#tlau2

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

If you have never felt the grief of someone around you or the grief of yourself, you most likely will not like the ending.

For the good portion of the game, you fucking HATE Abby. Which of course, she kills Joel, basically Ellie’s dad. Through the adventure, you find that Ellie had a very difficult time coming to terms with forgiving Joel for what happened in the first game. Ellie is stricken with grief and the way she deals with it is anger by wanting to go after Abby.

A lot of things happen, I’m not gonna go totally into it but near the end, things backfire on Ellie after she kills off all of Abbys friends. Abby in turn, hunts down Ellie and fucks up Tommy, kills Jesse and beat the shit out of Ellie and almost kills Dina.

But she lets Ellie go, and Ellie in turn travels off with Dina. Well, it doesn’t end there. Ellie is extremely traumatized by Joel’s death (she saw it happen) and has severe PTSD. Now if you have never dealt with PTSD, again, you might not like how the ending goes. Ellie hunts down Abby AGAIN, and forces Abby to fight her while they’re both already half dead. Well, Ellie almost kills Abby before letting her go and then Ellie crumbles to the ground and sobs.

A lot of people hate the ending because Abby got away and Ellie didn’t go through with it. This was never about revenge or being angry, this is about a girl that has extreme grief over losing the only father she’s ever had, on top of the guilt for not forgiving him. Ellie feels like she wasted copious amounts of time being angry, she lets Abby go because she doesn’t WANT to be angry anymore. Killing Abby wouldnt have brought Joel back. It wouldn’t have cured her trauma. It wouldn’t have cured her grief. But Ellie wanted all of the pain to stop and she thought killing Abby would have given that to her. Well, surprise! Ellie has this realization and lets Abby go.

She didn’t forgive Abby. She didn’t let Abby go because “Abby is a good person.” She let Abby go because it. wouldn’t. have. fixed. anything.

At the final ending, Ellie loses two fingers on her right hand that she plays guitar with and she can’t find Dina. This isn’t a metaphor that Ellie has lost everything. This is a metaphor that Ellie lost SOME things, but she still has things left. Tommy, Dina, JJ, all of Jackson. And this isn’t to say Ellie can’t play guitar anymore either, it means she has to relearn, adapt and try to play differently with her left hand. Again though, metaphor. Living with grief and the loss of yourself and the things around you, these things mean you have to learn how to live differently now. Ellie has to learn how to live with her grief and a life without Joel.

Over all, I would give the game a decent rating if you can get over the initial rage for a good half of the game when you have to play as Abby. This isn’t a story that’s for everyone, because down to its core, it is has very conflicting opinions and it’s extremely complex. If you’re not willing to let yourself open up to both Ellie AND Abby, walk away man, you’ll just hate it. But personally, I find it to be relatively okay but there is some things here and there that I obviously didn’t enjoy either. They should have focused more on Ellie or at least evened it out because they focused SO much on Abby’s development. They should have showed us Ellie dealing with her grief in the beginning negatively (having a meltdown and throwing things, screaming, etc) instead of just throwing her down the rabbit hole. They should have shown more of the core PTSD throughout the game rather than once at the ending (nightmares, flashbacks, dissociating, not eating, not sleeping, etc) And the BIGGEST piss off was the way all of the trailers came out because naughty dog straight up lies to your face so you’ll buy the game because they KNOW you’ll be angry and not wanted to have played this game. I was fucking furious when I saw that nothing in the trailers was truly accurate. The way they handled Abby wasn’t the greatest either, they basically copied the last of us 1 and made her Joel, saving a kid and developing a connection to said child so Abby finally understood how Joel AND Ellie feel. While it’s a good tactic, its still copying from the first game.

Is it perfect? By all means, no. But it is an extremely heart touching story if you allow yourself to be in the places of both of these characters.

IS THAT A

WEED????