The Last of Us Part 2is a well-done steak with a lot of meat to chew on. The sequel’s primary conflict may be Ellie’s pursuit of Abby and the consequences of both of their actions, but even more poignant and arresting is the slow burn of context provided via flashbacks for why Joel and Ellie’s father-daughter relationship was strained in the present day, which is not made plain until much later in the narrative and its somber closure isn’t revealed until the end of the game. It’s also only in these flashbacks that Joel and Ellie get to be together in-game beyond non-playable cutscenes inThe Last of Us Part 2.
BecauseJoel and Ellie spend almost all ofThe Last of Us Part 1together,Part 2is enormously jarring even before Joel is beaten to death with a golf club. Joel and Ellie’s cross-country trek successfully depicts how the two slowly peel back each other’s hardened layers and bond naturally, andPart 1ends with a lie born from that newfound love. Joel and Ellie can never again be together, and Ellie’s tether to Joel via the guitar he gifted her, like the pink and ring fingers on her left hand, is now severed. It may come as a balm, then, that the two are able to pair up inThe Last of Us Part 2’s roguelike mode, No Return.
The Last of Us Part 2: How the Loss of Joel is Felt by Ellie
Ellie reminisces about Joel throughoutThe Last of Us Part 2, beginning with an initially pleasant memory of Joel taking her to a dinosaur- and space-themed museum. Here, it’s lovely seeing Joel as an NPC who Ellie interacts with, whether she’s shoving him into a creek a minute after he had done the same to her or handing him a hat to wear so the two match.
This experience eventually goes awry, though, when Ellie has a run-in with a boar and finds graffiti lamenting about their lack of faith in the Fireflies, stirring her curiosity. A second flashback then has Ellie and Joel encounter a bloater that nearly kills Ellie before Joel heroically saves her. The two discover familiar corpses, and Ellie is once again reminded of how her life could’ve been sacrificed in service of the greater good as she had wanted, and Joel’s response is cold and dismissive.
The third and most climactic flashback reveals that Ellie had traveled back to Salt Lake’s hospital to see if she could uncover more details herself. Joel arrives after Ellie has already found a Firefly’s voice recording and, by threatening to leave Jackson, she finally coerces the truth out of Joel.
A distraught Ellie agrees to return to Jackson as promised, but their relationship is estranged thereafter and until the winter dance, where Ellie tells Joel that she’s willing to try to forgive him—the last conversation Ellie and Joel would have beforeJoel’s death.
The Last of Us Part 2’s No Return Lets Ellie See Joel in Roguelike Runs
It may not be story-related or canon, butEllie having Joel as a possible NPC ally inThe Last of Us Part 2’s No Returnis in some way a rekindling of their relationship and a hypothetical epilogue where the two continue to survive amidst Wolves, Rattlers, Seraphites, and the infected. The two can’t interact in the same way that they would if it was a scripted scene from the base game’s story campaign, and yet Ellie and Joel getting to be together again at all is remarkably touching.
Joel sadly can’t have Ellie as an ally, but brothers Joel and Tommy being allies to one another is equally rewarding. Similarly, Dina and Jesse can be allies for each other, while Abby can pair with Manny.
NPC companions may actually be counterintuitive if players are seeking tremendously high scores in No Return’s daily run. That said, anyone who is exceptionally sentimental about therelationshipsThe Last of Us’ characters sharewill probably enjoy seeing their favorites fight side by side in various No Return encounters.
