Very different games but very similar bittersweet endings, which I both love very much.
In Prince of Persia (spoilers obviously), the Prince revives Elika by setting big bad god of darkness Ahriman loose again after spending the whole game trapping him, basically dooming the land because he couldn’t live without Elika.
In the Last of Us, Joel spends the whole game getting Ellie to the fireflies only to break her out and take away humanity’s only hope for a future, because he couldn’t live without Ellie (even the names are similar actually).
Both main characters had the realization last minute that the person they had grown to love over the course of the events of the game had to sacrifice themselves in order to (possibly) save the world.
Both characters decide they can’t live without their companion so start fucking up everything they worked so hard for. It’s love and it’s selfishness, it’s heroic and it’s tragic, but what makes these twists so good above all is because their choices are completely understandable.
Both games also make you act out the choice yourself as the player, which only adds to the power of it.
Damn right I am, lol.
The thing is, at least in POP’08, you can understand both sides of the equation. You can understand why the Prince feels so broken at Elika’s loss and why he’s desperate enough to cut the new tree of life to bet the world on round two, and also understand why Elika is so angry and upset with him over doing so that she splits the party and tells him to fuck off forever.
With TLOU1, there is no reconciling the Fireflies behavior versus Joel’s. Nothing indicates that their decision to sacrifice Ellie (in POP’08 terms, not cutting down the tree) will guarantee a good result (in POP’08 terms, keep Ahriman sealed).
Instead of being a binary choice of let Ellie die and save the world (i.e. save Elika versus keep Ahriman sealed), it’s a choice of let Ellie die so the Fireflies can pretend they have a plan and a science team instead of desperation and a fucking quack pretending he’s a good doctor. There’s literally a bunch of “and then” statements they don’t have answers to even if cracking Ellie’s skill open to harvest goop and see what it does works out in the first place.
The TL;DR here is that I can still understand and empathize with Elika’s anger at the Prince in POP’08 every time I play it, but in TLOU1 I simply don’t buy that Ellie’s potential death was anything but the delusions of the insane operating at any level more fundamentally complex than ancient civilizations hoping that the latest young woman chucked into a volcano would make their fruit more plump or some shit.
Maybe it’s because I’ve never played TLoU part 2, but I didn’t feel there was much indication in Part 1 that the fireflies didn’t know what they were doing, nor that they did for that matter. It was left pretty much open as far as I remember. Did part 2 made it more clear then that the fireflies didn’t have a proper plan?
Part 1 itself makes it clear.
There are various audio logs and other collectible notes which indicate the organization as a whole is falling apart. Hell, one of them is technically unmissable: The researcher at the university which gets bitten by his test monkeys basically admits they don’t have any real resources or reach to do any proper testing.
Plus, if the Fireflies can’t get one single girl safely across the USA one way, they’re not going to be able to get the vaccine anywhere even if they somehow make one.
Fair enough, I don’t remember those details, it has been 7 years or so since I played the game. The netflix show has probably also warped my memories.