@thebarrylad: Welcome to GB! I agree with your thoughts completely, couldn't have said it better myself.

I thought Joel should have been killed while trying to "save" her from the surgeons. It would have been the more fitting ending I think. Although I liked the ending, and I see how it sets up a second game if they want it. But I like this ending better.

Imagine after fighting your way all the way there, him opening the door just as it zooms in on the doctor cutting her skull open. Him taken aback and stammers for a moment, while a firefly soldier shoots him in the head from behind. Fade to black. Fade in 20 years later with humanity starting to thrive again. No more people turning, society fully rebuilding, etc. A view of his brothers family in a park having a get together with other families. Children playing on a play ground. Someone serving drinks and food. People laughing, having a good time. Then just as the camera is about to fade out again, you see Ellie all grown up. And you know its her because of a large scar on the side and back of her head where the hair has not grown in quit right. And she is picking up a child of her own, a son. Crying because he fell and scraped his knee. And she says "Its okay Joel, momys got you". Fade out.

Everyone is crying.

I love the Winter part of it. Controlling Ellie was fun. Totally unexpected. At one point I even thought the adventure continues even though Joel is dead. Glad that wasn't the case. In Spring like a lot of people I had that sense of dread. I loved the giraffes and Ellie's reaction to them. But my dread came from picturing how it's going to end. Every step was heading in that direction. I expected so many different endings. Picturing Ellie already dissected on a operating table. Or finally getting to Tommy's and turning around and Ellie finally turns and you put a bullet through her. Glad none of those were it.

Was it just me or was almost every cutscene used in some sort of trailer for this game? I swear I was recognizing a ton of moments in those.

@rabidcentipede: that's what everyone expects from this genre nowadays. The last of us subverted expectations and went for a much more bitter ending; one that is'nt easy to swallow

When I played through Winter and got into that abandoned warehouse with all the clickers, I thought that was the dam Tommy and the rest were staying at. I thought "Damn, the whole group was either wiped out or forced to move on. They seemed pretty organized too"

But later on they made it seem like Tommy and his gang were doing fine still at the dam.

God damnit, jeff just said on his tumblr that the last of us (probably) wont get a spoiler cast because it will cease to be relevant before they all beat it. I say this, @Jeff, don't make assumptions. This game will be relevant for a long time.

OH NO, I JUST MADE AN ASSUMPTION TOO....

*head explodes

I posted this in another thread, just wanted to talk about it in this thread dedicated to the ending:

Sad thing is, medically, there was no reason to require Ellie's death. In fact, the best scientists, even ones that are psychpathic mad scientists, would recognize that Ellie being alive in the hospital for a long stay with lots of tests over the years is worth more than a hack job of a surgery to cut out infected parts of her brain.

You literally do not need to get an entire sample of the cordyceps parasite directly from the brain. You just get a sample from her blood or other bodily fluid, it's the exact same thing. Then there's this thing called "culturing" where you take a basic strain of something and just grow more for lab use, not a big deal.

Also, the immunity is within Ellie, or likely the interactions.

I would have loved to see it end instead on a note where you have a crazy scientist who wants all the credit for saving humanity there and then, trying to grab as much samples directly to speed up the process. Then, a more reasonable scientist trying to get Joel to help.

In the end, they could still need to have a risky surgery. One where they don't know if it will be successful, and Ellie makes the choice to go through with it. Ellie and Joel have a really heartbreaking talk before the surgery. Then as she's being prepped and laid down on the table, you flash back to Joel laying Sara down, coming to grips with his loss, and now potential loss of Ellie.

I cringed the moment I heard Marlene say some BS about needing to kill Ellie. If they'd gone with my route, we could also have skipped that terrible section where you're dodging soldiers in segments that were almost impossible to sneak through.

In the end, knowing the science and medicine behind it could have led to a more interesting writing of the outcome. Not only that, if they wanted to leave more room for a sequel, it's easy enough to say, as others have pointed out, that a vaccine would take a long time to develop, and even if there was one it would take a long time to distribute.

With the current ending, there's the issue with Ellie still being infected, so have fun getting people sick by spitting on them Ellie. I feel sorry for when she ever gets a boyfriend and kisses him. Honestly, if they do a Last of Us 2, I suspect it will pickup right off from Ellie, now 19 or a 20 something, having been banished or runs away from the community after accidentally killing her boyfriend.

This is exactly what I thought too .

The game was pretty fascinating. There were a lot of different themes to take in such as; companionship, morality, and fatherhood.

Did anyone else feel like seeing DLC that showed events before the game started? like maybe 10 or 15 years after the outbreak starts? I would like to see Joel meeting Tess for the first time and getting into smuggling. Judging by the conversation that Joel and Tommy had, it seemed that they worked together in the smuggling business or as bandits so it would be cool to see that. Plus, I would like to have seen why Tommy decided to leave the Fireflys. I may have missed something, but I dont think he ever really said why he left.

I very much like the ending, a very good ending that subverted all of my expectations. Sure Joel was being selfish but there was no guarantee it would work. Did anyone find the voice recorder in the hospital a bit before Ellie's room, i thought it kind of hinted at their being other patients with immunity before her;

Here's the video, around 7:20 if its not linked to right time. Am i off base with the recording means by saying "As we've seen in all past cases...antigenic titers", did anyone else think this?

Also in the epilogue when Ellie looks at her arm did it look like her infection was worse; more bubbly than at the beginning?

Yeah, me too. Pretty great ending. I didn't particularly care for Winter, it seemed like a garden-variety horror movie inside a game that was in general much better than that.

But the ending was great. It really sells how important it was to have that prologue with Sarah, we really needed to see exactly how she died to understand Joel's motivations. She wasn't killed by an infected, she was killed by a government man in full body armor with an assault rifle, very much like the Fireflies who took Ellie. You can imagine that Joel was having massive flashbacks and feeling like history was repeating itself and that he had no other choice and went a little

And morally, it was the wrong choice here. Ellie wanted the surgery, and I interpreted the epilogue and the beginning of the Spring chapter as implying that she was fully aware that she was going to die from it (that's why she was so depressed and hesitant to go further along right before they saw the giraffes). She had made the decision with full knowledge of what it meant, and she had mentally prepared to die. No wonder she's so weird in the epilogue, she didn't expect (nor want, really) to be there. It was her choice and Joel took it away from her, and he had no right to do that.

God damn great game. Great game.

Apparently there is a recorder at the end of the game that says there were others like ellie and they still couldnt get a cure. Can someone confirm of deny this? Someone posted a thread about it, but I'm not sure I believe them (and their thread title is mighty spoilerific)

Yes, there's a recorder just before the end that implies that they there have been others, but it also says that Ellie's immunity is "unlike anything I've ever seen" and that her immunity really can be used to cure it. It's a little bit ambiguous whether it's meant to imply "these doctors are monsters who slaughters lots of people in pursuit of an impossible cure" or "we've finally found the key to solve this thing!". Ellie is definitely "unique" in some way, though, that much is clear.

@gkhan: Read my OP. I put an update explaining it. There weren't others with an immunity. The wording on that tape recorder is just a little tricky

Edit: oops, I meant tape recorder... Hope no one saw that :l

Was bill gay? he and frank were partners, and Ellie found a male porn mag. Although frank hated him. That was a playgirl right?

@laserguy: The impression I got was it was a girly mag, not a playgirl mag (could be wrong about that). And they were partners in the sense that they were watching eachothers backs (hehe, not in that way), keeping eachother alive.

Though, if it was indeed a playgirl that changes a lot of things. Would be interesting to follow up on this (currently doing my survivor playthrough that I promised myself I wouldnt do.... The trophy whore in me is strong).

Doesn't Ellie quip 'so long dudes' when she chucks the mag out of the car? Pretty sure Bill was gay.

I liked ND's subversion on my expectations, as 'both characters live' but I hate they still through in a 'screw you, it's still a miserable ending'. I hate abrupt and ambiguous endings, especially in video games.

There's no way I can believe there's not a quality sequel left in Joel and Ellie. Or at least a DLC prologue.

I think I'm okay with there being no sequel to the game. Their story is told in my book. I prequel I wouldn't be too bad an idea. I'd like to see what happened in the years before Ellie came along and watch things turn to shit all over the country. I'm also curious about the rest of the world.

last semester I took a class on philosophical ethics, and one of the questions discussed at length was whether or not harming another person could ever be justified. I thought that, in a case like this, I would always side with sacrificing a single life to save many others. But by the very end of the game I agreed completely with Joel, I mean, what if the stuff they needed was just in her blood, or could have been taken from the infection on her arm? Ellie didn't deserve the fate she had been given, and while she may have eventually resigned herself to it, but with that kind of pressure put on you, who wouldn't?

On a side note, with how dark the rest of the game runs, I figured Ellie would be killed at some point, and Joel would be forced to take her body to the fireflys, or Joel would die and Ellie would have to make the rest of the trip alone.

@elwoodan said:

I was convinced two scenarios were going to happen near the end of the game that actually didn't occur. The first was that as soon as Joel got off the elevator with Ellie in his arms, he would be shot, killed and Ellie would be brought back to the operating room. The second was that at the very end, Ellie would realize Joel had killed Marlene and was lying about the Fireflies and would feel forced to kill him and return to get herself operated on.

@toosweet: I think they could do another game in this Universe without returning to these characters.

Anyone have any ideas as to what the significance is at the end when you're playing as Ellie instead of Joel? They could have given you control of Joel at that point; during every other part of the game when it's both of them, you're always playing as Joel. Why do you think you're playing Ellie for the last few minutes during the last hike?

I would have done the same thing. There's no way they could have mass-produced a vaccine with such little time and such little ressource. Might have saved a couple hundred people, but to be honest, I wouldn't have done it either. I entirely back Joel on this.

@foxillusion: Id also like some theories about that. I really cant think of a solid reason

If I had to make a guess, and my memory is already a bit hazy on the specifics of the end, but you seem to always play as a character in dread. You never play as Ellie when she's all happy and chipper, only in serious survival mode, and Joel would rarely be happy, always being defensive.

At the end, its the opposite, Joel is all "HEY LETS GO LOL COME ON SLOW POKE TAG YOUR IT!!" and Ellie is all downtrodden.

Or, it could be that after Joel saves Ellie, he now has a mindset and a reason to live and control his life while Ellie just became unclear and a little bit unnerved at Joel and might be 'losing' control, to terribly describe it. If any of that makes any sense.

It could be because Joel's story had come to an end. He had his Sarah-surrogate and he was ready to carry on living whatever life he can muster with Ellie. Ellie on the other hand still clearly has her suspicions about Joel and whatever decisions she is to make from that point on (forget about it, or push a little harder in trying to get the truth) is the ambiguous ending we're left with.

Someone else mentioned this earlier on the boards, but basically it's because Ellie had transitioned into the role of the protagonist, whereas Joel could almost be considered a villain, given that for all we know, Ellie may have willingly sacrificed herself just for the possibility of creating a cure.

I love how the ending subverted my expectations of what I thought would happen which just shows what great writers Naughty Dog are. Although after finishing it, I thought it would of been more awesome if they faded to credits after Joel shoots the Marlene because the line "you'll just come for her" was what I was thinking in my head before he killed her. But now I have sat with the ending for a day, I think that it couldn't of been handled any better, such a subtle ending and not something we are used to seeing in games. Hope we see more of this going forward

I just noticed that on the opening title screen of the game Ellie's knife is at the window. I'm guessing that's the home they settled in at after the game finished.

So, while I really enjoyed the game, I still think that in regards to the narrative the actual "game" part gets in the way a little bit.

Patrick mentions in his review the ludo-narrative dissonance in the Uncharted series, and claims that this puts less walls between the gameplay and the narrative, but that's only half-true.

You're still gunning down dozens of trained military personnel at the end, and you can get shot in the head multiple times but when Joel falls on a spike in a scripted event, he almost dies.

I mean, I still think it's a fantastic game that delivers an impactful story, but i think that last year's The Walking Dead sold it better, because the actions of the characters never seemed unrealistic and "gamey"

I'm not going to read any of the posts in this topic till later as I'll be getting my copy of the last of us tomorrow but it almost seems like the ending is so emotional that there need to be support groups for the people that have finished it which, quite frankly, makes me want to play this game even more badly than before.

I just noticed some nice symmetry. Sarah is killed by someone who thought killing her would contain the infected. Ellie was about to be killed by people who thought her death would cure the world.

@secondpersonshooter: did you play it on normal? Hard was 3 shots and your dead. Trying to kill everyone becomes unfeasable, and sneaking by/running away becomes the better choice. Maybe it was just me, but I think the gameplay fit the story/world perfectly

I mean, I did play on normal, and did sneak around quite a bit, but still. Wrapping a bandage around your arm to repair gunshot wounds is still a little weird, I just don't feel right complaining about it though because I feel like it's nitpicking, but in a game that's trying to sell you on gritty realism it stuck out to me.

Also there were three separate occasions in the game where I got stuck inside of objects in the environment and had to restart the encounter

I played it on hard and at the very end when you are going through a whole army of Fireflies I did find it to break the games realistic narrative. I ended up killing a least 20 guys who were saying stuff like, "It's a massacre!". I might be wrong, but i don't think you can stealth past the guys in the last encounter. It reminded me a lot of the end of spec-op the line when the guys you are killing view you as some sort of unkillable demon.

But that was the only part of the game where the narrative broke for me.

Was anyone else shocked to see in the credits that Nolan North played David? What a performance.

@drbroel: his performance was unbelievable. I had a lot of respect for him before, but now? He is the master of his craft. It makes me sad that oscars dont give out mocap awards. He deserves the highest of praise

@secondpersonshooter: its a little unfair to expect a survival simulation from this game. You just gotta look past that stuff.

just beat the game and found this song on my news feed seconds after I beat it. embodied the ending perfectly

http://hypem.com/artist/Feist+x+Timber+Timbre

I felt that Joel understood what Ellie was going through. He was trying to justify to her by explaining people have to do whats necessary to stay alive, but stopped when she told the story of how her friend and her were infected. Maybe he realized the truth wasn't going to help because Ellie was being driven by her survivors guilt to give herself up to the fireflies.

I took it to be exactly the opposite. I think she knew Joel was full of it and so realized that he literally cared more about her than the entire human race. That's powerful. That's what she was processing

Hey guitar players, here's a tab for the games theme song

http://www.intellimusica.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/The-Last-of-Us-Gustavo-Santaolalla-tab0001.pdf

It's a fun song to play that's also easy to learn!

But it also means that everything she went through to get to that point was for nothing. It was during her travels with Joel that she was forced to kill... a lot, after all. In that sorta world it was an inevitability anyway, but she could have lived a few more years--at least enough to become an adult--before she'd be forced to take a life. She also already felt guilty about Tess, but was able to look past it all because she thought it was worth it to potentially save the human race. Plus Marlene was like a mother to her after all; I don't know if she could still look at Joel the same way knowing fully well that he killed her, even if she was going to do the same to Ellie to possibly create a cure.

There's also the fact that Joel never even gave her a choice in the whole matter as well. But of course, the same could potentially be said for Marlene as well... I think. I have to assume that Marlene was never actually upfront with Ellie about the whole thing when it came time to operate.

For the people asking, Bill is 100% gay and I'm fairly sure Frank was his partner in more than one way.

• The way Frank talks about Bill in his letter to him makes it sound like they were romantically involved.
• Bill calls him his "partner", there are other ways he could have phrased this if they were simply friends.
• It is most definitely a gay porn mag that Ellie took from Bill's safehouse, she says "How can he even walk around with that thing" presumably talking about a very well endowed man, she also says "So long dudes" when she throws the mag out the window.

Gaining a father isn't nothing.

@defaultprophet: At the cost of her mother-figure, the guilt of knowing that Tess died, and all the lives she took along the way...She said herself how much she hates this world and the infection because of having to watch her best friend die as well. The fact that Joel lied to her in the first place is proof enough that he knows she wouldn't have taken the news all that well.

I completely agree. She knows he's lying. Her "ok" isn't "I believe you", its "I'll go along with this." She has little reason to believe life is worth living but in the end she reluctantly trusts in Joel to go on living anyway.

He is also taking on the burden for her so she doesn't have the whole world on her shoulders.

I honestly didn't see it that way. They get to live happily ever after in a functional little community, complete with electricity. Felt pretty weak sauce.

@kishinfoulux: thats assuming a lot of things. Maybe ellie is smart enough to realize joel lied to her and their relationship is ruined because of it. Saying it's a happily ever after ending is a fallacy

The real fallacy would be if she believed the lie and gained closure that was independent from her relationship with Joel. That wouldn't be in line with the rest of the story.

What we get instead is an optimistic ending just one that is nuanced enough to not eliminate Ellie's despair towards the world. She is trusting in Joel that she should go on living even though she doesn't believe it herself.

I really don't think he destroyed the last chance for the human race. In reality he only slowed humanity down a few thousand years. Ellie is a carrier for the disease, when she has children they have the potential to inherit that genetic trait from her and in doing so they would also pass that trait onto their children as well. Given enough time this genetic trait would begin to spread within the remaining human population over many generations. Sure the Fireflies may have sped this process along but there's no guarantee they would have succeeded with the operation and the creation of a vaccine. They could have easily failed and ended up destroying any chance of Ellie passing her trait to future generations.