That day finally comes in the very final scene. She never gets quite to that point, but she leaves with the hope that she might one day. Hold onto this anger towards someone she loves, or put it down of her own volition. But when he tells her he would still, after having seen the fallout of his actions, choose to save her life, she’s left with a choice. She remembers her and Joel’s last talk, where they argued over his violent actions at the end of the first game, denying her the chance to save humanity. She returns to her farm in Wyoming, tries to play the guitar Joel gave her, but can’t because Abby took her fingers in the scrap. In a moment of clarity, Ellie realizes that this grief she’s been carrying with her won’t go away by killing Abby, and that the only way she can actually move forward is to forgive not Abby, but Joel. The Last of Us Part II ends with a violent clash between Ellie and Abby that, even when you win the fight, Ellie makes the decision to let her go. So it’s important that, rather than simply putting her pain down because that’s what others want, she has to make that decision for herself. Ellie’s story is one of constantly having to do what is demanded by others and circumstance, rather than getting to make her own decisions. Well, The Last of Us isn’t about you, and Ellie has had her own agency ripped from her by a pack of infected biting her and her first love, Joel denying her the chance to be the cure, and Abby beating her within an inch of her life as she sought revenge. Why doesn’t Ellie see what I, the omnipresent observer of this entire situation, have seen? Why can’t she simply do what I want? I, the player, have seen the truth of why Abby killed Joel in the opening hour. It’s easy to dismiss Ellie’s final bout of revenge-driven violence in Santa Barbara, one that comes at the expense of her family, as a regression of her character. Then when you’ve seen all these truths finally uncovered, it asks you to, once again, engage in Ellie’s revenge tour because she is not satiated. It makes you play as the woman she came to kill and paints her as a sympathetic victim in actions you once carried out as Joel in the original game. It deliberately walls you off from the motivations of Ellie as she travels through post-apocalyptic Seattle in righteous fury. The Last of Us Part II can sometimes seem like a senseless exercise in violent excess. It’s one of the wildest endings I’ve ever experienced in a game. And then, bam, the game ties it all to a JFK conspiracy theory and kills a senator. The rest of the game is all about a gritty story of revenge and street-level crime bosses fighting each other. I have no idea what the developers behind the game had planned for a future sequel. At this point, Donavan takes out a handgun, promises he’ll track down all the others who were involved, and shoots the senator dead. And then he reveals the final wild bombshell: The senator running this hearing, who’s been asking him questions the entire game, was also involved with the murder of JFK and working with Marcano. He reveals that Sal Marcano, the mob boss who you killed after destroying his entire empire, was connected to the Kennedy assassination. It’s at this moment that the former CIA operative and war vet reveals why he was so eager to help Clay take down the mafia. But in its final moments where Ben blinks between life and death, it reminds us that to be human is to be more than ourselves, it’s to be everything we are to those we care about, and to know that sometimes they see us more clearly than we’ll ever see ourselves. Mortality’s vice grip on our existence, shame in unfulfilled dreams, and how we all ascribe some kind of storytelling to our lives when sometimes, the world stops following the script. Before Your Eyes mediates a lot of profound themes. In this sequence, you listen to the Ferryman tell Ben’s tale, but as you blink, the game seamlessly swaps between his narration and Ben’s mother, as they tell the same tale in perfect sync. Meanwhile, the Ferryman, having learned the truth of Ben’s life, also sees him with a new clarity, and is able to tell his story to the powers that be. Ben has spent all of Before Your Eyes hiding who he was because he was angry at the life he lived, and is grieving the one he wished for. After Ben has reflected on his life, remembering his attempts to write his life story down at the end, he remembers his mother reading a revised version of the story he wrote that is much kinder to him than his was. That is completely recontextualized in the game’s final moments, because blinking is key to a full understanding.
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