Reviews VideoGame / The Last Ofus

I see what you mean, of course. I think that it just wears thin. If the game wanted to present itself as complex, it would give you more than one or two talking points within the story, the story which is 20 hours or so long and pads itself out with vignettes that contribute very little to the main plot other than characterization of the protagonists. Its atmosphere and its environments work well, but it only goes so far. There's just such a lifeless lack of personality in all of the antagonists that it fails to create any interesting conflict.

What's interesting is that I could apply almost your entire review to Assassin's Creed 3, another game that I didn't particularly care for, but I think that game engaged me quite a bit more if only because it felt more varied, more complex, and went more at your pace. However, there were similar design philosophies in the hearts of both games, I could argue. You could say The Last of Us was more subtle, but as simplistic as it is, there's not much for it to be subtle about, which works to its detriment, in my opinion.

I saw you mention in another review that you thought it was subtle in how it deliberately tries to "alienate" the player. I disagree that it even attempts to do this to begin with. I've played several games where I've felt no connection with the protagonist and/or where I've disagreed with his or her actions, but that in and of itself does not mean that the game is trying to alienate me (unless that's what the developers say they were trying to do). Aside from that, the game has nothing I'd consider "subtle", but plenty I'd consider outright vague. There are so many times where the game is fuzzy on the details, never actually provides them, and just expects you to go along with it. Yes, it adds to the "feel" of the world, and the "realism," but it also makes so much of the game pure speculation that it deprives us of anything to talk about or anything that we could glean from the characters or environments other than superficial guesses.

I guess what I'm saying is that while we never have a full perspective on life and while we as humans don't have all the answers, it'd be nice to have something, at least. The "something" that The Last of Us gave us was a sticky note with the words "zombie tropes" on it. Scare Quotes.

I'll leave the alienating discussion mainly to that other review. I think I've made a fairly comprehensive case for why they were doing that. If you weren't on board at the start then sure, that's not the developers plan. I believe the idea was that you'd like Joel and want to believe that he could change and be saved by Ellie and then slowly over the course of the game you'd come more apart from him as you realise it's not going to be like that. The opening cutscene of the game is obviously designed to make you sympathetic to Joel and the ending cutscene is designed to make you feel not in sync with his thoughts. Since those were deliberate decisions the only conclusion can be that the writers wanted you to come apart from him over the course of the game (but not at the beginning).

I can understand the wearing thing argument. I think it does this thing (Which I don't believe AC 3 does, but it might), where it's good at showing you what a day in the life for Joel feels like. It's not just the narratively important moments, like in The Walking Dead, but everyday he might wake up and see something beautiful and wake up fight for his life.

But a)you have to be fairly sympathetic to that idea to enjoy it. That's not the sort of thing that's going to grab your attention

and b)It still wears a little thin. I have this theory, that if you kept all the encounters but removed half the enemies from each of them, then the game would feel a lot more appropriately placed and it would also make it's atmosphere even more believable. Fighting more than a handful of enemies always felt unimmersive in this world.

I do think the game gives a lot to talk about without delving into superficial guesses. If you look at the alienation comments, we've got paragraphs and paragraphs there of completely in game situations. I could talk about the guilt that Tess seemed to feel, ask about what it was that made her stick with Joel, how despite living the same life as him she didn't seem to give up on humanity in the same way, she just kept it under the surface. Or Bill and cutting yourself off from life and how he did it differently from Joel because Bill wanted to run away whereas Joel was happy to be around people, he just didn't want to believe that people were important. Or whether the Fireflies were right etc...

It's kind of hard though, because I don't want to tell people that 'you should have liked The Last of Us' or 'you were wrong to be bored of this game.' I think it's going to let a lot of people down and the game isn't good at making you like it.

But in the case of The Last of Us, I don't think that's necessarily a failure on it's part either. I really appreciate what it does and it is what it is, even if that's something that some people are going to play and not enjoy.

I'd disagree that the opening cutscene is designed to make you sympathetic to Joel because the way it's designed, you really can't, and there are several reasons why: You barely know who Joel or his daughter are at that point (a recurring problem throughout the story), you're only given a minute or two before you're thrown into the chaotic, apocalyptic action, and you're led to believe that the story's going to be bigger than just Joel's personal struggle through this large scale destruction, it makes the scope seem grander than it really is. The death of Joel's daughter has barely any impact and comes off as cheap and manipulative shock value.

I can see your point a bit easier with the ending, but yeah. I never actually liked Joel to begin with, so it's hard for me to make that call. I didn't like Ellie either, for that matter. I always found her to be just as selfish as Joel, if not more so at some points, so the fact that she didn't get Joel to act in the interests of humanity isn't terribly surprising to me. Their bond didn't exactly encourage that idea, especially when the entire game's been about the two of them surviving, no matter the cost. If the audience didn't expect the ending, that's more on them than the developers, I'd say.

AC3 actually does show its protagonist's daily life and has an entire series of sidequests devoted to just that, though obviously the experiences of an American Revolutionary War ninja are going to be quite different than those of a post-apocalyptic gun-runner. He spends his time getting to know the people in his town and helping them with their mundane problems, having a beer with some of the Assassin recruits at the pub, gambling over your skill at board games with certain people, going hunting, or simply sending convoys to trade with merchants like a businessman. Are these things immersive? Not terribly so, no. Most of them I would argue aren't even fun, but they are more engaging to me simply because they have more personality and character. That's why I really think The Last of Us just needed more people in general, or at least to have the people who were there stay around longer than they did. Every time it seems like you just get brief sketches, hints of personality before the game leaves you feeling hollow again because there's just wasn't enough interaction between Joel and anything else but Ellie.

While I appreciate The Last of Us's streamlined gameplay, much of it felt like you were doing the same thing in a different ruined city, especially in the beginning of the game. And even when the objectives were different, it still kind of boiled down to "what faceless goon am I going to put a bullet in next?" Which is all well and good for the theme of the game, mind you, but again, it's too little to make a game as long as this one out of. Removing half the enemies would be even worse, though, because then you'd have virtually no gameplay considering how much of the game is running through environments with absolutely nothing in them except supplies already. A better solution, I'd say, would be to add more of those environmental puzzles they used a couple of times throughout the story. Have the ruins designed to be impassable more and more, requiring clever solutions to get across. Maybe they could do a bit of both, I don't know.

And how you think you can go beyond superficial with the situations you mentioned is, well, beyond me. We don't know why Tess feels guilt because we have no idea what she's had to do or what makes her and Joel work together. The game barely hints at either of these things, so we just have to guess. We don't know what favor Joel did for Bill, how they came to know each other, why they drifted apart, why Joel apparently still know where Bill was anyway, or what about Bill pissed off Frank, and the game doesn't want to tell us, so all we can do is guess. And so on. Sure, it's good that they don't just spout off these things during the cutscenes all Metal Gear style, that would break the immersion, atmosphere and pace of what the game's going for. But it also means the characters have little to no depth at all and feel more like plot devices than they do characters. They could have made all those notes and messages you find throughout the game about the characters (Resident Evil/Bioshock style) and it would have worked perfectly fine if they did that. Instead, most of them are about random characters that add nothing to the environment and whom you never read about again except for that one sewer area where it actually kinda worked.

This game, it just feels like all the elements were in place but it failed to fully realize any of them

I don't think the death of Joel's daughter can be called cheap at all. You have to start somewhere to get to know a character, they can't come onto the screen familiar. The sheer panic of the night everything goes wrong was a really neat place to start and the death of Joel's daughter is hugely important to both the character of Joel and the message the story ultimately wanted to get across. Cheap would be if they killed her just for impact, but they didn't, they killed her because this was the story about the man who'd lost all the things close to him and his fear of losing again warped his personality and attitude on life in incredible dangerous ways. It's a game about the attachments you choose to make with people and starting with someone losing one of his closest seems like a fair thing to do in the apocalypse.

And equally, just because you don't get a lot of actual details about the characters doesn't make their situations shallow. The acting and writing is incredible enough that huge amounts can be gleaned from relatively little. They aren't using stock cliches to make the characters feel fleshed out, the feelings Tess and Bill went through are incredibly specific to them, it's just they were confident that those details could come through without needing to write it on a piece of paper and stick it to the ground.

As far as combat being the same in each scenario, to an extent I understand that, but at the same time the repetition of combat is important for establishing Joel's character in a way that one off combat or environmental puzzles wouldn't. I found the combat itself really enjoyable and to me fights seemed to all play out differently, but I would agree that a lot of the fights were indistinguishable in set-up and that would have been a great area to add some diversity to the game without losing tone

It's become evident that our enjoyment of this game (or lack thereof) is simply the difference between you, who seems to read into things that aren't necessarily there, and me, who prefers Jigsaw Puzzle Plot stories and is often the reason that the Anvilicious trope exists, so I don't think there's too much more we can say at this point.

All I have left is that when I said that the death of Joel's daughter was cheap, I was talking about it in the context of the scene itself. In terms of the overall game, it's obviously somewhat more meaningful, but when you first see it, it does come across as cheap, and as I said, it doesn't do a good job at getting you to sympathize with Joel because it happens way too quickly after he's introduced and too much else is happening at the time, etc. Maybe it did the trick for some other people, I don't know.

I think the game would've been better off without the prologue. 'cause in the prologue I see the girl and my brain goes "Oh. She looks like the girl on the cover, but she's not the girl on the cover. So what's gonna happen is she's gonna die and later the deal's gonna be that the girl on the cover reminds him of her."

The prologue is actually necessary to establish Joel as the character the overall theme. Yeah, you can easily guess what happens, but so? What you said is the premise, not the twist.

I don't know why I didn't respond to "you, who seems to read into things that aren't necessarily there" slide back then.

It seems like a bit of a cheap way to get out of a discussion without having to respond to what the other person is saying.

It's also kind of limiting to not think any more about stories than what is presented right in front of you.

I mean apart from anything, subtext is a basic writing tool.

I wish the game had more open areas where it's possible to sneak past enemies, solve environmental puzzles, etc., and you get to decide what to do. The game's linearity was annoying.