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.
I’m going to say no, because Joel didn’t remove humanity’s only hope for a future.
First things first, there was no reason that Ellie needed to be killed and operated on before she woke up. A day or two of waiting so she could give informed consent and allow her the choice of sacrificing herself so that the doctors could get to the gooey bits in her brain would not have been the make of break point of solving the world’s problems. They’d dealt with the shit for twenty years.
For two, there was no reason to kill Ellie right away. Doctors can do these things called “biopsies” where they can extract a small, non-fatal amount of tissue to test. Ellie was literally a goose that laid golden eggs, and the brilliant plan of the doctor running the hospital Joel escorted her to was going to cut her open to find out how she made it. Biopsy that shit. See if you can replicate it as a culture in a petri dish. See if it can help other people before you kill her for the brain goo. No need to jump straight to killing her.
For three, even in the event Ellie needed to die for the cure and even if it would have worked (neither of which were confirmed by the Fireflies), there is no way they could have used it to cure the world. The Fireflies didn’t have the logistics, manpower, or facilities to manufacture a mass amount of the cure or vaccine, even if they could do so in the first place and even if everything went exactly to plan. They couldn’t smuggle one girl across the USA and they’re acting like they could have done something with a cure? Nope.
Finally… The damage to the world was done long, long ago. Even in a miracle situation where killing Ellie would produce a viable cure that they could distribute without issue to every surviving member of humanity, that doesn’t change all the currently infected which keep them caged in cities with high walls and all the damage that’s been done in the twenty years since it happened. Even if everything went to plan perfectly, it doesn’t change the fact that a cure or vaccine is putting a bandaid on a fucking apocalypse. The world wasn’t on the verge of collapse. It collapsed. It’s done.
Everyone saying Joel fucked humanity by choosing to not let Ellie die is ignoring some very basic, fundamental facts about the world they live in.
I see you are a true Joel apologist (joking). This was not the point I was trying to make, of course there are differences between the worlds and details of the choice made in both games. But more importantly there is a huge similarity in the choice the game sort of forces you to make, a choice that is inherently selfish and does not feel like the right choice. However, the alternative is subjective worse to both the protagonists and to us as players who have identified with them and have also grown to care for their companions.
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.
I might also add that in both stories the companions are both very much willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and are greatly disappointed when we don’t let them make their own choice, which makes it all even more conflicting.