, the violence in the game is also offset by the fact that you can play most encounters stealthily, using the mechanics of the game to lure people away, prone through grass and leave areas without a body count. Ellie’s actions are typically defensive and this is again where her inexperience shines through. It’s when she lets her guard down that she is only left with the option to react violently to the actions of her enemy. Whether it’s to protect her friends, or herself, from attackers both human and canine. Ellie is a skilled killer but not a murderer at heart, and each death takes a toll on her.

Eventually, as Ellie’s mental state continues to break under the weight of her actions. She seems to be coming to the realization that her actions are only mirroring those of Joel's killer, Abby. There will always be the need to make Abby pay for her actions, but is it worth the safety of the people she cares about and her own emotional health? However, just as Ellie makes the difficult decision to end her pursuit of Abby, we arrive at the final showdown between these two characters.

And just as The Last of Us Part II did, we are now going to shift our focus to Abby. As the daughter of the Doctor Joel kills to save Ellie, we play the events of that day through her perspective. During this scene the game accomplishes to sow the seeds of empathy for the person you have spent the last 15 hours hunting. But it doesn’t end there, in one of the riskiest and boldest moves I have seen in any medium, the clock resets and we begin the 3 day journey but now entirely from Abby's perspective following Joel's Death. Needless to say, Last of Us fans were not happy.

But to immediately write this off, would be to ignore one of the biggest achievements in this game. I can honestly say that without Abby’s section, the Last of Us 2 would not work. The game becomes more than just a few isolated characters playing little pieces of the story here and there. It evolves into an interactive analysis of human nature. Dissecting not just the destructive force of obsession but boldly emphasizing the power of perspective, empathy, forgiveness and being true to yourself. You can be just as much the hero of your story as the villain in someone else’s.

Remember all the people and dogs that Ellie has killed? You will now get to interact with them and build relationships of your own. You are lulled into caring for them only to remember that these are the same people that brutally set Ellie on her journey to begin with. But slowly we start peeling back their own motivations and, like Ellie, they are all orphaned both literally and figuratively from the same organization that Joel single handedly massacred.

Abby has spent the last 4 years obsessively training herself physically, mentally and emotionally, preparing herself for when she finds Joel. We don’t need to see that part of Abby’s journey because we live it through Ellie as she is consumed by the same single-minded obsession, it’s literally the first half of the game we just played.

The game does an amazing job of setting up the parallels between Joel, Ellie and Abby and the violent cycle that entwines them as they lack the empathy needed to forgive. We talked about consequences, Joel's actions directly impact Abby just as much as Abby's actions impact Ellie. At any point they all had a choice to end the cycle of violence by focusing on what really mattered, the relationships with the people around them.

Through Abby we get the redemption arc, this is strategic on the developers part as we slowly build back up to the confrontation between Ellie and Abby. Through Abby's story we experience the emptiness felt after finally exacting revenge and the path to rediscover who you really are, it basically is alluding to Ellie's future, should she continue down this path. Even after Joel's death, Abby is still plagued by the same nightmares of losing her father from before. The peace she was looking for is nowhere to be found.

It’s not until she starts focusing on the needs of others, in this case specifically in protecting two runaway kids from the enemy faction, that she truly begins to redeem some of her humanity. As we have pointed out, this game will challenge you by making you feel the weight of your actions. As you begin to know and care for the characters around you, they are systematically being taken out by Ellie at the same time. You go through the next few days building relationships that you know are going to be destroyed since you, as the player, took them out during Ellie’s section.

Through Lev, Abby found what she never did with the death of Joel. She learns that healing does not come through violence but comes through love. It’s devastating to see the amount of times Abby had the opportunity to give into that and decided not to. When she finally does give into it we see for the first time, Abby opening the door to the room where her father was killed and instead of death we see light. This only further drives home the mistakes Ellie is committing by feeding her hate instead of redirecting her energy to what truly matters.

On the heels of that revelation, Abby is once again going to be challenged as she discovers that her friends, companions and lover have been killed. She tracks down Ellie and in one of the most conflicting moments in any game I’ve ever played, the game makes you fight against Ellie as the villain in this story. I remember getting to this moment, putting down my controller and saying, “I don’t think I can do this”. At this point, I’m thinking that they are either going to have me kill Ellie or allow Ellie to kill me and both were scenarios that I did not want to see play out.

The fight ends with Abby having the upper hand, poised to kill Dina and Ellie. Again it is through Lev that Abby is reminded of the emptiness she felt having already taken this action before and the peace she felt when she finally let go of her anger and hate. She makes the decision to let them live and in her mind, finally end the cycle of violence.

Some time later we follow up with Ellie and Dina, living what seems to be a happy life out on a farm with their son JJ. And as we are teased with a happy ending, we see that not all is well with Ellie. During the course of the game we go to play the violent and hate filled singular mission for revenge through Ellie and we thought we ended it having played the redemption arc thanks to Abby having learned the lesson she needed in order to heal and move on. We as the players feel that satisfaction, we have closed the loop for ourselves because we played it through these two characters.

That is not to say that Ellie has had the same revelation nor resolution. She continues to be stuck in the same position Abby was when we first began her journey. Past her happy façade, she is suffering. Suffering from the pain of the people she has lost and no closure to help her get past it, as is portrayed in her PTSD episode in the barn.

Her motivation to once again pursue Abby is not for a lack of having learned her lesson, it’s a reaction to her mental state of trauma and PTSD knowing that she will not be able to survive if she does nothing. She is risking herself, her family to find the answers she is looking for.
It's poetic that by making this decision, Ellie becomes Abby's savior, saving her from certain death by her captors. Abby is now looking beaten, weak, frail compared to her previous self and in the climactic fight with Abby that takes place in an almost dreamlike setting, it appears as if Ellie is fighting the physical representation of her own mental state. Her choice at the end to forgive Joel is as much forgiveness for Abby and for herself.

In conclusion, The Last of Us Part II delivers an unforgettable epic that challenges your notions of humanity and blurs the lines of hate and love, revenge and forgiveness, despair and hope. I can find no better way to conclude this analysis than by looking at how beautifully this story is tied to its music. The guitar is a central theme to this story as it represents the strings that tie our protagonists together and is structured through the song Future Days, originally by Pearl Jam, that bonds Joel, Ellie and yes, Abby together.

“If I ever were to lose you,
I'd surely lose myself”

Joel, Ellie and Abby are characters that experience a devastating loss, not just in the form of the people they love, but of themselves. When Joel loses his daughter Sara, he roams through the next 20 years shutting out his emotions from those around him including his brother, but more importantly himself. A shell of the man he should have been, he survives but does not live.

On the other hand we have Abby, who loses her father at the hands of Joel and through his actions becomes a victim herself. She is no longer the innocent girl who would gladly give her life selflessly for the cause, she will spend the next 4 years consumed with thoughts of vengeance as she trains her body and mind for the single purpose of carrying out revenge, while pushing away every meaningful relationship she has. She was determined that the only retribution she needed to feel at peace again was through the death of Joel. But what she did not expect was with that last powerful swing, the final blow was not just to him, but to Abby herself.

You could argue that Ellie lost herself through the fading light in Joel’s eyes when he is brutally taken from her, but I believe it happens much earlier than that. As I have argued, Abby and Ellie run a parallel story and have more in common than meets the eye. You see, Abby and her father aren’t the only victims that night at the hospital.The third victim is Ellie. People have an issue with Ellie seemingly sacrificing the life and family she has gained for this needless pursuit of vengeance. However, Ellie has struggled with the meaning of her life from the moment she wakes up in the backseat of Joel’s car as they drive away from the Firefly’s hospital. Her journey runs deeper than just a need for revenge.

“Everything I have found here,
I've not found by myself”

It’s through his relationship with Ellie that Joel begins to regain the parts of himself he had lost. Joel’s relationship with his brother Tommy is mended, his sense of community restored but more importantly his capacity to love and trust is reestablished.

Then we have Lev, who is the catalyst that wakes up the Abby that has been lost for all these years. Through him, she understands that the only enemy she has left to fight is herself. She grew up a firefly that held true to the belief to always “follow the light”. Lev is that light. Lev is guiding her back to who she truly is, someone who will selflessly defend those in need and whose people are those that are in need of that protection.

Ellie’s path is a journey of regaining her sense of self which was robbed from her that night in the hospital through Joel’s actions. With both Joel and Abby gone, Ellie's true battle, which is represented through her mental state and episodes of PTSD, is with herself.

Abby becomes the physical manifestation of Ellie’s own reflection. Her pursuit of Abby is no longer vengeance, but a need to bring meaning back to her life. Her hatred of Abby is her growing hatred of herself. Through pain and sorrow, we aren’t witnessing Abby suffocating under the shallow water during that climactic fight scene, it was Ellie drowning herself with her own hands. In those crucial moments, our focus closes in on Ellie’s face. She struggles to breathe under the weight of her emotions. Her path to forgive Joel is a path to forgive herself and as we flash back to him stringing his guitar on the porch, she is reminded of that. Letting Joel go, forgiving him, allows her to release her tight grip that had been suffocating her.

“Try and sometimes you'll succeed
To make this man of me,
All of my stolen missing parts
I've no need for anymore”

Releasing the shackles of revenge, hate and anger from their lives allows our characters to move on from those pieces of them that were stolen. Joel tells Ellie that if he were given the chance to do it all over again, he would do it the same. Even in those last moments of his life, as he opens his eyes to see the face of his baby-girl one last time as he understands that his end is near, we see a man without regrets.

Ellie is finally able to understand this and reflect on that last conversation. The image of Joel's bloody face is replaced with a man silently weeping, his heart full and yearning for the opportunity to be forgiven. Joel may have been taken from Ellie but his memory never will.

Personally, I believe that Ellie has been back in Jackson for some time, her relationship mended with Dina. She arrives at the farmhouse with her injuries healed and no weapons. And the bracelet that Dina had given her as a token of their relationship is worn again by Ellie after she had left it in the final chapter when she leaves Dina in her final pursuit of Abby. She has arrived simply to pick up her guitar, but as she strums Final Days for the final time, she is able to finally say goodbye to Joel. His memory will always be a part of her and as she continues down the path of recovery she lays the guitar down one last time. She is able to let it go and in so doing, is able to lay Joel to rest and bring peace to herself.

“I believe,
And I believe 'cause I can see
Our future days,
Days of you and me”

Alex's Cowabunga Collection Marathon, Pt. 5 of 13

When I played this on my NES as a teenager, I thought "Man, I wish I had the actual TMNT arcade machine in my house. That'd be amazing!!" But after having finished that arcade game for the first time, I'm shocked to realize that this was the superior version of the game all along!

The farthest I ever got pre-Cowabunga Collection was probably around 2003, when I made it to the hoverboards-on-the-street level while playing co-op with my cousin. We had tried so many times, but always ran out of continues right around that level. Finding out as an adult that there's a simple button combo you can do on the title screen to get 10 lives instead of 3 was similar to finding out years later that a girl you liked in school secretly had a crush on you too. We could have had it all! If only I had KNOOOOOWN

There are a few key things this game does to improve on the arcade experience. Obviously the visuals are a downgrade, and it's only 2-player as opposed to 4. But the most important aspect of a brawler, the combat, just feels so much better here, especially with that quick A+B combo jump swing attack. The hitboxes are actually decent, which is a huge plus, and there are more levels and bosses here as a bonus for console players. Lastly, while the bosses are still quite difficult, they don't feel as quarter-devouringly brutal as the arcade version.

Oh, and this port has that same epilogue again, which is unsurprising since it's a port of the Arcade title which that wall of text originated in, but this one spells "milkshake" properly as one word. DEFINITIVE PROOF that the NES release is superior to the original.