The Last of Us was the PS3's swan song, an incredibly polished game from the developers of Uncharted. I remember being pretty hyped because of that: I was always a fan of games with lots of story and, while I was never into plain shooters before, Uncharted managed to win me over with its charming characters and movie-like beats, with a campy approach to both narrative and gameplay. When I saw the reception The Last of Us was getting, I jumped right into... and I didn't like it that much. I didn't hate it, either -- far from that -- but I felt it played to its strengths too little.
For its time, it was one of the most beautiful games you'd see, squeezing what it could from the PS3's hardware. But it wasn't just a matter of visual fidelity or graphical effects: the game counted on stellar audio design; the art direction and environment composition were near flawless and the animation quality was on par with 3D animation movies, creating scenes with an impressive attention to detail, from transitioning between animations to body language to facial movements to even eye movements. All of which the game puts towards building its characters.
The Last of Us takes place in an America destroyed by a Cordyceps variant. Cordyceps, in the real world, is a parasitic genus of fungus which infects insects, taking control of the host's brain and forcing it to help spread its spores from tall places. In The Last of Us, it has made the leap to humans, infecting those who come in contact with its spores and turning them into mindless monsters.
You play as Joel, a man made bitter by the loss of his daughter to the zombie apocalypse. Joel finds himself tasked with escorting Ellie, a young girl whose significance is unknown as the two meet, but is explained over the course of the narrative. Over the course of the adventure, you see a bond develop between the two characters, as Joel becomes something of a father figure to Ellie and begins to open up his heart. TLoU was part of the "dad game" trend of its time, which featured middle aged men taking care of children or teenagers, and it did a lot of work towards making that trend more popular.
I'm not fond of that trend. It's not that I can't empathize with the situation of someone being thrown in the role of a parent all of a sudden, it's that, as it is most often used, the trope glorifies male violence, turning parenthood from a constructive activity to a destructive one, where the father's role is to kill everything that threatens his precious, vulnerable daughter. Joel TheLastOfUs is the epitome of that, a man closed off from his emotions who, for a lot of the game, knows only violence, and only begins to improve when Ellie starts influencing him.
Ellie completely stole the show on this one -- such a layered character. She's a fantastic depiction of a child who was raised on this ravaged world, who never knew normal, and so, simultaneously and paradoxically, is very mature for her age and prone to childish moments, yearning for a normal childhood all while dealing with survivor's guilt from people she's lost. Far from the female McGuffin that gets escorted around and kidnapped a lot in videogames, she's vulnerable, but not helpless, and definitely not window dressing.
Ellie makes Joel a lot more likeable by proxy, and the game shines the most when it's focusing on them and their character developments. The sections that see Ellie looking after Joel, or that see the two getting separated, are some of the most intense in the game, and the epilogue to the story carries such incredible nuance that I still wonder if I'm reading too much into it.
It's just too bad that, to see all of that unfold, you have to put up with so much generic AAA shooter gameplay. The game is filled with standard action sequences or ridiculous zombie movie situations that feel jarring and disconnected from what is supposed to be a serious, character-driven story.
First, let's talk about the abundance of guns and human enemies. This is a desolate world that was destroyed over twenty years before the main story began, whatever's left of American civilization being governed by the US military with an iron fist.
Everywhere you go, though, there seem to be these gangs of bandits who just randomly stick around, sitting on their traps, waiting for someone to go through so they can rummage their belongings. You'd think, twenty years into the apocalypse and most of the human population gone, that would be one of the most inefficient ways to sustain a population. After all, we meet two other people going through these areas, and get to see or hear about maybe half a dozen victims, while the bandits number in the tens of dozens. And they get gunned down by a single man -- it says a lot about the life expectancy in this line of work.
Half the times when the game needs enemies, it will summon bandit attacks, which in at least one occasion, are shown to have a devastating efficiency in penetrating settlements, but also completely fail to kill the people living in them. These men count on limitless guns as well as infinite ammo, which allow them to shoot at you nonstop, yet they leave only a couple of bullets in their corpses, their stocks having mysteriously depleted so that the game can maintain an illusion of resource scarcity. It's feels like a joke, really -- this is a world where knives are rarer than guns. And probably more useful, too, but we'll get to that in a second.
When the game isn't using "bandit attack" as an excuse, it's probably going to go for "guided zombie horde", an even more annoying cliché of the zombie game genre. One made worse here, mind you: the fungus that causes The Last of Us's zombies replaces the brain, and will eventually grow to the point of destroying most of the head, making its victims rely on echolocation as they lose their eyesight.
It's one of the coolest aspects of the game's lore, and one it doesn't respect this at all -- there are hundreds of presumably freshly turned zombies everywhere, all with perfect eyesight, ready to zerg rush you. This is true even in the middle of snowy nowhere, where one of the most tense character moments in the game gets randomly interrupted by a horde of hundreds of the critters you're then made to fight. In this sequences, even the variants that can't see are seen breaking through barricades and climbing walls twenty plus feet tall to drop in through the roof. It's simultaneously one of the hardest, most random and most pathetic action sequences in the entire game.
The Last of Us spends too much time being Uncharted: The Gritty Reboot. The same waves of numerous enemies, the same evenly spread, chest-high walls, the convenient amount of firearms and ammo in the hands of thugs and/or hidden in desolate places... It's like some executive walked into the people making a tense, stealthy zombie game and forbade them from continuing, because according to marketing, that kind of thing doesn't sell.
And the thing is, part of that game is still here! Clickers, the echolocating zombie variants that cannot see, are an incredibly terrifying presence. Sections where you must carefully navigate dilapidated buildings -- which, mind you, feel like real places instead of action game setpieces -- all while trying to avoid these disfigured humans roaming around, making their cursed clicking sounds... wondering if you should use the one improvised knife you managed to make on the one right in front of you...
These make for the best parts of the game, and should have been its focus. Mind you, I'm not saying there should not have been any action sequences in the game, only that they should have been fewer and more interestingly tuned. Knives, in their scarcity and frailty, but also game-changing efficiency, are what guns should have been, and in fact, the game world actually gives us a perfect additional reason for using guns sparingly, even when against plain humans, as it could draw the attention of dangerous zombies elsewhere.
There could have been so much more here, and I was left with confusing feelings regarding The Last of Us. On one hand, finishing it was kind of a painful slog, marred by generic shootouts I couldn't care less about. On another, it presented fascinating characters, an interesting world, and created scenarios that felt genuinely threatening. Maybe, one day, it would get DLC that would really play to these strengths a bit more (hint hint). But for now, I guess I can just say it's pretty neat.
For its time, it was one of the most beautiful games you'd see, squeezing what it could from the PS3's hardware. But it wasn't just a matter of visual fidelity or graphical effects: the game counted on stellar audio design; the art direction and environment composition were near flawless and the animation quality was on par with 3D animation movies, creating scenes with an impressive attention to detail, from transitioning between animations to body language to facial movements to even eye movements. All of which the game puts towards building its characters.
The Last of Us takes place in an America destroyed by a Cordyceps variant. Cordyceps, in the real world, is a parasitic genus of fungus which infects insects, taking control of the host's brain and forcing it to help spread its spores from tall places. In The Last of Us, it has made the leap to humans, infecting those who come in contact with its spores and turning them into mindless monsters.
You play as Joel, a man made bitter by the loss of his daughter to the zombie apocalypse. Joel finds himself tasked with escorting Ellie, a young girl whose significance is unknown as the two meet, but is explained over the course of the narrative. Over the course of the adventure, you see a bond develop between the two characters, as Joel becomes something of a father figure to Ellie and begins to open up his heart. TLoU was part of the "dad game" trend of its time, which featured middle aged men taking care of children or teenagers, and it did a lot of work towards making that trend more popular.
I'm not fond of that trend. It's not that I can't empathize with the situation of someone being thrown in the role of a parent all of a sudden, it's that, as it is most often used, the trope glorifies male violence, turning parenthood from a constructive activity to a destructive one, where the father's role is to kill everything that threatens his precious, vulnerable daughter. Joel TheLastOfUs is the epitome of that, a man closed off from his emotions who, for a lot of the game, knows only violence, and only begins to improve when Ellie starts influencing him.
Ellie completely stole the show on this one -- such a layered character. She's a fantastic depiction of a child who was raised on this ravaged world, who never knew normal, and so, simultaneously and paradoxically, is very mature for her age and prone to childish moments, yearning for a normal childhood all while dealing with survivor's guilt from people she's lost. Far from the female McGuffin that gets escorted around and kidnapped a lot in videogames, she's vulnerable, but not helpless, and definitely not window dressing.
Ellie makes Joel a lot more likeable by proxy, and the game shines the most when it's focusing on them and their character developments. The sections that see Ellie looking after Joel, or that see the two getting separated, are some of the most intense in the game, and the epilogue to the story carries such incredible nuance that I still wonder if I'm reading too much into it.
It's just too bad that, to see all of that unfold, you have to put up with so much generic AAA shooter gameplay. The game is filled with standard action sequences or ridiculous zombie movie situations that feel jarring and disconnected from what is supposed to be a serious, character-driven story.
First, let's talk about the abundance of guns and human enemies. This is a desolate world that was destroyed over twenty years before the main story began, whatever's left of American civilization being governed by the US military with an iron fist.
Everywhere you go, though, there seem to be these gangs of bandits who just randomly stick around, sitting on their traps, waiting for someone to go through so they can rummage their belongings. You'd think, twenty years into the apocalypse and most of the human population gone, that would be one of the most inefficient ways to sustain a population. After all, we meet two other people going through these areas, and get to see or hear about maybe half a dozen victims, while the bandits number in the tens of dozens. And they get gunned down by a single man -- it says a lot about the life expectancy in this line of work.
Half the times when the game needs enemies, it will summon bandit attacks, which in at least one occasion, are shown to have a devastating efficiency in penetrating settlements, but also completely fail to kill the people living in them. These men count on limitless guns as well as infinite ammo, which allow them to shoot at you nonstop, yet they leave only a couple of bullets in their corpses, their stocks having mysteriously depleted so that the game can maintain an illusion of resource scarcity. It's feels like a joke, really -- this is a world where knives are rarer than guns. And probably more useful, too, but we'll get to that in a second.
When the game isn't using "bandit attack" as an excuse, it's probably going to go for "guided zombie horde", an even more annoying cliché of the zombie game genre. One made worse here, mind you: the fungus that causes The Last of Us's zombies replaces the brain, and will eventually grow to the point of destroying most of the head, making its victims rely on echolocation as they lose their eyesight.
It's one of the coolest aspects of the game's lore, and one it doesn't respect this at all -- there are hundreds of presumably freshly turned zombies everywhere, all with perfect eyesight, ready to zerg rush you. This is true even in the middle of snowy nowhere, where one of the most tense character moments in the game gets randomly interrupted by a horde of hundreds of the critters you're then made to fight. In this sequences, even the variants that can't see are seen breaking through barricades and climbing walls twenty plus feet tall to drop in through the roof. It's simultaneously one of the hardest, most random and most pathetic action sequences in the entire game.
The Last of Us spends too much time being Uncharted: The Gritty Reboot. The same waves of numerous enemies, the same evenly spread, chest-high walls, the convenient amount of firearms and ammo in the hands of thugs and/or hidden in desolate places... It's like some executive walked into the people making a tense, stealthy zombie game and forbade them from continuing, because according to marketing, that kind of thing doesn't sell.
And the thing is, part of that game is still here! Clickers, the echolocating zombie variants that cannot see, are an incredibly terrifying presence. Sections where you must carefully navigate dilapidated buildings -- which, mind you, feel like real places instead of action game setpieces -- all while trying to avoid these disfigured humans roaming around, making their cursed clicking sounds... wondering if you should use the one improvised knife you managed to make on the one right in front of you...
These make for the best parts of the game, and should have been its focus. Mind you, I'm not saying there should not have been any action sequences in the game, only that they should have been fewer and more interestingly tuned. Knives, in their scarcity and frailty, but also game-changing efficiency, are what guns should have been, and in fact, the game world actually gives us a perfect additional reason for using guns sparingly, even when against plain humans, as it could draw the attention of dangerous zombies elsewhere.
There could have been so much more here, and I was left with confusing feelings regarding The Last of Us. On one hand, finishing it was kind of a painful slog, marred by generic shootouts I couldn't care less about. On another, it presented fascinating characters, an interesting world, and created scenarios that felt genuinely threatening. Maybe, one day, it would get DLC that would really play to these strengths a bit more (hint hint). But for now, I guess I can just say it's pretty neat.