CENTRAL THEME
The Last of Us Part 2 creative director Neil Druckmann drew a pretty clear distinction between it and its predecessor a couple years ago, saying that the biggest difference manifests in the overall tone and central themes of the two games. While the first game centred around a theme of “love” – the father-daughter relationship between Joel and Ellie and how that drove every major story beat – the second game is taking a darker road, with a central theme of “hate”. More specifically, Ellie’s driving motivation in The Last of Us Part 2 is revenge, and the story seems to be building itself up around the question of how far she will be willing to go to get that revenge, and whether she will ever top to question her own actions while doing so.
