Joel and Ellie: A Classic, Perfect Duo

It’s hard to overstate the impact Naughty Dog has made when it comes to narrative driven games. Starting with the Uncharted series and the cataclysmic success now retitled The Last of Us: Part I, many games today now include a lot of “Naughty Dog-esque” features: cinematic cutscenes, deep character work, and scene driven primarily by dialogue. The Last of Us: Part I was hailed as a narrative masterpiece with good reason. More than a video game trying to be a movie, it took full advantage of its capabilities as a game, introducing players to a post-apocalyptic world where the gameplay wasn’t just about fending off hordes of infected but navigating the complexities of relationships between unlikely people.

The announcement of a sequel was met with both anticipation and apprehension. Expectations were high. Part I left an indelible mark. Even if Part II couldn’t make par, could it at least be a satisfying, comprehensive experience?

Part II has its fans, but for me, I can barely understand how the same studio could produce two products so vastly different in quality. This makes the Last of Us series an interesting case study for me. We have two games created by (mostly) the same mind and studio, with the same world and similar characters and themes, yet one is universally loved while the other split audiences in two, creating a stark division between critics and players.

It’s time to dissect the storytelling prowess of Part I against the narrative blasphemy of Part II.

Before I go on, I must give a huge shout-out to NakeyJakey, whose YouTube video Naughty Dog's Game Design is Outdated was a massive inspiration for the thought and ideas present in this article. I encourage you to watch this video to see where I'm starting from here. My goal is to contribute the NakeyJakey's ideas from the perspective of a storyteller, while also going into much more detail. This obsession of mine wouldn't exist without NakeyJakey's work, so from me to him, thank you.

(Disclaimer: I’m assuming you are familiar with the plots from both games, so I try to avoid going into extensive detail with what is happening in this game beyond what is strictly necessary for context. So, Spoiler Warning.)

Crafting Unforgettable Characters

Part I’s defining strength was its central characters, Joel and Ellie. And I do mean characters, plural, Neil (we’ll get to that later).

In terms of concept, Joel and Ellie’s relationship wasn’t shockingly original. Its brilliance is all in the execution.

At the start of the game, players are made to play as Joel at the beginning of the apocalypse, when Joel loses his daughter. I don’t know anyone whose played through this sequence without tearing up, no matter how many times they’ve played through it.

It is one of the most heart wrenching introductions to a game… no… a story—we’ve seen in the last few decades. It’s a perfect introduction to Joel’s character, a grizzled survivor who doesn’t let himself get close to anyone, partly because he doesn’t want to be hurt again, and partly because he’s a psychotic murderer who would do anything to survive.

It’s at this point we meet Ellie, a brave and capable teenager, though inexperienced in surviving outside the Boston QZ.

There are a lot of points of tension in their relationship: Joel’s pragmatism vs. Ellie’s idealism, Ellie’s capability vs. Joel’s cautious, controlling nature. Joel’s dialogue starts off brief. He doesn’t want to talk about himself or where he comes from, instead focusing on immediacy.

Ellie is a little more willing to share about herself. She keeps some secrets, but is quick to come clean when confronted, and has no problem sharing her fascinations with puns, comics, and whistling. She focuses on the future, talking about how wonderful things will be once they find the Fireflies.

A game developer’s instinct might be to pull away from having too much conflict between secondary characters and player characters if they want the player to connect with that secondary character, but on the contrary, this conflict is what generates interest in the player.

Where the player is interested is where the player is invested. But how do the game developers capitalise on this investment? How do you build this relationship so that the players not only feel the characters have this touching and complex bond, but that the players themselves have that bond with the characters?

The answer is in the job description. You do it with game design.

Elements of Game Design

Every level of a video game is made up of a series of elements:

· The player’s goal.

· The obstacles they have to overcome.

· What assets players have at their disposal.

· A way of measuring success.

Combat systems are really prevalent because they provide a lot of these elements on their own.

· The goal: kill all the bad guys.

· The obstacles: the bad guys.

· Assets: Ammo, weapons, cover, pathing, stealth.

· Measuring: Health bar, resource management, not dying.

· Bonus: Active Content. The bad guys move to close in on the player. This forces the player to act and naturally improves the game’s pacing.

Of course, this isn’t a complete model. Developers still need to be creative with what the capabilities of players and enemy AI are. They also need to design sets and scenarios to be the backdrops for each combat situation.

Still, it sure does help to start with all these elements inherently in place and not have to reinvent an outline for every project. There’s even a lot of standard practices a developer can draw on, such as creating different enemy types. The Last of Us does this with their runners, clickers, stalkers, and bloaters on the infected side, melee and single fire scavengers, Molotov throwers, tanks, sniper shooters, and soldiers with automatic weapons on the human side. The weaker enemies are introduced at the start of the game, followed by the tougher one later on, then, to create further challenge, enemy types are mixed together and appear in greater numbers.

In terms of environment, the first few combats can occur on a two-dimensional space (player and bad guys face each other head-on), then three-dimensional space (player and/or bad guys come at each other from above or below), then throw in some disintegrating cover.

Characters as Player Assets

Credit where credit is due: Part II is much more innovative in varying its gameplay. While Part I did it to an extent, the set pieces of Part II limited and provided opportunities for players in unique ways that forced them to adapt their play style and take different risks.

Where Part I massively outperformed Part II, relevant to the topic of this article, is how it integrated storytelling with gameplay.

Incorporating the characters you want players to empathise with as an asset should be your goal as a game designer if want to achieve the sort of narrative effect Part I achieved. It’s by treating Ellie as a part of the game that the players come to care about her, as they would care about a new ability or a reward.

The key difference is that this asset is still a character, capable of expressing human emotions, thus drawing on player’s empathy. In what is perhaps the most iconic moment in the game, shortly after Ellie expresses her frustration that Joel won’t let her use a gun, the duo come across a crow’s nest with a rifle and ammo (presumably only enough to last the following fight). On the ground, there is what is probably one of the more challenging fights in the game. There are a ton of enemies spread around a street and two buildings with at least two floors each.

In a dramatic moment of trust, Joel has Ellie cover him with the rifle while he goes down to fight these survivors. The player then plays out the combat scenario.

It’s not likely they will be able to stealth the whole thing before the enemy is alerted. Once the enemies are aggroed, players might quickly feel overwhelmed by the large number of enemies, if Ellie wasn’t providing cover fire.

Sometimes her shots miss, but mostly they hit, sometimes even downing enemies. Within gameplay, Joel will often under his breath say, “Nice shooting, kid,” probably reflecting the relief players feel as they catch a break from the pressure of having to maneuver around bad guys or use their own limited supply of ammo.

At the end of the combat, Joel lets Ellie have a pistol, completing the character arc as Ellie has proven how capable she is and Joel shows he trusts her.

It’s an important part of the story, and it is executed mostly through gameplay. From here on, Ellie provides the player with covering fire in offensive situations. It feels like the players have earned an upgrade as much as Ellie feels rewarded and the duo’s relationship has improved, and it’s acted out through a combination of gameplay and excellent storytelling.

Ellie also serves as an important asset to players when it comes to solving the game’s puzzles. The puzzles often rely on Joel boosting Ellie to a ledge so she can knock down a ladder or box for you to climb up, or Ellie slipping through a tight gap or under a garage door to unlock a door from the other side.

Ellie also can’t swim, while the player can. This introduces another asset to the puzzles in the form of bodies of water the players have to get Ellie across somehow, usually in the form of pallets that players have to locate and bring to Ellie. Of course, all these elements are introduced in isolation before being mixed together later in the game to create more complex puzzles.

Having Ellie be an asset in puzzle solving creates a relationship between the player and Ellie that reflects the building relationship of a team dynamic that’s happening between Joel and Ellie.

Criticism where criticism is due: these puzzles aren’t great. They can be tedious and frustrating if you don’t look at the part of the ledge that triggers the dialogue that allows you to boost Ellie up. They aren’t really solved with insight (it’s usually a matter of finding the right asset and bringing it back to the right spot), so players never experience the thrill of figuring something out like in some of the puzzles of the Uncharted games. They also get repetitive.

However, the puzzles are worlds better than the puzzles in Part II, both in gameplay and in getting players to engage with characters. (Like, seriously, with seven years and more resources than indie developers have bytes on their hard drives, you couldn’t improve moving pallets and ladders around? Though that’s a conversation we are going to have to save for… later.)

Repetitive as the puzzles can be in Part I, this repetition is sometimes subverted to engage players in the story.

For example, after the winter sequence, the way the characters talk to each other shifts dramatically. Joel is chipper and upbeat. The end of their journey is in sight and he’s happy they’re both still alive, talking about teaching Ellie how to swim and how to play the guitar. For the first time in the game, Joel is talking about having a future beyond the daily grind of survival.

Ellie, however, is morose and quiet, reflecting on the trauma she faced in the winter. It’s a complete one-eighty of how their dynamic was in Boston. Instead of banter being passive between the two, whenever Joel says something, players have to trigger a response from Ellie by pressing a button over Ellie’s head, usually just so Joel can get Ellie’s attention and repeat what he says. Ellie’s responses are brief, showing she’s not really listening.

When Joel needs to boost Ellie to a ledge to get a ladder for the hundredth time this game, there’s a long delay. Joel looks around and sees Ellie sitting not far off, looking into her lap. Players get a perfect understanding of where Ellie is at from this interaction. The YouTuber jacksepticeye says it outright. “She is so traumatized.”

Not-so-subtle variations in the routines really unbalance the player, raising questions they ponder and reflect on long after they shut down their game console. Because these sequences so often involve the secondary characters, players end up thinking about and caring about them.

Characters as Player Goals

Game design is a lot like storytelling. In storytelling, you have a character who wants something, and the author makes it progressively more difficult for the character to get that thing.

A game seeks to do the same, except now you do it to the players. The players are motivated to accomplish a goal, get from point A to B. You as a game designer develop challenges that get progressively more complex and difficult as the player progresses.

How do you get players to invest in a goal? You must evoke at least one of two emotions: curiosity and/or concern.

Players get curious when a story poses questions they want answered. They feel concern when they are presented with a daunting situation but there’s hope that a good outcome might be possible.

How do Part I’s gameplay leverage these emotions?

Back to the spring sequence. When Ellie is lowering the ladder for Joel for the thousandth time this game, suddenly something catches her attention and she drops the ladder to run after it. The player’s curiosity is piqued as they try to follow her and see what the big deal is.

“What’s going on? I want to see. I have to see.”

What there is to see is the beautiful and iconic moment with the giraffes. But when you look closer, you notice scenes like this are actually scattered throughout the game.

There’s one scene that’s quite memorable where Joel is lifting rubble to allow Ellie and Tess to get through before moving through himself. This is a sequence players have played through about half a dozen times by this point.

However, this time, the rubble collapses. The player is separated from Ellie and Tess, and the last they see of them is them being chased off by clickers.

This breaking of routine gets players curious. “What is happening to my allies?”

It also raises their concern. “They’re in trouble. I have to get to them!”

This scene becomes memorable, of course, because it’s the moment Tess gets bit.

Another example: Joel and Ellie are traversing an elevator shaft in a hotel crawling with ruthless survivors. Joel gives Ellie a boost to the next floor, something the player has done two dozen times by this point, but suddenly the elevator Joel is standing on gives way and he falls to the bottom.

Once again, an interaction the player has done a lot is suddenly subverted. Now they are separated from Ellie and the player is thinking, “Crap, I have to get up there. I have to see what’s going on. I have to make sure Ellie’s okay!”

Another: In the infected-infested sewers under Pittsburgh, the player goes to open a door, as they have a million times before, but this time a trap is triggered that drops a steel wall between Joel and Sam and Ellie and Henry, creating an interesting scenario where the guardians of these children, who don’t really trust each other (after Henry leaves Joel to die on the bridge out of Pittsburgh) now have to trust each other with one another’s kids.

All these moments become very memorable scenes because they get the player to feel concern or curiosity for the wellbeing of Ellie to a degree stronger than a cutscene ever could. Rather than passively watching events unfold, players are immersed in gameplay and feel part of the action and drama. They feel in sync with Joel.

Notice that in all these cases, the player’s goal is to get to Ellie. Involving Ellie in player’s goals holds true in combat as much as outside it.

For example, a very memorable moment in The Last of Us: Part I is when, while scavenging through Bill’s town, Joel gets caught in a trap where he is tied by his legs with a rope that hangs him upside-down in a warehouse. The other end of the rope is tied to the top of a fridge serving as a counterweight.

Ellie climbs on top of the fridge to cut Joel down. Meanwhile, Joel is vulnerable as infected come to kill him.

The player’s goal is to survive the encounter. They have no mobility, and their vision is inverted, disorienting them. Infinite ammo is turned on, but players are forced to use their revolver, which has massive kickback and only has six shots before players have to sit through a long reload animation.

Players have to not panic, wait for their aiming reticle to settle, and try and down as many infected as they can before having to reload. If a runner gets to the player, they have to mash a button while their health gradually decreases to push them away and try and shoot them again.

The danger here is that it distracts the player while a clicker approaches. Clickers have armor and require more shots than runners. Also, if a clicker gets to the player, they die instantly. If the player’s health goes to zero, they die and have to restart the encounter.

At some point, the fridge falls over. This pulls the player up and out of harms reach while Ellie falls to the floor.

Now the player has to cover Ellie while she tries to cut them loose. If the infected get too close to her, she stops making progress on the rope and runs, prolonging the encounter (theoretically. The encounter eventually ends when Bill shows up and cuts the player down).

If not killed by the player, the infected will eventually catch her, and a rapidly depleting health bar appears over her head. Fail to kill the infected before Ellie’s health depletes, and they rip out her throat and the player gets a game over.

There’s a very subtle shifting in the player’s goals here that end up further endearing them to Ellie. The encounter starts off very classically with the objective being self-preservation. “If I die, I lose. I have to keep myself alive.”

When the player is lifted out of danger, you would think the player would feel their goal was accomplished. Instead, the sequence keeps going, and instead of going to a cutscene where Joel is protecting Ellie, players play out that interaction. Everything remains the same, excepts their goal shifts to, “If Ellie dies, I lose. I have to keep Ellie alive.”

Players care about accomplishing their goal. By making Ellie a part of the players goal, Naughty Dog guaranteed players cared about Ellie.

Even before Ellie gets her gun, Ellie often supports you in combat by lobbing a brick or bottle at an approaching enemy, stunning them, or, if you get caught in a choke hold, by stabbing the enemy and allowing you to break free. Likewise, sometimes Ellie gets caught in a choke hold, and you have to save her before her neck gets snapped or bit, resulting in a game over (thus continually reinforcing, “I have to protect Ellie.”)

When we get to the end of the game and Joel makes his controversial choice, it doesn’t really matter how the players feel about it. Regardless of if they agree or disagree with Joel, their objective is the same as it has been since almost the beginning of the game, “I have to get to Ellie. I have to protect Ellie,” so players are on board with it and it feels like a natural and reasonable progression of events, despite how extreme Joel’s actions are. The ambiguity of the choice would certainly disconnect certain players if the game continued, but wisely, this is the end of the story (or it was >:( ), so instead the climax of the story leaves a massive impact on the players as they drift away from these characters and this world.

Moving Onwards

I have pretty exhaustively gone through how Part I builds the relationship between Joel and Ellie with gameplay, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of how much complexity a game half as long as its successor is able to incorporate. It is important for me to lay this groundwork because all the other elements of both games, the supporting cast, the world building, the themes, and the development of both games, they are all going to be coming back to this central point which is at the heart of The Last of Us series’ success.

Part I did something new by combining the practices of game design and storytelling. The Joel and Ellie dynamic had all the excitement and engagement found in gaming combined with the deep emotional resonance created in storytelling. The result is a powerful connection between audience and character that’s hard to replicate in any other medium for storytelling.

How the other elements supported this, and how Part II departed so far from it, will be a discussion we will have later.