Is One Life Worth Millions? - THE LAST OF US
Here are links for The Last of Us: https://amzn.to/2VjYQ5Z and The Last of Us Part II: https://amzn.to/3ezVNhE
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I'm a massive fan of The Last of Us. The story is fantastic. The gameplay enhances the typical third-person shooter style by limiting your supplies. Making you barely escape the battles. The clickers still give me nightmares to this day, and Joel and Ellie have to be two of my favorite video game characters of all-time.
I can gush over The Last of Us all day, but this isn't a review. I don't really do those. Instead, we are going to look at the game's ending. If you somehow have gone this long without playing The Last of Us and don't want to be spoiled? This is your final warning.
The game's ending is the most exciting thing to come out of the first game. You play as Joel, who just found out that the lab entends to use the spurs on Ellie's brain as the foundation of the cure. Ellie would not survive this procedure, but they can ultimately save the world. Joel, in a fit of rage, kills the surgeons and doctors, then takes off with Ellie's unconscious body and runs off.
Joel never tells Ellie what happened that day, and the game just ends there. It's a powerful scene, and it's the most uncomfortable segment to play through. The game makes you kill for survival, whether that be normal humans, monsters, or clickers, you kill to survive. At this moment? You kill the innocent for your own selfish reasons.
This raises the question, was Joel wrong? Ellie throughout the story was able to finally live, she made friends, and found a family, she even says that everyone who's ever cared for her either died or left her. But even through all of this, Ellie is a caring person. She wants to help the doctors find a cure. If she had known that it would cause death, would she have gone through with it? I honestly think she would have, and the ending just doubles down on that theory. [clip of her suicide pact].
What makes this even more complicated? The Marlene and the doctors didn't have enough faith that Ellie would make the right choice. They purposely withheld information from both Joel and Ellie to get their grubby hands on her vulgar little brain. Which is downright evil. They wanted to sacrifice this girl in the HOPES of a cure. No one ever said it was a 100% definite cure if they proceeded with this plan. So, rewind to Joel, [rewind effect to start of gameplay footage] with all of this running through his head, was he wrong?
I honestly don't know the answer here, and that's what makes this ending so good. Joel ended up wanting to save Ellie, his adopted daughter from being killed as a science experiment. The Fireflies were never truthful with what they intended to do with Ellie. Joel had to make a hard choice, and it will likely come back to bite him. The game makes you play this moment, and after being forced to kill the surgeons, you just feel sick. That's really the beauty of The Last of Us. You have to scrap for everything you get just to survive, and Joel couldn't survive without Ellie. It’s a beautiful tragedy and still Naughty Dog’s greatest achievement.