There are so many things that video games do badly that it’s hard to pick a favorite—writing, acting, treatment of sex and violence, general quality—but one thing they almost always blow is the ending, sometimes over and over again:
One of the extremely rare exceptions is Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, which somehow managed to pull together all of its threads into something thematically and formally perfect. (Like most video games, it steals liberally from movies—like no other video game, it improves on some of its source material.) Its ending was so final that the game’s downloadable content, the excellent Left Behind, was a miniprequel rather than an attempt to follow the characters further in time. In short, it was a goddamned miracle, beamed in from some other world where video games were a vibrant and interesting art form. Even zombie games.
But The Last of Us made money—a lot of money—and the surest way to turn a period into ellipses is to add dollar signs. So on Saturday at the PlayStation Experience in Anaheim, California, Naughty Dog announced The Last of Us Part II. From the looks of the trailer, many of the elements that made the original so great are still there—the gorgeous Alan Weisman–inspired visuals of nature reclaiming the constructed world, the tone of biblical apocalypse, the treatment of violence as traumatic and awful to its perpetrators as well as its victims, the miles-ahead-of-its-competitors animation (the eyes!), and the genuinely interesting, morally compromised protagonists—the only mass murderers in video games’ long history of mass murderers who know that they’re mass murderers. What’s missing? For one thing, any sense that there’s a compelling reason to revisit the characters or their world after the end of the first game. The most important events and decisions in their lives are in The Last of Us; spelling out the aftermath of the game’s final betrayal can only be a superfluous letdown. It’s hard to imagine anything else we need to know about Joel or Ellie. Well, maybe one thing, as the trailer reveals: Ellie plays guitar now. Get your $59.99 ready.
