The game shouldn't need to be analysed to death to understand it.
Wait, who's saying they don't understand it?
None of it stands out as "wtf this doesn't make sense".
Pretty sure I haven't said this. Pretty sure I'm looking for justification for the direction the ending went in (hence my desire to "analyse it to death", as you so eloquently put it).
"One observation, the first and last characters you play as are fourteen year old girls (Sarah and Ellie), and the first and last times you play as Joel are when you are carrying one of them (carrying Sarah through the street or Ellie through the hospital).
Also, the one thing that drives home that Joel is taking Ellie to be like his daughter is when he calls her "baby girl" when he picks her up off the table at the end. He calls Sarah the same thing when he lays her on the bed at the beginning.
Lastly, despite what the people in the video are saying, I don't think Joel is the bad guy. It seemed to me that the world of The Last Of Us was created to essentially be the real world, plus 20 years after a pandemic. And if that is true, then the creators know that in the real world, there are no true villains. The world is not black and white, and no one believes that they are the "bad guy". So in the game, there are no bad people, just people doing what we would consider to be bad things. And Joel makes the decision I think literally everyone would have made if they had been through what he had been through. Joel is not the bad guy, or the good guy. He is just a guy. Just like the rest of us"
And this is what I was looking for, which you could have easily posted without going through the trouble of being condescending and generally rude. So thanks, I guess.
I too noticed Joel calling Ellie "baby girl" as he was leaving the hospital, which lends credit to the argument that Joel considers Ellie as a replacement for Sarah. I'm not sure what the first observation about playing as Sarah and Ellie really has to do with anything.
What I'm not convinced on is that Joel has a progressive change in how he views Ellie, going from her simply being part of the job of smuggling to someone he genuinely cares about. The first time we see Joel really being warm towards Ellie is after the fight between Ellie and Mr. Religious Crazypants, when they're already in Salt Lake City, which is pretty much the end of the game. It feels rushed and undeveloped.
And on a slightly different note, Ellie's sense of reluctance in getting to the hospital as well as her statement of "There's no halfway with this" seems to indicate that she had some idea of what was going to happen to her in the hospital. This only makes me question further the logic behind the Fireflies' callous actions concerning Joel. Are the Fireflies intended to be shady? What do we know about them apart from their desire to find a cure and reestablish some system of government?
I highly recommend watching this, too. It's got a few guys that have different interpretations of the game. It's interesting to hear about how certain people thought differently about what happened. They also point out a few things I didn't even notice in the game. Very fun to listen to.
http://ca.ign.com/videos/2013/06/21/the-last-of-us-spoilercastI'll take a listen to it. Thanks.