The story of "The Last Us Part II" is almost perfectly symmetrical. From the opening and closing shots of the guitar, to the accordion-like structure, the rhymes between life in Jackson and the stadium in Seattle, the museum and the aquarium, Ellie's love of space versus Abby's fear of heights, and so on. Can you talk about how you wanted the two halves of the game to reflect each other?
Neil Druckmann: With the first game, the exciting thing was role-reversal: You're playing as this archetypal hero for a while and then at a certain point we flip it and you play as Ellie. Seeing how well that worked was so much of the inspiration here, and when we decided to make a game about empathy we knew we had to double down on that feeling — to structure the entire thing around getting you to connect [with unexpected characters]. You're already connected to Ellie and Joel from "The Last of Us," so we put them through a very tragic event, give you one look at a quest for revenge, and then shift to Abby in order to tell a mirror story of redemption that follows the person who — by killing Joel and avenging her father — has already accomplished what Ellie is trying to do, and is struggling to come to grips with it. We were trying to find those parallels you're talking about, and to do so in a way where it's not on the nose but it's still showing you how these characters — under different circumstances — could've been friends.
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