The Last of Us 2 Used To Have a Much Grimmer Ending

Needless to say, there’ll be spoilers in this article, but I strongly suspect most of you saw the headline and predicted that would be the case.

Anyway, The Last of Us 2 remains a fairly divisive game, with some critics and fans adoring the grim tone, stealth-action gameplay, and torture porn, while others didn’t care for those elements so much. One of the main themes of the game is of the circular nature of violence: Joel kills a dude, dude’s daughter, Abby, kills Joel, and then Ellie goes on a quest to kill Abby. A whole lot of people die and get hurt along the way, and the whole thing wraps up with Ellie deciding to not kill Abby even when given the chance. It’s one of the slim moments of almost pleasantness in this otherwise relentlessly dark game, and one that would almost feel meaningful if her sudden inspired mercy didn’t come at the tail-end of a game where she butchers literally hundreds of dudes to get to this point.

But I digress. In a new interview put out by Game Informer, creative director and probably bad dude Neil Druckmann and narrative lead Nalley Gross explained that the ending was actually supposed to be darker, until a last-second change when the two decided that ultimately showing mercy was more… in-character…?

I-I guess? Here’s what Gross said:

"When I signed on a lot of it was very similar,. We did a lot of iterations on what that last act looked like, but the final beat was that Ellie would kill Abby. About halfway through production, we changed that and had Ellie let go at the last second to [illustrate] that some little part of the old Ellie, the Ellie with humanity, the Ellie that is impacted by Joel, still exists within this character who has been so overtaken by her quest for revenge."

Which was followed by a comment from Druckmann:

"Letting Abby live felt wrong thematically initially, but at the end of the day, it felt more honest for the character. The theme [and] what we're trying to say shifted a little bit, but our top priority always is are we being honest to the character? There's certain things we are trying to hit but they can only work if we're consistent with the character we're writing."

I haven’t played the game so I can’t say this with any authority, but based on a lot of the comments I’ve read… are we sure? Are we this is consistent?

Whatever. Not my fight.