Is The Last of Us Part II Realistic, Mr. Santaolalla?

Recently, composer Gustavo Santaolalla shared his thoughts on The Last of Us Part II in an interview with Hobby Consolas. The Argentine musician specifically spoke on why he feels there is such a divide among fans of the series regarding the sequel’s narrative.

Everyone has a right to feel a certain way about a story, whether that be love, hate, or apathy. However, claiming that others who do not share your views must see life in an altered, unrealistic way is uncalled for.

Santaolalla insinuates that those who were upset about Joel’s death in The Last of Us Part II do not see life through a lens of realism. This begs the question: is The Last of Us Part II realistic? When considering the game’s plethora of slippery plot devices, the signs certainly seem to point towards “no.”

In response to his feelings regarding the game’s reception, Santaolalla states that “there are people who have a broader understanding of life, and there are people who see life more like a comic book.” The award-winning composer went on to say that those in opposition to the game’s story are “a little square.”

To evaluate Santaolalla’s claims, let’s take a look at the standard of realism The Last of Us Part II employs throughout its story.

Joel’s Death Sets Up the Rules for the World

To many players’ dismay, Joel Miller meets his fate in the prologue of the game. He does not die well.

Many proponents for The Last of Us Part II’s narrative claim that the way the writers handle Joel’s demise feels realistic. Obviously, Santaolalla is among this crowd. However, this event sets a precedent that the remainder of the story cannot keep up with.

See, introductions to a story serve in part to establish the rules of the world that the narrative aims to portray. By allowing a major character to die in such a brutal and unforgiving way, players learn the new status quo. To quote A Perfect Circle’s song The Doomed: “And the word was death.”

While Joel was murdered as a direct result of his actions in the original The Last of Us game, he did not make a mistake to warrant death in Part II. Joel dies as a result of his decision to save Abby’s life and return with her to the estate where her friends have made camp.

As these events unfurl, Ellie, Dina, and Jesse each set out to search for Joel and Tommy. In disallowing Ellie to save Joel’s life, the game refuses to employ the plot device known as a “deus ex machina” or “god from the machine.”

For those unaware of this tactic, an ex machina occurs when a character or event arrives just in time, usually to save the life of another character. While this device can be useful for building suspense, it becomes an issue when the ex machina is never established as a possibility or it’s never explained how it happened in the timing that it did.

From the prologue, players can gather that the threat facing our protagonists is seemingly insurmountable. So much so that Joel, who previously fought his way across the continental United States, was no match for their strength and cunning.

Life does happen in interconnecting and seemingly random ways, and the prologue is effective at showing players those puzzle pieces. Joel’s death is surprising and heart-wrenching, and players were likely waiting for a savior that never came.

I believe the prologue is effective at what it aims to do. However, issues arise when a story no longer decides to hold a character’s life accountable to their actions in the way that Joel’s death sets up.

Can a story simultaneously display a “broader understanding of life” and utilize contrivances to forward the plot?

Ellie’s Hunt Through Seattle

Following the prologue, we rejoin Ellie and Dina on the outskirts of the Seattle Quarantine Zone. Immediately, the player can dismount the horse and inspect Ellie’s journal for some insight into their journey.

Here, we find our first clue that The Last of Us Part II is no longer interested in portraying life as it really is. Players reading the journal will find that it contains the following entry:

“These hunters tried to ambush us. Fuckers didn’t stand a chance against us. We were scavenging for supplies and I was looking at Dina. I felt a deep appreciation for her coming along. I really love her.”

From these lines, we can deduce that the landscape of America is still filled with desperate, violent people. These individuals willingly murder others in order to obtain supplies to survive. However, two teenage girls are apparently far too much of a challenge for a pack of hunters.

Dead on Day One

Later, Ellie and Dina find Tommy’s trail and discover that he’s already killed one of the WLF members, or “Wolves,” responsible for killing Joel. Directly after moving on from this place, the two jump over a short barricade on a raised street and trigger an explosion.

Not only does this mine not kill either of our characters, but it also conveniently throws Dina off the road so that she can escape the WLF. Ellie, being at the mercy of these ambushers, is not shot, not killed, but captured and taken to the school.

It is in this setting that we once again meet Jordan, one of the individuals present for Joel’s murder. He makes conversation with Ellie as another Wolf joins the room and Jordan explains who she is. He then leaves her switchblade knife stuck into the arm of a chair at Ellie’s side.

The other WLF soldier informs Jordan that their leader, Isaac, has given an order to kill all trespassers on sight. Before the Wolf can carry out these commands, however, Dina appears on the skylight just in time to shoot him once through the chest, killing him instantly.

This, of course, is what one may call an ex machina.

Jordan then shoots out the glass Dina stands upon, and she falls to the floor. This knocks the wind out of her lungs, and she’s unable to get up and continue fighting. Jordan then holsters his pistol and struggles to choke Dina to death.

Naturally, the writers chose for Jordan to act in such a nonsensical fashion so that Ellie would have time to cut through her bindings with a shard of glass, grab her knife, and stab Jordan to death.

In reality, the mine should have killed Ellie and Dina before they even got to the school. In the real world, Dina would not have escaped the WLF, climbed onto the roof of the school, and found where Ellie was being held in time to save her. Realistically, Jordan would have shot Dina and Ellie after Dina killed the other Wolf.

The story of The Last of Us Part II should have ended right here with every intention for revenge scattered across the overgrown asphalt along with the remains of our protagonists.

An Implausible Continuation

In the spirit of fairness, we’re only looking at instances that are wholly unavoidable in the game. All moments where the player does not have control over the events that take place are open to criticism.

With this in mind, one moment in both Day 2 and 3 of Ellie’s revenge quest stand out as separate from the workings of reality.

The first occurrence comes along as Ellie makes her way through a park and towards the hospital. A group of Seraphites, or “Scars,” greet her with a surprise attack that leaves Ellie with an arrow stuck in her shoulder.

For some reason, the game makes you take damage if you leave the arrow in, so Ellie has no choice but to rip it out of her. Realistically, removing an arrow in this way would undoubtedly cause more harm and would result in Ellie bleeding even more.

Not to mention, an open wound such as this would be a sweeping invitation for infection to take hold. Given how scarce antibiotics would be 25 years into the apocalypse, Ellie would likely succumb to a bacterial infection.

However, the game pays no attention to this fact, and we move on as if it never happened.

About a day later, Ellie finally reaches the aquarium where she expects to find Abby. She soon realizes that Abby isn’t there and then kills Abby’s friends, Owen and Mel, due to a botched interrogation attempt. Horrified at the realization of having killed a pregnant woman, Ellie forgets to take her map with her when Tommy and Jesse arrive to bring her back to the theater.

In fact, Tommy and Jesse run into the room mere seconds after Ellie discovers that Mel was pregnant. If the interrogation took only slightly longer, Owen and Mel might have lived.

If Ellie, Tommy, and Jesse had stayed for a while longer, they would have been able to ambush Abby and still leave the next morning. If Ellie hadn’t dropped the map, Abby would have never found them. All of these events happen in such a way so that the plot can move forward in the exact manner the writers want it to.

Now that everyone has returned to the theater, the game decides it doesn’t need Jesse anymore. As he and Ellie rush to the lobby of the theater, he receives the same unceremonious death treatment most other characters receive when Abby shoots him in the face.

Not every character needs to go out in a blaze of glory or fill the audience’s eyes with tears, but the story largely drops Jesse for shock value. Furthermore, none of the characters ever seem to properly mourn him on screen, and neither Ellie nor Dina really mentions him again.

Unfortunately, this will not be the last time that The Last of Us Part II treats its characters in such a way.

The Last of Us Part 2.5

As players skid to a halt in realization that they’ll be reliving the past three days as Abby, we’re met almost immediately with some questionable events.

Abby, Mel, and Manny should have arguably reached the end of their line shortly after leaving the stadium base. After the initial ambush sequence, the characters seek to escape the Scars by cutting through a home improvement store. Here, Abby becomes pinned under some shelving with a clicker quickly closing in on her when the dog Alice leaps into frame at the last second to save her.

Later, the group finds themselves surrounded in a gas station by Scars, only to have two trucks full of WLF soldiers drive up and dispatch the enemy forces. Within a handful of scenes, the survival of these characters relies solely upon a last-second rescue.

After narrowly surviving thanks to the implausibly-timed heroics of others, Abby sets off to find her ex-boyfriend-true-love Owen. However, this plan takes no time at all to go awry, and Abby finds herself kidnapped by Scars.

Funnily enough, these sworn enemies of the WLF do not take the opportunity to kill Abby immediately. Rather, they decide to drag her for who-knows-how-long into the forest so that they can string her up and disembowel her.

This is one piece of pre-release footage that the developers did not feel the need to blatantly lie about, and it plays out just the same as it did in the trailer.

Still, this does not excuse the fact that Yara serves as an ex machina in this scene to distract the Seraphite leader from cutting Abby open, and Lev serves as an ex machina for them both.

Lev showing up just in time to save at least one of his sister’s arms stands in direct contrast to how the narrative treated Ellie’s efforts to save Joel. However, since the story needs Lev and Yara to join Abby, the writers decide not to hold this scene to the same level of realism that they did with the prologue.

After Yara saves Abby and Lev saves Yara and Yara and Lev save Abby, they now have to contend with a swarm of stalkers rushing in from the tree line. Yara, somehow, does not die in this section and is able to later sprint through the woods with a crushed arm. All the while, Yara does not whimper or slow down from the immense pain plaguing her.

The group escapes the infected, but the strikingly large woman who helped kidnap Abby earlier that day appears and knocks Yara and Lev to the ground. Keep in mind that this woman has an impressively large hammer.

While Abby struggles to crawl through a fence and rescue her new friends, the Scar woman decides not to attack with her hammer but instead chooses to choke Lev. This, of course, gives Abby the time to rush in and intervene.

After the fight, Abby displays what should have happened initially when the Scar woman had the upper hand on Yara and Lev by burying the pick side of the hammer in the woman’s face.

Making a Meal Out of Side Quests

Abby and Lev, The Last of Us’ new dynamic duo, head out to get medical supplies so that Mel, who apparently had no trouble at all getting to the aquarium even while severely pregnant, can amputate Yara’s exceptionally broken arm.

Naturally, they have to go to the WLF-controlled hospital so that the player can say to themselves, “Man, I just missed her as Ellie!”

According to Lev, the best way to get to this hospital is by rooftop. While the WLF play street soldier, the Seraphites are on the level with Dying Light 2. Obviously, this is the case because the story wants to again showcase that Abby has a fear of heights and is therefore worthy of empathy.

Eventually, the two come to a point where they have no option but to cross between two skyscrapers on an enormous crane. However, Abby and Lev fall off of this crane, smash through a plate of glass, and plop into a swimming pool. Somehow, and this really is a mystery, neither of them is hurt in any way, shape, or form. No broken glass stuck in their skin, no broken bones, just pure, unadulterated convenience.

As they make their way down through this building, the two encounter an area positively saturated in spores. Abby tells Lev to put his mask on, but he doesn’t have one. So, Abby exits the staircase onto the exact floor they’re on, which is the only option they have for finding a mask, and actually finds one in useable condition. Again, how much more convenient could that be?

Later on, Abby finds herself going head-to-head with a monstrous amalgamation of practically classical infected dubbed “The Rat King.” This freak of nature can bend and break steel security doors and plow through concrete walls as if it were born to do it.

Abby encounters this thing and it literally tunnels through an ambulance to chase after her. As she squeezes through a wall trying to escape, it grabs her by the arm and pulls her back against the wall.

After that, Abby should not have an arm. At the very least, her arm should be severely broken or dislocated, but she just gets back up and keeps running, seemingly unphased.

Later, the player has to progress through the chase by interacting with a door that’s been jammed with a fireman’s axe. The Rat King catches Abby before she can pass through the door and lifts her up by the neck. It does not crush her. It does not throw her. It does not try to eat her. It just holds her ever-so-delicately still while she chops away at it with the axe.

Still, this thing is huge! The axe is not doing a lot of damage, and perhaps eventually, Mr. King will stop being so forgiving. How does the story get Abby out of this situation? The floor collapses. Apparently, the big boy had been standing in one place for too long, and the infrastructure just couldn’t handle it anymore.

Luckily for Abby, they fall into the boss fight level where she has plenty of space to run and fight.

Following the fight, Abby leaves the parking garage and Lev happens to be right there so that he can warn Abby about the Wolves patrolling for her. Lev had no way of knowing where Abby would be exiting from, but the story needed him there, so there he was.

The Part Where I Forgot What Game I Was Playing

Yara gets her operation, then Lev runs away to go find his mom. Abby, knowing Isaac’s plans for invading the Seraphite’s home island, goes after him with the help of a newly one-armed Yara. Abby finds a safe place for Yara to stay put while she goes to get a boat for them, and she quickly finds herself marked as the bullseye in Tommy’s firing range.

However, just as she emerges onto the highway and Tommy sets her head in between his crosshairs, Manny appears out of nowhere to tackle her into cover. After all, the best kind of ex machina is the one you think is contrived the very first time you see it.

As much as I disliked Manny’s character, the game once again gives him the unceremonious death treatment. What’s more, is that Tommy lands a perfect headshot on Manny, then misses twice in a row when firing at Abby.

Even more still, Tommy jumps Abby as she exits a restaurant onto the pier. He could have easily shot her then and there, but he instead tries to choke her with his rifle. This gives Abby the opportunity to fight back and allows Yara to come in for the inexplicable ex machina. How did Yara get here so fast? How did she know where to find Abby? Why, the plot told her, of course.

However, Yara’s luck runs out on Scar Island when she’s shot by a Wolf. Previously, we’ve seen that characters who get shot once in cutscenes die almost instantly. The soldier that was about to kill Ellie in the school died from a single shot. Owen died from a single shot. Jesse and Manny both died in one shot, but theirs were to the head, so that doesn’t count so much.

Still, from what we’ve seen, we think Yara just died unceremoniously like everyone else in this game. Isaac and a squad of WLF soldiers show up and demand that Abby let them kill Lev. Abby disarms herself and tries to reason with Isaac, but he refuses to listen. Just before Isaac shoots Abby, Yara shoots Isaac once in the back and he apparently dies instantly.

The surrounding Wolves, enraged that they did not see this ex machina coming, break through Yara’s remaining plot armor with a barrage of bullets, giving all their attention to her so that Abby and Lev can escape.

As Abby and Lev fight through Haven in search of a boat, the two have to make their way through a burning barn. Lev gets out and Abby gets pinned under smoldering debris. As she crawls through, a giant of a man comes and attacks lev.

Choosing conformity with the absurd rules of this world, the Scar man chooses to choke Lev instead of using his weapon to kill him. Again, this allows Abby to struggle her way out from the debris and attack the man before he can do any real damage to Lev.

Even though Lev should not be that badly hurt, he lies down on the sidelines of the battlefield and contemplates the meaning of existence while Abby fights the big Scar guy. However, when Abby starts to struggle, Lev decides that it may be time to get up and use his bow and arrow to help out.

After everything, Abby and Lev finally find a boat. However, the only option they have is to take a wooden rowboat to cross a stretch of ocean in a storm. I’ll say it again: they row a wooden boat through the ocean in a storm! This is the same storm that produced the waves that capsized Ellie’s boat. The same storm that was so thick and intense that it provided cover for the WLF to invade the island in the first place. Yet beyond all logic, Abby makes it all the way back to the aquarium in a rowboat with no issues whatsoever.

Oh, Now I Remember

We’re finally back at the cliffhanger. Abby has Tommy face down on the floor at gunpoint, Ellie just tossed her pistol, and Lev has his bow trained on one of both of them. Somehow, Tommy gets up and throws off Abby’s aim before she shoots Ellie, then Lev decides to pay attention and shoots him in the leg with an arrow.

Abby isn’t satisfied and then shoots him in the head. But since the story still needs Tommy to drive the plot forward, these wounds are non-fatal. Ellie retreats, and Abby and Lev follow after her.

When Ellie and Jesse first emerged from these same doors, Abby immediately shot Jesse in the head. Abby and Lev burst through the doors in the same way, but Ellie is now too far away to get a proper surprise shot in.

Ellie retreats backstage and Abby follows. Lev, however, decides to sit this one out in favor of showing up later.

As Abby enters the backstage area, Ellie jumps her. Now, Ellie has a shotgun, which she eventually uses later in the fight. However, she decides that quickly blowing Abby away with said shotgun would be too easy, so she opts to hit her with a board. Still, Ellie decides that hitting her in the head may cause too much damage and may tip the odds too strongly in her favor, so she hits Abby in the arms, making her drop her gun.

Now that Abby is unarmed and Ellie has the upper hand, she of course decides to slowly stalk around searching for Abby so that the whole stealth-showdown boss fight can happen.

Later in the fight, Ellie stabs Abby directly in the thigh. Usually, this would decrease a person’s range of motion, but Abby brushes this little inconvenience off in a breeze.

Finally, as the player catches Ellie slipping for the third and final time, things look like they may be over for her. Dina, however, has other plans. Rushing up behind Abby brandishing a knife, Dina manages to give Abby two little paper cuts before Lev sends an arrow right through the right side of her chest.

Tommy has been shot in the leg with an arrow and shot in the head with a handgun, Ellie has been beaten senseless, and Dina has been impaled with an arrow and severely concussed. Still, all of these characters manage to survive and journey back to Wyoming with no horse to carry them.

Did You Think It Was Over?

The epilogue of the game sees Ellie take on the journey to Santa Barbara alone. To put this in perspective, the distance between Jackson, Wyoming, and Santa Barbara, California, is 1,000 miles at least.

The world of The Last of Us is filled to the brim with horrors. You have the infected, sure, but you also have hostile groups of survivors who are far less predictable. The chances of Ellie getting to her destination seem pretty slim.

Regardless, she arrives and picks up Abby’s trail, but soon finds herself caught in a trap laid by a group called “The Rattlers.” This snare trap snatches Ellie up into the air and swings her into a tree with a sharp, broken branch that stabs her in the side.

Somehow, infected do not come and kill Ellie, nor does she bleed to death. Two Rattlers come and cut her down, and one tries to feed her to a clicker strung up nearby. However, Ellie turns the tables on him, and he becomes the one killed by the clicker. Still, this hyper-sensitive infected does not flinch at all as Ellie walks by.

While the one Rattler was getting his throat evaluated by the infected, Ellie used his submachine gun to shoot the other in the leg. This caused him to drop his gun, and he did not try to retrieve it and defend himself while Ellie walked around the clicker.

After getting the information she needs from the second now-dead Rattler, Ellie pushes onward to find Abby. However, the game shows us that in between getting the information and finding the building the Rattler mentioned, Ellie found suitable sutures to sew up her puncture wound.

This may seem like no big deal, but the entirety of the Left Behind DLC centered around Ellie finding a first aid kit to sew up Joel’s wounds. Apparently, quality medical supplies are scarce in a post-apocalyptic world. This game, however, pays no mind to those kinds of details.

Ellie slaughters her way through the Rattlers in search of Abby, and upon finding a group of prisoners in a cell, she’s jumped by a Rattler with a baseball bat. This Rattler does not go for the head but instead hits Ellie in the side. They struggle and Ellie pushes the Rattler into the cell bars and the prisoners take hold of her bat and give her the honor of being the first person to die of strangulation in a cutscene.

The prisoners tell Ellie where to find Abby, but mention that she’s probably dead already. But of course, Ellie had set out on her follow-up revenge journey just in time to find Abby and Lev before they died. Once Ellie finds Abby, she does not immediately kill her. She cuts her free, then Abby frees Lev and carries him off to the boats docked nearby.

There are exactly two boats. There are a lot of Rattlers in this compound, but they keep exactly two boats docked in this area where they string up people and leave them to die just in case of revenge plots like this one.

Ellie, remembering that she came here to kill Abby, insights a final showdown by threatening Lev’s life. Abby reluctantly obliges, and the two fight. Ellie cuts Abby so many times and even stabs her in the chest with what appears to be the entire length of her switchblade knife. Even so, Abby likely does not die off-screen from these injuries.

Abby bites off two of Ellie’s fingers during the confrontation. The human mouth is full of infection-causing bacteria. There cannot be an ample supply of antibiotics just sitting around for the taking. With two serious, infection-prone wounds, Ellie does not die during her 1,000-mile journey home.

While it’s plausible that Abby and Lev have enough fuel in their boat to reach the Firefly base, there is no way Ellie is traveling all the way up the Pacific coast on one tank of fuel. Furthermore, it’s physically impossible for Ellie to sail all the way home or even within reasonable walking distance of home. She has no friends or allies anywhere near her, and death from infection should realistically be her story’s end.

Conclusion

The Last of Us Part II supports its prologue and the brutal killing of Joel by claiming that life happens in unpredictable ways that do not afford individuals with heroic or even satisfying deaths. However, the game willingly indulges in contrivances and cheap plot devices to keep characters alive and push the story forward.

While The Last of Us Part II certainly proves that one can have both a story supposed to be grounded in reality that displays a “broader understanding of life” and a story that paints life as being “more like a comic book,” juggling the two perspectives undoubtedly hurts the believability of the story presented.

Ultimately, these moments discussed above happened in the game because the writers chose for these events to happen this way and not some other way. Whether they make the story more entertaining or engaging is up to each individual player. However, claiming that the people who were upset by the game’s story are “a little square” or that they must see life in a fictional view only serves to show a shallow, topical understanding of the many parts that comprise this underwhelming whole.

Not every game needs to be hyper-realistic. Still, if realism is the goal, consider staying away from tired plot devices. If the story doesn’t work without them, maybe that’s a sign that a much larger part of the story isn’t working.

What are your thoughts on The Last of Us Part II now? Have they changed at all since you first played it? Comment down below to let me know.

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