Ludonarrative Dissonance and Narrative Design's Worst Failings
Forget plot. Forget character. TLoU2's real failing is in its inability to tell its story through gameplay.
This is part two of a three-part deconstructive analysis of The Last of Us: Part II. Find part one, about Ellie’s misrepresentation, here; find part three, about how horrible the story is as a whole, here.
I Hate This Game
This is a comprehensive deconstructive analysis on why I believe The Last of Us: Part II fails as a game. Others have written extensively on why the pacing of the story is so terrible and why the story itself is so bad—myself included in the first and third parts of this review—but I want to leave all of that aside here, with a few exceptions.
Here, the word of the day is narrative design. Games don’t have writers. Games have narrative designers. Whether or not you believe TLoU2 has good writing, what matters is the way in which the narrative is designed, the way it treats the player, and how it uses interactivity to tell a story. At this, TLoU2 fails spectacularly. I think this game has some of the worst narrative design of any AAA game ever released. It does everything wrong. So let’s jump in.
Part II, Not 2
This title is not an accident. The Last of Us: Part II is extremely concerned with its predecessor. It is a continuation of that same story. So we must ask the question, then: what is The Last of Us (the first game) actually about? There’s a simple answer: Joel and Ellie. Games are about specific things, and The Last of Us is about a developing father-daughter relationship between these two people. All else is wall dressing. More essentially, The Last of Us is a game about the relationship between two characters, in the same way that Halo is about being a supersoldier or Papers, Please is about being a Soviet-bloc border guard. A continuation of the first game, which is what Part II’s narrative keeps insisting on this game being, needed to maintain this premise. If it didn’t, it shouldn’t have been called The Last of Us: Part II. It should have just been…The Last of Us 2.
I believe the first game succeeds despite some small storytelling issues because of the ways in which Joel and Ellie’s dynamic is reflected within combat and within exploration. Interactivity is used to reinforce narrative. They exist alongside each other. This is why The Last of Us is so venerated, despite criticisms that its story isn’t necessarily special relative to cinema or literature. It puts the player’s “I” into a third person story in a way non-interactive media can never hope to. This is the reason for the perspective swap at the end of the game’s second act. The gameplay exists to build empathy with the characters IN CONJUNCITON WITH—and this is very important, NOT INDEPENDENTLY OF—the narrative. Neither would work as well in isolation. This is what the first game is about. Ellie and Joel and their relationship.
It’s clear by the end of the prologue, though, that Part II will be no continuation of Ellie and Joel’s relationship. Joel’s death is theoretically brilliant, but the failure to deploy this scene effectively is the rotten seed that will bloom into one nasty durian fruit tree. More on that later. For now, we’re left to wonder—if this game isn’t about Joel and Ellie, what is it about?
Revenge seems to be the obvious answer. Abby’s assassination of Joel is so vicious, heinous, brutal, and abrupt that, once the player’s anger has subsided, I cannot imagine anyone not wanting justice, just like Ellie. This is why that scene succeeds. And so Ellie sets off seeking her revenge, and her girlfriend tags along with her. All good so far. Our motivation is the same as Ellie's. That is great game design.
Then suddenly we’re faced with this game’s first ludonarrative problem. This is part II. We’re inhabiting a world which expects us to know and have played the first game—a world which is highly concerned with exploring the implications of the first game's climax. It doesn’t work if taken alone. Yet now we’re traveling with Dina, a character who does not appear in the first game and whose established intimate relationship with Ellie has been developed entirely off screen. Just like that? They’re already in love? I hardly know her!
The audience will be naturally apprehensive about new characters. The Last of Us handles this expertly, because Joel, just like the player, is initially wary of going on some stupid escort quest with a teenager. He learns to love Ellie over time, but it takes a lot of work. This gives the player a chance to also learn to love Ellie. Joel doesn’t start already loving Ellie because the writers find that more interesting and we’ve skipped three months ahead right after the prologue. The journey would be hollow.
And yet this is exactly what Part II does. We’re placed into Ellie’s shoes and subjected to her relationship with Dina, despite the fact that we’ve hardly been given any time at all to get to know her. The character is serviceably written and reasonably likable, to be sure, but there is a massive disconnect here between Ellie’s mental state and the player’s. Ellie was in the last game. I already know, understand, and empathize with her, but I suddenly have no ability to understand or empathize with her love for Dina. What gives? Why is Dina so special? Why not Cat? Why not nobody? She and Ellie seem…mostly the same, overall? I don’t get their connection.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind Dina tagging along. She’s useful enough, and her performance is good, but I sure as shit don’t love her yet. If I was ever going to, it was going to take a whole game! I don’t care about her relationship with Ellie at the start of the game beyond the fact that I already know I like Ellie and that I’m invested in her story.
This failing in narrative design is immense. Becoming invested in characters takes time and effort; empathy cannot be taken for granted. I found it extremely jarring that Ellie and Dina were already lovers basically at the start of the game. I didn’t feel that relationship in the gameplay, it happened without—or maybe despite—me. This, in the follow-up to a game about developing character relationships through gameplay. If we’re going to spend hours upon hours with Dina and Ellie, we can’t jump in at the middle. We need to see the beginning and we need to see these characters grow. Instead, we’re simply told about Dina and Ellie’s history with each other. We hear about their fun times. This is better than nothing, but it’s not enough to make us care. Dina just feels like baggage as a result. I know Neil & Co. were interested in jumping into that relationship, to include that as one small element as part of Ellie’s larger story, but it simply doesn’t work. They don’t do enough to establish empathy.
The writers apparently agreed with me. Dina felt like baggage, and so we dump her off at a theatre for the remainder of the second act. One must wonder why she was there at all.
Dina’s relationship with Ellie changes over the course of the story—or at least at the end—but her relationship with the player is static. I recall distinctly thinking when I first played Part II that it felt like these characters were on a different chapter of the story than I was. I liked Dina well enough, but I didn’t really understand what Ellie saw in her. She was just…average. Contrast this with the first game, in which, even if you as a player don’t like Ellie (you fucking monster), you can at least understand why Joel grows to care about her.
And so by the time Ellie leaves Dina to go exploring on her own, we have officially departed from the core of The Last of Us. This game features half of the iconic duo from the first game, and its mechanics/narrative design are not working together in a meaningful way to recapture that dynamic for some other purpose—which they very well could have. We’re left with a revenge story instead. Not characters, not relationships. Revenge. That is the game’s core. Whatever you think about the story as a whole, I think you can agree that this is not part II, not on the fundamental mechanistic level.
(Yes, I realize the game does this to some extent with Abby and Lev, but most of Abby’s sections are her alone. That isn’t good enough).
On Abby and Empathy
Our introduction to the character of Abby is a narrative design disaster. This is Part II, remember. We want to see Ellie. We want to catch up with her. We want to see Joel and we want to be eased back into the world. The game does this…until our perspective arbitrarily flips to Abby after we leave Jackson as Ellie. We don’t know anything about the character of Abby yet—aside from that she’s obviously hunting Joel down for some reason—and we immediately are given good cause to dislike her: she isn’t Ellie.
Forcing the player into the body of someone we don’t have any interest in, at the expense of allowing us to inhabit the body of someone we do have interest in, immediately makes us unhappy. You might not have noticed that you felt this way, but your brain did. Abby feels like a distraction. Nobody wants to be playing as her. We want to be playing as Ellie, and we want to get to the plot. Unlike in the first game, in which Ellie only ascends to PC status when Joel is incapacitated, the swap here is utterly arbitrary. Why are we playing as Abby now? Because the writers want us to. There is no narrative justification. And even though we don’t hate Abby yet, this is the first notch in a tally that’s going to come back and bite the writers in the ass later.
Fast forward through some tutorial filler as Ellie and we’re playing as Abby again. She does something amazingly stupid, nearly gets herself killed, and one massive coincidence later she’s been rescued by Joel and Tommy while out on patrol. What amazing luck that the one person she was looking to kill also happens to be the one person she randomly bumps into!
All three of them make their way back to Abby’s home base, where Joel inexplicably allows himself to be taken off-guard and captured. I want to call attention to this fact. A lot of apologia for this scene online follows along the lines of, “Oh, well, Joel has been living the comfy life in Jackson for the last four years, so obviously his guard would be down!”
To this I say, “Maybe.”
My issue is that this scene is taking place before we’ve allowed ourselves to have any real time with Joel. This is the whole idea, and will be important later, but it rings false because of this. What do we know about Joel?
He will do anything to protect the people he loves
He capped Marlene when she was no further danger just on the chance that she would try to come after Ellie later on
He is a survivor who will do anything it takes to survive
My favorite scene in the first game is when Tommy, after being told that he owed his life to Joel, says, “It wasn’t worth it.” This is how fucked up Joel is. The things he and Tommy did to survive were so bad that Tommy, now reformed and living a comfortable life, doesn’t think it was worth it. How powerful is that? At the very start of the first game, our introduction to Joel sees him shooting his neighbor to death and then instructing Tommy to abandon an entire family at the side of the road—despite the pleas of his brother and daughter—even though they definitely had room. This is the sort of person Joel is. He is a survivor. Why is his guard 100% down at the start of this game?
Maybe it is because “he’s gotten complacent in comfort.” I can maybe buy that. This isn’t what breaks the scene for me. But I do think, if Joel was going to act this way, he needed to be established as having grown complacent beforehand. He doesn’t feel like the same character we left off at the end of part I. A lot of the characters don’t, actually, but never mind.
And anyway, if the comfort of the old world of 2013 wasn’t enough to make Joel hesitate about survival, I really don’t think a few years in a hippie commune would either. Especially since he’s still actively on guard duty.
This is one of the ways in which a major plot scene in Part II leads the audience to think less about what’s happening on screen, more about what’s happening in the minds of the writers. I wasn’t angry at Abby in this moment; I was angry at Neil Druckmann.
But Joel did need to die. I’m fine with it overall, although I think the execution could have been better. So why do I think this scene is so problematic? There’s one really big reason…
Death by Cutscene
Joel is the player character for 85% of The Last of Us. He is an unstoppable killing machine who took on an entire hospital of fully-armed soldiers wielding automatic weapons, and he did so (in my Grounded playthrough anyway) with nothing but Molotov cocktails and his fists. He was impaled through the stomach by rebar and survived to tell the tale with nothing but a shot of penicillin. He is half of what the first game is about. He is a player character.
We get to fight alongside him as Abby briefly, and this is excellent. It’s really cool to see AI Joel in combat. He kicks ass—as he should. This is a really fascinating scene; I saw his death coming from a mile away—I had only been partially spoiled—but the notion of fighting alongside Joel before his death, the notion that Joel rescues his own killer, is awesome. Despite driven by an improbable coincidence, its construction reflects well on the wisdom of the writers. The irony is ripe. It’s dramatic. It’s compelling. I was eagerly awaiting what was coming next: would Abby be able to go through with it? How was this scene going to be communicated? What was going to happen?
And then Joel dies in a cutscene.
This is the most important plot event IN THE ENTIRE SERIES UP UNTIL THIS POINT, and it isn’t interactive.
If this game is serious about being a game, and not a movie, it needs to use its mechanics to tell its story. If we could have been in Joel’s shoes when he died, if we could have felt the hopelessness, maybe it would have worked. John’s death in Red Dead Redemption’s climax is one possible example of how to kill a PC off, and it works because you feel John’s sacrifice at the moment of his death. You play it. It caps off the game.
Imagine how much more effective this scene would be if the player was in control of Ellie, but had no ability to influence the outcome. You maintain the subjective third person PoV as if a gameplay sequence, there's a QTE but no matter how hard you press square you can't overcome four guys at once, and you can choose what to look at while Abby kills Joel--a bit like the opening of the first game where you play as Sarah in the car and experience her lack of agency.
Wouldn't that have been far, far more effective? Wouldn't you have actually felt what Ellie was going through in that moment? Wouldn't that be much more interesting than watching a completely passive cutscene?
However you do it, the death of a character who is > 50% of the first game needs to be mechanized. But it’s just a movie. This sequence is entirely non-interactive.
This is a big problem.
This big problem is embiggened further by their attempt to include Ellie in the scene. Even with my above suggestions, this would still break the scene: we’re in control of Ellie, we see Abby down the hall, and rather than shooting her dead on the spot—which is what I was ready to do—we have control arbitrarily taken away from us, and then Ellie decides to lower her gun and rush forward instead for no reason. You’d think that, after David had grabbed her from behind doors fifteen times in the last game, she would be smart enough not to go into rooms filled with obvious enemies now.
JUST STAY IN THE HALL, ELLIE. USE A MOLOTOV.
But no, she doesn’t. She walks forward and gets herself captured instead…in a cutscene. How come Ellie only ever gets captured in cutscenes? Most of her fighting is in the gameplay!
Anyway, then in a cutscene, we watch the horror ensue.
Within the context of the game's mechanics, there’s no particular reason why Ellie couldn’t have taken on all eight of those Wolves. We’ve done it in the last game. We’ll do it later on in this game. If she fails, she can just quickload! But the narrative designers have decided that the plot needs this scene, and so it happens without consideration for the gameplay.
This might not necessarily be bad writing, although it is also that, but gameplay and narrative are not coming together to tell the story in a compelling way. If each of these plot beats was interactive, the outcome would have been entirely different—which is why they had to be cutscenes. This whole prologue might as well just be a movie. Why not? What are we earning by occasionally having to press forward as Ellie or Abby?
If they had found some way to put the player in Ellie’s shoes, if they had made the player feel helpless while Joel was being killed, this would be a very different story. This scene would be immaculate. It would be beautiful. It would work entirely. They didn’t. That’s why, if you’re like me, your reaction isn’t, “Oh shit, they killed Joel!” but instead, “Are you kidding me I was saving 2 Molotov cocktails what the fuck Ellie this is so stupid!”
That is why this scene makes players angry, not sad.
This trend follows throughout the entire game. Every single character, except Nora, dies in a cutscene. I would like to contrast this state of affairs with the first game, wherein the only major characters who die in cutscenes are Henry and Marlene. Marlene’s death could have been mechanized, but this works better non-interactively for storytelling reasons. Henry kills himself, so his death might as well have been a cutscene. Everyone else—Sam, Tess, Robert, and most importantly David—either die within gameplay sequences OR as the direct fallout of a gameplay sequence.
But the gameplay in Part II never matters, ever. How many times does the player get grabbed by some guy hiding just behind a door in this game? How many times do we lose control over Abby or Ellie, just in time for something to happen in the story that would have happened differently in gameplay? Too fucking many times to count.
Consider briefly the deaths of Mel and Owen, also in a cutscene. Ellie kills both of these characters. She does so with violence. Part II's gameplay is all about violence. Why is a non-interactive sequence being used to tell a part of this story that the mechanics of the game are explicitly designed for? Why was this a cutscene?
You will note, upon reflection, that most of The Last of Us' cutscenes are actually just people talking. Almost no one ever gets killed in them, with a few exceptions. The Last of Us does not have mechanics for people talking dramatically, so this may as well be a dramatically blocked cutscene. But in Part II, there are enormous fights and entire sequences of combat that are entirely non-interactive. These sequences would be way more interesting if they were gameplay. Why aren't they? Why does every important plot even in this game happen in a cutscene?
There are plenty more examples to use, but I don’t want to take up more space than is necessary. Let me finish this section by reiterating that the ludonarrative disconnect between the player and the character in this game is almost unparalleled in gaming history. To do this, I’d like to remind you of a section as Abby, where she and Lev are going on a pointless sidequest to find medical supplies for a character that ends up dying in a cutscene two seconds later anyway. Let me set the scene:
Abby has a fear of heights. She keeps telling us about her fear of heights. She won’t shut up about her fear of heights. We’re walking across a crane, and Abby is freaking out. She just keeps saying over and over again, “Oh my god, I’m so afraid of heights!” And it’s a good thing, too, because if it wasn’t for her constantly reminding us, we never, ever would have known.
You may not have noticed how poorly designed this section is, but thankfully I'm here to notice for you.
A good game--The Last of Us, to use a random example--would have mechanized Abby’s fear of heights. The screen would have gone shaky. The controller would have started to vibrate. The colors in the game would have desaturated, and you would have had to overcome some new challenge designed to reflect what was happening in the narrative.
You can see the first game doing exactly this when Joel is impaled at the university. The whole world goes shaky. Joel's movement changes. It's harder to aim. The controller vibrates. The mechanics have shifted to represent the corresponding shift in Joel's physical wellbeing.
So what happens in Part II?
You press forward. You get to the other side of the crane. Abby keeps bitching about her fear of heights. End scene.
Literally no attempt, not even a cursory attempt, has been made to mechanize this psychological process. The designers have utterly failed, completely, entirely, to place us in Abby’s shoes in the way that video games can so uniquely do. I think this one small scene is the perfect example of why The Last of Us: Part II is so poorly designed. It's a microcosm of the way in which Naughty Dog has utterly ignored game mechanics in favor of their proscribed narrative and have entirely failed to do what Bruce Straley, and we know now for certain that it was all him, did so well in part I.
Contrast this with the first game. You’re in Salt Lake City. You need Ellie’s help to get a ladder. You go to boost her up on a ledge. You press the button prompt…and nothing happens. You turn around, and you see Ellie--she's despondent, sitting on a bench, not thinking about going forward.
This moment is more brilliant than all of the best elements of the second game put together. It's so brilliant that I'm 100% certain that Neil Druckmann had absolutely nothing to do with it. By the stroke of a single button prompt, the designers have not only shown the player that Ellie has changed since her encounter with David, but they've made us feel it. Part II doesn’t even try to capture this genius. I don’t think its designers had any clue what they were doing.
Player vs. Player
When we’ve finally slogged through Abby’s sections, we now have to defeat Ellie as Abby in order to find out what happens next. This is an interesting idea, but it is a profound failing in narrative design when implemented, and for a fairly simple reason: the fight between two playable characters robs the player of all agency.
I understand and appreciate that Naughty Dog games aren’t about the player making decisions, but agency is still important. Agency is the illusion that your choices matter. Agency is the feeling that you inhabit a real person’s body while you’re playing as them. It’s the sensation that you aren’t simply on a rollercoaster, but that you exist in some alternative apocalyptic reality. Death by cutscene robs the player of agency. Being grabbed from behind a door robs the player of agency. They are crutches that prop up the smashed legs of a poorly designed interactive narrative.
So Abby fights Ellie. Abby wins. Why? Because we’re playing as Abby. That’s it. That’s why. It’s so unbelievably shallow. Abby has to win, because the player’s character receives an infinite number of attempts to try, try again. How come, despite having overcome every obstacle ever placed in front of her, despite having killed David without Joel’s help, Ellie loses to Abby? Because we’re playing as Abby, and the writers have decided that Abby wins.
Abby dies over and over again while trying to flank around Ellie, but Ellie still loses because none of those deaths matter. This calls overt attention to the game’s systems. It breaks the ‘dream’ and reminds us that we’re not experiencing reality. If they wanted to put two playable characters against each other in a fight scene, the outcome needed to come from the mechanics, not the predetermined plot.
If we’d simply been allowed to keep playing as Ellie instead of swapping perspectives, Ellie would have had to win. Right? Or would she have won and then lost in a cutscene—one of the worst crimes a narrative designer can possibly commit? There’s no actual justifiable reason why we’re changing perspectives. Of course, the end is always predetermined in a Naughty Dog game, but it’s important that we don’t notice the arbitrarity of the writers’ hands.
For most of us, we don’t notice that we’re forced to kill Retcon Jerry in the OR at the end of the first game. We want to kill him because we empathize with Joel. The game has aligned us with the player character. Everything flows perfectly. It doesn’t work for everyone, I know some people dislike that final scene, but for the vast majority of players, it's perfect. We don't notice that it’s pre-ordained.
We notice it in Part II. It pulls us out of the game. It makes us frustrated.
“Why can’t I play as Ellie and end this here and now?” we ask.
“Because I don’t want you,” Neil replies.
In fact, the outcome of this scene defies the game’s mechanics. Abby has lost all of her shit, while Ellie is fully stocked and loaded, and carrying about 6 spare guns in her backpack. If we were in control of Ellie, she would never lose this fight against one unarmed NPC. You wouldn’t even need multiple tries. It wouldn’t ever happen. But Ellie loses anyway, because that’s the story.
Fuck that.
This is the opposite of emergent storytelling. This is demergent storytelling. It’s kick-to-the-balls storytelling. It’s arbitrary and it blows. It is yet another reminder that Halley Gross and Neil Druckmann clearly have no interest in telling their story using game mechanics; they would just as soon be writing a movie. Would this scene work in a film? Sure, probably. But it doesn’t work in a game. It doesn’t cohere with the mechanics and the systems in a meaningful way. It just fucking sucks.
Once again, the whole thing may as well have been a big cutscene. We gain nothing via interactivity.
What if, instead, you get one shot to do this fight as Abby? If you die, you expect the game to quickload--but it doesn't. It just keeps moving forward. Ellie is now the champion. The third act proceeds with this in mind.
Or, alternatively, if for some reason you don't commit suicide on your first attempt (as I and most streamers did) and you beat Ellie, the story proceeds in that direction. The narrative, therefore, branches into two separate paths. You know, like a video game.
That would have been awesome. That would have given this game the kick it needed. Unfortunately, it's not what we got. The mechanics have no connection whatsoever to the ultimate outcome of the story.
Calling Attention to Violence
Often it's remarked online that games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider suffer from a ludonarrative disconnect because the fact that the player characters are mass murdering maniacs is rarely, or only superficially, addressed within the narrative. The mechanics of the game do not seem to align with the story in meaningful ways. It's a very common problem in this medium, wherein every game is required to possess an artificial challenge component. Obviously it's unrealistic that there's so much violence going on or that one person could kill so many people; we just need to ignore it and move on.
And, honestly, we generally do without too much of an issue. It's just one of those things that you get used to. Those of us raised on Halo and Mass Effect can compartmentalize effectively enough to focus on what matters instead.
The Last of Us does a surprisingly good job of bypassing this issue entirely, however, and it's one of the game's qualities that I think has helped it endure for so long. Its post-apocalpytic world is so violent, so brutal, so entirely the State of Nature, that it kind of makes sense for Joel to slaughter so many people. Joel's character is that of a murderer. The mechanics and the narrative are, in this case, aligned with unusual closeness.
So when I heard that Part II was doubling down on this notion, granting each NPC a name and increasing the spectacle of gore with new technology, I was initially very excited. This could be just what gaming needs to move on! This could be a new chapter in narrative design!
What I didn't realize was how fucking wrong I was.
Some critics have applauded Part II's designs on addressing its violence, but what these critics have failed to recognize--as, it seems, with most facets of this game--is that, through calling attention to its use of violence, The Last of Us: Part II reminds us of how entirely fake that violence is.
Consider: you're on Grounded difficulty. You can either sneak past ten WLF soldiers, or you can murder them all in cold blood. Murder is, quite honestly, the easier option, so you opt for that. Maybe it takes you a few tries, but through stealth kills, a few molotovs, and a shotgun spree, you take them all down. While you do so, they cry out each other's names, they beg for mercy, and they get blown into literal pieces in a generally authentic kind of way.
And then you move on to the next encounter.
On the most superficial level, paying attention to the agency of the people you're murdering by giving them names does, kind of, alleviate the ludonarrative disconnect enjoyed by so much of this interactive medium. But only superficially, because the great irony is that, by reminding us that the people we're killing are all real, the system designers of Part II have reminded us that these aren't real people. Why?
REAL PEOPLE DON'T DIE SO FUCKING EASILY.
None of these NPCs have any actual agency. They still only exist to get killed. They may have names, but they die as easily as a single button prompt. Nothing about them is different than the NPCs in any other video game on anything but the shallowest level.
It doesn't matter how realistic the blood spray is or how hard they beg for mercy. They're not hard to kill. They don't behave like real people. They don't matter. If these were real people, a realistic Ellie could not possibly mow them all down. She would need to evade combat. She would need to not play the game like it's designed to be played. She would need to not have an infinite number of attempts at a given problem.
But she does, because she's the protagonist of a video game--and we all realize this. She plays by different rules than everyone else. The mechanics of the game place these two forces on inherently different planes of existence, and calling attention to the violence only makes this dichotomy more noticeable.
The narrative of the game as a whole reinforces this irony. Abby's dad is Jerry, some random doctor that Joel murders at the end of the game. He is one of ten million NPCs Joel murders throughout the course of part I. No one thinks twice about it.
Yet because of an enormous (and despicable) retcon, Jerry is now a real character. He had agency! He had a family! He had a life! Joel took that away!
Except he didn't. Jerry was OR doctor #1, AKA an NPC.
Consider: why is it only Jerry's daughter coming after Joel? What about Marlene? Or Robert? Or how about ALL OF THOSE OTHER RANDOM HUNTERS JOEL MURDERED? AND THOSE 50 FIREFLY SOLDIERS HE GUNNED DOWN? WHERE ARE THEIR KIDS?
The answer is nowhere, because those were NPCs. They weren't real people. This is an inherent artifact of the medium of gaming, and it's something we just know to ignore. Except we can't ignore it when the game keeps reminding us. If you're like me, you can't help but keep coming back to this question when you play Part II. You'll keep thinking to yourself, "If Jerry had a family, why doesn't everyone?" It seems like quite the coincidence that the one guy with a vengeful daughter also happened to be the one guy who was inextricably linked to the game's climax!
And then you are reminded that you are playing a video game in which the violence is utterly trivial.
They Didn't Know What They Were Doing (Literally)
Halley Gross, a screenwriter, is credited with "Narrative Lead" by The Last of Us: Part II. Had you ever heard of Halley Gross until this game came out? Me neither. It turns out she worked on Westworld and maybe some other stuff, too. She's a screenwriter.
A screenwriter.
Narrative designers are game designers. They aren't screenwriters. TLoU2 is one of the biggest, most ambitious, most expensive video games ever made, and they let someone with literally no experience take the reins of its narrative.
WHAT?
If Gross really was the narrative "lead" on this game, and not Druckmann--by which I mean, if Gross is personally responsible for the majority of the game's writing--then I think she severely misunderstands both the characters and the context of the first game. I think she is objectively a bad writer and primarily to blame for the complete mismanaging of this game's story, as the other parts of this series have made clear.
But forget about that. I just want to point out that, even were she an amazingly talented storyteller, giving her narrative control of this game is fucking insanity. It's no wonder that the ludonarrative disconnect is so bad; the "narrative lead" has no experience or understanding of the medium. It's like asking Steven Spielberg to write a novel. It won't be good.
There are some people who can bridge the gap between mediums. There are some people--Noah Hawley comes to mind--who are fantastic screenwriters, directors, and novelists. But they are few and far between. They are an exception and not the rule. Moreover, they tend to be older, more experienced, and familiar with the industry as a whole. I can find no evidence to suggest that Halley Gross has ever even played a video game before, much less studied how to design one. The fact that she was allowed to be put in charge must be an artifact of the way in which Naughty Dog is run as a studio.
The number of people qualified for the position of "narrative lead" for a game like this one is very, very short. Chris Avellone, Ken Levine, Neil Druckmann, Amy Hennig, Drew Karpyshyn, David Gaider, Raphaël Colantonio, maybe Bruce Straley, Joe Staten, or Patrick Weekes. Note that none of these people, except for Hennig, are screenwriters. They're all game designers--and most have backgrounds in level design--and they are all tremendously experienced in the field. These are the people who should be put in charge of a $250+ million dollar video game's story, not some novice screenwriter with four credits to her name.
So it's no wonder that part II suffers from such terrible ludonarrative dissonance. It was written like a screenplay, by a screenwriter. I can't even blame Gross for this. I have to blame Neil Druckmann for giving her the job, because she simply wasn't qualified.
I want this to be one of the main takeaways from this series of essays. The Last of Us is a game superficially accused of being "bad" in terms of interactivity because it uses blocked and non-interactive cutscenes, but that couldn't be less accurate. It is actually a demonstration of tremendously intelligent game design, as I hope you'll agree I've illustrated here. That is the reason why the game is so fantastic. That is why people take its story seriously.
But Part II? It might be a decent movie, but it's a terrible video game.
Until developers start taking the role of narrative designer seriously, acknowledging that it's a specialized position that demands unique expertise--and that it CANNOT be filled by any hack with a BA in Film & Television writing (like yours truly)--games will never reach the level of storytelling I know they're capable of.
But don't hold your breath. If the last few years have made anything clear, it's that this is a lesson developers will have a very hard time learning.
In Conclusion
It is through its failings to utilize game mechanics, and its total misuses of interactivity, that I condemn The Last of Us: Part II. Forget the story, forget the pacing, forget the characters. I could overlook all of it, were it not for how poorly the narrative design manifests itself throughout all 75 hours of this game's playtime. In a video game, that is an unforgivable crime.