Tear Jerker / The Last of Us

If you are planning on playing this game, fair warning: have a box of tissues next to you. Naughty Dog pulled absolutely no punches with it.

Main Game

Prologue

• The prologue, which the cast and crew members themselves cried at.
  • The soldier ordered to kill Joel and Sarah via radio at the borders of the city to contain the infection. His voice and hesitation ("But, sir, there's a little girl....") make it clear that he doesn't want to, which just makes that he's forced to do so by his superiors and what it means in the story as a whole, all the more tragic.
  • Sarah's cries of agony are horrible to listen to - she doesn't get any last words or dignity. She's crying in pain and then gone, just like that. And then Joel just breaks down, sobbing, begging for his baby girl to come back to him.
    Joel: Don't do this to me, baby, don't do this to me, baby...
  • Troy Baker himself took the prologue exceptionally hard. According to Druckmann, he flat-out despised having to shoot the scene again when asked to. Druckmann also mentioned one of the sound designers having to walk out of the studio to cry for a while. You can see it in the making-of documentary.
• It's a minor example, and one that can be easily missed: while exploring the house as Sarah, a dog can be heard barking outside. After a while, though, that dog suddenly yelps, and then it's never heard from again. Poor dog... Sarah will also gasp when she hears this.
• Sarah is barefoot throughout the entire prologue. Even if her leg hadn't been broken in the crash, Joel wouldn't have let her walk/run through the chaos in bare feet anyway, and there's no way they would be able to find her shoes. He was doomed to carrying her, slowing himself down, and accidentally getting her killed in the quest to bring her to safety anyway. Additional tearjerking also comes from the fact that she's a little girl in her pajamas, barefoot, at the start of an apocalypse - she should never have been there, not like that.

Summer

• Joel and Tess come across a man trapped under a bookcase in an Infected area, his mask broken. You have a gun. He's begging you. You do the math.
• The death of Tess. Some of you might know it's coming, but it doesn't make it much better. Being able to see the body afterwards certainly doesn't help matters.
  • Adding to that, her despair at seeing the dead Fireflies.
• This dialogue between Joel and Bill when they find the dead body hanging from a noose in the house.
  Joel: (sees the dead body hanging from a noose) Jesus. What? Do you know this guy or something?
  Bill: Frank.
  Joel: Who the hell's Frank?
  Bill: He was my partner.
• Frank's final letter to Bill was pretty sad because it partly justified why Bill is asocial.
  • Bill's reaction to Frank's death in general. He doesn't shed any tears, but he doesn't need to.
  • Then there's his reaction when Joel hands him Frank's suicide note. "That's how you feel? Fuck you too, Frank." Then he crumples up the note and tosses it to the ground.
• While in Pittsburgh, Joel and Ellie come across a couple in a bathtub that electrocuted themselves rather than be taken by the Infected. Ellie says they took the easy way out to which Joel replies "It ain't easy", implying he had also been suicidal in the past. And considering what happened to Joel's daughter...
  • You will see a couple being gunned down by some Hunters in hopes of finding useful loot. They didn't have any and the Hunters just leaves. Two adults who have been around since the outbreak, killed for virtually no reason.
  • There's another part in Pittsburgh where you will comes across posters for the movie "Dawn of the Wolf Part 2." If you chose to interact with Ellie during this part you'll get this:
  Joel: I saw this right before the outbreak.
  Ellie: You did? Does he totally gut her by the end?
  Joel: Nobody gets gutted. It's a dumb teen movie.
  Ellie: Who dragged you to see it then?
  Joel: (sigh) I don't know.
  • Even after all of these years, you can still see that Joel still hasn't gotten over his daughter's death.
    • By this part of the game it becomes clear that Joel's coping mechanism is to not acknowledge when someone dies if he can help it. As he did with Tess when Bill brought her up.
    • Crosses into Heartwarming territory when you realize the note in Sarah's bedroom way back in the beginning mentioned she hates the movies Joel likes, and that she has a Dawn of The Wolf poster on the wall. Apparently, neither of them likes each others taste in films all that much, but they still watched them together because they're family.
• A small one, but in the Lincoln chapter, Joel may at one point find a journal written by a young boy where he eventually tells how his family had to move to a quarantine zone and, because animals weren't allowed there, he had to release his dog into the wild. If you're a dog owner/animal lover, just imagine: your whole society suddenly collapses due to whatever reason one day and you're shipped off to a designated quarantine zone, then when you get there, you're told that animals are forbidden and you have no choice but to simply release your dog into the wild and leave it there. At least with people, you can explain what's going on and inform that silence is important regarding infected, many abandoned dogs would probably stay at the gates whining for their owner for days on end till they got shot for making too much noise. At least it's not hard to imagine...
• Going off the number of abandoned buses at the high school in Lincoln, it looks like the evac point fell before everyone could get out.
• Reading all of Ish's notes and seeing what happened to the sewer community.
  • While the entire level is depressing, the really emotionally wrenching part is when you come across the room - which is filled with children's toys - where the children's corpses are and reading the message scrawled on the floor: "THEY DIDN'T SUFFER."
  • Joel, who's usually fairly callous, doesn't try to hide his shock and horror, not even from a relative stranger like Sam.
  Sam: Why couldn't they keep it safe?
  Joel: Son, I wish I knew. God knows they didn't deserve it.
  • It's later revealed after the sewers in a note from Ish that while he and a few others escaped, all it took to be overrun by the Infected was one open door. The incredibly sad moral of the story is that complacency kills, and it took a lot of lives.
• The scene after Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam manage to escape Pittsburgh. Sam turns due to a bite on his leg and attacks Ellie, forcing Henry to shoot him. Having passed the Despair Event Horizon, Henry blames Joel and himself for what happened and then turns the gun on himself.
  Ellie: Oh, God!
  • All the worse when you realize when Henry is saying "It's all your fault!", he's actually talking to himself.
  • For all the crap that Joel's been through in his life, having his moments of anger or shock pop up through his thick surface of a survivor's attitude is one thing - but he's visibly horrified after witnessing Henry kill himself only mere feet away. Whether he's never actually seen someone Driven to Suicide, or never seen despair of that level before his eyes in such a high tension situation, Joel's guarded empathy breaks apart hard, even if only briefly.
  • On top of that, after you're handed control after the seasonal time gap, branching off the path after crossing the dam leads you to a makeshift grave with a teddy bear leaning against it. Interacting with it will prompt Ellie to chastise herself for not placing the toy robot on Sam's grave in a similar manner. Joel scolds her for bringing the event up, to which she replies "I want to talk about it!" and Joel responds "No. How many times have we been over this? Things happen... and we move on."
  • In the director and cast commentary, after the scene between Ellie and Sam the night before Sam's death, Ellie's actress (Ashley Johnson) mentions how extremely saddened she is by the fact that Sam spent the rest of that night he turned alone. Pass the tissues.

Fall

• Joel's comment upon finding a child's grave.
  Joel: That's too small of a grave.
• After Joel and Ellie encounter Tommy, Ellie runs away when she realizes Joel plans to leave her with him. Upon finding her, they have what is perhaps their saddest conversation in the game. Ellie confronts him about his decision and eventually brings up Sarah, and, despite Joel angrily telling her not to go further on that topic and that she has "no idea what loss is", Ellie gets a broken expression as she tells him how "everyone I have ever cared for has either died or left me. Everyone - fucking except for you. So don't tell me that I would be safer with someone else, because the truth is I would just be more scared!" To this, Joel appears to have tears in his eyes as well, but coldly tells her "You're right. You're not my daughter. And I sure as hell ain't your dad. And we're going our separate ways." Thankfully, after they ride through the woods back to Tommy's, Joel will have time to think it over and reveal to Ellie that he will take her with him after all.
  • Ellie's face after their fight says it all. She really did see Joel as her surrogate father and he coldly, with all the gentleness of a hammer to the face, told her otherwise.
  • The Left Behind DLC makes this worse, given what happens to Riley. Ellie knows exactly what losing a loved one feels like.
• Tommy revealing that he went back to Texas a year before Joel turned up with Ellie, and that whilst their stuff was gone, he found something - a picture of Joel and Sarah after one of her soccer games. Joel simply tells Tommy to keep hold of it. And then Ellie gives him the photo again the following summer, having swiped it from Tommy. He keeps it the second time around.
  • If you look closely in the prologue, you can see the same photo - along with one of Sarah and her friends; and one of Tommy, Joel and Sarah - on the wall next to Sarah's bed.
• At the very end of the season, Joel is impaled on an exposed piece of rebar. After half-fighting, half-passing out, he and Ellie manage to get on Callus, only for him to fall off, hitting the ground. Ellie immediately jumping off and going to him, crying and pleading for Joel to get up because she needs him to tell her what to do just demonstrates how thin her tough-girl armor is, and how much she truly needs him.

Winter

• The first level where you play as Ellie following Joel's severe stomach wound that leaves him on the brink of death. The sense of loneliness and vulnerability in the post-apocalyptic world is somehow heightened even more, and you wondered if Naughty Dog really was gutsy enough to kill your protagonist off only two-thirds into the game.
  • When Ellie returns after her hunt and finds Joel in the basement she's secluded him in, he appears to not be moving and she anxiously calls out to him, briefly fearing if he's dead.
• Ellie and Joel's horse, Callus, getting a bullet to his head when Ellie attempts to escape David's gang on him. It crosses over to Nightmare Fuel when David later hints that Callus likely ended up as food.
• Joel finally finding Ellie after walking the entire town just as she kills David in a bloodbath, in shock and totally broken. Cue a Cooldown Hug from Joel.
• During the above scene when Joel for the first time calls Ellie "baby girl". At that point you knew he had grown to see her as a daughter.

Spring

• The start of Spring, following Ellie's kidnapping and almost rape by David. She has completely lost her former humourous disposition, becoming sullen and depressed. Even Joel notices this, and he attempts to joke with her and tell lighthearted stories, to no avail.
• On the top floor of the Fireflies' headquarters there are three audio recorders you can find and listen to; two of them being Marlene's. The second of the two reveals that Ellie's mother, Anna, was an extremely close friend of her's, and she had been looking after her per her request. After a somber chat with the dead regarding her promise and her decision to spare Joel, contrary to advice from her subordinates, she ends her recording with "Oh, I miss you, Anna... your daughter will be with you soon."
• In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, during Joel and Ellie's talk at the very end, Joel will briefly touch his watch while telling her how "you keep finding something to fight for."
• The ending. It's probably one of the least-judgmental, openly morally gray endings in video game history. After everything they go through, Joel saving Ellie is both beautiful and terrible, and it's just so heartbreakingly unfair that Joel has had to choose between saving the world, or saving his world, and has to lie to her to do it... and after the legions of evil humans still running around, himself included, it's hard to blame Joel for thinking that humanity doesn't deserve a cure if it means killing Ellie.
  • Also, pay attention to the music when Joel is escaping with Ellie and it's the same soundtrack that played when Sarah died.
  • Heck, just the fact that during a scene that would usually be accompanied by either action-driven or threatening music, it instead plays an absolutely heartbreaking score to really highlight how Joel's in the same position he was at the beginning of the story, carrying his "baby girl" to safety through hostile environment with no means of defending himself. Gets even worse if you fail to escape with her, in which you're then treated to a scene of the Fireflies pulling Ellie out from Joel's arms while he desperately yells for them to let go of her, before they knock him to the ground and shoot him in the middle of a Big "NO!" and Futile Hand Reach.
  • After Marlene catches him at gunpoint in the parking garage, she tries to peacefully talk Joel into giving Ellie back. It cuts to Joel in a van driving away, seemingly alone, until we hear Ellie wake up in the back. Joel lies to Ellie, telling her that the Fireflies had found dozens of others who were immune to the Cordyceps and that it hadn't gotten them any closer to finding a cure. At the same time Joel is explaining this, it shows him shooting Marlene in the stomach with his hidden pistol and placing Ellie in the van. Marlene begs Joel to let her live, but Joel says "You'd just come after her" and puts a bullet between her eyes. The tone of Joel's voice makes it clear that he doesn't want to kill her, but he knows he has to.
• Even if you agree with Joel's decision to take Ellie away from the hospital, you can't help but feel the horrible burden on Joel's shoulders now. He knows that the world needs this cure, or else life will die. He has to live with the fact with maybe, just maybe, Ellie would have cured the world of this infection. And saving her life sealed Humanity's fate.
  • That and there's also the hesitation he had before he said 'I swear'. It's possible he knew she wouldn't believe him, and did it so she could blame him rather than herself for potentially screwing up humanity.
• Joel telling Ellie "I'm taking us home..." referring to them just like they were family. Made worse as it's followed by "I'm sorry..." when he sees her turning away, knowing he basically just broke her heart telling her that her immunity was nothing special and their journey had been for nothing.
  • It doesn't help that Ellie probably figured out that Joel was hiding something right away, and that Joel probably knew she wouldn't buy it. He may well have been implicitly apologizing for what he did.

Left Behind

• Naturally, Ellie and Riley getting bitten. Ellie reacts by rubbing at the wound as if she's trying to remove it and repeatedly saying "No... no"' before Riley reveals to having been bitten as well. Cut till next scene with them, Ellie is smashing pots in anger before she sits down next to Riley and cries while Riley contemplates what "options" they have. In the end, they decide not to go for suicide but will stay alive together as long as they can, before they'll "poetically lose their minds together". Riley's broken expression while Ellie cries and wipes tears and blood from her face is what makes it so sad to watch.
  Ellie: What are we going to do?
  Riley: Way I see it, we got two options. One: (lifts gun up), we take the easy way out. It's quick and painless. ... I'm not a fan of option one. Two: we fight.
  Ellie: Fight for what? We're gonna turn into one of those things.
  Riley: ... There are a million ways we should've died today. And a million ways we could die before tomorrow. But we fight... for every second we get to spend with each other. Whether it's two minutes... or two days... we don't give that up. I don't want to give that up. My vote? Let's just wait it out. You know, we can be all poetic and just lose our minds together.
• The conversation is made even more sad and meaningful by the fact that it jumps ahead in time, showing Ellie having patched Joel up and wrapped him in blankets on a makeshift sleigh hooked onto Callus, preparing herself to ride into a snowstorm with him. The implication being that Riley's words are what made her insistent on doing her best to save Joel rather than just consider the situation hopeless.
• The saddest is probably Riley herself, considering you spend the whole DLC getting to know her as well as her and Ellie's touching relationship, only to realize that she became an infected shortly after the ending. Plus, Ellie would either have had to kill her, or she was "left behind" remaining a Runner.

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