Video Game / The Last of Us Part II

Due to its nature as a sequel, spoilers for The Last of Us and the Left Behind DLC will be left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

"...but I can't walk on the path of the right,
because I'm wrong."

"I'm gonna find... and I'm gonna kill... every last one of them."

— Ellie

The Last of Us Part II is the sequel to The Last of Us, developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 4.

Its story opens a few years after the end of the first game, and once again follows Action Survivors Ellie and Joel in a United States that has been destroyed by a fungal based Zombie Apocalypse. After a violent encounter with another survivor group, a now-19-year-old Ellie embarks on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge across the shattered country.

The game was released on June 19, 2020 after being delayed amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic and a major Content Leak. The story for a potential sequel has been outlined, but ND has no immediate plans to develop it. Due to the success of the first season of the HBO series adaptation, a second season adapting this game was announced not too long after the premiere. According to Neil Druckmann and co-showrunner Craig Mazin, they plan to adapt the game over multiple seasons (which is understandable considering the length of this game compared to the first one).

A remastered version for the PlayStation 5 was released on January 19, 2024; owners of the original game may upgrade to the remaster at a cheaper price. Apart from improved visuals, this version includes developer commentary, several unfinished levels, and a new Roguelite mode called "No Return", where players can play through several levels as characters from the series in wave-based combat challenges.

Previews: PSX 2016 Trailer, PGW 2017 Trailer, E3 2018 Trailer, State Of Play 2019 Trailer

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The Last of Us Part II provides examples of the following tropes:

Tropes #-D

• 11th-Hour Superpower: There are two "final" weapons to be found that can't be upgraded, but they don't need to.
  • Abby gets a flamethrower that is essentially a One-Hit Kill against anything below Shambler levels of suck. Its ammo consumption is okay-ish, as is its range, giving you a get-out-of-jail-free card in most situations if things get hairy.
  • Ellie gets a natively suppressed submachine gun instead. With an ammo cap of 60, a two-shot burst fire mode that insta-kills most humans on a headshot, and plenty of spare ammo pickups, that's 30 dead enemies even without restocking. Its only downside is its abysmal accuracy.
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: When Ellie is looking through an old dinosaur book, she mispronounces Deinonychus as "die-no-NY-kus", instead of "die-NON-ih-kus".
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: The PSX 2016 trailer has Ellie quietly playing the guitar, only for the camera to pull out to show a large shootout has just occurred in the house she's sitting in.
• Action Girl: All of the female playable characters and companions are able to mix it up with human and infected opponents. Abby, however, distinguishes herself as the most dangerous fighter head-to-head and indeed, her gameplay sections and skills are meant for direct combat.
• Advertised Extra: Despite being the faction that Ellie is shown fighting in the first gameplay trailer, the Seraphites have nothing to do with her goals, as they only serve as mooks who she comes across. The WLF, or rather specific members of the WLF, are Ellie's true enemies. Downplayed during Abby's segment of the story—the Seraphites are the main antagonists she deals with since she's a member of the WLF, and is trying to help two children escape them. Played straight again when the WLF turn on Abby; she then just tries to escape while the two factions tear each other apart. Neither faction shows up in the last arc.
• A.K.A.-47: All weapons in the game are faithfully modeled after real-life gear (save for the military pistol, crossbow, and flamethrower), but are only referred to by generic names like revolver, hunting rifle, pump-action shotgun and so on.
• All for Nothing:
  • The WLF's all-out assault on the Seraphites' home on the half-submerged Queen Anne neighborhood turns out to be a senseless waste of life on both sides of the conflict. The Wolves are slaughtered and completely routed after Isaac's death at Yara's hands, with the only survivors being the ones who didn't participate in the invasion and remained at SoundView Stadium or the FOB. The Scars violently and horrifically massacre the invaders, but their homes and supplies endure a scorched earth-level attack, meaning the survivors will most likely die from their injuries and/or malnutrition. After the Time Skip, neither faction is ever mentioned again, suggesting both were disbanded due to lack of sufficient numbers left on either side.
  • On both ends of the spectrum when it concerns Ellie and Abby's quests for revenge. The latter avenges her father, but it doesn't bring her any closure, and her friends paid the price in trying to achieve her revenge at either Ellie or Tommy's hands. For Ellie, while she does take out some of those responsible for Joel's death, she ultimately spares his killer at the end of everything. However, Jesse was also killed, and by the time she breaks her Cycle of Revenge, she's given up her family for the sake of revenge, with Dina making good on her threat of not being there when Ellie returns. The only things Ellie had to show for her efforts were losing her switchblade and two of her fingers after her final fight with Abby. It's strongly implied that Ellie, while in the midst of her near-victory (amongst a number of other feelings), realizes that she has effectively "won" the game's revenge feud, but by killing Abby, she gains effectively nothing in the end while having already thrown away a great deal more.
  • Tommy's own revenge quest falls into this. While he also kills many WLF members and some that were responsible for his brother's death, his two encounters with Abby end with him getting injured (with the second one in particular nearly killing him). Not only does this dampen his relationship with Maria, but by the time his wounds heal up he's limping, blind in one eye and it's implied in his last scene with Ellie and Dina that he's now possibly suffering from some sort of brain damage. Him guilt-tripping Ellie into going after Abby one last time also falls into this as she ultimately spares her.
  • On a smaller scale, Abby's ordeal to obtain medical supplies for Yara, including her nightmarish encounter with the Rat King, is rendered moot when Yara is shot dead by Wolves less than a day after her surgery.
• Ambiguous Ending:
  • Ellie: At first it can come off as a Downer Ending, with her returning home to find Dina and JJ gone with nothing telling her where they went; losing her ability to play the guitar like Joel taught due to the loss of her fingers to Abby; and a good deal of her friends dead or gone. However, some players have pointed out several important factors such as Ellie wearing completely different clothes and looking a bit fuller compared to how skinny she was in Santa Barbara, the only items left in the farm specifically being things that remind Ellie of Joel, her lack of surprise or grief regarding Dina and JJ not being there, and the fact that she's wearing Dina's bracelet, imply that she and Dina did reconnect after she gave up on trying to kill Abby and that they simply moved elsewhere, with the reason she's at the farm being so she could finally confront and get closure for Joel's death.^note In the earlier section where they lived on the farm, Ellie can come across a letter from Jesse's mother who offers her family's help if the couple and JJ were ever to return to Jackson, suggesting at least one possible answer to where they are by the ending. However, there are opposition to this theory since nothing is outright confirmed. Therefore, how the game ends is ultimately up to the player's interpretation, which is ND's official stance about it.
  • It’s never outright stated what happened to Abby and Lev, but after completing the story, the main menu screen becomes a beached boat with Catalina Casino in the background, implying that they found the Fireflies safely.
• Ambiguously Evil: The Seraphites’ prophet. Yara and Lev say that there is nothing inherently violent in what she taught and it’s the current elders who’ve corrupted her teachings. However, Lev doesn’t deny that she blew up a truck and killed a bunch of soldiers.
• Anachronism Stew: The opening has Joel play Pearl Jam's Future Days for Ellie on the guitar. The song, never released as a single, was the closer off of their album Lightning Bolt. Unfortunately, Lightning Bolt was released in October of 2013, a month after the pandemic wrecked society in the games. The song was debuted live in July of that year, however, making it slightly possible, albeit unlikely, that he heard the song through one of the band's official bootleg album releases. Druckmann later explained that Joel heard the song from a fancam Youtube video of that concert, linking to the exact time in a tweet.
• Angry Guard Dog: The guard dogs of the WLF are this to Ellie. Enemy squads will occasionally bring a dog along with them, and they can sniff out Ellie, following her scent trail without fail before attacking viciously. Of course, from the point of view of the WLF, a guard dog is a helpful and friendly Canine Companion.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Somewhere between a third and half of the game, including the entire second act, is played as Abby.
• And Then What?: Abby spent the last five years becoming big and strong and a ruthless killer, all to find Joel and kill him for what he did to her father. She tracks down Joel, kills him brutally, and... she's still having nightmares. His death didn't bring her closure, her ex and closest friend Owen still loves her but is terrified of her, her other close friend Mel sees through her and knows she's a bad person that's done terrible things, and Isaac and the rest of the WLF still expect her to be the top Scar killer and torturer and don't actually challenge her morality. In the flashback of the immediate aftermath of Joel's death, her facial expressions alone show her realization that revenge hasn't actually made her feel any better. Through helping Lev and Yara, she works through her guilt, gets the closure she needed from her father's murder and starts making a redemptive turn.
• And Starring:
  • The opening credits sequence has "And Laura Bailey", who plays Abby, the main "antagonist".
  • The closing credits sequence has “and Jeffrey Wright as Isaac”.
• Annoying Arrows: Played Straight by the player; while you can be shot with arrows by the Seraphites during combat and they have to be removed in order to stop progressive health loss, it's still only a minor inconvenience rather than being a crippling injury. Thankfully Averted for the enemies though, as any shot is almost always lethal on an unarmored enemy, like in the first game.
• Anachronic Order: The story bounces between flashbacks and current events, and between Abby and Ellie's perspectives; it shows Ellie's current unrelenting drive for revenge, while Abby's side of the story is shown to garner sympathy for those Ellie kills.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • When you kill all the enemies in an area, your character (or ally) will always give a verbal statement letting the player know the area is secure, so you'll know it's safe to stop sneaking around and can freely search for supplies in peace.
  • The game gives players a huge range of options to adjust its difficulty according to one's personal preference (such as the ability to manually adjust enemy AI), giving gamers who aren't good at this sort of game a decent chance to enjoy its story without worrying too much about combat. The litany of accessibility features can also be used to make the game much easier to play even if you don't need them for their intended purpose. A lack of difficulty-related achievements (aside from those for completing Grounded and Permadeath modes) only makes this more attractive to casual gamers.
  • Aside from ammo, enemies now also drop crafting components if you're running low on those.
  • Ellie retains her trusty unbreakable switchblade from the first game. Not having to rely on jury-rigged shivs makes clickers much easier to deal with as long as they haven't detected her.
  • No matter where you go through buildings, your horse will always be waiting on you when you get outside so you don't have to go looking for it.
  • If you reload a checkpoint after picking up collectibles in the same area, they don't need to be picked up again to make sure you don't miss or forget about them.
  • All of the tripwire traps or out-of-reach glass panes have a few bricks or bottles nearby to use on them.
  • Watching your companion's behaviour is a reliable way to judge if there's trouble ahead. They'll walk casually when you're safe, draw their weapons and move more carefully when you aren't, and drop a line like "that's all of them" after combat encounters to let you know you're in the clear.
  • If you get stuck finding the way out of a certain area, the companion can usually be found looking straight at it, if they don't point it out aloud.
  • Instead of the vague descriptions in the original game, Part II's weapon upgrades tell you exactly how effective they'll be (like "+25% damage" or "+60% stability") to allow you to make more informed decisions on what to spend your scarce resources on.
  • Finishing the game lets you replay its chapters individually, complete with showing you the total amount of collectibles they contain versus the ones you've found.
  • In Assault and Capture levels in No Return, when there's only one enemy left, an on-screen arrow will provide their real-time location on all difficulties below Grounded.
• Anyone Can Die: And boy, do they ever. You'd be well advised to not get attached to any particular character.
• Are You Sure You Want to Do That?: Joel asks Ellie in the PSX 2016 Trailer "You really going to go through with this?" in regards to her planned Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Not only is Joel dead at this point, given the motivation behind the rampage, it's a textbook case of Trailers Always Lie.
• Armies Are Evil: Just like in the first game, every organized military force is depicted negatively. Both the WLF and Seraphites are shown as more than willing to slaughter anyone they come across, including kids and civilians.
• Armor Is Useless: Zigzagged. The human enemies in the final chapter wear riot armour that protects them from headshots and lets them soak up a few more hits to the body, but it does nothing against melee takedowns, Molotovs, or explosives. Other enemies, such as WLF soldiers and certain infected, wear ballistic vests but aren't any tougher than folks clad in jeans and shirts.
• Armor-Piercing Response: After Abby chides Owen and tells him to grow up and stop chasing the Fireflies, Owen retorts that Abby's method of "growing up" was finding and murdering Joel. Abby can only try to assault him in response.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • Unless you neuter it in the options menu, the enemy AI is terrifyingly good at its job of making your life a living hell. No nook or cranny is safe from their investigation while they're looking for you, they usually cover each other well enough to make it difficult to take them out individually without alerting the whole group, and once open combat breaks out, their well-rehearsed teamwork will get you flanked and surrounded before you know what hit you if you aren't constantly aware of your surroundings. And woe betide you if they brought guard dogs, or start tossing molotovs and pipe bombs.
  • On the flip side, with all protagonists now being adults, your sidekicks have also taken several levels in badass. Companions like Dina are very capable at defending themselves from most attacks, pulling raging infected off of you, killing attackers quickly and efficiently, and even setting up the occasional melee combo with you. If you manage to ninja your way through hostile encounters until only two enemies are left, they'll stealth-kill one when you're taking care of the other.
• Artistic License: For the most part, the traversable areas in Seattle are accurate, though there are a few artistic liberties taken for the sake of gameplay and story and/or to keep things lawyer-friendly, such as removing building names (like the Polyclinic), changing building names (Hotel Sorrento to "Serevena Hotel", Washington State Convention Center to "Seattle Conference Center", Nordstrom to "Norkirk", etc.), adding buildings (the Hotel Blacray), replacing buildings (the Capitol Hill gas station is noticeably bigger than its real-life counterpart), and changing the interior of existing buildings (the Synagogue is actually a former Methodist Church IRL; the in-game Seattle Waterfront Aquarium's exterior is accurate, but the exhibits inside bear no resemblance to its real-life counterpart).
• Artistic License – Animal Care: The WLF's football stadium-cum-farm is several hundred times too small to support the number of animals living in it. Dozens of cows and sheep are shown grazing comfortably in about half an acre of pasture. That wouldn't be enough to feed one cow for one week, never mind dozens of them over several years.
• Artistic License – Biology: On at least three separate occasions (the Outbreak Day robbers within the Downtown bank vault, the Hillcrest neighbours trapped inside a spore-infested garage by Boris Legasov for planning to betray him to the WLF, and the monstrous Rat King), Infected humans are clearly shown to be capable of remaining active for years to decades without any sustenance whatsoever.
• Artistic License – Engineering: Apart from its size, the viability of the concept of turning a football field into a farm is pretty questionable in general. While smaller or amateur fields sometimes are simply soil and grass, the playing fields of large football stadiums are generally comprised of several feet of artificial grasses, rubber, shock absorbers, textiles, crushed stone and drainage pipes, with compacted soil only comprising the very deepest foundational layer. To be able to grow plants or pasture animals would be impossible without digging everything up and replacing it with soil and planting grass, and while the latter is not impossible, it would be hugely difficult and time-consuming even with unlimited access to modern construction equipment (assuming said equipment even still works after twenty years or so of inactivity).
• Artistic License – Military: While replaying previous levels in New Game Plus, boxes of ammo for the submachine gun will appear the same as the ones for the rifle. However, by definition submachine guns are only designed to fire pistol ammunition.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: A very minor example. At one point, Ellie reads a dinosaur picture book and reads Deinonychus out loud, and mispronounces it as Die-no-nigh-kus. The correct pronunciation is Die-non-i-kus.
• Artistic License – Pharmacology: The player characters can again collect random pills, but after decades, there is no chance that whatever chemical in the pills would have a beneficial effect great enough to buff the characters, and that's not counting the fact that the pills are scavenged indiscriminately and ingesting a mix of medicines without care is never a good thing to do.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The AI may have taken several levels in badass since the first game, but some of the old tricks still work like a charm. Case in point: while facing un-alerted infected, throw a bottle or brick, wait a few seconds, then throw a molotov cocktail at the exact same spot. Nine times out of ten it'll reduce the pack to one, maybe two stragglers at most, if not wipe it out completely quickly and efficiently. The best thing is that it mostly falls under Gameplay and Story Integration, since infected are basically dumb animals that fall easily for such tricks. Trying this on humans won't work nearly as well.
  • Enemies never react to pipe bombs at all. You can throw one directly at an enemy soldier's feet while they're engaged in a shootout with you, and they'll just continue taking pot shots until it blows them to bits.
  • AI is as competent at fighting the Player Character, as it is inept at fighting NPCs. This becomes painfully apparent whenever WLF soldiers and Seraphites go up against each other, and especially when humans are attacked by infected. A single clicker, sometimes even just a measly runner, can wipe out a whole squad of heavily armed soldiers with nothing in terms of meaningful resistance. Soldiers simply running from cover to cover as clickers chase them around the map in circles, Benny Hill-style, instead of fighting is also common.
  • Human enemies who discover a mound of their slain allies will walk right up to the same spot and fall into your clutches as well.
  • As in the first game, attempting to fire an empty gun will result in the enemies noticing the clicking sound and attempt to charge you in response, which would be artificial brilliance...except for the fact that you can immediately switch to a live gun and pop them real quick, rinse and repeat, and they’ll never grow the wiser from it.
  • It’s very easy (and hilarious) to lay down a mine, throw something to lure a human enemy over and blow them up, and do this repeatedly since they don’t wise up to it.
• Asshole Victim: Oh boy, where to begin... With the story revolving around hate and revenge, set in a city that's being fought over by two equally evil factions of survivors, almost everyone who bites the dust qualifies, minus a small handful of sympathetic supporting characters that didn't deserve their gruesome fate. And then the final chapter introduces a group of slavers to massacre without remorse. You know a story is dark when the resident infected hordes are the least evil threat because, dangerous as they may be, they're merely driven by animalistic instincts instead of the worst facets of human nature. With the apocalypse having well established itself, the infected are narratively a background threat, if one that sometimes asserts itself (most notably in the form of the Rat King); in one flashback while out on a patrol, Tommy casually notes that they have established migration patterns.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Abby's semi-automatic rifle can be upgraded with a burst-fire mode. While certainly cool, it changes nothing about the rifle's ammo cap of 18 rounds, so using burst fire cuts down the number of potential dead enemies from 18 to 6. You're better off sticking with semi-auto fire and investing upgrade resources into something more practical.
• Badass and Child Duo: Abby and Lev as a Foil to Joel and Ellie in the first game.
• Badass Army: The Seraphites. Despite their refusal to use modern technology (mostly), they are a massive threat to the vastly more well-armed WLF. The Wolves' invasion of their island is the last mistake they ever make.
• Bag of Spilling: There are a few times where the protagonists end up with a reduced inventory, but these are usually justified. Some are a consequence of Time Skips, others of official procedure (like Ellie checking in her weapons and any salvaged ammo at the end of her patrol for Jackson). Weapon upgrades are permanent, though.
• Bait-and-Switch: At the Seattle Harbor, Abby can find a note from a person whose boat was shot at by a Scar sniper. Shortly after, Abby reunites with Manny, who is attempting to close in on an unknown sniper who just killed his WLF team, with the shooter only being seen as a reflection from their scope and a shadow behind it. It initially seems apparent that this is the same sniper from the note, however as they get closer, a keen-eyed player will notice the assailant looks oddly familiar. After the trespasser kills Manny and Abby pursues them onto the pier, the sniper slams a door on her head, pummels her against the railing, and the camera turns around to reveal none other than Tommy.
• Bait the Dog: Abby's first on-screen interaction with Joel is a positive one; he saves her life and they fight together to survive. Also, before that, Abby is shown to be a pretty decent person. Killing him is her driving motivation, and she brutally tortures him to death a while later.
• Balance Buff: The bow returns from the first game, and has a few boosts to make it more useful. For starters, the bow originally had an arc similar to throwing items. The sequel replaces the arc with a standard reticle to make aiming much easier and provides a specific upgrade to still help out with determining the range. Secondly, the bow also has better accuracy since arrows fly more straighter this time around. Lastly, arrows can now be crafted and you even get access to explosive arrows.
• Bald of Evil: Male Seraphites shave their head. This serves as a plot point because Lev also shaved his head, his way of coming out as a man.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: The WLF's all-out invasion of the Seraphites' home on the flooded Queen Anne neighborhood quickly sets the town ablaze from end to end. You spend some intense minutes trying to get through this hell alive.
• Battle Couple: Ellie and her girlfriend Dina kick major ass together.
• Battle in the Rain: It's raining for most of the time the protagonists spend in Seattle, so they have plenty of those.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: After Abby delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to Ellie and Dina in which both their faces are smashed into bloody messes, the only effect is a few very subtle scars.
• Biblical Motifs: The Seraphites take their name and inspiration from the Seraph order of angels in the Bible. They're seen in the Book of Isaiah, where they help him see the error of his ways, and Revelation, where they're constantly in God's presence.
  Revelation 4:4-8: [A]nd they rest not day and night, saying, 'Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.
• Big "NO!":
  • A gut-wrenching one by Ellie as she watches Joel's head get bashed in with a golf club.
  • Tommy does a similar one earlier when he sees Joel get shot in the knee with a shotgun before being knocked out.
• Birds of a Feather: Apparently, Ellie's first long-term girlfriend was a tattoo-artist named Cat, whose only commonality with Ellie was that both of them were sexually attracted to each other.
• Bittersweet Ending: The main protagonists go through complete and utter hell, suffer major losses and are considerably worse off than where they started at the beginning of the game. All that being said, while their futures are uncertain, they do get some measure of peace in the end:
  • Ellie has survived and ultimately decided to end the Cycle of Revenge. However, Joel is still dead, she murdered a lot of people, and she also lost two fingers and her switchblade in her final confrontation with Abby. Her loved ones are either dead, crippled, or have abandoned her. In the epilogue, Ellie returns to Wyoming, only to find that Dina has left and taken the baby with her (having previously pleaded with Ellie to let go of her desire for revenge and warning her that she might not still be there when she returns). Finding that she can't even play the guitar anymore (the last link she had left with Joel) due to her lost fingers, she abandons the guitar and leaves the farm. Nonetheless, Ellie has forgiven Joel's actions, and has forgiven herself for her survivor guilt and for pushing Joel away for years. In the final scene, she heads off to an unknown destination, though she still has Tommy, Maria and the town of Jackson to return to.
  • Abby has succeeded in avenging her father by killing Joel, but it brings her no catharsis. Her revenge quest has directly led to the deaths of all of her friends, including Owen whom she was still in love with. She is outcast from the WLF and forced to run away with Lev when both their groups go up in smoke in a huge battle. Several months later, Abby follows a tip about a possible reorganization of the Fireflies that leads to her and Lev's capture by slavers. In the end, she is spared by Ellie but both her and Lev are left injured, malnourished and with nowhere to go and no one turn to. Despite this, she has survived the ordeal and regained her humanity. Abby gets closure for her father's murder and finds new purpose in caring for Lev. There is also Fireflies' new location tip they can follow, and upon completing the game, the main menu background shows their boat beside Catalina Casino, indicating that the both of them may get a new beginning.
• Black Comedy: This game is full of this and some of the collectibles has a lot of morbid jokes, as well as several conversations from other characters. As if the story wasn't dark enough...
• Blackout Basement: While exploring, one can always find dark areas hidden from sight, usually with good loot but also sheltering a mob of infected. The only lighting available there will usually be the characters' flashlights, which are frustratingly prone to temporary failures in these specific areas.
• Blamed for Being Railroaded: Abby's grudge against Joel is the result of his killing her father, who was the lead surgeon on the operation on Ellie at the end of the first game. This is deliberately invoked, as any player who finished the original game would have had to kill him in order to proceed, making them complicit in the act.
• Bland-Name Product: A lot of the stores in Seattle are made up companies to keep things lawyer-friendly. However, a few, in particular, stand out for being clearly based on real ones.
  • When Ellie is fighting a group of Seraphites, you have to go through a makeup store called “Merci” to progress. With its black and white colour palette and store layout, it's a pretty obvious stand-in for a Sephora store. The name also gives it away, since Sephora is a subsidiary of French luxury conglomerate LVMH.
  • In the Capitol Hill section of Seattle, Ellie can explore a wooden-shelved, chalk sign using a stand-in for Trader Joe's.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The gore effects are hugely improved from the first game, with a focus on minor grisly details rather than just reducing everything to a red pulp. Jaws get split open by machetes or even just flat out shot off, skulls get crushed by lead pipes or get skinned with a blunt weapon, limbs get blown off by shotguns and hunting rifles, pieces of bone can be found in the gore that remains of an obliterated head, teeth get knocked loose by baseball bats, bodies get bisected by landmines with their guts spilling everywhere, Pretty Little Headshots is averted even harder than in the first game, Slashed Throats have realistically large blood spurts, and blood will realistically and dynamically pool from wounds in ways that are consistent with the environment surrounding the corpse (including diffusing in puddles and causing snow to melt). If someone dies in an explosion, their viscera may get stuck to and drip from low ceilings, and you might even find sizable chunks as interactable objects you can push around.
• Blood Is Squicker in Water:
  • Enemy blood pools will get diluted by puddles of water.
  • Ellie stabs a Clicker to death in a river, producing a cloud of blood.
  • Falling off a waterfall results in this happening after Abby hits her head on a rock.
  • Happens when Abby bites Ellie's fingers as she's being choked in the ocean.
• Blood-Splattered Warrior: Several shots from the story trailer show Ellie covered in varying amounts of blood, including a scene in the rain where she's completely drenched.
• Body Horror:
  • Thanks to the updated graphics, the infected look more disgusting and horrifying than ever.
  • For much the same reason, whatever you do to your enemies also tends to have very nasty effects, from gaping bullet wounds to entire limbs getting blown off by shotgun blasts or explosions, all rendered in excruciatingly realistic detail.
• Body of Bodies: One boss that Abby encounters is the Rat King, a unique infected form where the Cordyceps fungus has caused several infected to merge into one disgusting blobby body. Things get more complicated when the damage Abby inflicts on it helps a massive beefed-up stalker-clicker hybrid to tear free from the main form, forcing her to fight two boss-level enemies simultaneously.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Jordan has a fatal lapse of this. He insists on keeping Ellie alive to pump her for info, which is fair enough, but after Dina shoots his partner dead and comes crashing through the roof, he puts his gun away and decides to chance his victory on a physical throwdown instead, giving Ellie all the time she needs to break free and shank him in the neck. Dina is able to recover from the fall pretty quickly and puts up a decent fight, giving the player a generous window to free themselves.
• Book Ends:
  • The game begins and ends with a shot of Ellie's guitar.
  • The story kicks off proper with Joel rescuing Abby, and then Abby killing him despite his good actions. Towards the end of the story, Ellie rescues Abby, and Abby can't even think of herself in the moment and goes to immediately rescue Lev, a nod to her Character Development. She only fights Ellie after Ellie threatens Lev's life.
• Boom, Headshot!: Helmeted enemies only appear in the final chapter, making headshots with any gun instantly lethal against anything short of clickers and other Elite Zombies for most of the game.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The basic pistol remains indispensable throughout the whole game thanks to its relatively high ammo capacity, frequent ammo pickups, good base stats all around, its ability to kill most human enemies with one headshot, and being the only reliable silent ranged weapon when fitted with a suppressor. It's the main reason you should always be on the lookout for more bottles to turn into suppressors.
  • Like in the first game, bricks and bottles can be incredibly effective in combat. They're everywhere, can be used to stun humans and infected, and make great melee weapons. If you're playing on a higher difficulty, they're indispensable in saving precious ammunition and other throwables.
  • Abby’s crossbow isn’t nearly as awesome as some of her other weapons (hello, flamethrower), but it can be brutally effective. You can upgrade it with a scope, and the arrows are sturdy enough that if you get a headshot you’ll be able to recover them (usually). It also doesn’t have the arc that Ellie’s bow does to get headshots more easily. It’s the most practical and reliable of the silenced weapons if you upgrade it enough.
• Boss Battle: Quite a few of them, though with varying degrees of intensity.
  • At least three Seraphite Brutes armed with massive sledgehammers must be killed to proceed. Ellie has her full arsenal at her disposal, while Abby only has her fists.
  • Once again, Bloaters must be defeated in two separate instances.
  • The sniper at the Seattle Harbor. A sequence that tests the player's ability to proactively duck and cover from a relentless shooter off in the distance while staving off hordes of infected that the assailant is luring over with their gunshots. You finally reach them, only to find out your deadly enemy was actually Tommy.
  • Ellie and Abby throw down two times. The first time, the players control Abby while Ellie behaves much like a One-Hit Kill Stalker, leading to a deadly game of cat and mouse in the theatre. The second time is a brutal melee fight with the player controlling Ellie.
  • And of course there's the Rat King, a unique infected that Abby encounters in the basement of the Seattle hospital. Out of all these examples, this one is arguably the one "true" boss battle.
• Boss Corridor: Abby goes to the hospital parking lot to find an ambulance for medical supplies. The area is very quiet despite the clear signs that something big is roaming around. Sure enough, the Rat King attacks her as soon as she enters the ambulance and grabs what she needs.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Usually averted with extreme prejudice, but played straight in scripted sequences where the plot demands that the player be able to shoot as much as they like. Played straight with the NPCs, unsurprisingly.
  • The game was patched shortly after release to include gameplay modifiers; these modifiers include the ability to play the game with infinite ammo. The only requirement is beating the main game on any difficulty first.
• Breakable Weapons:
  • Although Ellie's primary melee weapon, her switchblade, is as unbreakable as it was in the original game, heavier melee equipment still breaks after a few uses. Fortunately, the craftable upgrade that increases their damage now also restores them to full durability, so with some careful planning and the occasional investment of resources, you can prevent your weapon from breaking for quite some time.
  • Not a weapon per se, but the jury-rigged suppressors Ellie can craft for her semi-auto handgun only last for three to five shots before burning out.
  • While playing as Abby, single-use shivs are once again required to take on clickers in melee.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: After Abby's crew captures Joel and shoots him in the leg, Abby tells him to guess who they are when he asks why they are doing this. He thinks for a moment, then tells her just to get on with whatever speech she has prepared. It's then that Abby starts to whale on him with a golf club, driven by fury as Joel left her life in complete shambles and doesn't even know who she is and why she's doing this. Later on, Ellie even tells Dina that there is no point speculating who they were with (this being before they learn about the WLF) since Joel crossed a lot of people in his time.
• But Not Too Gay: Downplayed. While Ellie and Dina are quite affectionate, even exchanging a few passionate kisses, their sex scene is quite tame: you see them make out and take their clothes off, then Fade to Black, and you see them lying on the couch wearing bras and boxer shorts. In comparison, the sex scene between Abby and Owen that happens much later in the story is much more explicit.
• Call-Back:
  • With a touch of Ironic Echo. The first teaser for The Last of Us showed Ellie arriving in a building where Joel was busy killing enemies, one of which is lying bloody on a bed next to a busted window overgrown with vegetation. In the teaser for Part II, Joel is now the one arriving in a building where Ellie just finished murdering the enemies inside, before she's sitting on a bed next to a broken and overgrown window.
  • The game proper begins with Joel recounting the original game's ending to his brother Tommy, with the flashbacks including brief shots of Ellie's and his journey across the US and a montage of scenes from the Fireflies' hospital that returning players will probably remember all too well.
  • When in Seattle, Ellie and Dina stumble upon two WLF members who were tied to chairs and tortured to death. Ellie then tells Dina about how Joel tortured two of David's men by getting each one to confirm the other's information, and deduces that Tommy did the same.
  • While travelling through the booby-trapped streets leading to the WLF controlled news station, Ellie mentions to Dina how Bill had a similar method of defense.
  • Ellie gets trapped by a hanging leg snare much like Joel did in the first game when approaching Bill's place. The game, in general, recycles a lot of gameplay elements and setpieces from its predecessor, like two separate Boss Battles against Bloaters, a segment about getting through a hostile sniper's kill zone, a hospital level full of professional soldiers, and more. During the leg snare sequence, Ellie also ends up swinging and puncturing her torso with a broken tree branch in basically the exact same place Joel was impaled in the previous game's final chapters, leaving her with an essentially identical wound for the final part of the game.
  • Much like Joel lost touch with his possible love interest Tess in the first game due to personal reasons, Ellie loses her potential love interest Dina when she chooses to continue on her path for revenge.
  • During one of the flashback scenes, Ellie finds a pallet in the water. Should the player interact with it, Ellie will ask Joel if he wants to give her a ride, referring to the previous game's requirement to float Ellie across water as she couldn't yet swim.
• Cap: This game's ammo limits are somehow even lower than the original's. Up to 8 shotgun shells can be carried at one time, down from 18, the pistol gets no more than 16 bullets (previously 28), and so on. This is probably meant to balance out that gun-toting enemies now drop ammo more often and also wield a wider variety of weapons, making it generally easier to stock up again after a shootout. Of course, with infected now only dropping crafting components, you'll still want to place your shots particularly carefully when fighting those.
• Cassandra Truth: Early in their relationship, Ellie reveals to Dina that she's immune to the infection, but Dina dismisses it as mere BS. Lampshaded when Dina finally gets the full story (after having seen the graphic proof) in a movie theatre where the billboard is for a feature named "Cassandra".
• Central Theme:
  • The cycle of violence brought on by hatred and revenge.
  • You won't have answers to situations that are always mentally pleasing, and that is showing mercy.
  • Perspective is another theme, as several events in the game are shown in a different point of view, as well as how groups of people compare themselves to others.
  • Hate, namely: how love can lead to incredible hate and how hate makes us dehumanize others. Neil Druckmann even said that the first game was about love, and that this sequel is about hate.
  • Grief and trauma, and the process of accepting loss.
  • The consequences of one's actions.
• Character Death: The body count is ridiculously high in this game compared to the predecessor. In short, it's much faster to tell you who doesn't die: Ellie, Dina, Dina's baby, Tommy, Maria, Abby, and Lev all survive.
• Character Development:
  • Towards the "character gets worse over time" spectrum, we have Ellie. It started off proper when Joel finally reveals that he lied to her about the circumstances with her rescue in the last game. She was a spunky girl with an optimistic outlook, but after Joel's reveal, she becomes consumed with Survivor's Guilt, didn't think her life mattered since she could've stopped the Zombie Apocalypse, and became jaded. Joel's death emotionally wrecks her, and she becomes a hardened murderer who ignores her friends' advice and well-being just to satisfy her need for revenge. She does show some signs of her youthful innocence a few times; she is rocked by killing Nora and Mel and she does end up sparing Abby after reflecting on Joel in heat of strangling her. Despite losing everything in the end, it appears that Ellie's true self is starting to shine through again.
  • When we meet Abby, she's a cold-hearted, selfish person willing to risk her life and the lives of her friends just to exact her revenge. In the immediate aftermath of killing Joel, the expression on her face gives away that she thought she would instantly feel better but instead, she regrets it and it doesn't bring her peace. Additionally, she still has nightmares about her father's death. She latches onto Lev and Yara quickly, which allows her to rebuild her empathy, and finds that helping them is what is bringing her closure. Towards the end of the game, she spares Ellie due to Lev's interruption, showing that she's starting to consider the input of her friends. The biggest show of character growth for Abby was immediately being concerned for Lev's well-being after being rescued by Ellie at the end of the game, in stark contrast to the beginning of the game which saw her repaying Joel's kindness in saving her by killing him.
• Cheat Code: Shortly after its release, the game was updated to include unlockable gameplay modifiers that are effectively cheats to make the game easier for the player. Among these cheats are the ability to have infinite ammo, infinite crafting components, infinite melee weapon durability, making all weapons into One-Hit Kills, etc. The only requirements are to beat the game once on any difficulty and build up points from completing specific objectives (e.g., finding all or as many collectibles as you can).
• Color Contrast:
  • Certain key sequences for both Abby and Ellie have them bathed in colored light, Ellie in red (pronounced during the underground section of the television station and warded-off section of the hospital) and Abby in blue (during the aquarium scenes).
  • The color theme above is reversed if you have the subtitles on and have the character names in color. Ellie's is blue while Abby's is red.
  • This also applies to the Dualshock 4 controller. Depending on who you are playing as, the light on the controller will change hues. Ellie is blue, Abby is yellow, and Joel is green. As green is a combination of yellow and blue, this is obviously meant as a display of Ellie and Abby being linked via Joel, even if Abby isn't linked through love, but through hate.
• Combat Breakdown:
  • Abby and Ellie's first fight begins with both of them armed with guns and ends with Abby delivering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown with her fists.
  • Downplayed in Abby and Ellie's final fight. Ellie starts off armed with her switchblade, while Abby is unarmed. Once Ellie loses her knife in the ocean, the fight becomes a simple bare-fisted brawl.
• Combat Pragmatist: Duh, it is the Zombie Apocalypse. For most characters, anything that remotely smells of honor or fairness goes out the window the moment a fight starts. Eye-gouging, hair-pulling, biting, hitting people with shit like bricks and 2x4s, you name it—as long as the other guy is dead and you ain't, then it's fair game. Even plain ol' perfidy—a lot of badly wounded Mooks will shamelessly plead for mercy when you have them at gunpoint, but if you actually oblige then they will just get up and continue trying to kill you (which usually gets them killed instead).
• Commonplace Rare: While it's understandable that working duct tape or sharp blades have become a rare find in the post-apocalypse, the low number of empty soda bottles in post-consumerism America can be a bit perplexing. Even with only some of them being intact enough to be turned into jury-rigged suppressors, you'd expect more lying around.
• Company Cross References: There's a couple of references to other Naughty Dog games:
  • Uncharted: Ellie and Dina can find an "Engraved Ring" in a bank (with a trophy for doing so), and there's a Nathan Drake Halloween costume in a party store.
  • There's a Jak X: Combat Racing arcade cabinet in the arcade Ellie makes her way through during her section of the game. In Abby's playthrough, she can find a Precursor orb.
  • When Ellie and Dina stumble upon their deceased friend Eugene's weed and porn stash, they see a VHS tape titled "Smash Brandi's Cootch."
• Continuity Nod:
  • Joel made a comment in the Spring chapter of the first game that after he and Ellie were done with the whole thing, he'd teach her to play the guitar. This game starts with Joel gifting Ellie a guitar, and mentioning how he promised her that he would teach her how to play.
  • Ellie has Sam's robot toy from the first game in her room.
  • While riding through a wintry landscape, Dina quips to Ellie that "you'll probably die from hypothermia from wearing canvas sneakers in the snow", which is what Ellie wore throughout the entire Winter section of the first game. Ellie clearly has a better wardrobe now though, as she defensively tells Dina "I am wearing boots today".
  • While making their way into Seattle after Abby, Dina speculates whether her group could be connected to the "crazy cannibals'' (David's group), or the black market smugglers from Boston Ellie told her about.
  • Joel was exasperated by Ellie not being able to swim in the first game, and he told her at one point he'd teach her when they got the chance. She knows how to swim now.
  • In the Fall chapter of the first game, Ellie at one point mentions that had she been living in the "old" world, she would have wanted to become an astronaut. In Part II, a closer look at her backpack reveals that she has a spaceship pin on it, and she has an astronaut statue in her room.
  • Ellie tries to use the same map-based interrogation method on Owen and Mel that Joel used in the first game to find out where Ellie was being held captive by the cannibals. Due to Ellie's inexperience and lack of leverage against the two, however, it backfires on her.
  • In the Left Behind DLC, when Riley tells Ellie she wants to show her something, Ellie jokingly asks, "Is it a dinosaur?" In the museum flashback in this game, Ellie guesses what Joel's birthday gift for her is, with her first guess also being if it's a dinosaur. This time around, it really is.
• Conscience Makes You Go Back: Despite Yara being badly hurt, Abby initially leaves her and Lev be, but when she later finds Owen, her conscience gets the best of her and she goes back for them.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Owen points out to Abby that he saw a patrol headed towards a cabin that is implied to have been Joel and Tommy, and Abby shortly after stumbles upon their horse's footprints and follows them. It's still incredibly lucky for her that the first person she runs into while tracking down the Jackson group's base is the target of her vengeance, Joel himself, on what was a spontaneous scouting trek, no less. The circumstances behind their meeting also perfectly segue into Joel being at her group's mercy. Even she seems a bit rattled by how absurdly easy this sequence of events made what she and Owen both believed could be a difficult, risky, and possibly futile nut to crack.
  • In an additionally astounding coincidence, Ellie just happens to show up there within minutes as well.
  • Mel just happens to be wearing a big coat when Ellie finds her at the aquarium so she can’t see she’s pregnant.
  • After Abby discovers Owen and Mel's corpses, she manages to find a map that Ellie had very conveniently dropped in the same room so that Abby would have an easy way to track Ellie back to her hideout at the theater.
• Conveniently Placed Sharp Thing: When Ellie gets captured by WLF soldiers and has her hands tied, she can free herself by sawing at the rope with a piece of glass from the glass ceiling Dina broke through.
• Country Matters: Ellie calls Abby a cunt during their first fight.
• Covers Always Lie: The box art features Ellie on a black background. While she serves as a main character in the game, the retail cover doesn't show Abby, who is the game's Villain Protagonist and third playable character.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Ellie's collectible trading cards repeatedly mention an in-universe fictional character named Dr. Uckmann, named after the game's creative director, Neil Druckmann. He's also listed as villainous.
  • Another collectible trading card concerns another in-universe fictional character nicknamed The Imp, who is based on the game's narrative lead and co-writer Halley Gross. She's stated to be psychically connected to Dr. Uckmann (an allusion to the fact that Halley Gross and Neil Druckmann are connected as co-writers of the game) and, like him, is listed as villainous.
  • In Ellie's first segment, the banjo player sitting outside the Copper Peak Inn is modelled after composer Gustavo Santaolalla.
• Creator Thumbprint:
  • The dodging-and-punching gameplay has shades of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (and, to a lesser extent, Uncharted 2 and 3). Particularly noticeable with all the Fisticuffs Boss fights.
  • The same could be said with the "Look At" feature, which is also present in the Uncharted games.
• Cult: The Seraphites are a religious cult based out of Seattle who believe the plague was God's way of purging the Earth of its sinners.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Joel is killed brutally in the first act of the game; Abby blows off his kneecap with a shotgun blast, has a tourniquet tied so he doesn't bleed out too quickly, and then beats his head in with a golf club. The last shot Ellie sees after Abby delivers the killing blow is his brains on the club itself.
  • Ellie drops Nora into the spore-filled lower level of the hospital with her, dooming her to be infected. A chase gives way, but Nora doesn't make it very far because she can barely breathe. Ellie offers to make it "quick" or "so much worse." She refuses to give Ellie information that can lead to Abby, and Ellie exacts revenge by smashing her repeatedly with a pipe. Nora does end up giving up Abby's location, so Ellie may have kept her word about a quick death. May have.
  • Getting caught by the Rat King may lead to a couple of limbs being ripped off.
  • The second Seraphite Brute that Abby fistfights ends up stabbed in the throat, through the eyeball, and in the throat again by a broken arrow shaft.
  • One of the ways Ellie can kill Abby in their first fight is to down her with a shotgun blast to centre mass, causing her to clutch her wound and look up in desperation before Ellie blasts her face in.
  • Seraphites execute captured WLF soldiers by hanging and then disemboweling them while they're still alive and kicking. Their bodies are then left as a threat to others.
  • Meanwhile, Seraphite prisoners are sent to holding cells where they are interrogated and tortured to death. The methods are left up to the imagination, but they manage to terrify the normally fanatical Seraphites.
• Crucial Cross: A character is convinced to forgive a mortal enemy only after seeing them near-dead from a crucifixion. The biblical connections are downplayed, since the enemy doesn't have their hands impaled on a two-beam crucifix, but rather has their hands tied above their head on a single pillar as in most historically-attested crucifixions. There are still a few two-beam crucifixes in the area where the character is crucified, so the game gets to both supply powerful religious imagery and accurately depict a historical means of violence.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The entire plot of the game is set into motion by Joel killing the Firefly head surgeon (out of three personnel) who were going to work on Ellie in the previous game. Whilst the encounter was mandatory to complete the game, it was ultimately up to the player if Joel killed all the surgeons despite only Abby's father opposing him with a scalpel in desperation (forcing Joel to plunge it into him if he isn't shot immediately). On a minor note, the way to do the deed was up to the player, but his placement and blood stains are concurrent with the melee kill. It is also possible (difficult, but possible) to reach the operation room without killing any guards, but the flashback of the beginning of this game will show one of the hallways littered with the corpses of guards to further cement how many Joel killed to save Ellie.
• Cycle of Revenge: The main gist of the story. Abby kills Joel to avenge her father, but doesn't feel any better and ends up setting off Ellie to go after her to avenge Joel. In the process, both Ellie and Abby end up losing almost everyone they love, and even by the end of it, when the two are just tired of all the violence, Ellie still insists on killing Abby, but ends up having a Heel Realization to spare her and break the cycle.
• The Dead Have Names: Enemies will occasionally cry out the name of anyone you have killed.
• Damage Over Time:
  • Shamblers, bloaters, the Rat King, and the Stalker that breaks from it throw or shoot out acidic spores, causing this effect until you walk out of the cloud.
  • The Seraphites have archers with them that can impale you with arrows, causing this effect until you pull them out.
• Darker and Edgier: The game overall is arguably the most graphic and grittiest PlayStation exclusive ever made. While the first game was no walk in the park, Part II has somehow proven to be even darker and more nihilistic. Enemy NPCs can cry out the name of anyone you killed, and some of them might even shout that you just killed their husband or wife. Fights are more graphic than the original, there's less humor, and the game even features explicit sex scenes between key characters. That's not even going to the vicious cycle of hatred and revenge overtaking the original's emphasis of survival, loss, and personal connections as its main theme, and how it leads to dire consequences for the game's characters.
• Deconstruction: Of Protagonist-Centered Morality. For one, Joel is killed early on as a consequence of his actions at the end of the original game, with the perpetrator, Abby, firmly believing he deserved it. Second, both Ellie and Abby believe that they are unquestionably in the right when it comes to their respective quests for revenge. However, the game shows how their actions cause pain for other characters via the game's use of both as player characters. Ellie is ruthless and brutal in her pursuit, her rage very evident as she continues through the events of her portions of the story, while Abby's sections tend to show just how painful this is for her, losing her friends left and right because of Ellie. In the end, both Ellie and Abby are in the right from their own perspective, but from the opposing side, they are irredeemably horrible. The game pulls no punches, basically saying that just because a character is the protagonist does not mean they are right, or even that they are good people.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Due to the more open-ended nature of the game compared to the first, characters will have different reactions to things depending on the order you play. For example, early in the game, Ellie can find a key for a pet store inside an old coffee shop. If Ellie picks the key up before even knowing about the pet store, she'll have no idea what the key is for. If you discover the pet store first and then find the key later, Ellie will correctly theorize that the key is for that particular store.
  • The game has an extremely elaborate breathing system that takes into account the mood and intensity of each scene—whoever you're playing as can have short, raggedy breaths from exhaustion, full breaths from relief, quick gasps for terror, and so on. There are a surprisingly large number of breathing possibilities depending on the scene at hand, and the extent of this system is explained here.
  • Most enemy-infested areas will have a door or pathway that requires you to hold down a button to proceed, and the cutscene that follows will change depending on the situation. If you've killed all enemies, the characters enter normally. If you've managed to sneak to the exit undetected they will try to open the door quietly, possibly while exchanging hushed whispers. If you manage to get through while chased by enemies, they'll hurriedly slam the door shut behind them while your pursuers bang and yell from the other side. In Ellie’s trip through the hospital in Day 2, there’s a section where the WLF are pursuing her through an area with several clickers; if you manage to sneak past them all, you’ll hear them duking it out.
  • In the hospital level, in the section where Ellie is about to confront a coughing, slowly dying Nora, Ellie does not look straight at them, trying to avert her gaze as much as possible (no matter how you turn the camera and it happens even in photo mode). Given that this scene is where she savagely beats Nora for information on Abby and immediately afterward she's incredibly shaken by what she did, it's a small but significant detail on just how Ellie's quest for revenge is taking a toll on her psyche.
  • It's possible to knock a particular glass jar off a table in the aquarium, breaking it. When returning to the same spot later on in Abby's section, the jar will be either broken or untouched depending on the player's earlier action (or lack thereof).
  • Abby suffers from acrophobia (fear of heights). If you're walking on a ledge while playing as her and looks down, the view blurs and stretches and Abby begins to pant anxiously.
  • If you walk up to a Clicker while already grabbing another enemy, human or Infected, the blind Clicker will snatch the enemy from your grasp and rip out their throat instead of your own.
• Don't Create a Martyr: While what exactly happened to the Seraphites’ prophet isn’t made clear, Abby touches on this when she says Isaac made one out of her.
• Dramatic Ammo Depletion: Emily has a revolver and pulls it out when she has Yara cornered. She hears noises coming from the forest and fires a few shots. When Yara tries to attack her, she fires again but misses as Abby restrains her. She tries to fire at Abby, but the revolver is out of ammo.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Inverted; it's revealed midway through the game that Ellie had known for years the exact nature of what Joel did at the Firefly hospital at the end of the first game. Knowing that sure makes some of the events earlier in Part II seem a little different in hindsight.
  • The audience knows that Abby's friends are doomed when we see them on Day 1 of Abby's playthrough, due to seeing (and playing) Ellie killing almost all of them in brutal fashion hours before. Seeing them make plans to escape the WLF and any possibility Abby and Owen could get back together during Abby's playthrough twists the knife deeper.
  • The audience also knows that during Abby's playthrough on Day 2, that she narrowly escaped Ellie's wrath - Ellie spent the entire day looking for her and unbeknownst to her, they were both in the same location. The Rat King's screams can actually be heard in the background during Ellie's interrogation of Nora, implying that Abby was fighting for her life directly beneath Ellie's feet at that very moment.
• The Dreaded: Tommy is this to Abby, as he is the only non-infected threat she faces in the game that genuinely causes her to lose her composure and have a small mental breakdown in the middle of combat.
• Dueling Player Characters: Ellie and Abby fight each other twice. The first time, the player controls Abby, and Ellie gradually uses every trick the player has (except listen mode, for obvious reasons). The second time, the player controls an injured and switchblade-armed Ellie against an emaciated, unarmed Abby.
• Dungeon Bypass: An entire chapter of Abby's story branch is devoted to finding a way from Seattle's aquarium to the hospital that doesn't take a whole day to traverse. Lev knows one—a network of rickety bridges the Seraphites constructed between downtown Seattle's skyscrapers to bypass the WLF patrols on the ground. To say the acrophobic Abby is not thrilled about this would be putting it mildly, but for Yara's sake, she goes through with it regardless.
• Dying as Yourself: The bank robber's corpse Ellie and Dina can find in the Seattle bank vault has a note describing how he got locked in the vault after he got bit during a robbery on Outbreak Day and commits suicide before he turns.

Tropes E to J

• Early-Bird Cameo: In the Downtown area on Seattle Day 1, Ellie can find FEDRA wanted posters with several mugshots on it, including a younger Isaac's.
• Early Game Hell: Much like in the first game, you spend the first several hours without advanced weaponry, although you have the rifle from the beginning and you learn how to make the Molotov cocktail a bit earlier. It's not too bad if you're fighting humans and the earlier levels of infected, but fighting clickers in particular is much more challenging earlier on. It's not until well into the Seattle section that you really start getting the higher-tier weapons.
• Eiffel Tower Effect:
  • Several Seattle landmarks appear in the game; the in-game Pinnacle Theatre is based on the real-life Paramount Theatre, the Washington State Convention Center appears as the Seattle Conference Center, the WLF's base is Century Link Field (renamed SoundView Stadium), the Seraphite's “island” is the lower Queen Anne neighborhood (now half-submerged and surrounded by flooded water), and the Seattle Aquarium and the Great Wheel feature prominently. This is basically Inverted with the Space Needle, as Seattle's most iconic building only makes a brief background appearance in the penultimate level set in Seattle.
  • A shot of Mount Rainier serves to indicate the player's arrival in Washington.
  • In Abby's flashback, we see the Salt Lake Zoo in Salt Lake City once again.
• Enter Solution Here: The players has to open safes with codes they found elsewhere.
• Environmental Symbolism: The three main areas of gameplay have clear symbolism:
  • Jackson and the area around it are in the winter covered in snow, giving the clear feeling of incoming death. Not surprisingly, the infected are the most plot critical here as their relentless assault on Abby, Joel and Tommy gives Abby the opening to exact her revenge on Joel.
  • Seattle is a water logged city, half covered in ocean and with rainstorms every other day. The protagonists are bogged down in their problems that will not end as long as they are in this city.
  • Santa Barbara is a sun drenched city. Here the protagonists' sins are finally burned off in a final battle. While they leave injured they do so ready and willing to let go of all the pain that they had before.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: The WLF army has equal numbers of men and women in their ranks. Surprisingly, the same holds true for the otherwise ultra-conservative Seraphites.
• Evil Counterpart: The WLF to Jackson; they are both groups that have been able to restore some sense of civilization despite the post-outbreak world. But while Jackson is an idyllic settlement just interested in keeping safe, the WLF is a heavily militarized organization that is determined to take control of Seattle at any cost.
• Evil Luddite: The Seraphites dislike technology and don't even dare touch the Lost Technology of the pre-outbreak period, as they believe it is full of sin. That said, they have no problem using guns and powered elevators for military purposes.
• Evil Versus Evil: Both the WLF and the Seraphites are led by genocidal lunatics driven by nothing but hatred for the other, and their leaders' charisma ensures that most of their troops share their mindset. Neither Cold-Blooded Torture nor the indiscriminate killing of kids is beyond them. They're also more than willing to turn on their own people without mercy, as shown with Lev and Yara for the Seraphites, and Abby herself for the WLF. No tears are shed when both factions tear each other apart in the penultimate chapter.
• Evolving Title Screen: There are two title screens, one for pre- and post-game completion. The former shows a small boat moored in shallow water during foggy weather, foreshadowing Seattle's grim atmosphere and Ellie and Abby's final confrontation in Santa Barbara. The latter shows the boat's final destination, a sunny beach near Catalina Casino on Catalina Island. This serves as a stinger to the game's story, indicating that Abby and Lev made it to the supposed new home of the Fireflies, while the sun breaking through nearby fog shows us that Abby and Ellie have both let go of their pain and are on a path to healing.
• Exploited Immunity: Ellie weaponizes her immunity in order to kill Nora, by dragging her down into a spore-infested lower level of the hospital. Although Nora runs away after, the rapidly-spreading infection in her body ensures she doesn't make it far. Ellie promises her a quick death if she gives up Abby's location. Nora's loyalty to Abby ensured she didn't get one.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: Ellie's hair is noticeably shorter after the roughly year-long Time Skip in the last chapter.
• Expository Theme Tune: In the PSX 2016 trailer, Ellie sings a Then Let Me Be Evil folk song before committing to her planned Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The main events of the game take place over only three days but leave hundreds, if not thousands of people dead and the lives of the survivors in shambles. The first section takes place a few months earlier and the last several months later.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • After Ellie murders Owen and Mel, and then breaks down upon learning at the last second she killed a pregnant woman, she accidentally leaves the map she had used to track down her targets next to their corpses. When Abby returns, Lev finds the map, helping Abby track Ellie's group at the theatre.
  • Even though she is controlled by the player, who could be more observant, Ellie doesn't notice that the escape ladder that Abby uses to infiltrate the theatre is a security risk while checking out the place.
• Face Death with Dignity: Wounded enemies will sometimes accept their fate telling Ellie to just finish them off.
• Fan Disservice:
  • You get to see Ellie topless from the back, but her body is covered in bruises and cuts after an escape from a traumatic fight in Seattle.
  • The final fight features two young, muscular women in jeans and tank tops duking it out in shallow water, a premise which would not be too unusual for a typical Cat Fight. But when the women in question start off badly injured and/or starved, get even more injured and covered in blood as the fight wears on, and are genuinely trying to kill each other? Not so appealing anymore.
• Fed to the Beast: The player can actually exploit the combined hunger and blindness of Clickers by using the grab & drag mechanics; if the player snares a human enemy—or a Runner—and then throws them into a Clicker, the Clicker will be distracted as it kills and eats the enemy.
• Final Battle: Ellie and Abby slug it out in the surf while freed prisoners battle the Rattlers offscreen.
• Final Death Mode: A new Permadeath difficulty setting is added. But unlike most games with similar modes, Part II allows the player to choose between either completing the whole playthrough without dying, or only having to restart from the last Chapter or Act.
• Fingore: Ellie loses two of her fingers from a bite during her final fight with Abby. One is lost outright, and it's implied Ellie amputates the other.
• Finishing Stomp:
  • One way Abby can kill Ellie in their final fight is by stomping her head in.
  • Also, one of the ways you can kill an infected if it ends up crawling at you, which results in its head being entirely crushed.
  • Seraphite Brutes can kill the player character by pinning them down with their hammer before crushing their skull.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The first game's flamethrower returns as a weapon that Abby can find. It spits short-ranged bursts of flame, ideal for taking on infected.
• First-Name Basis: Like in the previous game, virtually everyone goes by their first names, with their last names barely even being mentioned. This includes authority figures like Isaac, the leader of the WLF and Abby and the others' superior officer.
• Fisticuffs Boss: Quite a few, including the fights between Abby and Ellie, take place without your guns available.
• Flashback: Part II makes extensive use of flashbacks to provide background exposition about its protagonists.
• Foil: Ellie and Abby are contrasted and compared with each other throughout the game:
  • Ellie is a short, slender woman, but Abby is ripped and much taller.
  • Ellie is fond of puns and jokes, but Abby has a no-nonsense personality and doesn't joke around.
  • Ellie is a lesbian; Abby is presumably completely heterosexual.
  • Gameplay-wise, Ellie is best at picking off enemies one by one using stealth and using traps and smoke bombs to distract, and Abby is best in a firefight and using her hands and melee weapons.
  • Ellie is in love with space and astronomy, and Abby is scared to death of heights.
  • Both women are alike in that they both have caring Love Interests that reconcile with their partners' darker natures, both women have nerdy interests (Ellie likes comic books, while Abby is more of a traditional bookworm), both are very headstrong (sometimes to their own detriment), and both have older male characters (Ellie has Joel, Abby has her father) that were devoted to them).
• Forced to Watch: Ellie is pinned down to the ground and helplessly watches on as Abby kills Joel with a golf club.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Part Foreshadowing, part Establishing Character Moment; at the very beginning of the game, Seth apologizes to Ellie for his homophobic tirade at the dance and offers a steak sandwich, both of which Ellie rebuke, indicating she doesn't forgive easily. Joel definitely knows this for a fact after Ellie found out about the lie he told to her at the end of the first game, after which she stopped being on friendly terms with him for years, and only started to repair her relationship with him shortly before he was tragically killed. It's also why she continues her Roaring Rampage of Revenge, despite its detriment to her relationships and mental health.
  • Early in the game, while out on patrol during a blizzard, Ellie briefly loses sight of Dina and is alone. The game's ending has Dina taking JJ and leaving Ellie with an empty house.
  • During Seattle Day 1, Dina makes a couple of comments about wanting to live in a farm and asking Ellie about pets and saying that they "get a little creature together" when they get back. Both of which come true, though JJ isn't a pet, but Dina and Jesse's child.
  • Ellie and Dina also talk about Bill from the first game, a paranoid shut-in that drives everyone away from him, leaving him alone and isolated. Ellie possibly finds herself in the same situation, with her quest for revenge consuming her to the point that she loses everything and everyone.
  • During Day 1 of Seattle as Ellie, if you pay attention to Dina, she can occasionally be seen holding her stomach and acting like nothing's wrong when she thinks Ellie sees her. Towards the end of the chapter, she reveals to Ellie that she's pregnant.
  • While making their way to the aquarium, Ellie and Jesse overhear a WLF radio transmission reporting a sniper at the Marina who is inflicting casualties, with reinforcements being sent to take them out. Jesse quickly deduces it to be Tommy (revealed to be correct when playing as Abby), and tries to get Ellie to come help him. Ellie expresses doubt, stating that with their common target, the best way to find Tommy will be continuing on to Abby (though she is clearly far more focused on the latter), with her and Jesse ultimately spitting up. Towards the end of the game, Ellie again chooses her fixation on revenge over her loved ones, leaving Dina and JJ behind to pursue Abby to California.
  • Ellie can overhear a conversation between two Seraphites about someone named Lily who did something "shameful", with one mentioning being shocked by Lily's sister's actions. Later on, in Abby's playthrough, she meets a young Seraphite named Lev that shaved off his hair like the other men to indicate his identity as a trans man. This caused him to be shunned by the other Seraphites, who still call him by his deadname (Lily), with the exception of his sister Yara, who supported him.
  • A conversation in the theatre during Day 3, combined with a dash of Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
    Tommy: Hey. They got what they deserved.
    Ellie: But she gets to live.
    Tommy: Yeah. Is that okay?
    Ellie: It has to be.
  • During an early part of Abby's playthrough, one of the WLF soldiers gets his hand badly injured and is later seen getting it mended. He remarks that that at least he'll keep most of his fingers and Manny quips that he only needs three. The end sees Ellie losing two fingers as the result of a bite from Abby, leaving her with only three.
  • During Ellie's section in the hospital after she pulls Nora into the contaminated area, the power suddenly comes on, which startles the WLF enemies. During Abby's playthrough in a different area of the hospital, she turned on the power to unlock some of the doors.
  • In a flashback midway through the game, we see Tommy teaching Ellie how to snipe infected from long range. During Abby’s playthrough, while being gunned down by an unknown assailant, revealed to be Tommy, Manny remakes that the sniper “is a fucking pro”.
  • When Ellie finds the Seattle aquarium, she comes across an operating table covered in blood, and questions what happened, leaving open the possibility that it was some kind of Cold-Blooded Torture. In Abby's section, you learn that it was an operation to amputate Yara's arm, and Abby went through hell and back to accomplish it. Later in that same sequence, Ellie can hear Owen and Mel arguing that Abby has left to go the Seraphites' home island, with Mel openly saying "People don't come back from that island!" In Abby's section, Mel is nearly proven right. Abby and Lev barely return, but Yara, Lev and Yara's mother, Isaac, and the entire WLF invasion force die there.
  • Small snippets are made through the game that Tommy and Maria were having ongoing marital issues in the years before the main plot begins. By the time-skip of Ellie's life on the farm, a combination of Tommy leaving (his only communication being a apology note) on his dangerous solo revenge mission, along with his implied brain-damage leaving him a much more bitter man has resulted in them "taking some time apart" in Tommy's words.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • Joel saving Abby in the prologue, unintentionally setting off the game's events.
  • Ellie leaving her map in the aquarium after killing Owen and Mel. This allows Abby to track her to the theater, kill Jesse, shoot Tommy in the head, leaving him crippled and brain damaged, and beat Ellie and Dina half to death, setting up the final chapter's events.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: During the Seattle Harbor sniper battle, when Abby and Manny chase the sniper off the bridge and into the pier building, if the player is quick enough and aims at the shooter, you can clearly see that it's Tommy.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: The surgeon Joel killed in the ending of the first game was Abby's father, and she's been hunting Joel ever since. Abby's allies are uneasy around her, but Lev is the one who gets Abby to finally let go of her anger so she can start again. Abby also learns that Joel's death meant nothing, her dad is still dead, and it didn't bring the closure she was expecting. Mel also tears into her for how needlessly brutal she was about it, and how it makes her a really shitty person.
• Futureshadowing:
  • Near the end of the museum flashback, Ellie encounters a diorama of an elk being attacked by wolves, and later goes through a gap in a wall that puts her in the centre of a group of stuffed wolves, all snarling at her. Not too hard to guess the meaning there.
  • During the museum scene, Joel and Ellie see a row of dinosaur skulls, with one of them being noted to be exceptionally thick. Joel says that it "reminds him of Tommy". Tommy ends up surviving being shot in the head by Abby, and comes out relatively fine.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Ellie sometimes freezes in a default pose upon interacting with collectibles, making it impossible to progress without loading the last checkpoint. Remember to save often.
  • It's possible to kill the sniper in Abby's section at the aquarium. It requires precise timing, but doing so will break a cutscene in that section and softlock the game.
  • Abby can end up jumping INTO a concrete pillar at the construction site if the player aims the jump unluckily, locking the game in a noisy glitch and causing it to shut down.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Ellie plays differently than Joel because she's a teenage girl who lacks his strength. Ellie has to be sneakier and fight from a distance since she doesn't have the strength to brute-force her way through some situations. The game gives you more options with stealth and explosives (since you can throw them from cover without being spotted) to encourage this way of fighting. Being lighter and smaller also has its advantages, since you can now hide in and squeeze through places Joel could never have been able to, and Ellie is much lighter on her feet, making running from hairy situations easier. Abby plays somewhere between the two; she's stronger than Ellie and about as strong as Joel, but doesn't have Joel or Ellie's knack for stealth and traps. She plays much more directly and has more options to take down enemies quickly and directly. This all comes to a head with the boss fight with Abby versus Ellie—Abby is much stronger than Ellie and can take her down easily, but Ellie is a Combat Pragmatist and uses weapons, biting, and fighting dirty to get the upper hand. Ellie's also very quiet with stealth making it hard to track her. The end of the game shows them more evenly matched, as Abby has lost a lot of her muscle mass.
  • Abby's acrophobia. If you position yourself near an edge leading to a fall that will kill you and look down, the camera will do a Vertigo Effect, darken around the edges, and Abby will begin hyperventilating, her facial expression will turn to horror and she will shiver and hold her arms and hands close to her body.
  • You can read many things in Ellie's journal throughout the game, including flashbacks, that mention somewhat important things and events she never talks about out loud (for example, what journeying from Jackson to Seattle, and later from the farm to Santa Barbara, was like). Perhaps Ellie's most interesting journal entry that's easy to miss is in the flashback where Tommy teaches her to use a sniper rifle. Many had wondered if Ellie technically being infected meant she could infect others by biting or alternatively kissing someone, which is answered directly in her journal there. It was a fear Ellie herself had when her friend Kat suddenly surprised her by kissing her. Ellie freaked out at this, but apologized and lied about the reason, then spent the whole night watching over Kat while she slept to see if she would turn. Ellie was overjoyed to see that she didn't and that Kat liked her, and they soon started dating. It also explains why Ellie confidently told Dina later that she couldn't be infected by her.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: When hearing the word "Seraphite" spoken for the first time, Ellie claims she doesn't know it, even though the player has likely read at least one note using that name by that point.
• Gang On The Human: When the WLF attacks the Seraphite island you have to escape while encountering WLF soldiers and Seraphites attacking each other. When they spot you, soldiers from both factions will immediately prioritize blowing up your brains rather than killing their sworn enemies.
• Gender Is No Object: You only fought and killed male human enemies in the first game. In Part II, there are about as many female mooks as there are male and Ellie can brutally kill anyone she meets regardless their gender.
• Geo Effects: Part II expands on its predecessor's cover mechanics by letting Ellie crouch or go prone to hide in tall grass. Enemies can still spot her in this state, but need to get pretty close to do so.
• Get It Over With: Taking a shotgun blast to the leg and restrained by the others in the WLF group, Joel realizes their intentions and accepts he's doomed, telling Abby to give whatever speech she's rehearsed and to get it over with. Unfortunately for him, Abby does not want Joel to simply die quickly.
• The Ghost:
  • The Seraphite Elders. They are mentioned several times as the ones leading the cult, but are never seen in person. If they were not killed during the WLF's assault on their island, they would have most likely starved with the rest of their people due to Haven and the surrounding villages being decimated by fire.
  • Ellie and Dina have a few discussions about Ellie's ex-girlfriend Cat, who does not physically show up in any scene aside from an illustration in Ellie's journal.
  • Dina mentions her sister, Talia, a lot and you can find a recent picture of the two of them but she never shows up and it's not clear if she lives in Jackson or is even alive.
• Giant Mook: The Seraphites field a few huge fighters that can't be stealth-killed normally, turning them into minibosses of sorts (and two of them provide actual boss fights). Keep an eye out for those wielding two-handed sledgehammers lest you run into a nasty surprise.
• Golf Clubbing: Abby takes some Extreme Mêlée Revenge on Joel by beating his head in with a golf club. Ellie even gets to see the final strike that ends Joel's life.
• Gorn: The game has frequently graphic and disturbing content in the form of brutal, gory violence.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The camera stays on Ellie when she beats Nora to death with a pipe.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: Trophies can be earned by collecting all trading cards, coins, artefacts, training manuals and weapons, as well as for finding all workbenches and unlocking all safes.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Seraphite Elders for Abby and to an almost irrelevant extent, Ellie. They lead the faction directly opposed to Abby and the WLF, and even after she defects they are still just as hellbent on killing her as before. Ellie has a minor confrontation with the Seraphites in a case of her passing through their territory and them assuming she is just another Wolf.
• Great Offscreen War: Seattle was once the battlefield of the war between the WLF and FEDRA,^note the Federal Disaster Response Agency an authoritarian faction trying to impose order. Ellie can stumble upon the remnants of their hideouts and the corpses of their fallen soldiers.
• Green Hill Zone: When entering Seattle's downtown, Ellie and Dina stumble upon a rather large grassy plain with gentle slopes, next to no enemies, and plenty of hiding spots for loot. Ellie does point out that the zone ended up like this probably because of heavy bombardment.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: All the principal figures in the game's Cycle of Revenge are flawed but ultimately human, the violence they inflict and endure in the end achieving little more than further pain. One of the major themes of the story is how the world post-outbreak has its beauty, but all too often pushes people down the road of bleak, hollow, violent cruelty.
• Group-Identifying Feature: The Seraphites are known as "Scars" by the WLF because they ritually scar themselves from ear to ear, and wear thick brown hooded trenchcoats. Furthermore, the men shave their heads, while women wear a crown braid.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The bloater Ellie fights is killed in a cutscene triggered when it hits her after taking a certain amount of damage. The complete counterintuitiveness of this has led to players emptying entire ammo reserves in vain.
  • As in the first game, the player can find collectables (i.e., notes, training manuals, superhero cards, etc.) lying around the overworld. However, the more open-ended setting means they're much easier to miss this time around. The fact that the game increases the number of collectables (the first game had around 140 collectables; the sequel, however, has 266) doesn't help either.
  • This time around, you have to find some of the weapons, and they can be missed. The flamethrower is one of these. Good luck fighting the Rat King without it.
• Gun Accessories: Gunsmithing is back, and unlike in the original game it actually shows the modifications you add to your guns. They're mostly the Boring, but Practical kind that don't look flashy but help you survive in the post-apocalypse, like extended magazines, better stocks or grips for improved stability, or scopes and sights.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way: In the name of preserving the game's cap on the ammunition you can carry, you end up constantly walking around with one full magazine loaded in your gun and, for whatever reason, a spare mag loaded with only a few rounds—even though there's no reason not to fully load both magazines.
• Hand Cannon: Abby can find a Thompson Contender, an antiquated-looking but powerful single-shot hunting pistol.
• Happy Ending Override: The Last of Us ends more or less happily; Joel and Ellie are set to live their lives in Jackson and away from the danger of their journey. It does have one sour beat: Ellie knows Joel isn't telling her whole truth about what happened in Utah. That sour beat ends up forming the foundation of the sequel as Joel is killed and Ellie goes on a mission for justice, despite her finding out the truth.
• Heel Realization:
  • Ellie has one right before she almost kills Abby; seeing a vision of Joel smiling at her. It's at that point she can no longer go through with killing Abby; it's implied that she finally understood just why Joel saved her and how her life mattered to him.
  • Abby, through her campaign, comes to a slow realization of her misdeeds; her killing of Joel didn't bring closure, Owen can't look at her the same way, and Mel gives her a "Reason You Suck" Speech on how suddenly caring for Yara and Lev won't absolve her of her previous actions.
• Hell Is That Noise: The noises the various Infected make return from the first game, and this one adds the Seraphites' whistling. You'll usually hear it before you see any of them, and it will instantly put you on edge, since it means you've got a bunch of stealthy archers stalking you.
• Hero of Another Story: Tommy pursues Abby on his own revenge mission and is offscreen for the majority of Ellie's story until its conclusion, but his handiwork is seen as Ellie begins to catch up to him. Torture victims, bodies riddled with bullet holes and/or mutilated, vehicles burning and destroyed, Tommy does at the very minimum as much damage to the WLF as Ellie does, if not more. He also appears near the conclusion of Abby's parallel storyline, with the player wondering where he is after witnessing all the destruction he caused in Ellie's storyline, only to appear as an unexpected surprise in the final hours of Abby's.
• Heroic BSoD: At the farm, Ellie suddenly gets a flash of Joel being killed and suffers a terrifying panic attack. It's indicated that this was one of many episodes that she's had. After getting intel from Tommy about Abby's location, she leaves to finish things for good, if not just to seek some sort of closure.
• Hide Your Children: Yara and Lev, who are 16 and 13 respectively, are the youngest characters in the combat-riddled parts of the game. Ellie and Dina have a snowball fight with some of the kids from Jackson at the beginning before they head out on patrol. Likewise, in Abby's first segment, she and Manny walk through the WLF's school, with an entire class being ushered in for the day. Post-Time Skip, Dina's son JJ can be taken care of, but only in an exploration segment.
• Hope Spot:
  • After the brutal encounter in the theater, the story jumps forwards to Ellie and Dina's new life on a farm, raising the latter's baby. It's a sweet, peaceful sequence that offers Ellie a chance of happiness with a family after the hell that she's endured, though PTSD from Joel's death and general depression by her own admission prevent her from taking any serious solace. When Tommy arrives with intel on Abby's whereabouts, Ellie leaves to finish things despite Dina's pleas, and by the end of the game she and her son are gone for good, Ellie's need for revenge having ruined her chance at that life with her family.
  • After Abby shoots Joel in the leg, she orders her men to tourniquet it. You hope that maybe she's decided to spare his life for some reason. But no. She wants to kill him slowly.
  • Though Genre Savvy viewers know something is up when Abby reveals her location over the radio, there is a brief moment of happiness for Abby and Lev before the Rattlers catch them.
• Hell Hotel: One of the most gruelling and brutal stages of the game is called "The Descent", in which Abby and Lev are stranded on the top of a high-rise hotel building overrun with infected and have to fight their way down to the street level.
• Hotter and Sexier: The first ND title to get a sexual content warning in its ESRB rating. The game contains the company's first explicit sex scene between Abby and Owen and a more chaste one between Ellie and Dina.
• How We Got Here: The entirety of Abby's character arc basically exists for two reasons: to show the player who she is and why she did what she did, and explain where she was the whole time Ellie was searching for her and how she finally ended up in the theatre.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Exaggerated compared to the first game, where the infected are sidelined in favor of focusing on atrocities committed by the human characters. The only habitants we see within Seattle are the WLF military and the Seraphites. Both factions are at an outright genocidal war with each other, both are not hesitent to attack outsiders on sight, and Abby's playthrough shows that just simply being apart of the factions isn't all that great. You also got the Rattlers near the end of the game, who kidnap random survivors and submit them to slave labor and Cold-Blooded Torture. And that's putting aside the main story focusing on the Roaring Rampage of Revenge Ellie and Abby go through that not only gets a lot of people killed or seriously injured but also damages their relationships with their loved ones.
• Human Shield: Just like Joel, Ellie can take human enemies hostage at gunpoint. However, certain bow- or gun-armed human enemies will continue to attack regardless.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Or, rather, just "What I Had to Do"—it serves as the name of the trophy awarded for completing your first playthrough.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: One of the reasons for leaving Ellie and Tommy alive is that the group wanted only Joel, and that killing Ellie will make them just as bad as Joel.
• Ignored Confession: Early on in the game, Ellie admits to Dina that she's immune to the infection. Her admission is passed off as a joke.
• I Have No Son!: Yara and Lev's fanatical mother utterly disapproved of Lev coming out as a trans man and wanted to have nothing to do with them after they fled Haven. Heartbroken that Yara was willing to abandon their mother to start a new life, Lev rushed back to the island alone to convince her to flee with them, but she became hysterical and tried to kill him, forcing him to defend himself; he ended up accidentally killing her in self-defence.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: If you enable the Reduced Enemy Accuracy option in the Combat Accessibility menu, gun-toting enemies can't hit the broadside of a barn. You can go through most of the game without suffering more than an occasional graze as long as you're not actively trying to get shot.
• Inertial Impalement:
  • Dina has a scar on her abdomen from when she fell off a skateboard onto her knife when she was 12.
  • When Ellie gets caught by the Rattlers' snare, the momentum swings her right into a sharp tree branch that stabs deep into her side.
• In-Series Nickname: The two warring factions in Seattle, the Seraphites and WLF, have nicknames for each other. The former are “Scars” because of the scars they've cut into their cheeks, and the latter are “Wolves”.
• Inspiration Nod: Abby can have an optional conversation with a fellow WLF soldier who has borrowed her copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most influential and read revenge-stories ever written.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Early in the game, Ellie tells Dina that she's immune to the infection whilst explaining she gave herself a chemical burn to hide the bite mark; Dina doesn't believe her & Ellie has to tell her all over again months later, after her mask breaks while they're about to be overtaken by a horde of infected and she wants to stop to share a mask.
  • Through the flashbacks it's revealed that Ellie returned to the hospital from the first game's ending in search of answers, already being dubious of Joel's lie and struggling to come to terms with how her immunity means little now there is no chance of a cure. Searching through the hospital reveals what actually happened, and when confronted Joel comes clean with the truth, resulting in his and Ellie's relationship becoming strained before the start of the second game.
• Invulnerable Knuckles: Downplayed on two occasions:
  • Abby punches Ellie hard in the face at least a dozen times during their first fight. By the end, her left-hand remains unmarked, and her right-hand ends up, at most, skinned (the blood could potentially be from a slash wound on the same arm, or even from Ellie). Neither of her hands ends up broken.
  • The same happens in their final fight. Both end with, at worst, skinned knuckles despite winging haymakers at each other's jaw (Fingore notwithstanding).
• Irony:
  • In the original game Ellie states to Sam that her true fear in the post-outbreak world is ending up alone. By the end of Part II, she has regained her humanity and is offered small rays of hope for the future, but her revenge had ripped away everyone close to her until she is indeed alone.
  • Joel saves Abby in the prologue, the daughter of the surgeon he killed years earlier to save Ellie in the first game. It is this act of kindness that unknowingly comes to bite him in the ass, effectively dooming him to his death when Abby realizes that this is the man responsible for her father's murder.
  • The events of the first game had Joel becoming emotionally vacant and ruthless after his daughter was killed. He rediscovers his humanity by bonding with a child and ends up tearing apart an organization due to his love for the child. Abby kills Joel due to this, as he killed her father... only because she was emotionally vacant and ruthless after her father was killed. She rediscovers her humanity by bonding with a child, and ends up tearing apart an organization due to her love for the child.
• It Can Think: Not as dramatic as other examples, but Tommy notes that the infected are starting to form herds and migrate seasonally like animals, whereas previously they would've just paced around aimlessly looking for something to attack.
• It's All Upstairs From Here: While trying to get to Nora's hospital, Abby needs to go up one of the few standing skyscrapers in Seattle, taking one of the hidden routes of the Seraphites. Unfortunately for her, she has acrophobia, and she's definitely panicking when she has to cross the jibs of a tower crane that connect two skyscrapers.
• Jump Scare: Has quite a few given the setting.
  • After exploring most of the Seattle area on horseback, Ellie and Dina leave the area and consider camping for the night. They jump over a barbed wire obstacle only to get knocked off their horse by a hidden anti-personnel mine. The reason it's effective is you're controlling the horse and there's little to no warning it'll happen.
  • In one of the optional buildings in the first explorable area in Seattle, a runner jumps out at you from a bathroom stall. Dina wonders out loud just how the Infected get into those places.
  • At one point Ellie explores the house of a man who was a pro archer and very proficient at killing infected from some of the notes you find. However, when you reach the garage area, that same archer jumps you as a Stalker, which you have to put down.
  • When you reach a hotel area, there doesn't seem to be anyone there and just another abandoned building with items to grab and a workbench to upgrade your weapons. Go to do so and an enemy combatant will suddenly attack you from behind without warning, forcing you into a firefight with his friends after you kill him. The hell, game?!
  • Some particularly heavily infested buildings have Stalkers grown into walls that'll suddenly break free and charge at you screaming if you get too close.
  • The flashback to Ellie's 16th birthday contains a nasty one, when a startled boar suddenly charges past her in a dark and foreboding part of the museum. Made particularly effective by all the supplies you can pick up before it happens despite no actual fight happening in the chapter.
• Justified Tutorial:
  • The section right after you get the bow and arrow is a flashback from two years ago with Ellie using a sniper rifle and making note of the bullet drop, which is helpful since the bow no longer shows the arc like it did in the first game.
  • The first introduction to action sequences such as aiming, cover, and jumping over obstacles, is shown during a snowball fight that Ellie and Dina have with some children in Jackson's playground.

Tropes K to N

• Killed Mid-Sentence:
  • Manny.
  • Just like in the first game, opposing human characters will talk among each other or yell at you if they're alerted to your presence, and you can invoke this.
• Kill It with Fire: Molotovs and the flamethrower make a return, but now, there are also incendiary shotgun shells for that extra bit of crispiness.
• Lack of Empathy: One of the focal points of the story: namely, how hate helps dehumanize others.
  • Ellie is increasingly traumatized by her Roaring Rampage of Revenge, but it only makes her more bent on continuing it, until she begins to disregard other people. It culminates in her unapologetically leaving Dina to go after Abby, even telling her that it's on her if she doesn't wait for her.
  • Abby is taken over by hate to this point. She doesn't get why Ellie would go after her, even though their motivation is pretty much the same, and her sheer hatred towards Joel doesn't make her hesitate for a second, even in spite of his kindness towards her. She also has a hard time seeing the Seraphites as people, and only lets go of the notion after she connects with Yara and Lev.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The karma gods are not to be mocked in this game. No one's immune.
  • The Salt Lake crew's quest to murder Joel and avenge Abby's father succeeds...and then every single one except for Abby ends up dead violently at the hands of the victims who they forced to witness the vicious murder, save for one who's killed by the Seraphites.
  • Abby is the first to take a step back from the revenge feud and sets off to make a big change in her character by rejoining the Fireflies... only to be captured by the Rattlers and endure a hellish few months of starvation as a captive.
  • Ellie's brutal quest to avenge Joel and his memory ends in her not only losing the people she cared about, but her last link to Joel (literally) severed: the ability to play the guitar.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Abby says what most people are thinking after she first encounters the Rat King in the hospital:
  Abby: Holy fuck! Holy fucking fuck!
• Leave No Survivors: While enemies can surrender to you, the player is encouraged to kill them anyway since they'll invariably attack you once you turn away.
• Let's You and Him Fight: You'll occasionally come across groups of mutually hostile enemy factions in the same area, and instead of taking them all on by yourself, you can try to lure them into contact with each other and then clean up what's left once they're done killing each other. Alternatively, you can attempt to sneak past them all while they're busy. You can also do this with the Infected, by luring them to a group of enemies and watch them lay waste to each other.
• Love Cannot Overcome: Both Ellie and Abby's Love Interests care deeply for them, but find themselves unable to deal with the lengths that they go to for revenge. It's implied this was the reason why Owen and Abby are no longer together, and Dina (possibly) leaves Ellie for good after Ellie leaves to find Abby and end her once and all.
• Lured into a Trap: Had the WLF's scouts returned from the Seraphite island alive, they would have known they were sailing their army into a complete and absolute slaughter. Abby can find the scout's note indicating they did not realize how utterly massive the Scar's numbers really are and how well they are dug in around their home.
• MacGyvering: Item crafting has been greatly expanded upon. Aside from medkits and improvised explosives, Ellie can learn to craft jury-rigged suppressors, stun bombs, explosive arrows and more. The only problem is that, due to the crafting resources being mostly the same, you'll find yourself facing Sadistic Choices even more often when it comes to decide what to use them for in any given situation—do you stuff that piece of cloth into a bottle to create a suppressor, or do you make a medkit out of it instead? However, one of the gameplay modifiers includes the ability to have infinite crafting components, completely negating this disadvantage.
• Main Character Final Boss: It's played straight at first with the end of Abby's three-day plotline concluding with a boss battle against the game's main protagonist Ellie. After a Time Skip, it's zigzagged as the protagonist Ellie then pursues Abby to California, and her final battle is Abby.
• Male Gaze: There is quite a few shots of the female characters butts. Even the camera work during regular gameplay seems to be reworked from the first game to show more of the players behind then before.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Abby and Owen's relationship is this dynamic; Abby is a buff, hardened soldier who's great at killing, and Owen, while a soldier as well, is more sensitive, playful and grows tired of the killing and constant conflict the WLF is in with the Seraphites. It's implied that it was him that started pulling away from Abby once she had her mind set on avenging her dad and working towards that goal, and while he didn't blame her, he was scared of the level of sadism she showed by torturing Joel to death.
• Man Bites Man:
  • Ellie bites Abby's forearm in their first fight.
  • Abby bites Ellie's ring finger and pinky in their final fight, removing the former one entirely.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • A huge number of Abby's gameplay or flashback sequences echo earlier scenes with Joel:
    • Owen leads Abby through the Seattle Aquarium, just as Joel led Ellie through the Wyoming Natural History Museum.
    • Abby and her father have a bonding moment with a trapped zebra from the Salt Lake City zoo, as Joel and Ellie did with giraffes from the first game.
    • Abby's exploration mechanics with Lev are quite similar to those of Joel and Ellie, bringing back the "toss the child up to a retracted ladder to kick it down" mechanic as well as others.
  • In the Seattle Aquarium restaurant, there is a note from the Seraphites to a teenager they are trying to recruit, warming him not to adopt his father's weaknesses. The corpse of the father is in the same room, clutching a letter explaining how the boy took his younger brother and fled to join the cult, using the same phrase.
• Meaningful Name: The Seraphites' name comes from a group of angels in the Abrahamic religions. Seraphs have six wings, and the Seraphites are a religious cult that wants to “clip people's wings”. In the Book of Isaiah, the seraphs help him see the error of his ways and free himself of sin, much like the cult believes the plague was wiping the world of sin. They also believe they're washing away their hanging victims' sins. The word also comes from the Hebrew word “saraph” which means “to burn”, as in burn with passion for God which they have in common.
  Isaiah 6:2-4: Seraph angels stood around him. Each angel had six wings. They used two wings to cover their faces, two wings to cover their bodies, and two wings to fly. The angels were calling to each other, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord All-Powerful. His glory fills the whole earth.” The sound was so loud that it caused the frame around the door to shake, and the Temple was filled with smoke.
• Menu Time Lockout: Averted, just like in the first game, where you can be interrupted while accessing the inventory menu and crafting materials by enemies. There's one specific instance where there's a pre-scripted Jump Scare when you access a certain weapon upgrade workbench in a (supposedly) empty building and get grabbed from behind by an enemy from out of nowhere. The same is likely to happen if you're dumb enough to tweak your weapons while there are still enemies in the area, as not all workbenches are in safe territory. On higher difficulties, Clickers can actually hear you open your inventory or reload if you're close by.
• Mirror Character: Abby spent the last five years hating Joel for killing her father, only to go through the same Character Development Joel did in The Last of Us: she becomes a less emotional person, drives away anyone close to her, and commits some serious sins, only to have her tough, hardened exterior melted away by a child companion.
• Model Museum: There is a model viewer available covering a significant portion of the cast, with some characters available in alternative outfits. You can freely examine any of these models and watch them play simple animations.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The E3 trailer has Ellie kissing Dina transitioning to a shot of Ellie slowly and tortuously slashing a man's throat.
  • Most of the museum flashback section with Joel is heartwarming and bittersweet. However, the final section in the Natural History Center is ominous, featuring a dark building with disturbing confessions spray-painted on the walls, creepy dioramas, a skeletal corpse, and a Jump Scare.
  • Near the end of the game, a tranquil scene of Ellie trying to get a lamb back into the pen on her and Dina's farm is interrupted when Ellie has a flashback to Joel's death.
  • The game's depressing ending is accompanied by its Evolving Title Screen changing from a gloomy, fog-shrouded lake to a bright and sunny Californian beach.
• Morality Chain Beyond the Grave: This is what stops Ellie from killing Abby for her murder of Joel in the end, as a vision of Joel himself appears in front of Ellie.
• Morality Pet: Rescuing Lev not only leads Abby to her personal redemption journey, it's Lev who appeals to Abby to back off at the last moment rather than kill a pregnant Dina as revenge for Mel.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Ellie has this reaction when she learns that Mel, who she'd killed less than a minute earlier, was pregnant.
• Nerf:
  • The hunting rifle, previously a One-Hit Kill weapon against most basic enemies, now needs at least two body shots to kill even early-game humans wearing nothing but shirts and jeans. You need to purchase its expensive damage upgrade to bring it somewhat in line with how it used to behave. It's probably compensation for having the rifle available from the very beginning.
  • Proximity mines are no longer throwable, needing to be set instead, so they require a lot more planning and prediction of enemy movements to use effectively. Abby's pipe bombs are a bit like the proximity mines of the first game, but with worse range.
  • In the first game, bows were an insta-kill against unaware enemies (save for bloaters and armored humans) if you shot them in either the head or their bodies. Here, they're only an insta-kill via headshots. This is perhaps to compensate for the few buffs that the bow was given (such as having better aim this time around).
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • The announcement trailer had Joel walk into a house to find Ellie surrounded by bodies, and she tells him she plans to "find and kill every last one of them." This scene never happens in the game because Joel is dead by that point in the story, and Ellie is out to avenge him.
  • The State of Play trailer had Joel stopping Ellie to tell her that she can't go out by herself. In the final release, the scene instead has Jesse join her and deliver the line.
  • The same trailer implied that Ellie would be getting revenge for Dina, as a big deal is made about Ellie looking for her before the scene where she's forced to watch someone get shot. In the game Ellie and Dina are very briefly separated by a blizzard and the death Ellie watches is Joel's, who was killed by bludgeoning. Other trailer shots are from the horseback sections in Seattle showing Ellie riding alone but in the game Dina is with her and never goes on foot when Ellie's in the saddle.
  • Trailers had shown scenes of Ellie interacting with an older Joel. The actual game shows these as flashbacks with younger versions of Ellie and Joel.
  • Like the State of Play trailer, the story trailer also removed Dina from multiple cutscene shots and gameplay footage she's actually in. In addition, a brief shot in the same trailer is from Ellie and Abby's final fight, showing Ellie in her usual shirt and hairstyle and with her face covered in blood. In the actual scene, she has a different outfit and hair, while the amount of blood on her face is a dynamic element of that segment and varies.
  • The final commercial lauding the game with reviewers' scores features a brief scene with Isaac and his troops cornering someone, implying it's Ellie. The shot used here removes Abby completely, who by then had already betrayed the Wolves.
• New Game Plus: Like the first game, starting an NG+ carries over all skills and weapon upgrades you acquired during your first run. Unlike the first game, however, your weapons will carry over as well (though they won't actually appear in your inventory until Ellie reaches Seattle). Trophy hunters will have to do at least one such run to acquire the trophies for fully upgrading all skills and weapons, something that's impossible to accomplish in a single campaign.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Arguably, the whole game comes about because Joel killed the doctor who was about to do the operation on Ellie, unaware he had a daughter. The man wasn't heavily armed (save for a scalpel) and did try to reason with Joel, but Joel was the one to fatally kill him rather than just incapacitate him. Had Joel not gone through with his decision to save Ellie at the cost of going against the Fireflies, the events of the game likely would've never happened.
  • Ellie reaches the area where Abby and her friends are. But after killing Owen and Mel, Ellie finds out too late the latter was pregnant and is on the verge of a breakdown before Tommy and Jesse get her out of there, with it likely that she was set to give up the quest altogether (Jesse earlier imploring they turn back, mostly for Dina's sake). However, she made the mistake of dropping the map of Seattle she was using (with it marked to boot) that Abby would later find and track them back to the theatre they were staying at. This results in Tommy getting shot in the head and losing sight in one eye (as well as wounded in the leg, that would give him a limp from then on) and Jesse being shot dead in the scuffle.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • Joel and Tommy assist Abby and her group in fleeing from a horde of infected. They also offer to let the group recover and stock up with Joel's camp. This leads to them learning of Joel's identity and Abby killing him for revenge.
  • Abby and Owen decide to spare Ellie and Tommy's lives since their main target was Joel. However, all this results in is Ellie and Tommy chasing them all the way back to Seattle. All of Abby's friends, including Owen, are killed at Ellie and Tommy's hands.
• Noodle Incident: The circumstances surrounding the Seraphites’ prophet’s death aren’t made clear. Abby implies Isaac had something to do with it and that it was what broke the truce between them and the WLF, but it never moves past implications.
• No OSHA Compliance: While it's justified, as there isn't an OSHA anymore and the Seraphites are a delusional death cult, the Seraphite bridges are incredibly dangerous. In between the high winds, the slippery grips caused by the fog, and the incredibly narrow walkways hanging over an abyss, one wonders how many Seraphites have fallen to their deaths trying to cross. Abby's segment crossing them would have been infinitely easier if the Seraphites had thought to install handrails.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Owen points out that the way the WLF views the Seraphites as dangerous, insane cultists isn't all that much different from how the government viewed the Fireflies as dangerous, insane terrorists.
  • When Jerry is trying to convince Marlene to go through with the operation to sacrifice Ellie, Marlene challenges him by asking him if he would be willing to go through with the operation if it was his own daughter on the operating table. Jerry hesitates but successfully dodges answering the question, suggesting that he would have done the exact same thing as Joel and sacrificed a potential cure to save his own daughter. In the same scene, Abby says that she would want her father to go through with the surgery, mirroring Ellie's own words in a late-game flashback where she outright tells Joel she would've wanted to be sacrificed at the hospital so that her life would matter.
• No Sympathy for Grudgeholders: Ellie gets pushback from all her companions except for Tommy in regards to continuing to pursue Abby and her crowd; most of the time it's within reason (such as going off to find Abby instead of helping Tommy escape from the WLF). By the time she learns her lesson, it comes at a massive personal cost as Dina leaves Ellie, taking JJ with her. In Abby's case, her pursuit caused a rift in her relationship with Owen, and Mel later chews her out about the things she's done, but she takes more of a redemptive direction during her gameplay section.

Tropes O to Z

• Once More, with Clarity: Several scenes you see while playing as Ellie are revisited once you start playing as Abby, with one specific scene from the original game being given this treatment.
  • Joel's death, when seen from Ellie's perspective, has incredibly tense music playing up until Abby deals the killing blow. After this, the music is replaced by a loud, relentless ringing sound, with all dialogue being muffled to the point where it's impossible to make out anything but Ellie's enraged and devastated grunts and threats. When revisited as Abby, the dialogue is now audible, and less attention is given to Joel's death, with the focus now being on Abby's group debating what to do about Ellie and Tommy now that Joel is dead.
  • Jesse's death is given similar treatment, with Ellie's perspective giving more attention to it than Abby's.
  • The ending scene of the original game in which Joel kills the lead surgeon is expanded upon. To elaborate, it's revealed that the surgeon that Joel killed was Abby's father, giving her motivation to hunt down Joel.
• One-Hit Kill: The post-apocalypse knows many ways to end a life very abruptly.
  • A headshot from any weapon is instantly lethal to humans unless they wear a helmet, which no enemy does until the final chapter. Runners and dogs are also subject to this, while more advanced types of infected avert it, requiring multiple headshots to take down unless you're using a particularly powerful gun.
  • Heavy melee weapons like fire axes and two-handed sledgehammers need only one hit to kill, balancing out their low durability.
  • Few opponents can survive a point-blank shotgun blast, even less so once you upgrade the shotgun's damage.
  • High-level infected like Shamblers and Bloaters have an "Instant Death" Radius—fail to evade their melee attacks and you're treated to a gruesome death scene.
  • Only the most resilient Elite Mooks can survive being set on fire, making Molotov cocktails and the flamethrower very effective against anything short of Bloaters.
  • Similarly, explosive weapons like pipe bombs, proximity mines and explosive arrows turn anything that isn't an Elite Mook into Ludicrous Gibs, no questions asked.
  • Bosses often have the ability to inflict this on the Player Character (like Ellie during her and Abby's first battle, or the Rat King) to set them apart from normal Elite Mooks.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: When Ellie finds out Abby has been captured by a gang of sadistic bandits, she still insists on going to their hideout to personally kill her. And it's not just to make sure she dies either. Several times along this journey, Ellie says she hopes the bandits haven't killed Abby yet because she wants to be the one to do the deed.
• Oxygen Meter: Finally averting her infamous Super Drowning Skills and fear of deep water from the previous game, Ellie can be seen learning to swim and dive in the early game; which becomes important later. However, she can only hold her breath for about twenty seconds before she immediately drowns.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • There's a reason you get a trophy for finding all weapons. Only half of the 12 available weapons are acquired automatically. If you want the heavy hitters, you'll have to search for them, and missing them means you'll have to get by with only your basic gear. This is particularly dangerous for Abby and her eventual encounter with the Rat King, as having fewer weapons means fewer rounds to unload into the abomination, making the fight exponentially more difficult.
  • The additional holsters, previously craftable upgrades, are now also found in the world, and just as missable.
  • Both protagonists have only a single basic skill tree available by default and need to find well-hidden training manuals to unlock their more advanced skills. Missing them, especially the stealth-centric ones, makes the game a whole lot harder.
• Personality Swap: Abby's gameplay section with Lev displays Abby's grumbling, closed-off nature contrasting with Lev's almost cheery optimism and encouragement. After their character development, they both switch moods, which is highlighted in the section before they're grabbed by the Rattlers: Abby is upbeat and positive and Lev has gained Abby's grumpy pessimism.
• Perspective Flip: The story is primarily about Ellie's Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Abby, seeing her and her companions purely as antagonists. Then, about halfway through the game, you're suddenly given control of Abby to learn her motivation and witness the events up to that point from her perspective. Suddenly all those people you killed as Ellie become much more sympathetic. Ultimately, the two paths meet again where they previously diverged, culminating in a vicious battle between the two Dueling Player Characters.
• Pet the Dog:
  • After Joel is killed, Owen is shown refusing to allow the others in Abby's group to pragmatically kill off Ellie and Tommy as loose ends, fully stating that if they do so that they would be just as bad as they think of Joel. This ends up becoming their undoing, as it enables Ellie, Tommy and their allies to hunt them down in revenge.
  • Abby's Redemption Quest. She spends the entire game rescuing the hunted Yara and Lev from the Seraphites, being nice to everyone around her, and literally petting (and playing fetch with) dogs.
• Photo Mode: With more filters and frames than inThe Last of Us Remastered. Once again, Naughty Dog held a contest for it in 2020.
• Plot Parallel: Ellie and Tommy. By the end of the game, their animalistic need for revenge has left them both physically and emotionally crippled, and their spouses have left them due to their destructive behaviour.
• Plot-Triggering Death: This can actually apply to two deaths.
  • The first is Abby's father, Jerry Anderson, the lead Firefly surgeon who was killed by Joel in the first game's climax, setting in motion Abby's intense desire for revenge against Joel.
  • The second is Joel himself. His death at the hands of Abby is what sends Ellie on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, as well as setting up Abby's Redemption Quest upon realizing that Joel's death brought her no closure nor satisfaction.
• Pregnant Badass: Two of the characters are pregnant yet do their patrols like any other member of their community, fending off enemy humans and infected alike. The first of them is Mel, a member of the WLF whose pregnancy is quite advanced. The second is Dina, who's bearing her and Jesse's child.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Lev runs away from the Seraphites because they won't accept him as a trans boy, but his sister Yara (another ex-Seraphite) remains supportive.
• Poor Communication Kills: On both sides of the conflict, barely anyone bothers to sit down and just talk things out rationally, not even a Motive Rant, often being too blinded by the need for vengeance to listen to reason. Abby never tells Joel why she's trying to kill him; she just shoots him on sight and beats him to death. Ellie isn't any better, killing three of Abby's friends before they can explain themselves (though admittedly because they try and attack her first when she has them at their mercy) and by the time she does realize why Abby did what she did, Abby's come to try and avenge her friends and the two are too caught up in trying to kill each other to see reason anymore. Even more so at the end where they're both too tired and wounded to be in any position to fight each other and by all rights, should just talk it out. But Ellie once more re-engages the conflict for one more fight.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
  • Though Ellie is lesbian, and Dina is bi, neither of them understand the LGBT connotation of rainbows upon seeing a few of them in Seattle, including the pride flag itself inside a gay and lesbian bookstore.
  • Lev grew up in a religious Luddite cult and thus has only the barest idea of the outside world. When Abby calls something he did "cool", he doesn't understand the term. She has a lot of explaining to do while they travel together.
• Power Up Let Down: While most of the weapon upgrades tend to be objectively straight upgrades for the weapon, the semi-automatic rifle's unique upgrade is a bit more questionable. It adds a toggle-able burst fire mode to fire 3 bullets per trigger pull instead of one. However, the ammo economy in 2 is rather scarce, and players may already find themselves counting every bullet as is, particularly if their aim isn't the best. So the ability to spend more bullets per "shot" is not exactly the most attractive option, especially considering the bolt-action rifle's unique upgrade is just a straight damage boost with no strings attached.
• Preserve Your Gays: Like in the first game, Ellie survives, if not unscathed. Ellie's bisexual love interest Dina survives with her child but leaves due to Ellie's quest for vengeance. The transgender Lev survives as well with the help of his sibling Yara, who dies.
• Pretty Little Headshots: You thought the first game averted this? Let's go over how this one averts it even harder...
  • Very, very detailed entry and exit wounds for every kind of bullet.
  • Being able to flat out blow people's jaws off with a well-placed shot.
  • Brain matter, blood, and bone fragments flying out of the wound and hitting the ground, even splattering on a nearby wall and sliding down, leaving a trail of blood.
• Product Placement: There's a lot of surprisingly intact PlayStation consoles to be found in abandoned homes. One of the Wolves, Whitney, is even seen playing Hotline Miami on a PlayStation Vita several times, with Abby even asking her about the game she is playing. At least she has the decency to mutter "stupid video games" while walking away.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Deconstructed thoroughly. Ellie goes off on a revenge-fueled rampage after Joel is killed by Abby and mows down soldier after soldier to reach her goal. But the second act of the game has the perspective shift to Abby, who is understandably angry towards Joel, as he killed her father and possibly doomed humanity by saving Ellie in the last game. The enemies Ellie killed were Abby's friends and compatriots in the WLF, so naturally, she's pissed when she confronts Ellie at the theater. Also, throughout the story (most prominently in Abby's campaign), the story confronts the dangers of demonization of entire groups.
• Pun: Despite the game's relentlessly grim atmosphere, groan-inducing puns make a return to lighten the mood every now and then, although it's not Ellie who's telling them this time around. Joel of all people cracks one in the prologue in an effort to cheer up his still-crestfallen surrogate daughter, and Dina also comes up with some.
  Joel: What's the downside of swallowing a clock? It's time-consuming.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Abby gets revenge for her father's death and is allowed to leave with Lev so she can start a new life. However, because of her actions, all of her friends are dead, her dog is dead, and her revenge didn't bring the closure she was expecting.
• Ragnarök Proofing:
  • Delicate electronic devices like the PlayStation Vita handheld console are unlikely to still be fully functional 25 years into the post-apocalypse, but one minor WLF character is repeatedly shown playing with one in a particularly blatant case of Product Placement.
  • The basement of the WLF hospital in Seattle is a particularly bad case. No-one's been there since the building was abandoned in the wake of the original outbreak a quarter-century ago, the entire sublevel is submerged in shin-deep water, but the electric wiring still works, the emergency generator still contains usable gasoline and starts up without a hint of trouble, the first-aid kits are still in serviceable condition, and there's a (relative) abundance of crafting materials that can still be turned into useful equipment. In reality, everything below ground (if not the entire building above as well) would likely have collapsed in on itself after decades without maintenance in such an environment.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: Both Ellie and Abby lose almost entirely everything in their pursuit of revenge, but both characters ultimately realize that revenge wasn't the answer, and their endings show that they're finally starting to heal (at least mentally) and move forward.
• Rebuilt Pedestal: Despite losing almost everything in her pursuit of revenge against Abby, Ellie is at least able to forgive herself for her guilt, and at very least understand Joel's perspective and the reason why he saved her from the Fireflies. It's with that, she's finally able to metaphorically put him to rest.
• Religion of Evil: According to Yara, the Seraphites used to be a peaceful cult until their self-proclaimed prophet was killed, at which point the new leadership twisted her words into the hateful and downright genocidal perversion one gets to witness in the game.
• Redemption Quest: Joel's arc, even after death, is eventually getting the forgiveness of Ellie for lying to her about the vaccine. And Abby, for killing Joel to redeem herself in the player's eyes. For this purpose, Abby spends the entire game petting the dog while Ellie spends it, conversely, making herself look awful in contrast.
• Red Herring: A minor example at the very end of the game. When Ellie discovers the pillars where the Rattlers' disobedient slaves are strung up and left to die, there's a tall woman with a ponytail that the player will likely make a beeline for. But the real Abby is actually opposite said woman, now borderline unrecognisable after enduring starvation and having her signature ponytail sheared off.
• The Remnant: Abby, Owen, Manny and a handful of others are former Fireflies who are now part of the Washington Liberation Front (WLF). While they have assimilated into the WLF and are aligned with their goals, they (and especially Abby) still want revenge over what happened at the end of the first game. Them executing their revenge is the catalyst for most of the second game's plot.
• Revenge Before Reason:
  • Ellie, several times throughout the game, most prominently towards the ending where after settling with Dina and the baby, she can't let go of what Abby did and pursues her—only to let her go. She loses everything afterwards, outside of Tommy and her home of Jackson.
  • Abby, who has been tracking Joel for the last five years, and training for the moment to kill him. It's implied that she and Owen ended things because he was turned off by her obsession of getting revenge, and after she kills Joel, it's clear he was only there to make sure Abby didn't do anything else rash.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: Abby wants revenge because Joel killed her father, the surgeon who going to sacrifice Ellie to make a cure for the outbreak. Once Abby kills Joel, she gives Ellie a reason to want revenge and everyone in Abby's group believes she went too far in killing Joel. They understand her reasoning to kill Joel but decree that she went too far in beating him to death. Abby even agrees in the end by saying it didn't bring any peace or bring her father back. Ellie also realizes that killing Abby won't undo the damage done to her or bring Joel back. She ultimately decides to spare Abby, so she doesn't lose anything else in her life.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • Almost halfway through the game, we're given a flashback that reveals that Ellie did find out the truth about what happened at the Firefly hospital, which resulted in her cutting her ties with Joel. This puts her revenge mission in a somewhat different light as before the reveal, the players might assume Ellie is going after Abby's group not knowing what would have caused Abby to kill Joel (although she never learns the exact reason). However, the real eye-opener comes at the very end when it's revealed that the day before Joel is killed, Ellie had just decided to try and forgive him, only to be rid of the chance thanks to Abby. This would lead to the interpretation that during her revenge journey, Ellie is just as mad at herself as she is with Abby. While Abby physically tortured Joel, Ellie emotionally tortured him for two years for not speaking to him, and then lost him forever thanks to her refusal to forgive him before it was too late. Ellie's whole journey can thus then be seen as her learning to forgive both Joel and herself more than it is to get revenge, concluding with her deciding to spare Abby after all and leaving the guitar she was gifted by Joel at the window of her and Dina's farmhouse, seemingly as a symbol for finally getting over his death and letting go of her hatred and guilt.
  • When Ellie drags Nora down to a floor filled with spores before fighting some WLF soldiers, one of them can be heard asking "What the hell is the power doing on!?" On a second playthrough, you know the power is on because Abby was at the lower floor earlier and turned it on before fighting the Rat King.
  • In that same scene above, you can hear the Rat King's roars as it fights Abby. It's easy to mistake the roars as ambient noises as part of the soundtrack but Abby fights it a short time after turning on the power which was on when Ellie and Nora entered the pit, so it can't be anything else. It also roars at the exact moment Nora pisses Ellie off to the point where Ellie nearly beats her to death for information about Abby, highlighting just how monstrous Ellie has become.
• Retirony: Owen plans on leaving the WLF behind and then on Day 3, Abby, Mel, Lev and Yara decide to go with him - except Ellie kills both Owen and Mel hours before Abby comes back, ending Owen's plans to reunite with the Fireflies.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • Since there's no unbiased source around the conflict between the WLF and the Seraphites, and the Jackson crew stumble into their war three days before it comes to a boiling point, there's no answer given as to who exactly broke the truce between the two of them, as both sides claimed the other side fired first.
  • Abby comes across a derelict ferry where some of the crew and passengers mutinied against the captain over how to deal with potentially infected passengers on board. While the mutineers murdered many of the sick passengers before being killed by the captain, the mortally wounded captain wondered if they were really right when he started to hear infected trying to break into the bridge during his last moments. However, given how much time has passed, it's impossible to really know the true answer.
• Ruins of the Modern Age: Like in the last game, you come across ruins of neighbourhoods and cities. With the PS4's higher graphical power over its predecessor, there's a lot more detail to areas that were once teeming with life. A few buildings are still in somewhat pristine condition, while others are covered in fungus or have walls missing, making it both sadly beautiful and horrifying at the same time to explore.
• Rule of Symbolism:
  • Joel dies getting his head bashed in by a golf club. Golf being considered a fatherly hobby, this does double duty, as Abby does it because he took her father from her, and it removes Ellie's Parental Substitute.
  • Ellie loses her left ring finger in her final fight with Abby; while Ellie loses two fingers from that fight, the ring finger is the only one Abby directly bites off. This symbolizes that Ellie lost her chance at a happy life with Dina for going after Abby again.
  • Similar to the above, the implication that Ellie had to amputate her pinky symbolizes the damage she's done to herself in her quest for revenge.
• Sacrificial Lion: There are a lot, but the most iconic one goes to Joel. While it's true that his death was vital to the story, because of the Perspective Flip, he became one, making him both fit Plot-Triggering Death and this trope, which is quite rare.
• Scary Black Man:
  • As Abby is escaping the burning town, she gets into a unskippable hand to hand combat sequence with a black man wielding a pickaxe. After she takes half his face off with a sickle, he becomes absolutely terrifying.
  • Isaac qualifies as well, given him being the leader of WLF and that he personally tortures prisoners.
• Scenery Porn: One thing that has earned unanimous praise is the art of the game. Some environments are truly gorgeous, with views of mountainscapes near Jackson, overgrown buildings that take on a strangely serene atmosphere, lush forests, and lovingly rendered settlements, full of details of their inhabitants' lives.
• Secret-Keeper: Joel, Tommy, and Maria are the only people in the world that know Ellie is immune. Joel chided her at one point for getting lazy about wearing her mask. She later tried to clean her bite up with acid, but it left a scar, so she had her soon-to-be first girlfriend Cat put a tattoo over it. Later, she tells Dina while they're in Seattle, because the latter starts freaking out when her mask breaks as they're being swarmed by infected.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Downplayed. Ellie, after once trying (and failing) to avenge Joel by hunting down his killer, tosses away her family life with Dina and JJ for one more shot at revenge. She succeeds, but at the last second has a Heel Realization; Ellie lets go of Abby and the need for vengeance. Returning home, Dina and her son have left Ellie and it's not clear if they can be won back. Ellie is left alone and facing an uncertain future, but has forgiven Joel (and to a lesser extent, Abby) and her mental health seems to be on a path to healing.
• Schmuck Bait: Weapon benches are normally safe to use after you clear out the area... except for one that spawns a squad of enemies behind you when you interact with it. The packing-up animation can't be interrupted, throwing you into Controllable Helplessness as you hear someone running up to you without being able to do anything about it until it's too late—unless you had the foreknowledge to know to put a mine behind you.
• Shoot the Mage First: WLF guard dogs are a non-magic variant thanks to their beyond-human ability to track Ellie based on her scent. If you want to fight stealthily, getting rid of any dogs in the area will invariably be at the top of your priority list.
• Shout-Out: Go here.
• Shown Their Work: A lot of the paleontological facts stated while in the museum. Particularly, Velociraptor being much smaller in reality as the raptors of Jurassic Park were actually based on Deinonychus.
• Signature Style: The third ND game in a row to have the climactic fight be a good ol' drag-down, knock-out slugfest with a Fisticuffs Boss (although one is technically a Sword Fight) rather than some elaborate set-piece.
• Sinister Silhouettes: How the sniper is seen from the player's perspective for the majority of the Seattle Harbor battle. The shooter is revealed at the end of the fight in a surprisingly great twist.
• Skill Scores and Perks: Unlike the original game's mostly independent skill selection for Joel, Ellie's skills are arranged in linear branches that must be progressed through one after the other to reach the more powerful ones. She also only has two branches unlocked by default and needs to pick up skill magazines to unlock more.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Near the end of Abby's Day 1, a scene between Abby and Owen involves the two of them getting into an argument about Owen's guilt over his hand in Joel's death, followed by the two of them attempting to choke each other out. After taking a moment to stop, the two end up making out and having sex immediately after.
• Slashed Throat: Probably the game's leading cause of death due to Ellie performing all her stealth kills this way. Justified of course by being the most efficient method to kill someone and prevent them from calling for help at the same time, at least for someone who lacks the raw physical strength to choke others dead or snap their neck as Joel did.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Far down the cynical side. While the first game could be very dark, it overall still had a message of hope and multiple moments of levity and humour. This game, while it does have lighter moments, also has a habit of taking any sense of optimism and hope the player may have and smashing it into pieces. In the end, Ellie loses almost everything important to her, even after deciding to end her own quest for revenge.
• Snow Means Death: The first chapter of the game takes place in a snowy forest and ends with Joel's death.
• Soft Glass:
  • If you're tired of breaking windows or other glass panes by throwing bricks at them, you can use melee attacks instead. The protagonists will use their melee weapon if they have one available, but if they don't, they'll use their elbow whether it's clothed or not, and they'll never suffer as much as a scratch for it. Crawling over glass shards left in window frames or on the floor also poses no health risk whatsoever.
  • One of Abby's chapters combines this with Soft Water when she falls off a very tall crane through a skylight into a swimming pool without the slightest injury.
• Soft Water: Abby and Lev fall at least ten stories from a crane into a hotel's pool and neither is injured.
• So Happy Together: The story apparently ends with Abby alive but all her friends dead, and Ellie and Dina living a harmonious family life with Dina's and Jesse's baby son on a beautiful, peaceful farm. The game being what it is, it doesn't last as Ellie lets herself get talked into continuing the search for Abby despite Dina's pleas to stay with her. When she returns months later, Abby is still alive but Dina and the boy are gone, leaving Ellie with nothing but the ruins of the life she could've had.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Dina has Jesse's baby several months after he died.
• The Straight and Arrow Path:
  • The bow returns as one of Ellie's weapons, now capable of launching very powerful explosive arrows in addition to the normal ones, but no longer showing you the arrow's exact trajectory, making it harder to use.^note The bow can be upgraded with a rangefinder to alleviate this disadvantage, however. Also, recovering arrows is only possible after a headshot, and even then the chance is about 50:50 at best.
  • Abby gets a crossbow instead of a bow, a much better alternative overall because it holds the same amount of ammo while being easier to aim, and its sturdy bolts mean they're recoverable more often.
  • Lev wields a bow as his main weapon while travelling with Abby.
  • Although most of the Seraphite soldiers wield firearms, they're also the only faction to field the occasional archer in battle. Getting hit with an arrow actually has a few unique gameplay elements like taking periodic damage while the arrow is lodged in the protagonist's body, thus forcing you to take cover for long enough to pull the arrow out.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Ellie has access to proximity mines, Molotov cocktails, stun/smoke bombs and explosive arrows. Abby makes do with pipe bombs instead.
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Joel's death at the hands of Abby is what kickstarts the plot of Ellie trying to get revenge on everyone involved.
• Sunken City: The Seraphite “island”, according to the WLF radio map at the theater, is actually the Queen Anne neighborhood half-submerged and surrounded by massive flooding. The neighborhood in real life is located on a large hill, so elevation above water is not surprising.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The Washington Liberation Front act like a bunch of military folks after they overthrew their own local government force remnants, but are really a civilian militia that take to extreme measures of peacekeeping, relying heavily on Abby to keep the Seraphites at bay and attacking people like Ellie on sight. Their extremism in being willing to even murder children simply for being from the Seraphites turns Abby against them and directly causes the death of their leader, getting in Ellie's (and Tommy's) way gets them slaughtered in droves, and their civilian nature means they have no preparation for skilled people like Ellie and Abby altogether that doesn't boil down to Attack! Attack! Attack! instead of cutting their losses. Radio chatter spells out that at least their massive focus of fighting power into the Seraphite Island invasion was entirely decimated, making a seemingly-powerful militia crippled if not outright gone within days.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Mostly played straight. See a bunch of materials lying around, and an upgrade bench with no enemies around? Yeah, you'll need them. There is one aversion: in the flashback with Joel and Ellie at a museum, you can find ammo and crafting materials lying around despite there being nothing to fight.
• Tap on the Head: Many scene transitions take place this way, with the player character being bonked on the head and the screen cutting to black, then waking up a little later no worse for wear.
• Teleporting Keycard Squad: More often than not, doing anything plot-progressing will spawn a bunch of enemies nearby, including in areas you had already cleared out. Watch your back.
• Temporal Paradox: It is eminently possible to die during the extended flashbacks that represent a significant part of the game's Anachronic Order. This leads to some fairly amusing questions when seeing, say, Abby dying a brutal death at the hands of some infected when we know for a fact that she's alive three days later.
• There Are No Therapists: Naturally, with society's wider collapse post-outbreak. Ellie undergoes profound mental trauma over the course of the game, PTSD from her violent revenge journey and complicated feelings of guilt and other emotions with her relationship with Joel and his death. In spite of being in a loving relationship with Dina, she has no way to address her trauma.
• Time Skip: Part II opens shortly after Joel and Ellie returned to Jackson, and then skips five years ahead to the game's present-day events. Then there's another skip of roughly one year between the Seattle section and the final chapter.
• Too Dumb to Live: One of the Wolves, Whitney, is an avid PS Vita gamer. So avid, in fact, that when posted on guard duty at a major WLF outpost, she sits down with her back to the entry she's supposed to watch and focuses on her game instead, headphones and all. Ellie doesn't even need to be subtle to get the jump on her. No points for guessing how that ends for Whitney.
• Toplessness from the Back: When Dina is cleaning Ellie up after a fight in Seattle, she takes her shirt and bra off, but all you can see is her back. Although it's also averted later on, because Abby is topless in a scene and you actually see her breasts.
• Torture Always Works: Ellie learns the location of the aquarium Abby is staying at by torturing Nora via a particularly savage beating with a lead pipe. Nora is initially defiant and lampshades that she is doomed anyway with her infection, but Ellie's state of disturbed shock in the next scene largely suggests that the sheer brutality she endured ultimately caused her to break and tell the truth rather than attempt to lie.
• Tragic Keepsake: Ellie keeps Joel's broken watch and jacket in a dresser drawer at the farm where she's living with Dina and JJ, showing that she still can't let go of him, and by extension can't let go of her revenge quest.
• Trapped in a Sinking Car: There's an on-the-rails sequence in Ellie's storyline where she and Jesse get caught in an ambush when they're driving a car. Jesse swerves into a pond and the car starts to fill up with water, forcing him and Ellie into a struggle to get out. They make it out alright, though.
• Traumatic Haircut: Abby wears a braid throughout the game up until the very end, where she is discovered completely emaciated and with her hair cropped short by her captors.
• True Companions: Over the course of three days, Abby bonds with Yara and Lev, which gives her life new meaning. After the former is killed by Abby's former WLF compatriots while they escape, we get this exchange:
  Lev: Those were your fucking people!
  Abby: No, you're my people!
• Two Beings, One Body: The Rat King found in the hospital basement is several infected who have been together for so long that they've fused together into one huge mass. The individual entities are still somewhat independent, with one of them able to detach itself from the rest after enough damage is dealt.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Ellie's gameplay sections are much like Joel's from the first game, though there is a bigger emphasis on exploration, puzzle-solving, and traversal. The stealth sections are wide open, with plenty of spots for Ellie to hide in, but she's the only player character that deals with enemy dogs that can detect her location with scent. She's not as durable as Joel, so she gets several weapons and methods to kill enemies indirectly or quietly, and the skills she learns help boost her stealth skills. With Abby, the game suddenly becomes a lot more action-oriented. There's not a lot of exploration, and she faces off against regular human and infected enemies more often. Her stealth sections play more like a cover shooter, with fewer hiding spots (making direct confrontation more likely). She has skills and weapons meant for close-quarters combat, and can create incendiary shotgun shells to better take down enemies. It's also her that goes through the most action sequences and Boss Battles, such as the Rat King, Tommy and Ellie herself.
• Unique Enemy: Averted with the Stalkers; unlike the last game with only two appearances (three, if you count the Left Behind DLC), Stalkers show up much more often, having their own sequences as well as being mixed with normal enemies.
• Universal Ammunition: Although there's a wide variety of weapons to be found in the game, the only thing that matters is their class—pistol, revolver, hunting rifle, etc. Anything within the same class uses the same ammo for the sake of convenience.
• Updated Re-release: A remastered version of the game for the PlayStation 5 is scheduled to be released in January 2024 featuring improved graphics, unreleased levels, and developer commentary. It also introduces a new Roguelike mode with randomized levels and new player characters.
• Useless Useful Stealth: As with the first game, stealth is intended to be used to get the drop on enemies and kill them without using resources rather than sneaking by them completely. Although it is technically possible in some areas, the game discourages it by making many exits noisy, potentially alerting nearby enemies to attack you before you can escape. As such, you must take out as many enemies as you can to proceed. Sneaking past enemies also prevents you from looting the levels thoroughly before leaving. Even if you use fewer resources by avoiding combat, you'll still miss out on supplements and parts that you can use to level up your abilities.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: One of the core themes of the game.
  • Despite Abby killing the man who murdered her father, Abby ultimately doesn't feel any meaningful sense of fulfillment after she kills him, and spends the rest of the game suffering the mental consequences of it. Doesn't help that Ellie hasn't learned this yet, as her Roaring Rampage of Revenge goes through Abby's friends.
  • Occurs right after the last boss fight. Ellie ultimately doesn't kill Abby. Even with Abby's life in her hands, Ellie can still see Joel's death as clear as the day it happened. Killing Abby won't bring Joel back, or assuage Ellie's guilt for not speaking to her surrogate father for the last two years of his life.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Taken even further in combat than the first game. Even if you try to keep your kills clean, enemies will not only be upset at you killing their friends, they cry out the name of your victim and curse you for it, and some of them might even shout that you just killed their husband or wife. Furthermore, some of the enemies will have dogs with them to track you down. If you kill a dog, the owner will stop in horror and get seriously pissed at you, while if you kill the owner, the dog (unless it charges straight for you) will be confused and sad that his owner suddenly fell.
  • Aside from the benefits of stealth and the need to conserve ammunition and weapons to progress through the game, there is nothing stopping you from being creatively brutal as you kill people. The game is filled with enough Developer's Foresight to allow for a good deal of experimentation with various weapons—from small-calibre firearms and explosives, to Ellie's switchblade or Seraphite Brute sledgehammers—and enemy AI responses. You can be so vicious that Dina expresses momentary surprise.
  • There is a part early in Abby's segment of the game where you can play fetch with a dog. However, instead of playing with the dog, you can throw the ball over a fence, causing the dog to stare in that direction and whimper sadly.
  • During the final boss fight, as you're playing as Abby, you can purposefully let yourself be killed. While this normally isn't anything worth noting, in this case it is, considering the boss in question is Ellie, and thus you're letting her fulfill her revenge.
• Villain Decay: Clickers, which were The Dreaded enemies in the first game, have been completely outpaced by the player characters' skills and weapon loadouts. They still have their One-Hit Kill (Ellie cannot fend one off when grabbed and Abby is done if she doesn't have a shiv when grabbed), and a new move where they can echolocate in front of them, but it's nothing compared to what Ellie and Abby have. Ellie no longer alerts Clickers with her stealth kills and has her switchblade, meaning she doesn't have to waste resources to create shivs. Abby does have to create shivs, but she learns the skill to defend against a Clicker grab immediately after learning the Create Shiv skill, as opposed to Joel who had to get enough supplements to learn it, which could take until the mid-to-late game. And with a variety of weapons that kill quietly and indirectly or directly and powerful, having to take an alerted Clicker down is no problem.
• Villainous Underdog: Abby is not popular in her group because of her brutality and wrathful behaviour driving others away.
• Villains Out Shopping: Ellie at one point sneaks up on and interrogates a mook playing Hotline Miami on a PlayStation Vita, whom she casually kills after the woman pulls a knife on her.
• Villain Protagonist: The player takes the roles of both Ellie and Abby, so both serve as protagonists of their half of the story. The alternate character becomes the villain of each one's story, as they are both locked in a mortal struggle in which neither side is fully in the right.
• Violence Is Disturbing: Killing a person is actually awful and messy to do and/or watch someone doing: The player character will graphically stab, shoot, cut or hammer their enemies in often disturbing detail. While most action videogames make it fun and satisfying to kill your enemies or sometimes just NPCs for no reason, ND has stated that for Part II, you're meant to wince or feel uncomfortable every time the player character kills someone for how realistically it's portrayed. Arms and legs are blown off by guns (with their former owners wailing as they bleed out), and melee weapons realistically hack, cleave and smash with blunt force into enemies, who may choke on their own blood afterwards. The camera constantly moves and shakes with Ellie to realistically reflect the feeling of force, being hit and hitting enemies back.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Upon finding Owen and Mel dead, Abby falls to her knees and throws up in shock and grief.
• Walking Armory: Ellie picks up quite the arsenal in her travels: her starting pistol, a bolt-action rifle, a revolver that used to belong to Joel, a pump-action shotgun, a bow, and a suppressed submachine gun during the Santa Barbara sequence. Abby has a similarly wide-ranging arsenal in her section as well.
• The War Sequence: The "Escape" chapter is all about the WLF's full-scale assault on the Seraphites' flooded fortress at Queen Anne. It doesn't take long before the whole island is burning and you're caught between two armies massacring each other any way they can. Unfortunately for you, you are fair game as well, to both sides. Fortunately, they tend to be too busy with each other to pay you much heed unless one side gains the upper hand.
• We Used to Be Friends: Abby's flashback to five years ago reveals that she, Owen and Mel were in the Fireflies together, and were a close-knit group. Owen and Abby had a budding romance and Mel left a letter, grateful to Abby and her father for her medical training and wanting to get drunk later. After Salt Like City, and after Abby decides to focus on getting even with Joel, their relationship changes and deteriorates; Owen and Abby broke up sometime afterwards and Owen started a relationship with Mel. But Mel and Abby's relationship is completely rocky, made even worse after Abby kills Joel. Owen, for his part, still loves Abby but cannot deal with her thirst for revenge.
• Wham Line: After Joel and Tommy introduce themselves to Abby's people, we get this exchange that sets the tone for the rest of the game.
  Joel: Y'all act like you've heard of us or something.
  Abby: That's 'cause they have.
  [Abby shoots Joel in the knee]
• What the Hell, Hero?: Lev, serving as Abby's Morality Pet, stops her from knowingly slitting the throat of a pregnant Dina.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Zigzagged. Part II gives players much more explorative freedom than its predecessor's strictly linear levels, with huge open areas containing numerous optional sub-sections that can be visited for supplies, conversations and similar atmospheric events, and the occasional equipment upgrade. However, the plot itself still progresses along fixed paths and set pieces with little in terms of variation.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • An inadvertent example, with Ellie being profoundly horrified once she realizes Mel was heavily pregnant after sticking her switchblade through her neck. In her vengeful rage over her and Owen's deaths, Abby seems ready to return the favour to Dina in the theatre, even after being told she too is pregnant. Fortunately, her Morality Pet Lev talks her down, and she tells Ellie's group to leave Seattle.
  • A very intentional example is provided by Isaac, leader of the WLF Seattle, when he's about to shoot Lev dead despite one of his best soldiers (Abby) vouching for the kid, and he doesn't have a Morality Pet with him to convince him otherwise. It takes a mortally wounded Yara shooting Isaac In the Back to save Lev's life.
  • The WLF and the Seraphites in general have standing orders to kill members of the opposing faction on sight regardless of age, showing that for all their cultural posturing they're not that different.
  • When Abby and Lev get ambushed by Rattlers in Santa Barbara during the final chapter, one of the ambushers doesn't hesitate to punch Lev so hard he gets knocked out instantly and thrown face-first against a half-open garage door. It's borderline miraculous the boy survived this sort of treatment without lasting injuries. Granted, Lev did shoot one of them with an arrow first, but the sheer viciousness and callousness of the retaliation is still disturbing to watch.
• Worst Aid: The protagonists not only can, but must, pull arrows out of their body whenever they're struck lest they take periodic damage until they do. In reality, they'd very much risk bleeding to death every time they pulled one out, as you're really supposed to leave a stabbing object in your body until you receive professional medical help.
• You All Look Familiar: The game's photo-realistic face models can end up damaging the player's immersion once you notice that Seattle seems to be populated with countless clones of only about a dozen different people. Becomes particularly jarring while stealth-killing Seraphite squads because all their male fighters are bald and all the women wear their hair in the same braid, making it quite common to strangle two or three copies of the same enemy in the same encounter.
• You Bastard!: What the game delivers once everything unravels, even overlapping with the Violence Is Disturbing trope cited above.
• You Killed My Father: This is Abby's motivation for killing Joel, since her father was the lead surgeon he killed in the previous installment. The rest of the game follows Ellie's journey avenging her (surrogate) father, ironically.

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''If I ever were to lose you''

''I'd surely lose myself''

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