Without sufficient investment in the story’s character, there’s no catharsis that comes with seeing their triumphs or failures, and it renders the story emotionally inert. Sarah’s death at the end of the prologue in The Last of Us would have worked sufficiently as the springboard for a revenge story, given that the player is able to sympathize with Joel’s grief, but it would have made for another rote/concerning example of the “women in fridges” trope that New Yorker critic Chris Suellentrop misidentifies the game for exploiting. But The Last of Us doesn’t give Joel, or the player a big bad to take vengeance on, or a way to set things right; the game’s initial antagonist is death, and since this isn’t Castlevania or a JRPG, it’s not like we’re going to get a boss fight with a scythe-wielding spook as the climactic finish.
The absence of such goal-oriented plotting doesn’t lead to ineffective drama though, as the characters are what matters more than the events of the plot. To reiterate: everything you need to know about Joel as a character is clear after playing the game for 30 minutes. When the game does cut back to him twenty years after the outbreak, it’s quickly apparent that he’s become a broken shell of a man, both because of the loss of Sarah, and because of what a brutal, dehumanizing place the world has become. He’s a man that lives for the sake of living, which is the most barebones dramatic impetus for a character to have at the start of a game, but he makes for just one half of the relationship that drives The Last of Us’s actual story.
The other half of that relationship is Ellie, the young girl who rounds out the game’s four-quadrant appeal, but also contrasts with Joel in ways that create simple, and effective dynamics. Where as the decaying remnants of the post-apocalypse are a constant reminder of what’s been lost for Joel, Ellie, having been born after the infection spread, treats artifacts like billboards and arcade units with curious amusement. Joel often only speaks when necessary, preferring to keep his ears open for the sound of ferocious zombies clicking in the distance, while Ellie has the mouth of a stevedore, and a knack for lightening the mood with a joke. Most importantly, while having no doubt faced her fair share of adversity in a short lifetime, the realities of what it takes to survive the outside world are still new to Ellie, which is why Joel, a survivor to his last fiber, is the one charged with ensuring her safety on a long trek across the country, and to a militia group thought to be trying to cure the Cordyceps plague.
The game doesn’t muddle the importance of Joel and Ellie’s relationship by needlessly complicating their quest. In another example of the game smartly refusing to keep things a secret for the sake of shock value, you learn that Ellie is immune to infection shortly after she’s first introduced. No one seems to understand why this is, or what it means, if anything at all, but it might mean something, and in the world that’s been established up unto that point, hope for things getting better is as rare a resource as they come. The goal itself is almost nebulous in comparison to its actual storytelling purpose, which is to launch the twin character arcs that form the story of the rest of the game: Joel rediscovering a purpose for which to live in this world, and Ellie seeing her own reason for living challenged by the trauma the pair experiences over the course of the game. Again, this is all basic, Screenwriting 101 stuff, but that’s a good thing; fundamentals need to come first in storytelling, because once you’ve nailed those, you have the audience’s attention. It’s only then that you can take the investment the player has made, and use it to lead them through the real story you want to tell.
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