They Made It Anyway
The Last of Us didn’t need a sequel. That was the clearest thing about it. The first game ended in a way that broke you—you weren’t sure if what Joel did was right, and that uncertainty was the whole point. Continuing that story felt like it could only fail, either by explaining away what made the ending so powerful or by repeating the formula that had already been perfect.
So when they announced The Last of Us 2, I had the same thought everyone else did: unnecessary. But then I watched the trailer. There was Ellie, older now, with a hardness in her face that the first game hadn’t prepared you for. The announcement made it clear that this wasn’t going to be a comfort sequel—no redemption, no escape. Neil Druckmann and his team understood exactly what people loved about the first game and what they wanted to avoid. Instead of smoothing over the ending, the sequel was going to live inside it, twist inside it.
The central question was meaner than the first game had dared to ask: how far would you go for revenge? What happens to a person when they give themselves over to that completely? What happens to everyone around them? It’s the kind of thing that justifies a sequel, the kind of story that needs to be told even if it means wrecking the beauty of what came before. The trailer didn’t promise catharsis or closure. It promised something harder—a story that would refuse to let you off easy, that would make you complicit in something you wouldn’t want to be complicit in.
I didn’t know how it would land, but I knew the instinct was right. The willingness to hurt your own work for the sake of honesty is rarer than people think.