Video Game / Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

"Guns blows door to the system..."

Nadine Ross: Think it's safe?
Chloe Frazer: You know that treasure hunting is not a good gig for the risk-averse, right?
Nadine: Neither is being a mercenary. Difference is, when I pull the pin on a grenade, I know what's going to happen next.
Chloe: My way's much more fun.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is the standalone entry in the Uncharted series, and the first entry in the entire franchise to not feature Nathan Drake as the protagonist.

Set six to twelve months after the main story of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, The Lost Legacy has Chloe Frazer (last seen in Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception) on the hunt for the Tusk of Ganesh in the ruins of the Hoysala Kingdom (located mainly in the modern Indian state of Karnataka). The artifact is of personal significance for her, and to do so she allies with Nadine Ross, disgraced ex-leader of Shoreline, seeking a score to get her reputation back. They traverse the ruins of Halebidu and Belur in the search of the artifact while getting into conflict with a warlord named Asav, who is also on the trail of the same artifact and has separationist ambitions.

The game was released worldwide for PlayStation 4 on August 22, 2017. A remastered port for PlayStation 5 and a brand new port for Microsoft Windows (both a part of the Legacy of Thieves Collection) were released on January 28 and October 19, 2022 respectively.

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The Lost Legacy provides examples of:

• Action Girl: Chloe and Nadine, obviously. Chloe especially gets full One-Woman Army status by virtue of being the Player Character.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Nadine and Sam spend most of the time at each other's throats once they reunite, but upon seeing Orca again, Sam makes a crack about his mullet which even Nadine can't help but chuckle at.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: Chloe goes up against an armored car that she has to run from, until she finds Rocket Propelled Grenades much later to take it out. The car proves to be remarkably durable, requiring 3 rocket hits to destroy. Keep in mind, this is a lightly armored wheeled vehicle, while an RPG is a weapon designed to destroy tanks.
• A.K.A.-47: Played straight mostly but the FN P90 does appear under its proper name.
• Always Save the Girl: Twice Chloe prioritizes saving Nadine first over Sam. To be fair, Nadine had saved Chloe multiple times already.
• Amoral Afrikaner: Nadine, again, though she gradually moves away from the 'amoral' part with Character Development. Orca and what remains of Shoreline, however, have become more ruthless than ever.
• Androcles' Lion: Downplayed. The elephant that Chloe and Nadine rescue doesn't attack and even allows them to ride her for a while, but she's more indifferent to them than anything, wanting to get back to her herd, and both of them know better than to push their luck when she reunites with her calf.
• Arms Dealer: What Shoreline, under Orca's management, have retooled themselves into, supplying Asav's insurrection with guns, equipment and, in exchange for the Tusk of Ganesh, one really big warhead. Nadine is appalled that this is what they became since she left.
• Ascended Extra: Orca, one half of Nadine's two former lieutenants from Uncharted 4, had fewer appearances than his counterpart Knot, was mostly silent, and totally vanished with Nadine just before the climax while Knot was found killed in an explosion. He reappears here with a bigger role in the story and speaking lines, as the guy who sells Asav a city-leveling warhead in exchange for the Tusk and kickstarting the final chapter.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Chloe asking Nadine why she wants Shoreline back. Nadine says "Seriously?" and lists the numerous factual reasons why she'd want to retake it^*Rafe turning her men against her, Orca making off with the bounty and the Drake brothers walking away scot-free, as well as the fact that she inherited the company from her father, but when Chloe says she is serious about the question, Nadine can only half-heartedly say that it happened on her watch. This hints that Nadine is only really doing it out of obligation, foreshadowing her walking away from it once she sees what Orca has turned Shoreline into.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • The game is set in modern day Karnataka (where Halebidu and Belur are located), but Karnataka is not a wartorn region under civil strife (it's actually doing pretty well for itself). There are parts of India that kind of fit the bill (Kashmir most famously, and Chattisgarh which has a long, and ongoing, bleeding ulcer of Maoist insurgency) and even then not to the extent that the Indian Army sends fighter jets to bomb shantytowns (they prefer helicopters, Vietnam-style).
  • When Chloe Frazer wanders around the marketplace the languages she hears are Tamil and bits of Hindi, when being that this is Karnataka, the language should be Kannada (now of course given this is South India with a lot of regional migration, there might be Tamil speakers wandering in and out but the main language should be Kannada, and Hindi should certainly not be used too much^note India has a long, and contentious, history with language policies, and South Indians especially are quite picky about Hindi being a "national language" seeing it, not without reason, as a form of Northern hegemony).
• Artistic License – History: The game has Chloe state that the Hoysala Kingdom suffered three Persian invasions. This is false on multiple levels:
  • Persia, as in Ancient Persia, has never invaded India as a whole, and the parts of India that might have been clients of the Persians are today in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they never reached Karnataka and the Western Ghats. ^note The only major event of Persian (or Iranian) invasion of India was Nader Shah's sack of Delhi in 1739, which was the Shocking Defeat Legacy of the Mughal Empire, leading to the loss of the Koh-I-Noor diamond and the Peacock Throne, and even that was more a raid rather than outright conquest, since Nader Shah went back to Persia after looting and raiding the North of India.
  • The Hoysala Kingdoms finally did fall and got assimilated by the Madurai Sultanate but that was done under the command of the Delhi Sultans, under Alauddin Khilji and it would be ridiculous to call him Persian since he was born in Northern India, and his family descended from Central Asian Turks. Furthermore the general he dispatched to conquer the South and establish the Sultanate was Malik Kafur, who was a Muslim convert of Hindu origin (and in the opinions of some historians, Alauddin's homosexual lover).
  • The Hoysala Kingdom is hypothesized as some kind of lost Ancient Kingdom, but it was only active between the 10th and 14th century CE, rough contemporaries of the vikings and The Crusades. For reference one of the oldest civilizations in the world, The Indus Valley, was in the area and had urbanized around 2500 BCE meaning that India has had some form of civilization and culture for about three thousand years before the Hoysala.
• Badass Bookworm: Asav. Despite being a former doctor who is well-versed in Indian mythology, he is exceptionally skilled in close combat. The game proves this on two separate occasions when he holds his own against both Chloe and Nadine, who have defeated dozens of his own men at this point and in the latter's case, dominated both Nathan and Sam Drake in a fight.
• Bait-and-Switch: The seventh chapter is called "The Lost Legacy". As Uncharted 4's last chapter also was a Title Drop, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the finale. The game continues for three more chapters, finishing with "End of the Line".
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Zig-Zagged. Chloe and Nadine do get cut and dirty throughout the game, but even after multiple violent fistfights and other assaults, they never develop black eyes or other major injuries on their faces. Two exceptions are damage they go through fighting Asav, and one of them does get a bloody nose, however these aren't nearly as persistent. Asav, on the other hand, gets noticeably more damaged despite going through relatively less, and Orca the lieutenant gets incredibly cut-up after a crash landing. In an inverted example, Sam Drake is hardly a looker and is introduced with a swelled up eyebrow, but this mellows out by the start of the next Chapter.
• Big Bad: Asav, a warlord and Indian separatist in the mold of Lazarevic, though with a more serious edge and a more sincere facade.
• Big, Bulky Bomb: In the climax. It's not stated outright whether or not it's a full-blown nuke, but it definitely has the potential to kill thousands of people if Asav sets it to detonate in a crowded city epicenter.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Asav captures Nadine and Chloe numerous times, but in each case he either talks to them long enough to give them an opportunity to escape or leaves them for dead using methods that would be far less efficient then just shooting them.
• Brick Joke: Chloe promises a girl that if she makes it back from her trip, they'll eat pizza together. She makes good on her word during the credits.
• Buffy Speak: Nadine, not being as well versed in archaeology and Hindu mythology as Chloe is, sometimes lapses into this:
  Nadine: Okay, back to the big... wheel... thing.
  Chloe: Big wheel thing?
  Nadine: Whatever the... archaeological term for it is.
  Chloe: "Big wheel thing" works.
• Bullying a Dragon: Nadine mentions a client who was fairly sexist towards her and then tried to back out of the deal, which she responded to by breaking his legs. One wonders what he thought would happen when he tried to shortchange the leader of a ruthless PMC.
• The Bus Came Back: Orca, Nadine's lieutenant, who was last seen heading towards Avery's ship near the end of Uncharted 4, appears here as the buyer of the Tusk. Her other lieutenant, Knot, died on the ship.
• Captive Push: Chloe, Nadine and Sam get captured by Asav's men at one point. The three have their hands cuffed behind them and then are marched along by their captors, while Sam and Nadine bicker the entire way.
• Cassandra Truth: When Nadine asks Chloe what took her so long to meet together at the start of the game, asking if it was a test, Chloe says she was just straight up late because the little girl at the beginning wouldn't leave her alone. Nadine simply scoffs.
• Casual Danger Dialogue:
  • Nadine's reunion with Sam, while they and Chloe have all been captured by Asav and his men, is filled with lots of snide, passive-aggressive remarks as they bicker with each other like children, with Chloe playing middleman and telling them to cut it out, all while they are being marched to uncertain doom while handcuffed and surrounded by lots of guys with assault rifles. The closest any of them come to openly acknowledging their situation is Sam lamenting that they are now, once again, coming away with nothing.
  • Orca, wounded and held at gunpoint by Nadine:
    Ma'am. Well, you're looking well.
• Character Development: Both Chloe and Nadine have to learn to trust each other to get the job done, with Chloe needing to learn to be up front while Nadine needs to learn to let go of old hang-ups. On a smaller scale, Nadine refuses to let Samuel Drake borrow her rope in the train yard level, and by the end she's defrosted just enough to let them borrow it. Averted with Sam, who repeatedly tries to get Nadine to warm up to her despite Chloe hinting that it's annoying her.
• Child of Two Worlds: Chloe Frazer is the daughter of an Indian archeologist and an Australian, and was raised in Australia.
• Collection Sidequest: In the Western Ghats section, there's an optional sidequest in which you can go around collecting eleven tokens to unlock the Queen's Ruby, a bracelet that glows and emits a sound when you're near collectible treasure.
• Company Cross References: A well-hidden treasure near the end of the game, a "Strange Skull," is in fact the Skeleseer toy from another Naughty Dog developed game, The Last of Us: Left Behind.
• Controllable Helplessness: After being captured by Asav, Chloe and Nadine end up handcuffed and being escorted by his men. You get to control Chloe, but all you can do is walk forward while unable to escape. Trying to go back several times, will lead to her getting shot.
• Covers Always Lie: A mild example, but the cover shows Nadine wearing a bulletproof vest, while in the game itself she just wears a T-shirt with no vest.
• Cue the Rain: After Nadine abandons her and Chloe is left alone with her regret, it starts raining...
• Cutting the Knot: After reaching the terrace of Asav's headquarters, Chloe tries to unlock the balcony doors with her lockpicking skills, but only manages to pick one tumbler before Nadine gets impatient, punches through the mostly glass door and unlocks it manually.
• Deuteragonist: Even though she isn't the Player Character, Nadine Ross is as much the protagonist of the story as Chloe, and the game's narrative focuses on the relationship between the two women.
• Developer's Foresight: The Western Ghats Chapter takes this to a ridiculous degree: since the chapter is non-linear Chloe and Nadine's dialogue will account for what the player has and hasn't done. All the faucet towers have the same layout so the cutscenes will fit any of them, and their puzzles are the same but with variables for the later ones. Chloe looking at the giant carved relief reflects if you've visited it already, and the look to the other two faucets account for if you didn't climb the central tower (which is incredibly unlikely because visiting it is the first thing you're told to do). The fortresses will also have different dialogue if you're visiting them first or second to reflect how much Nadine has warmed up to Chloe^*The Sala and the Tiger pop quiz and monkey bars jokes won't happen if you visit their respective fortresses first. Lastly Chloe won't mention Shiva and Ganesh in the Optional Dialogue at the Bow Fortress entry if you didn't visit the other two yet, where she explained them to Nadine.
• Disappeared Dad: Chloe's father was an Indian archeologist who sent her and her mother to live in Australia while he continued his obsessive quest to find the Hoysala and the Tusk of Ganesh, a pursuit that ultimately claimed his life, making Chloe's quest for the Tusk all the more personal. It's revealed he eventually did make it to the Hoysala capital and sent Chloe a Ganesh amulet that she carries throughout the game.
• Double-Meaning Title: The title can be considered to be about The Tusk of Ganesh, the legacy of Hoysala culture. It could also be about Chloe and her father, whose last expedition was in trying to find the Tusk but died before he could. Heck, even Nadine's story could fit as she is trying to restore Shoreline, a company her father started but was lost by her.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male:
  • Nadine at one point mentions that she once retaliated against a man refusing to work with her because she was a woman by breaking both his legs.
    Chloe: Haha... you're not kidding.
• Dramatic Irony: For much of the game Asav speaks disparagingly of the young king as he showed mercy and ended Human Sacrifice, claiming that the softness of the young king was why Hoysala fell. As we later learn, the young king moved the capital to Halebidu as a decoy and invested a lot of wealth in it to make it a more tempting target, letting the city, its inhabitants, his army, and effectively the entire kingdom die to keep the Tusk of Ganesh safe. While he outlawed ritual Human Sacrifice, he sacrificed more people than any of his predecessors, just in a different way.
• Eagleland: Chloe has a Type 2 attitude. She notes that while she has traveled the world, she's never been to the United States and hangs a Lampshade by stating that it's only 200 years old and doesn't have much history for an adventure setting. This of course does ignore America's long history with the settlers even before The American Revolution: the entire Western part of America was under Spanish and French rule, there are Native American ruins and, if you go North into Canada, you have Viking settlements. This not to mention a lot of stuff in Mexico and further into South America, where parts of Drake's Fortune and Golden Abyss are set.
• Enemy Mine: Nadine is forced to work with Sam, one of the men who ruined her life. While they're eventually able to cooperate without killing each other, they still hold antagonism towards each other after all's said and done.
• Empathic Environment: Once you exit Halebidu, the sky has started clouding over, foreshadowing Chloe and Nadine having their big argument. Once this happens and Nadine abandons her, it begins pouring rain. Conversely the sun shines through the clouds just a bit once they re-unite, foreshadowing their reconciliation.
• Everybody Hates Hades: Discussed, when Nadine notes Shiva being the god of destruction as seeming sinister from a Western perspective, but Chloe points out that in Hindu beliefs, destruction also symbolizes the loss of ego, pride and other bad things, as well as change in general.
• Evolving Title Screen: As you go through the game, boat table on the title screen gains items. The full list includes the Tusk of Ganesh drawing and disc for completing Chapter 2, the grappling rope for the start of Chapter 3, the Western Ghats map once you start Chapter 4, the Piton and the Queen's Ruby bracelet once you find them, Chloe's trinket after discovering its importance in Chapter 7, a pair of handcuffs for escaping the final chamber in Balur, Sam's cigarette box and broken shades once he breaks them in Chapter 8, Chloe's phone and lockpicks for getting all the photos and Lockboxes. the Tusk of Ganesh itself after getting it from Orca, and lastly some pizza for completing the story.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Chloe and Nadine start the game barely able to stand one another's company. But as they fight Rebels, solve puzzles and have heart to heart talks they become close friends. Nadine and Sam a little less so by the end, but hey at least they no longer want to kill each other.
• Foregone Conclusion: Since Sam is mentioned in the Distant Epilogue of Uncharted 4, there was no way he would die during this story.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the second cutscene of the game, Chloe tells Meenu that she "need[s] to help a friend". She's on a rescue mission for Sam Drake, Chloe's partner in stalling Asav until he went missing.
  • Whenever Asav's Hoysala expert is brought up, Chloe dismisses him. Said "expert" turns out to be Sam Drake, who's trying to stall Asav in the hopes of a rescue. He's also as much of an alleged expert as Chloe make him out to be.
  • At the first faucet in the Western Ghats, the topic of the Drake family comes up, but once back in the car Chloe reassures Nadine that Nate's no longer in the picture. This is because Chloe is also trying to rescue Sam Drake, since Nate retired from adventuring at the end of the previous game.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Asav wears some very round and sinister spectacles, and he behaves in a distinctly ruthless manner. At one point Nadine even notes she thinks the glasses are just an affectation.
• Freud Was Right: Invoked Trope. When Sam says "that's using the old noodle!^*brain", Nadine is confused and offended, and admits that what the phrase actually meant is not what she pictured.
• Heavily Armored Mook: As in previous Uncharted games, this one has you occasionally fighting enemies covered in full body armor and armed with machine guns. These guys are remarkably durable, as even multiple direct hits with grenades are often not enough to bring them down.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • The plot of the game is about Nadine going from mercenary commander Only in It for the Money reforming herself through her friendship with Chloe Frazer. She is appalled that after dropping her, Shoreline has been reduced to petty arms-dealers and she gives up the mercenary life for good.
  • Chloe Frazer was once fairly amoral and tended to be more ruthless than Nate, here she risks her life, after finding the MacGuffin, to willingly stop a terrorist attack and save the lives of hundreds if not thousands. At the end of the game, she also decides to give the Tusk to the Indian Ministry of Culture, restoring patrimony to the Indian government rather than sell it to the highest bidder, much to Sam Drake's disbelief.
• High-Speed Train Reroute: Upon discovering Asav's plan to blow up a bomb in the middle of a city in order to fuel his civil war, Chloe and Nadine board the train they're on to stop it. However, they discover that the bomb can't be defused and the engine has been completely welded shut, so Chloe steals one of their jeeps and rides ahead to swap out the track, rerouting the train towards a collapsed bridge, and saving the city as well.
• Highly-Visible Ninja: Should Chloe and Nadine end up having to shoot their way out of the Trident fort in the Western Ghats, Nadine will criticize Chloe for impulsiveness, a lack of fire discipline, and wearing a bright red shirt in the middle of the jungle.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Or possibly in Asav's case, dragged to his death with his leg caught under his own petard.
• Honorable Elephant:
  • Again, Chloe and Nadine save a mother elephant who gets pinned down by a fallen column, and she carries them a short distance closer to the Tusk. They know better than to try getting close to her herd afterwards, though. If Chloe steps towards one of the bulls, he advances threateningly on her, and Nadine warns her, "That bull. Will. Kill you."
  • Just as written in the Brahmanda Purana, Ganesh is shown in the final puzzle to have willingly sacrificed the end of one of his tusks to Lord Parashurama; though he was by far the stronger of the two and could have easily beat his opponent, Ganesh knew that the axe the hero fought him with was bestowed by Shiva, and he could not dishonor a gift given by his own father, even if it meant Parashurama would mutilate him. Asav, who always viewed the legend as a triumph of the Indian people's strength in combat, is taken aback that the true moral is of humility, love, and letting go of the material.
• Indy Ploy: Nadine objects to this tendency from Chloe. Chloe points out that treasure hunting is not a profession for the risk averse. Nadine counters that she's not averse to the risk being a mercenary, but the difference is a mercenary knows what to expect when a grenade pin is pulled whereas in treasure hunting, you never quite know when a puzzle room is a death trap.
• Internal Homage:
  • The finale takes place on an extended moving train with multiple shootouts along the carriage is one to the famous sequence in Among Thieves with updated mechanics and situations, like the vehicle traversal system which leads Chloe and Nadine to jump on and off the train at various times and then get back on board.
  • Also, earlier when Chloe, Nadine, and Sam are captured by Asav in the Belur Temple, Asav forces Chloe to help him in recovering the Tusk of Ganesh by threatening to kill Nadine and Sam. The whole situation is very similar to the scene where Lazarevic forced Nate to help him opening a path to Shambhala by threatening to kill Elena and Chloe in Among Thieves, right down to the atmosphere of the room they're in.
  • In the game's prologue Chloe purchases the headscarf she was seen wearing in the PSX 2016 reveal demo from a young Indian girl, which she doesn't end up wearing in the finished level.^note She was wearing the scarf because in the reveal demo her identity isn't revealed until the Pink Lotus rooftop fight with Nadine at the very end.
• Interquel: The game takes place between the penultimate chapter and epilogue of A Thief's End.
• Invulnerable Knuckles: Averted. Chloe's knuckles have cuts on them after the first fight that stay there for the rest of the game.
• Ironic Echo: Several, mostly involving Nadine, showing both how much she's learned from Chloe and how far she's come in terms of Character Development:
  • "Relax. You'll live longer." First said by Chloe to Nadine after the latter had called her out for her recklessness and unprofessional behavior, then repeated by Nadine to Sam as she gets ready to charge in and take the Tusk back from Orca and Shoreline without any set plan.
    Chloe: I am so proud.
  • When Nadine first admits that she'd never even heard of the Hoysala Empire, she mispronounces it as "Hoy-SAH-la", and Chloe eventually corrects her that it's "Hoy-sa-LAH". Much later, Sam mispronounces it the same way and Nadine instinctively corrects them.
  • Asav uses the phrase "Progress demands sacrifice" while praising the old Hoysala practice of ritual sacrifice, using it to justify his own philosophy. Chloe throws it right back in his face before leaving him to die on an out-of-control train, trapped under his own bomb. He doesn't appreciate the irony.
  • Asav admits that Chloe's plan to use Sam's "expertise" to mislead him and keep him running around in circles while Chloe and Nadine made real progress was clever, then quips that "Perhaps there's a little Indian blood in you after all." When Nadine later shows that she grasps the significance of Ganesh's loss to Parashurama really being a Heroic Sacrifice instead of a total defeat better than Asav, Chloe rubs it in saying "See? Even she gets it. Not a drop of Indian blood in her."
• Kick Chick: Chloe and Nadine use lots of kicks when they fight hand-to-hand, especially when they tag-team Asav at the end.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Chloe snarks that she never went to America, which hangs a lampshade that the Uncharted series (except for both the flashback to the orphanage and the glimpses into Nate's retired life in Uncharted 4) are never set in USA. She also notes about the Drake brothers that while she knows Nate well, she doesn't know Sam, muttering he just came out of nowhere, echoing many complaints fans had about Sam.
  • Sam's first instincts when faced with a ledge out of reach are to search for a caster-wheeled crate of some kind — just like he was able to find in, as many reviewers noted, an ancient Scottish monastery and a Malagasy pirate utopia. Here, in rural India, they have no such luck.
    • There's also a moment in the first chapter where Chloe finds two such crates, one after the other, to progress. After nearly killing Nadine while dropping the second one down, Nadine suggests that they should avoid crates altogether from now on. There are no more crate puzzles at all after that.
• Locomotive Level: Yep, it's back from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves for the game's climax, and it's merged with the car chase level from Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, with some car-destroying gunplay from Uncharted: Drake's Fortune for good measure.
• Lovely Angels: Chloe and Nadine fight terrorist rebels and solve ancient puzzles, all while building a trusting partnership.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: Discussed. In one side conversation with Nadine, Nadine starts reviewing Asav's force deployment tactics in the Western Ghats and notes that if it were her running the show, she would have held back until Chloe had done all the complex puzzle solving and retrieved the Tusk, then swooped in and taken it from her to "mitigate a lot of risks". Mostly a Call-Back to A Thief's End where she did indeed do just that several times.
• Made of Iron: Even more so than usual. The game's five-to-ten hours happen over a 24-hour period wherein the protagonists fistfight, carjack, and rope swing through one of the most humid climates on Earth with no noticeable loss of speed or power.
• Male Gaze: You play the entire game as Chloe. Admit it, you missed that ass. Nadine is less vain and wears much more practical pants.
• Morality Chain: Both Chloe and Nadine act as this for one another. Chloe helps Nadine to not take things so seriously and enjoy the moment more. Nadine calls out Chloe on her usual flip-flopping approach to loyalty.
• My God, You Are Serious!: Stated word for word by Sam when Chloe and Nadine agree that they will legally turn in the Tusk of Ganesh to the Indian authorities rather than auction it off to the highest bidder. Sam is still trying in the post-credits scene to get them to back out of what he admits is "the moral thing" to do.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Dicking around in the room with the Tusk or running into Asav's guards will result in Asav executing Sam.
• Once an Episode: Averted. Every Uncharted game in the series opens with a quote from a famous explorer. The Lost Legacy is the first game not to do so. In fact, this is the first game in the series where the main story doesn't relate with any famous explorer. The closest it gets to an explorer is Chloe's father, who was obsessed with the Hoysala Empire, but murdered by bandits before he could make his big discovery. His name isn't even mentioned.
• Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure: The reveal that Chloe was hiding from Nadine that she and Sam Drake are working together, causes Nadine to feel outright betrayed. When Chloe tries to explain, or more like excuse, why she hadn't told Nadine earlier, Nadine punches her in the face, then takes the Jeep and leaves Chloe behind. Luckily it doesn't last long thanks to the rebels blowing up the Jeep, and a ride on an elephant after freeing her from fallen debris is enough to bring them back together.
• Portal Statue Pairs: The entrance to the lost city of Belur features two giant statues of Ganesh flanking a waterfall.
• Pride: Chloe asks Nadine why she wants to regain and re-establish Shoreline, noting that, while Nadine had inherited it from her father, she is talented enough that she could do and be good at anything else she set her mind to. All Nadine can say in response is that Shoreline was lost on her watch. Encountering The Remnant of Shoreline one last time, and finding out that they were about to enable civil war by selling Asav a warhead, culminates in her abandoning that idea, and the mercenary trade, for good.
• Product Placement: Considering the game's PS4 exclusivity, it's very likely that Chloe's phone is completely intended to resemble a Sony Xperia. A bit of a continuity nod to Elena's camcorder from the first game, which was complete with Sony branding.
• Profane Last Words: As noted above, right before falling to his death in his train with his bomb, Asav furiously calls Chloe a "smug little shit".
• Promoted to Playable: Chloe was a support character in the second and third games in the Uncharted series. This game sees her take the role of the main playable character.
• Redemption Demotion: Since Nadine has been ousted from Shoreline, she no longer has access to the huge amount of resources and manpower she previously had, forcing her to work solo on Chloe's budget. She seals this by thrashing what's left of Shoreline and leaving mercenary work behind altogether, partnering up with Chloe again.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Played mostly straight with Chloe, the reckless, snarky Distaff Counterpart to Nathan Drake, and Nadine, the no-nonsense, humorless and disciplined mercenary. It's even followed through with their outfits' respective color schemes. This gets toyed with in later level when the revelations about Sam Drake and Shoreline's involvement in Chloe and Asav's activities make Nadine much more of a loose cannon, and Chloe has to reign her in a bit.
• The Remnant: Even with the sizable amount of treasure that Orca had managed to salvage from Libertalia, the huge loss of equipment and personnel during the events of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End have seriously hobbled Shoreline, forcing them to start selling arms and explosives to terrorists just to stay in the black. Nadine is both appalled and disgusted.
• Ruins for Ruins' Sake: Lampshaded. Chloe can identify most of the structures as fortresses, temples and even sculptor's quarters, but there are some ruins that she can't identify as anything in particular.
• Rule of Three: Discussed by Chloe and Nadine. Being quite green to treasure-hunting, Nadine is surprised to learn from Chloe that everything comes in threes, such as the axe-swinging puzzles in the Western Ghats. By the time she and Chloe get to the Shiva statue puzzle, she's noticed this trope numerous times since, such as the three mirror statues.
• Running Gag: Nadine's miscellaneous trivial knowledge, particularly about animals, comes up throughout the game, usually to Chloe's disbelief or snark.
• Scenery Porn: The game loves its breathtaking views. Chloe even has multiple opportunities to take pictures of the scenery so she and the player don't miss anything.
• Sexy Soaked Shirt: Given the game takes place in a rainforest and the ruins uses water to make things move, the women spend a majority of the time drenched.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: How most of Nadine and Chloe's conversations go.
  Nadine: Try not to break it this time.
  Chloe: Sassy.
• Smash Sisters: Chloe and Nadine always fight together in well-coordinated attacks. They kick the shit out out of Asav by raining blow after blow down almost simultaneously and finish him off with a double upper cut.
• Spiritual Antithesis: If Uncharted is for Indiana Jones, this game is for The Temple of Doom, rather than Mighty Whitey protagonists you have a mixed race daughter of an Indian archeologist and a (implicitly) mixed-race South African. Rather than demonize Kali and the Hindu religion, we have a mostly respectful portrayal of the religion and culture, and likewise the ending of the episode which has the anti-heroes returning the MacGuffin to the Indian government is a correction of the Spielberg film ending with the glorification of the Raj.
• Stealth-Based Game: Zig-zagged, the game certainly incentivizes you to play more stealthy than Drake, by providing you with silenced weapons early on. Chloe also tends not to be as good at up close fights as Drake was needing one or two more hits then he did. But going in guns blazing is also a perfectly sound option.
• Teeth Clenched Team Work: Nadine and Chloe start off as this but very quickly become close. Nadine and Sam on the other hand can barely stand each other, even after the adventure is over.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Chloe's face when Nadine realizes Sam is Asav's expert and her tone of voice when she tells Nadine he was initially working with her. Sure enough, Nadine immediately punches her in the face.
• Walking Disaster Area: As a playable character this time around, Chloe seemingly inherits Nate's Unluckily Lucky fortune of destroying everything she touches. Wherever she goes, the place would wind up collapsing. She even lampshades this in one of the later chapters.
• Wham Line:
  Nadine: (looks through binoculars) No.
  Chloe: What do you mean, no?
  Nadine: Sam Drake. His "goddamn" expert is Sam Drake!?
  Chloe: Yeah...
  Nadine: Piss— You know what? This is a good thing. I can kill two birds with one stone.
  Chloe: Nadine.
  Nadine: What? What?
  Chloe: Sam's sort of the reason we're here in the first place.
• Wham Shot:
  • When the two women exit Halebidu and see the newly-revealed entrance to Belur, Nadine looks through her binoculars and sees that Asav has already preceded them, with his expert ...Samuel Drake. Nadine isn't very pleased, especially when she learns that Chloe actually hired her to rescue him.
  • Chloe and Nadine find an entire collection of amulets similar to the one Chloe's father gave her when she was young. One is missing, and Chloe has it, confirming that her dad almost found what he was looking for.
• What You Are in the Dark: Near the ending, Chloe and co. have successfully taken back the Tusk of Ganesh, their primary objective, from the bad guys, but Asav is still at large with aims to detonate a bomb in the middle of a city to spark a civil war. They could've done nothing and let Asav go instead of risking their lives for no reward. But Chloe decides to stop Asav because it's the right thing to do. After failing to convince her to alert the authorities (it would be too late for them to mobilize), Nadine reluctantly decides to come with her, and Sam decides to help. Chloe and Nadine also decide to give the Tusk to the Ministry of Culture instead of selling it to the highest bidder.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Asav pretty much every time he runs into Chloe and Nadine. He never just shoots them on sight, and he doesn't even have the excuse that previous Uncharted villains have had (wanting to keep the heroes alive so they can help him find the treasure), because he always makes it clear he's planning to kill them eventually or makes a thwarted attempt to do so. Even after he finds the Tusk, he still doesn't simply shoot them personally, for religious reasons.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: Once you complete the opening missions, the entire Western Ghats section is open with missions, side-missions, other collectibles, and activities fully open to be completed in any order. Many compared it to the driving section in Madagascar in the middle of Uncharted 4 but made into an entire game^*Which is a bit inaccurate: the Madagascar level was very open but ultimately still linear with one destination, while the Western Ghats has multiple objectives with the exit not opened until you complete the three primary ones.
• The Worf Effect: In A Thief's End, Nadine was shown to be a highly competent hand-to-hand combatant, capable of taking on both Drake brothers at once with little problem. In this game, Asav repeatedly keeps pace with both Nadine and Chloe (who is also well-trained) in fights, and at one point stuns Nadine after body-slamming her through a statue. As a bonus, he's older than either of them. His model is even beefier than either of the Drakes, and, of course, he's formally trained and in practice, instead of brawlers who have been out of the game for a while.
• Would Hit a Girl: Asav has multiple brutal fistfights with Chloe and Nadine, without pulling his punches at all.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: After reaching the treasure room in the Hoysala capital of Halebidu, Chloe and Nadine expect to find the Tusk of Ganesh but are instead only rewarded with another key^*Or rather, it's the same key, just mechanically altered so that it fits a different lock now. and transported outside. Chloe then realizes that the Tusk was never in Halebidu at all, and the entire city, for all it's wealth and splendor, was just a decoy built to protect the "old" capital of Belur, and the Tusk, from the Persians.

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