As a result, when The Last of Us Part II was released, it marked the first time a major game featured a lesbian woman as its protagonist and eventually won the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Video Game. While patrolling the outskirts of the town for zombies, a daily chore among the residents, Joel goes missing.And when it came to developing the sequel, Druckmann said he wants players to “see the perspective of people that have different identities, different sexual attractions, they come from different countries,” and explore how the characters act when dropped in this world. While you embody Joel in game one, this time, you - the player - are Ellie, now 19. Joel and Ellie have been living in a small town with other noninfected people where life appears to be starting anew against the backdrop of the otherwise zombie-ravaged society. "The Last of Us Part II" opens several years later. He kills the Firefly doctors, pulls an unconscious Ellie from the Firefly hospital and lies to Ellie once she awakens, after the pair escape from the hospital, telling her that she's not the only person who is immune and that the Fireflies had found others. As the game closes, Joel finds himself unable to sacrifice Ellie. Belatedly, Joel learns that Ellie can, in fact, provide a cure - but to do so she will have to sacrifice her life.ĭuring their journey to the Fireflies, Joel and Ellie develop a parent-child bond. Among the rebels are doctors looking for a cure. At the end of the game, a smuggler named Joel brings Ellie, a 14-year-old orphan with unusual immunity to the virus, to meet a rebel militia known as the Fireflies. In part one, "The Last of Us," the fictional " Cordyceps Brain Infection" virus has turned most of humanity into mindless zombies. "I could see how it could have the impact where you're dealing with a global pandemic in the very personal sense of real life and your escape mechanism is going and playing a video game about a global pandemic," but the rich narrative has simply kept him even more engaged, he said. Critical writing has suggested that there was a political, and purposeful, early effort to sink those ratings before many people had played the game all the way through. Current Metacritic user reviews are a 4.5 out of 10. There are some claims that Naughty Dog pushed misleading trailers, which skewed expectations. Some user-critics have tried to tank the game's reviews for a host of reasons, according to CNET, and Forbes, with a crowd of gamers appearing to dislike the queer themes and the death of the first game's beloved protagonist. Referring to the game's developer, an Inverse game review read, "Naughty Dog plays it a bit too safe, investing all the creative energy into the plot." The game picked up a 94 percent critics' score on Metacritic, but not all reviews have been glowing. "It's a meditation on loss - not simply loss of life, but of community, family, and individual capabilities - and the effort it takes to muddle through maddening grief." Warning: Spoilers for the "The Last of Us Part II" are ahead. The Washington Post's Christopher Byrd called the game "an astonishing achievement - a searing demonstration of how a video game can marry heart-stopping gameplay, gorgeous environmental storytelling and anxiety-inducing moral complexity." Furthermore, he said, the game isn't just a game. Indeed some critics have lauded it in language more common to literature, or religion.