Since 1994, Sony has given us some of the best franchises in gaming history, and in 2013 Naughty Dog gave us the perfect swan song for the PS3. The Last of Us was an action-adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic world filled with groups of despicable people and people who are infected with a fungus that turns them into monsters, and it focuses on the relationship between Joel and Ellie, who end up forming a father-daughter bond.
The game achieved massive critical and commercial success, and it was considered by many to be the epitome of video game storytelling. It may have taken seven years, but we finally got a sequel, but unfortunately, there are issues with the writing. Every story has plot holes of varying severity, but some of the ones present in The Last of Us Part II are just to hard to ignore, and this list will take a look at some of them.
10 Tommy & Joel Get Lost, But Abby Doesn’t
After escaping a horde of infected, Joel and Tommy offered to take Abby back to her group, which happens to be located nearby, but it was pretty convenient that the brothers were there to help her in the first place.
The brothers have lived in Jackson, Wyoming for four years, and somehow they managed to get completely lost while on a simple patrol with a designated route, yet Abby, who is relatively new to the area, knows exactly where her group is and how to get to them without getting lost herself.
9 Out-Of-Place Trust
When you include the four-year time skip, Joel had lived in a post-apocalyptic world for 24 years, and he managed to live that long because he did whatever he needed to do to survive, but he was also very careful when dealing with strangers.
Joel ultimately meets his demise because he willingly walked into a building with multiple armed strangers who he seemingly trusted immediately simply because he and Tommy saved Abby’s life. And the dumbest thing of all is the fact that both Joel and Tommy used their real names.
8 Abby Is Only Grateful When She Wants To Be
When Joel saves Abby from the horde, she repays him by going to town on his head with a golf club. Grated, Abby had a good reason for wanting to end Joel’s life, but you would think that she would at least acknowledge the fact that he wasn’t a horrible person.
When she gets captured by the Seraphites, Abby gets rescued by Lev and she immediately grows close to him and Yara despite not knowing what they have done to survive, in fact, she trusts them immediately despite them being affiliated with an enemy faction.
7 Abby’s Dad Wasn’t The Original Surgeon Abby wants revenge because her father was the surgeon who Joel killed at the end of the first game when he rescued Ellie, but it looks like Jerry Anderson underwent some massive cosmetic surgery between games.In the first game Jerry wore green surgical gear, but it magically turned blue in the sequel, and for some reason, Jerry appears to be much younger and healthier in Part II, but he also seems to have developed a new voice. These may be cosmetic differences, but considering how important Jerry is to the story, you would think that the developers would make him look similar because these surgeons look like two very different characters.
6 Isaac Not Listening To Abby About Lev
When Isaac reveals that he plans to attack the Seraphites, he admits that he needs Abby for the attack to be successful, but on the night of the attack, Issac seems to have a different mindset.
At this point, Abby and Lev have developed a relationship, which is why she fights members of her own faction to protect him, which is when Isaac steps in and points his gun at Abby, who is defending her friend. Isaac paused his own attack and nearly kills his best soldier simply because she wanted to talk to him. The attack then fails.
5 Dina Offering Ellie Her Mask
We all know that Ellie is immune, but she still wears a mask to hide that fact from others for her own safety. At one point in the game when she and Dina are running away from infected, her mask gets cracked open and Dina attempts to give her hers.
Dina did not believe that Ellie was immune at the time and she had already breathed in spores, so logically she should have known that giving Ellie her mask was pointless, and to top it all off Dina knew she was pregnant, which means that she was willing to sacrifice two lives unnecessarily.
4 Nora Chooses To Not Lie
Ellie eventually tracks Nora to the hospital we visited in the first game, and after bringing her to a spore-infested area, she offers Nora a quick death if she tells her where Abby is. Nora refuses and Ellie goes on to violently interrogate her.
Nora eventually gives Ellie an answer, but for some reason, she gives her Abby’s actual location. She could have easily lied to Ellie and the end result would have been the same especially since Ellie would have never known it was a lie until she actually got there.
3 Letting Ellie And Tommy Go
After executing Joel, Abby and her group decided to spare both Tommy and Ellie, and for some reason, Abby is furious with both of them after they decide to seek their own revenge. In fact, Abby literally says that they wasted the chance they were given.
Was this quest for vengeance really that surprising? Did the group honestly think that Tommy would not try to avenge his own brother? And did they really think that Ellie would sit back and do nothing after she said she was going to kill them?
2 Ellie Letting Abby Go
At the end of the day, The Last of Us Part II is a story about revenge and what it does to people, but in the game’s climax, we never get to see Ellie get her revenge because she chooses to spare Abby’s life at the last minute.
Ellie realizes that revenge isn’t the answer, but she only realizes this after she’s taken the lives of dozens of people, most of whom had nothing to do with Joel’s death, so this epiphany just seems hollow and completely out of place.
1 Ellie Being Upset With Joel
After a decent amount of progress, we see Joel finally tell Ellie what happened at the end of the previous game, and she was not happy to learn the truth, to the point that she did not speak to him for well over a year.
She hated Joel because he saved her life, which would be justifiable if there was a 100% chance that her death resulted in a cure, but that wasn’t the case, and the Fireflies didn’t even give her a choice in the matter. Despite knowing all this, Ellie still hated Joel and disregarded all of the memories they created together. It’s odd to set an entire revenge plot around such a relationship.
NEXT: The Last Of Us 2: 10 Important Details You Didn’t Know About Ellie