YMMV / The Last of Us

For YMMV tropes pertaining to the HBO series, go here.

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The main game:

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Has its own page.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The fact that people turn into zombies after inhaling the spores of a fungus is just the developers' way of spicing up the zombie formula, right? Well, no, there's actually a family of fungi called Cordycipitaceae that takes over ants' nervous system and makes it climb into a spot with optimal humidity and temperature for the cordyceps to grow. Real cordyceps, of course, is harmless to humans (and is even used in some medicines).
• Anticlimax Boss: On Easy difficulty, the boss fight against David is made effortless since, as is turns out, David is just as vulnerable to a glass bottle to the face as anyone else. Knowing this changes the fight from a murderous game of cat and mouse to "throw a bottle then run up and stab him".
• Breather Level: After the sheer amount of hell that happens towards the end of the Summer chapter, the Fall chapter is much easier, with the majority spent inside an empty university filled with supplies. It'll prepare you for when things go south in Winter.
• Broken Base: Opinions on the Firefly Hospital vary over whether it's an equally exciting level to the rest of the game, epitomizing what you need in stealth and combat skills, or a Disappointing Last Level, switching the entire game from a tense, resource based survival game to another generic third-person shooter.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Many fans will attest to not being able to hear Ashley Johnson's voice in any other form of media now without hearing Ellie talking. This became especially apparent in the HBO adaptation, where she played Ellie's mother, with many viewers even able to recognize her grunting as being the same as Ellie's. While this is his most iconic role, Troy Baker averts this thanks to his famously large workload and altering his voice enough so that it's different from his other parts.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • After you've survived the nightmare that is the fight with the cul-de-sac sniper and his buddies in the Suburbs, the hunter tank that pestered you for half of the Pittsburgh level shows up one more time so you can have the satisfaction of blowing it and its psycho crew to hell.
  • After the terrifying cat and mouse boss fight against David, it's really quite satisfying to watch Ellie beat his face in with a machete after he tries to rape her.
• Complete Monster: David, a seemingly kindhearted survivor, is really the leader of a group of cannibals in the post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world. David sends out hunting parties, having his men murder other survivors on sight, including children, to retrieve their bodies for meat. Becoming obsessed with the teenaged Ellie, David has preyed on other girls in the past, with one of his followers referring to Ellie as his "newest pet". Having sent waves of men to capture her despite knowing how dangerous she is, David is apathetic to their ensuing deaths, even thanking Ellie for killing them and making his group stronger. When Ellie rejects his advances by breaking his finger, David tries to chop her up for meat, and, in their final confrontation, shows his full depravity by attempting to rape and murder her. Even among a cast of morally gray characters, David's actions and personality show him to be utterly irredeemable and the most heinous of all the enemies faced by Joel and Ellie.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The transition to the Winter Chapter. Joel collapses and seemingly dies of the horrific injury he just suffered. There's then a Time Skip and we see a cute bunny popping up from its burrow, as if to console the player. And then the bunny is suddently shot by an arrow.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Bloaters. They have ranged attacks, unlike the other Infected, can take an obscene amount of damage, and if they get close to you, it's an insta-kill. Fortunately, there's only two in the entire game you have to kill in an open fight.
  • The Fireflies in the hospital at the end. In a world where you're lucky if you have an improvised shiv, these guys have unlimited assault rifle ammunition and can take three or four shotgun blasts at point-blank range. They come in groups of about eight. You'll wish you had a gang of Bloaters to deal with instead.
  • Stalkers are incredibly fast infected who constantly hide around corners and walls, avoiding any and all contact with you. The only 2 ways to counteract this is to run towards them and face them head-on (Which is a terrible idea on the higher difficulties) or to wait until the rare occasion they face you and shoot them in the head. Combine that with being the most aggressive type of the Infected (Only second to Runners) and an uncanny ability to dodge gunfire (On Survivor and Grounded, they can even move out of the way of point-blank shotgun blasts) and you do not have fun fighting these. Somewhat rectified in that you only fight Stalkers twice.
• Difficulty Spike: Some points of the game are quite hard or easy depending on the circumstances. Most notable is in Boston during the parts where Joel has to sneak or fight his way past a large group of FEDRA soldiers. At this early point in the game, Joel has very few weapons or upgrades, and is taking on heavily armed professional soldiers who are far more dangerous the then the typical human bandits he usually deals with. In contrast, the Jackson County section of the game is rather easy compared to most encounters, as Joel has plenty of backup from allied NPCs in all the hostile encounters, and is very well-armed and upgraded by this point.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Ish seems rather popular, especially for a character you never meet. Even the people at Naughty Dog have noticed it.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • What happened during the 20 year timeskip, i.e. what happened in the days following the outbreak and Sarah's death, what was Joel and Tommy's life of crime like, how did Joel meet Tess and so on.
  • There's a Time Skip between each season in the game which can leave a lot to the imagination of what goes on between them. In particular, the time skip between Winter and Spring is implied to be around three or four months long.
  • Just what kind of favors did Joel do for Bill that warranted facing hordes of infected for a car battery?
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Infected are often jokingly referred to as "the mushroom people".
  • Some people have taken to calling the time before the infection outbreak as...well, Before. With a capital B.
  • In this Let's Play, Geop and Skippy Granola take to calling Joel "Solomon Grumpy."
• Game-Breaker:
  • The humble bow and arrow is a godsend in stealth sections for allowing you to silently pick off foes from a distance. One shot is enough to kill basic infected or humans if they aren’t aware of you, so if you’re careful you can clear entire encounters without blowing your cover once. Even better is that you can almost always retrieve the arrows from corpses so a meager supply of arrows can last a long time if you’re good enough with the bow. The PS5 remake also removes the arc in favor of a reticle, just like in Part II, making aiming a lot easier.
  • The flamethrower is comically overpowered. Fire is guaranteed to kill everything except for bloaters, so you just have spray enemies long enough to light them on fire and they are dead. It's only initial shortcoming is that the range is rather small, but that can be upgraded, along with the damage. At max damage, even Bloaters will melt rather fast. It's telling that it's the final weapon that you get in the game. And with Joel being out of commission for most of the Winter chapter, you don't have that much time to really use it. But for the encounters you DO have it for, it trivializes them, even on Grounded difficulty (Despite limited ammo, as long as the player taps the trigger instead of holding it down, you can burn dozens of enemies to death without depleting the fuel too much, especially if you have the Range upgrade).
• Genius Bonus: The Firefly lab is found at the (fictional) University of Eastern Colorado. While there, you meet David's clan of cannibals for the first time. At the real University of Colorado in Boulder, the students voted to name their cafeteria after notorious accused cannibal Alferd Packer ("Have a friend for lunch!" being the motto). Famous alums Trey Parker and Matt Stone made their first commercial project on him as well: Cannibal! The Musical. Later, Joel finds David's camp in the also fictional town of Silver Lake, Colorado. Packer was convicted in a trial in Lake City.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game has sold very well in Japan having been in the top 10 sales charts for three weeks. This is likely in part to its Survival Horror motifs and the game's extensive focus on Character Development and plot. It's still pretty impressive given that it was given the Japanese equivalent of an AO rating, which would usually limit how much a game sells.
• Good Bad Bugs: If a resource is close enough to a building wall, it can sometimes be picked up from outside the building.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • After playing the Left Behind DLC, the scene in Autumn where Ellie calls Joel out on trying to give her to Tommy becomes twice as heartbreaking now that we know exactly how much Ellie has really lost. The way Joel so bitterly crushes her doesn't help.
    Joel: You have no idea what loss is.
  • After Ellie shows Joel the picture of him and Sarah towards the end of the game, Joel comments, "Well, I guess no matter how hard you try, you can't escape your past." Not long after this, he murders the surgeon that intends to kill Ellie to extract a vaccine from her. Four years later in Part 2, regardless how nicer of a person Joel became while living peacefully in Jackson, it ultimately doesn't matter as the daughter of the surgeon he killed shows up and murders him in revenge.
  • There are times where it looks like the infected, at least the Runners, are aware of their state but can't control themselves, due to their cries and fearful looks on their faces. Four years after the game's release, a group of scientists dissected an Cordyceps infected ant, finding Cordyceps cells in the ant's body but not in the brain, that's been cut off from the rest of the body. Meaning that, yes, the Runners knows exactly what's going on, but can't do anything about it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Several people noted Ellie's resemblance to Elliot Page, before Naughty Dog changed her character model to remove this. And then at E3 2012, Sony unveiled Quantic Dream's new title, Beyond: Two Souls... Starring Elliot Page. Cue Epileptic Trees springing up that Ellie's character model changing was due to this. Another interesting coincidence between the two is Elliot came out as gay the same day as the Left Behind DLC released, where, in a way, Ellie did the same.
  • Ellie was originally meant to have the last name "Williams", but this was later scrapped. With the development of a movie adaptation, Ashley Johnson has stated that her own personal choice in actors to play Ellie is Maisie Williams, who was reportedly contacted to play the role in the film adaptation.
  • A double-whammy because of the DLC: When in Bill's Church he suspects that Ellie has stolen something from him, but she denies it. A later cut-scene show us that she stole, amongst other things, a gay male porn magazine from Bill. And the later revelation of Ellie's sexuality proved that, no, she wasn't lying.
  Bill: I swear to God, if you took anything...
  Ellie: Hey man, I don't need any of your shit. Trust me.
• Ho Yay: Joel and Henry's bonding scene when they talk about motorcycles like old chums. Ellie even lampshades it when she excuses herself from the room saying "You two deserve a little bit of privacy" in a way that says: "Get a Room!".
• Hype Backlash: Given that the game received literally hundreds of “Game of the Year” awards and unanimous acclaim from critics and audiences alike, reactions like this were inevitable, mainly from people who criticize the game for putting presentation over gameplay.
• I Knew It!:
  • There was a Running Gag on /v/ that Ellie was gay after the opening scene of the Left Behind DLC was shown in a preview, where we see Riley biting her neck to wake her up. This ended up being completely true.
  • There was speculation that a remake would appear on the PS5, and there was enough evidence of such that fans felt it was only a matter of when, not if it would be officially announced.
• Iron Woobie: Joel. The man has undoubtedly suffered, but twenty years of survival must have taught him to endure all those hardships. Also overlaps with Jerkass Woobie due to his occasionally amoral actions.
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: Much of the backlash against the PS5 remake is that it's basically just the original game but with enhanced graphics and implementing some of the gameplay features and AI from Part II (while excluding a few very useful additions such as dodging attacks and crawling while prone, with the devs giving an excuse that can be summed up as Joel being too old to do those things, even though Ellie also cannot do them in the remake despite her being able to in the sequel), making it essentially another remaster rather than a remake and thus not worth the $70 price (for comparison, the PS4 remaster can be purchased for as low as $20, and does come automatically with higher tier PS Plus memberships).
• Jerkass Woobie: Bill. He can be quite mean and unpleasant but it's hard to not feel bad for him considering what happened between him and Frank.
• Love to Hate: Despite the fact that he's a cannibalistic Ephebophile, David is popular in the fandom for being a very efficient, frightening, and overall down-to-earth antagonist. His voice actor's performance certainly helps too.
• Magnificent Bitch: Tess is an infamous smuggler in Boston acting as the brains to Joel's muscle in their operations. After Robert's attempt on her life, Tess uses her contacts to corner and kill him for selling their guns to the Fireflies. Tasked to deliver the immune Ellie to them, Tess shows kindness towards her and grows to see this mission as a chance for redemption. Infected along the way, Tess persuades Joel to carry on without her and performs a Last Stand against the military to allow him and Ellie to escape.
• Misaimed "Realism":
  • The crafting system allows you to repair the durability of weapons, but which is evidently accomplished through means that should not have any affect on the weapon, like repairing a machete by taping a pair of scissors to it.
  • Enemies have several reactions to your gun and its status, but seem to have issues noticing or remembering this. For instance, a group will yell out that you have a gun and act more cautiously, but sometimes it may take a few kills before they seem to catch on that it is in fact a gun; conversely, if you try to fire an unloaded gun at an enemy, they'll hear the empty click and try to jump you, but can be repeatedly tricked into leaving themselves wide open to get shot by baiting them with an empty gun and then pulling out a loaded one.
  • "Grounded" difficulty tries to make the game more realistic, but the primary way it does this is by simply removing the HUD, which leads to the completely unrealistic scenarios of the player being completely incapable of telling that they're on the verge of bleeding out or drowning.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Some think David crossed the line when it was heavily implied that he tried to rape Ellie in the burning restaurant. Others think he crossed it before then, with the reveal of him being a cannibal and running a cult based on it.
  • To some, Joel himself crosses it when he kills the Fireflies to stop them from killing Ellie to make a cure and then lies to her about it.
  • Alternatively, some felt the Fireflies crossed it for planning on operating on Ellie to extract the cure. The act could be justified through The Needs of the Many, but the fact that it's done while Ellie's still unconscious (and thus did not consent to sacrificing herself), and that there are several factors that may cast doubt on whether the cure can be successfully created, mass-produced and distributed, means that it is likely that Ellie's death could be an avoidable Senseless Sacrifice.
• Narm: From a gameplay perspective, many jokes have been made of how Joel will light a Molotov cocktail when you pick it, then if you pick another weapon instead, Joel puts the Molotov cocktail back in his backpack while it's still on fire, easily garnering some laughs when you notice.
• Nausea Fuel: The Infected, especially if you don't like fungus, are pretty tough to look at. Hell, even if you aren't bothered by fungus, they're still pretty disgusting to look at. They're even more disgusting in the PS5 remake, due to the higher quality graphics.
• Older Than They Think: The character arc between Joel and Ellie has actually been done three years ago by the leads in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, according to SuperButterBuns.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Despite the Word of God claim, the nature of Joel and Tess's relationship is delightfully ambiguous, with only her statement that "there's enough here [between us]" to give any implications that it goes beyond platonic convenience. It really can come down to personal interpretation if it's romantic, intimate, or just close friendship.
• Polished Port:
  • Aside from having all the DLC on the disc, the remastered PS4 version has an improved framerate that goes up to 60fps, and improved graphics.
  • The PS5 remake has the same plus remade graphics that are more in-line with Part II and the last two Uncharted games, redone A.I. for the enemies and allies, and additional accessibility options.
• Porting Disaster: The PC version of the Part I Remake is ripe with horrible optimization, a plethora of performance issues, Glitches so bad (and admittedly funny) they need to be seen to be believed, and infrequent crashing that can render the game borderline unplayable without heavily modifying your settings. Worse yet, Steam Deck users reported shader loading to last for an hour. It quickly became the lowest rated game in Naughty Dog's history, panned by users and critics alike. While subsequent patches addressed many of the issues, the damage was done.
• Retroactive Recognition: Sam was voiced by Nadji Jeter, who years later became better known for portraying Miles Morales in Insomniac Games' Spider-Man (PS4) and its sequel, Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
• Rooting for the Empire: At the end of the game some gamers were hoping for the Fireflies to stop Joel from saving Ellie because even though they were going to kill Ellie, they were going to use the cure inside her to save humanity and Joel's actions would prevent that from happening.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Or rather, "Remake Difficulty Spike", but the PS5 remake features the more advanced enemy AI from Part II, making it significantly more difficult than the original. The Infected also gain some of the boosts given in Part II as well; Stalkers are not as easy to detect with Listen Mode as they were in the original game and Clickers have their echolocation scream to detect enemies in front of them. Not helping matters is the fact that the dodge mechanic from the sequel was not even included to compensate, resulting in some deaths that could have easily been avoided had the dodge feature been added in. Also, Joel's movement and punching speed have been slowed down somewhat, likely for realism due to his age.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: After a frenetic and emotionally exhausting opening, the game takes about two full hours to introduce all of the major game mechanics before finally letting you off the leash in Bill's Town. What makes this bearable is that the plot is constantly moving, the encounters are no less threatening despite how poorly equipped you are, and the sheer Scenery Gorn of downtown Boston makes things interesting enough until the inciting incident of the story (Tess' infection and pleading with Joel to bring Ellie to the Fireflies) really kicks thing into high gear.
• Signature Scene:
  • Sarah's death at the end of the prologue. It's one of the most famous openings in modern gaming for what a brutal Gut Punch it is.
  • The scene where Ellie and Joel meet and pet a giraffe is often used in promotional pictures for the game.
  • Joel and Ellie's heart-to-heart conversation in the ranch house, where Ellie tells Joel that she isn't Sarah and she's lost people as well. The sequence is particularly heartbreaking on its own, but got a lot more exposure after Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson themselves said it was their favorite scene in the game.
  • The final Escape Sequence is quite noteworthy among fandom discussion. Particularly because of how often it's debated as to whether or not it was the correct choice for Joel to doom humanity in return for saving Ellie's life.
• Spiritual Licensee:
  • The Last of Us is in many ways a video game adaptation of The Stand, being a Road Trip Plot story set in a post-apocalyptic United States that has been ravaged by The Virus. There are some smaller plot points that are mutually reminiscent, such as the fact that in both stories the protagonists are venturing from the East Coast towards a location in the Rocky Mountains that contains the last remnants of "good" civilization. The big difference is that in The Last of Us, it wasn't really worth it.
  • It has also been called the greatest Children of Men-game ever made. Both stories take place roughly 20 years after a disaster that leads to the downfall of civilization, and involve the protagonist, a man who's lost a child, protecting a girl who could be the key to humanity's survival.
• Spiritual Successor: To the Uncharted series, albeit Darker and Edgier. Both have action setpieces mixed with character moments, and an emphasis on exploration. Both games were also made by Naughty Dog.
• That One Level:
  • The part in Pittsburgh where Joel gets trapped in a flooded, dark basement can be a royal pain to many first time players, or even if you handle it well on the "Normal" modes but then go on to "Survivor", where you don't have the listening mode and a very scarce supply of bullets. Good luck fighting those Infected when you don't know where they'll be coming from and you can hardly see them, next to fighting or escaping a Bloater through dark and narrow hallways without a Molotov Cocktail.
  • The sniper section in the Suburbs can be frustrating beyond measure. You're pinned down on a decently long stretch of cul-de-sac littered with car wrecks while an invincible sniper is taking potshots at you (and taunting you) from a house on the far end every couple of seconds. Now try and find a way through this mess without taking damage. Hint: it's impossible except for one specific route. The sniper is hard-coded to hit or miss while Joel is sprinting to specific pieces of cover on the road, so only this one route even gets you anywhere near him without taking a bullet or two in the process (and each hit takes off about two of Joel's health bars on Normal). You can cut through the houses and backyards to both sides of the road (which also have a nice amount of supplies in them), but every house you enter spawns between one and five alerted hunters that instantly open fire when they see Joel. Once you finally come close to the target building, another four hunters come running out, all the while the sniper is just waiting to nail you in the head the moment you take aim at his buddies. All in all, not a fun part of the game, and that's on Normal, mind you. Have fun trying this on higher difficulties where the sniper hands out one-hit kills no questions asked, leaving the abovementioned no-damage approach as the only viable option.
  • While this mainly is only the case on the higher difficulties Hard, Survivor and the DLC Grounded, the Hydroelectric Dam where players will not only face thirty straight minutes of heavily armed, body armored bandits but will surely use 75% of their ammo just to survive. There is almost no stealth in this chapter, and it's the reason why The University is a very easy level where you spend 90% of the chapter looting ammo and supplies. And on Grounded? Good luck having ammo for anything other than the revolver and 9mm pistol by the time you reach the University. Or, to be more accurate, good luck reaching the University.
  • "Winter" could be called That One Chapter, simply because of how fragile Ellie is compared to the guy you play as for three-quarters of the game. All those supplements and parts you've been diligently collecting as Joel won't do you any good here, because Ellie's health can't be increased, her weapons can't be made more powerful, and her healing, reloading, and crafting animations can't be made to play out faster. The game tries to balance this out by making enemies much weaker against gunfire, but that won't mean much if you get grabbed by an angry Clicker while reloading. Or indeed, if you get grabbed by anybody, since Ellie tends to emerge from unarmed combat with only a sliver of health left. But even if combat isn't Ellie's thing, she can still hold her own in terms of stealth, right? Well, not necessarily, since her idea of "stealth" tends to be jumping on someone who's twice her size and stabbing them frantically, probably blowing her cover in the process. The only advantage Ellie has compared to Joel is her knife, which acts as an unbreakable shiv and allows her to stealth-kill entire rooms of infected. Too bad most of the enemies in "Winter" are either humans or Infected who are already alert.
  • The Firefly Hospital on Grounded difficulty. It's one thing to fight dozens of assault rifle armored mooks while Joel himself has very limited ammo, but as hinted above, checkpoints are scarce as well, meaning that if you fail, you have to start all over again from the beginning of the level regardless how far you progressed. It's probably one of the most blatant examples of where you'll have no choice but to sneak past as many enemies as you can, as engaging them too early either results in a quick death or simply wasting all of Joel's limited ammo, leaving him more or less defenseless for the next wave of Fireflies.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The footage of fungi growing during the opening credits is actual real life fungi the creators filmed growing over several weeks.
  • Thanks to the PS5's stronger engine compared to the PS3 and even the PS4, the remake adds a lot of touch ups to the original's already pretty stunning graphics. The character models (especially for Ellie and Tess) were tweaked to look more realistic, the lighting and shadows are more natural and atmospheric, the background textures are more detailed and polished, and the framerate was bumped up to 60 FPS for more smoother cutscenes and gameplay.
• The Woobie:
  • Ellie. Almost everyone she knows and cares about is dead. This includes Riley, Tess, Sam, and Marlene, the latter of whom she doesn't know is dead.
  • Sam. Though his brother means well, Henry often admonishes him over the slightest things such as taking a toy to keep himself occupied. He is also not given a chance to be taught how to defend himself, unlike Ellie. And shortly after he bonds with Ellie, he becomes an Infected and has to be put down by his own brother.

Left Behind

• Broken Base: The fact that the game doesn't show what exactly happens to Riley. Some feel that the Smash to Black choice to end the DLC worked for it while others felt that they would rather have seen what came to be of Riley (e.g; did Ellie have to kill her, did she leave her, etc).
• Fanfic Fuel: What happened with Ellie and Riley after the DLC ended i.e how did they spend their final moments, what did Ellie do when Riley started turning etc.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: It's been pointed out pretty often that Ellie strongly resembles Canadian actor Elliot Page (as mentioned in the main game's entry). Left Behind was released on February 14th, 2014, and it reveals that Ellie and Riley had romantic feelings for each other. On the very same day, Elliot Page came out as gay during a speech for the Human Rights Campaign.
• That One Level: Taking down the first wave of Hunters who have surrounded Joel's hiding place is simple enough. The second wave not so much, since Ellie is not particularly well-suited to surviving an all-out firefight against superior odds. Good news is, if you manage to hide or hold off the hunters long enough, Infected will appear and possibly finish the work for you.

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