DaytimeDreamer
Southern Pounce.,
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EDGE gave it a 10 out of 10 amongst others. I can't remember a game being praised so much
The Last of Us
- Thread starter Taiso
- Start date
The story apparently does not elaborate how joel and ellie met and just throws you into this post-apocalyptic world. The AI is is not very good from what I heard in the reviews. The gamespot review was very honest about this game and did not just give it a perfect score like every other site.
You guys are salivating over how good the game looks and runs? It runs at 30 fps which is unacceptable and has frame rate issues in a few areas on top of that. The vegetation is poorly animated, like 3 frames bad. The vegetation in crysis 3(PC only) destroys this game.There is also pop-up issues.
You guys are salivating over how good the game looks and runs? It runs at 30 fps which is unacceptable and has frame rate issues in a few areas on top of that. The vegetation is poorly animated, like 3 frames bad. The vegetation in crysis 3(PC only) destroys this game.There is also pop-up issues.
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Is the vegetation in front or behind the character's feet?
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sorry, but some of us don't comprimise on the frame rate of our in-game vegetation, we have fucking standards here man
Last edited:
It touches Joel's perineum.
You know what vegetation counts ..your right I'm cancelling my pre order right now dam this game!
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This means it will be obtainable for under $30 used in a few months. Excellent.
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So I picked up the game at midnight tonight and played through the prologue event.
The storytelling is second to none. The narrative, and the gameplay elements of playing through the outbreak's first moments, are as skillfully handled as any I've ever seen. Book, movie, comic, TV show, whatever.
The tension you feel as you are running from the infected mounts with perfect escalation. They are on your heels and you do not want to look back because you fear altering the controls may slow you down and hinder your flight.
More to come as I play through it. I don't know that I can do a review of this game in one whole shot. Although the gameplay in the prologue was little more than pressing a button or two here or there, the gorgeous graphics, amazingly detailed environments and effective execution of the plot are all in service of creating a real sense of tension.
Haven't felt this way about the opening of a game in a long, long time.
More to come.
The storytelling is second to none. The narrative, and the gameplay elements of playing through the outbreak's first moments, are as skillfully handled as any I've ever seen. Book, movie, comic, TV show, whatever.
The tension you feel as you are running from the infected mounts with perfect escalation. They are on your heels and you do not want to look back because you fear altering the controls may slow you down and hinder your flight.
More to come as I play through it. I don't know that I can do a review of this game in one whole shot. Although the gameplay in the prologue was little more than pressing a button or two here or there, the gorgeous graphics, amazingly detailed environments and effective execution of the plot are all in service of creating a real sense of tension.
Haven't felt this way about the opening of a game in a long, long time.
More to come.
lantus360
Fu'un-Ken Master
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absolutely spot on. The opening is amazingly well done.
Im about 10 hours into the game now and i cant put it down. This game is a masterpiece.
genjiglove
So Many Posts
No Time
For Games.
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I'm having a hard time getting into it.
ViolentStorm
Windjammers Wonder
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It definitely lived up to the hype. Awesome game and a very powerful story driven game with awesome gameplay. I'm currently going through it a second time to find everything this game has to offer. That's just how good the game really is. Go out and buy it if you haven't already.
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The Last of Us (a review in two parts)
Long, because it's me. You've been warned. Enjoy!
Before I begin, I need to dispel a few notions The Last of Us.
It isn't a masterpiece. It isn't perfect. It isn't the definitive game in the survival horror genre. It makes some mistakes in game direction later on that bother me from a mechanics standpoint.
However, The Last of Us is well worth playing through and and has a truly subversive climax which requires a certain degree of emotional objectivity to effectively evaluate the experience. The critical moment of the game challenges the subconscious hero reflex that each of us, as gamers, instinctively possess, and it's easy to miss this key aspect of a narrative that defies our natural tendencies. Spec Ops: The Line is still a better product as it pertains to subverting the role of the protagonist, but The Last of Us is pretty good at asking you to think about its main character and the decisions he makes at the end. There is a very fine blueprint to Joel's psyche here, and Naughty Dog builds on that blueprint with expert precision.
So, let's get the basic stuff out of the way first, shall we?
The Last of Us follows its protagonists, Joel and Ellie, through a post apocalyptic world lost to a virus carried on the air by highly infective spores that, once breathed, turn people into (what else?) flesh eating mutants. There are three forms of mutation, from what I can tell. The first are, basically, your garden variety 'fast zombies' and are the easiest to overcome. The second type are known as 'clickers' and their infection level is so high that it has turned their heads into gruesome fungal protrusions. Because of this, they have no eyes so they only can hunt by hearing. The last type are a giant bloated version of a clicker that can throw spore growths on its body at you like grenades and possess greater stamina which comes at the loss of mobility.
The mutants aren't the only enemies you will face, however. At various points in the game, you will fight the remains of a US government which has taken a turn for the fascist, marauders that kills wanderers (which they refer to as 'tourists') who stray into their domain and, eventually, a rebellion faction known as the Fireflies, who are decidedly anti-government and willing to fight for their beliefs. They aren't a radical faction of zealots, and are more of your standard breed of ragtag freedom fighters. You will also meet a few strange individuals along the way that don't belong to any faction and are living 'apart' for their own various reasons.
The story is about how Joel is hired by the leader of the Fireflies, out of necessity, to transport Ellie safely across the countryside to a facility in the west for 'some reason', which is fairly obvious but that I will not spoil here. Of course, along the way you will travel through a variety of locales, get involved in a number of dangerous situations, stagger through the ruins of civilization, roam the resplendent beauty of unsullied nature and sift through the remains of smaller cells of survivors that thought they could survive on their own but were, of course, so very wrong. There are many harrowing scenarios as Joel and Ellie fight for survival, and there are a few twists and turns that you won't see coming. There are other plot elements that are rather predictable and tread down satisfying, if familiar, survival horror narrative highways.
The gameplay is going to be familiar to people who have played Uncharted. The cover based shooting mechanics, environment navigation, set pieces, puzzle solving, 'treasure' gathering (in the form of left behind mementos, dog tags, notes, diaries, maps, etc.) and controller responsiveness are all lifted part and parcel from that series. I can't say that I like or dislike the decision to go in this direction, as Ive never felt that they were any better at doing this sort of gameplay than anyone else. It's serviceable gameplay, just as it was in Uncharted, and is streamlined enough to give the player all the tools they need to survive or fail. The big difference is that Joel does not have Nathan Drake's arsenal or athleticism, but he makes up for it with ingenuity, an almost Daredevil type of 'sonar' that allows him to hear well enough to 'see' moving and noisy enemies through walls and, if those tools fail him, sheer brute force driven by survival instinct. You can equip up to two sidearms and two 'rifle class' weapons (bow and arrow classify as a sort of poor man's silenced rifle in this game), one melee weapon (which will degrade through use and will eventually have to be replaced) and can hotkey your other tools with the use of the D-pad.
Joel's combat suite is further enhanced by the ability to create a variety of useful weapons, such as smoke bombs and exploding nail grenades, as well as med packs to heal himself, shivs to pick locks or shank enemies with and also to modify his equipped melee weapon (lead pipe, 2 x 4, baseball bat, hatchet and, my personal favorite, machete) to make them more lethal and durable. Shivs, in particular, are important because if you lack a melee weapon and clickers get close to you, these handy little knives are the only way to kill them. Using a shiv breaks it, but you can build more of them, and all your other Macguyvered gear, from scavenged resources found throughout the game's bleak surroundings. You can create these items anywhere, but it's all done in real time so pick safe spots.
You can also level your character up by finding pills among the rubble, and with them you can buy things like greater health, faster crafting time, faster healing time and so forth. Also, you can find work benches in certain environments where you can modify your firearms for greater ammunition capacity, increased accuracy and range and reload speed and other various buffs. As you will find a great variety of firearms throughout the course of the game, you will have to decide whether to put all your eggs in one basket and max out one weapon or spread the enhancements around. As ammunition is not very plentiful, I went with giving key buffs to different weapons to improve general effectiveness of my inventory as a whole. It's very easy to run out of ammo when you want to play with your new super toy.
The melee combat is not as bad as I feared it might be from the demo, but rushing an attentive enemy to beat them to death with a lead pipe is purely last ditch. I rather liked this 'desperation' mechanic in the game-charging an isolated enemy, even if he's shooting at you, and taking him down can buy you a few more minutes of life and the breather you need to reset. There are many points in the game where I was cornered and forced to risk frontal assault. The survival metaphor is served well by this 'high risk-high reward' proposition. And there is no higher reward for a few seconds of risking a fast death than the few seconds of life that can be all the difference in the world.
Avoiding enemies and stealth killing when necessary are going to be your best tools. You can only hope that in the event you are discovered by your enemies, there are substantially less of them when the scrum does break out. Frequent side forays into abandoned buildings, even if they are being searched by your enemies at the time, to quietly gather resources bay be required to advance, and are some of the most tense moments in the game. When you're vastly outnumbered and you need just one nail bomb or health kit to make it through a particular gauntlet, that's when you are in the place The Last of Us wanted to take you.
Not so great, however, are the parts where the player is suddenly stripped of their weapons or finds their health and strength reduced, and the environment and rules of the game change completely. I found myself frustrated at two key segment near the end of the game. Not because they were difficult, but because they were examples of the very worst of storytelling driven games: the narrative dictated the removal of abilities you have used and built to bring you to that point. I understand that in the real world, you may find yourself lacking in some of the things you need to achieve a particular goal, but at some point the developers have to step back and realize that this is a video game. They have made a contract with their players: I will give you these tools, and you will use them to play this game. Stripping the player of these tools and asking them, very late into the proceedings, to 'make do without', is unfair on a developmental level. I am disappointed in Naughty Dog here because they are a capable dev studio, and they should have known better. There is more than one way to skin this particular cat. They chose the second worst way possible to do this. I can already think of three superior methods by which Naughty Dog could have implemented the desperation they were going for, but I won't cite them here to avoid potential spoilers.
The graphics, of course, are fully realized and must be pushing hardware spec. This is as vivid a portrayal of destroyed beauty as I've ever seen in a video game, and is all the more haunted for it. When you look at what is left of these ruins, and how nature is growing over them and reclaiming the land, you will feel civilization's phantom pain. This is whether you're in a once proud metropolis, an abandoned college campus or even a rusted out hydroelectric generator facility for a nearby dam.
(continued in part 2)
Long, because it's me. You've been warned. Enjoy!
Before I begin, I need to dispel a few notions The Last of Us.
It isn't a masterpiece. It isn't perfect. It isn't the definitive game in the survival horror genre. It makes some mistakes in game direction later on that bother me from a mechanics standpoint.
However, The Last of Us is well worth playing through and and has a truly subversive climax which requires a certain degree of emotional objectivity to effectively evaluate the experience. The critical moment of the game challenges the subconscious hero reflex that each of us, as gamers, instinctively possess, and it's easy to miss this key aspect of a narrative that defies our natural tendencies. Spec Ops: The Line is still a better product as it pertains to subverting the role of the protagonist, but The Last of Us is pretty good at asking you to think about its main character and the decisions he makes at the end. There is a very fine blueprint to Joel's psyche here, and Naughty Dog builds on that blueprint with expert precision.
So, let's get the basic stuff out of the way first, shall we?
The Last of Us follows its protagonists, Joel and Ellie, through a post apocalyptic world lost to a virus carried on the air by highly infective spores that, once breathed, turn people into (what else?) flesh eating mutants. There are three forms of mutation, from what I can tell. The first are, basically, your garden variety 'fast zombies' and are the easiest to overcome. The second type are known as 'clickers' and their infection level is so high that it has turned their heads into gruesome fungal protrusions. Because of this, they have no eyes so they only can hunt by hearing. The last type are a giant bloated version of a clicker that can throw spore growths on its body at you like grenades and possess greater stamina which comes at the loss of mobility.
The mutants aren't the only enemies you will face, however. At various points in the game, you will fight the remains of a US government which has taken a turn for the fascist, marauders that kills wanderers (which they refer to as 'tourists') who stray into their domain and, eventually, a rebellion faction known as the Fireflies, who are decidedly anti-government and willing to fight for their beliefs. They aren't a radical faction of zealots, and are more of your standard breed of ragtag freedom fighters. You will also meet a few strange individuals along the way that don't belong to any faction and are living 'apart' for their own various reasons.
The story is about how Joel is hired by the leader of the Fireflies, out of necessity, to transport Ellie safely across the countryside to a facility in the west for 'some reason', which is fairly obvious but that I will not spoil here. Of course, along the way you will travel through a variety of locales, get involved in a number of dangerous situations, stagger through the ruins of civilization, roam the resplendent beauty of unsullied nature and sift through the remains of smaller cells of survivors that thought they could survive on their own but were, of course, so very wrong. There are many harrowing scenarios as Joel and Ellie fight for survival, and there are a few twists and turns that you won't see coming. There are other plot elements that are rather predictable and tread down satisfying, if familiar, survival horror narrative highways.
The gameplay is going to be familiar to people who have played Uncharted. The cover based shooting mechanics, environment navigation, set pieces, puzzle solving, 'treasure' gathering (in the form of left behind mementos, dog tags, notes, diaries, maps, etc.) and controller responsiveness are all lifted part and parcel from that series. I can't say that I like or dislike the decision to go in this direction, as Ive never felt that they were any better at doing this sort of gameplay than anyone else. It's serviceable gameplay, just as it was in Uncharted, and is streamlined enough to give the player all the tools they need to survive or fail. The big difference is that Joel does not have Nathan Drake's arsenal or athleticism, but he makes up for it with ingenuity, an almost Daredevil type of 'sonar' that allows him to hear well enough to 'see' moving and noisy enemies through walls and, if those tools fail him, sheer brute force driven by survival instinct. You can equip up to two sidearms and two 'rifle class' weapons (bow and arrow classify as a sort of poor man's silenced rifle in this game), one melee weapon (which will degrade through use and will eventually have to be replaced) and can hotkey your other tools with the use of the D-pad.
Joel's combat suite is further enhanced by the ability to create a variety of useful weapons, such as smoke bombs and exploding nail grenades, as well as med packs to heal himself, shivs to pick locks or shank enemies with and also to modify his equipped melee weapon (lead pipe, 2 x 4, baseball bat, hatchet and, my personal favorite, machete) to make them more lethal and durable. Shivs, in particular, are important because if you lack a melee weapon and clickers get close to you, these handy little knives are the only way to kill them. Using a shiv breaks it, but you can build more of them, and all your other Macguyvered gear, from scavenged resources found throughout the game's bleak surroundings. You can create these items anywhere, but it's all done in real time so pick safe spots.
You can also level your character up by finding pills among the rubble, and with them you can buy things like greater health, faster crafting time, faster healing time and so forth. Also, you can find work benches in certain environments where you can modify your firearms for greater ammunition capacity, increased accuracy and range and reload speed and other various buffs. As you will find a great variety of firearms throughout the course of the game, you will have to decide whether to put all your eggs in one basket and max out one weapon or spread the enhancements around. As ammunition is not very plentiful, I went with giving key buffs to different weapons to improve general effectiveness of my inventory as a whole. It's very easy to run out of ammo when you want to play with your new super toy.
The melee combat is not as bad as I feared it might be from the demo, but rushing an attentive enemy to beat them to death with a lead pipe is purely last ditch. I rather liked this 'desperation' mechanic in the game-charging an isolated enemy, even if he's shooting at you, and taking him down can buy you a few more minutes of life and the breather you need to reset. There are many points in the game where I was cornered and forced to risk frontal assault. The survival metaphor is served well by this 'high risk-high reward' proposition. And there is no higher reward for a few seconds of risking a fast death than the few seconds of life that can be all the difference in the world.
Avoiding enemies and stealth killing when necessary are going to be your best tools. You can only hope that in the event you are discovered by your enemies, there are substantially less of them when the scrum does break out. Frequent side forays into abandoned buildings, even if they are being searched by your enemies at the time, to quietly gather resources bay be required to advance, and are some of the most tense moments in the game. When you're vastly outnumbered and you need just one nail bomb or health kit to make it through a particular gauntlet, that's when you are in the place The Last of Us wanted to take you.
Not so great, however, are the parts where the player is suddenly stripped of their weapons or finds their health and strength reduced, and the environment and rules of the game change completely. I found myself frustrated at two key segment near the end of the game. Not because they were difficult, but because they were examples of the very worst of storytelling driven games: the narrative dictated the removal of abilities you have used and built to bring you to that point. I understand that in the real world, you may find yourself lacking in some of the things you need to achieve a particular goal, but at some point the developers have to step back and realize that this is a video game. They have made a contract with their players: I will give you these tools, and you will use them to play this game. Stripping the player of these tools and asking them, very late into the proceedings, to 'make do without', is unfair on a developmental level. I am disappointed in Naughty Dog here because they are a capable dev studio, and they should have known better. There is more than one way to skin this particular cat. They chose the second worst way possible to do this. I can already think of three superior methods by which Naughty Dog could have implemented the desperation they were going for, but I won't cite them here to avoid potential spoilers.
The graphics, of course, are fully realized and must be pushing hardware spec. This is as vivid a portrayal of destroyed beauty as I've ever seen in a video game, and is all the more haunted for it. When you look at what is left of these ruins, and how nature is growing over them and reclaiming the land, you will feel civilization's phantom pain. This is whether you're in a once proud metropolis, an abandoned college campus or even a rusted out hydroelectric generator facility for a nearby dam.
(continued in part 2)
Last edited:
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2000
- Posts
- 19,380
(part 2)
The story bears further examination because this is a game that clearly wants to tell one, and it's the engine that informs everything about the game design. First of all, let's get something straight. This game is not about the end of the world. It is about the end of a man's soul, something that transcends the mere material realm. It can be said that what a man does in life is what is left behind for the future to mull over. But what happens when that man's soul dies, when the things that make him strive for goodness are stripped away from him by a cold, cruel turn of events? Who does that man become and what does he mean to the world and those still around him? What has he left behind for the future? This question is at the heart of The Last of Us: what has the tragedy of the opening scene done to our protagonist? Why does he even keep living? What is the point of his existence?
We learn, very early on in the game, that Joel has become an amoral breather, a person that lives just to live, doesn't question existence and doesn't even seem to be waiting for something to happen for him. He wakes up, makes his courier deliveries without caring what the cargo is and spends his days being a tool of convenience for the rest of t world. He is neither building nor destroying. He is simply breathing and consuming. He has no reason to be doing any of these things other than by sheer virtue of being alive.
The best of dystopian storytelling focuses on this element. The death not of the human race, but of humanity itself as it slowly conforms to the decaying structure of what it once built. Humans cling and persevere in damaged states because every decaying thing they have built around them is doing the same, and our slavish devotion to 'the way it was' will not permit us to die. As the stores around us continue to exist but no longer sell goods, the office buildings around us still stand but no longer drive commerce or politics, and the highways stretch for miles but no one traverses them, so too does mankind live and breathe but does nothing with that life and breath. We are all products of society, and our society only appears to exist from a distance. So we, too, only exist, distanced from our very souls.
So as I was playing the game (on easy, because I was more focused on content rather than challenge for my first playthrough), I was watching Joel very closely. I knew that continued exposure to Ellie was going to change him. That was inevitable. Why put him with a child if no growth was going to occur? What I wanted to see was how it changed him. The nature of their conversations, her reactions to his actions. The evolution of the relationship and the potential rebirth of his soul. These things were foremost in my thoughts from a narrative standpoint because I knew, at the end of the day, they were the meat and potatoes of the game, the thing that would give it substance and, hopefully, help it rise above.
Having finished the game and having seen how things turned out, I am strangely numb. Not uncaring, mind you, but I feel like something inside of me died, even only if for a brief moment due to the way in which the story affected me. I was not expecting an 'up' ending, but the vehicle in which the ending's irony was delivered to me comes from a wholly unique perspective. At least, for video games.
And that may be the thing that died in me when I finished The Last of Us: my expectation for the protagonist's role in gaming.
There are two important moments in the game which help to illustrate how the lines are blurring between the mutants and the humans. One is where you are forced to fight a crazed human enemy in restricted confines with limited resources. This encounter is fairly transparent in its attempts to show how survival has transformed this individual into a monster who only pretends to be human when it suits his fancy, and his deranged outlook on life forms an interesting relationship dynamic between him and one of the characters.
The other, and vastly more impressive, scenario is far more subtle and doesn't revolve around any kind of preconditioned boss fight. This is when you must make the most important decision of the game. It's not what you think it may be based on what I'm saying, and doesn't even revolve around Ellie's fate even though the game intentionally misleads you into believing that she's the one hanging in the balance when it is, in fact, JOEL who is standing on the edge of the abyss. This moment symbolizes everything about the doom we bring upon ourselves and the harsh way in which the game looks upon the player's preexisting emotional responses. We ennoble ourselves as the protagonist. Even if we are making tough choices and killing people left and right. Even when on the surface, the tough choices seem to revolve around some moral imperative which feeds our need to be heroes, this does not mean we are heroes and neither does it mean we do things for noble reasons.
We cannot 'be' Joel. We can only be the agent that advances his story. We are not making choices for him. We are only driving him towards the choices he makes as an individual, and the reasons for those choices are the epitome of dystopian future stories. He breathes and consumes because the world that made him will not permit him to die. At the end, when he makes his choice, he finally decides to rail against the forces that have dictated the course of his existence. He has finally done something FOR himself. The prologue event even shows Joel living in difficult times and difficult circumstances, a man on the edge and ready to fall off with just a slight nudge. Twenty years pass between the prologue event and the proper start of the game, and in so many way it ends as it began: with Joel running away from danger and towards an instinctive need to survive. The difference is that last time, the world punished him for it. This time, he's punishing the world back.
And that is what makes Joel human. That is what separates him from so many other characters in video games. He chooses to live and to have things for himself rather than existing to make life more plentiful for others. He has, in a significant and beautifully told way, remembered what it means to live, and to exist among all the black, white and gray areas contained therein. Ellie is the metaphor for the bittersweet fruit that is born of truly living life, rather than existing like both the mutants and most humans do.
Ultimately, I can only give the game an 8 out of 10 because of those climactic sequences where the devs change the game from what it was to ramp up the tension. Some will forgive The Last of Us for these crimes because they're engrossed in the story and will justify the reduction in mechanics because the narrative has dictated that. I can't do that in this instance. There are tines when it has worked (the sequence with Jake in RE 6 where he has no weapons, ironically, is one of the few things that I actually liked in that game). Not so with The Last of Us. Ultimately, however, the game is well worth a playthrough if you enjoy the genre at all.
The story bears further examination because this is a game that clearly wants to tell one, and it's the engine that informs everything about the game design. First of all, let's get something straight. This game is not about the end of the world. It is about the end of a man's soul, something that transcends the mere material realm. It can be said that what a man does in life is what is left behind for the future to mull over. But what happens when that man's soul dies, when the things that make him strive for goodness are stripped away from him by a cold, cruel turn of events? Who does that man become and what does he mean to the world and those still around him? What has he left behind for the future? This question is at the heart of The Last of Us: what has the tragedy of the opening scene done to our protagonist? Why does he even keep living? What is the point of his existence?
We learn, very early on in the game, that Joel has become an amoral breather, a person that lives just to live, doesn't question existence and doesn't even seem to be waiting for something to happen for him. He wakes up, makes his courier deliveries without caring what the cargo is and spends his days being a tool of convenience for the rest of t world. He is neither building nor destroying. He is simply breathing and consuming. He has no reason to be doing any of these things other than by sheer virtue of being alive.
The best of dystopian storytelling focuses on this element. The death not of the human race, but of humanity itself as it slowly conforms to the decaying structure of what it once built. Humans cling and persevere in damaged states because every decaying thing they have built around them is doing the same, and our slavish devotion to 'the way it was' will not permit us to die. As the stores around us continue to exist but no longer sell goods, the office buildings around us still stand but no longer drive commerce or politics, and the highways stretch for miles but no one traverses them, so too does mankind live and breathe but does nothing with that life and breath. We are all products of society, and our society only appears to exist from a distance. So we, too, only exist, distanced from our very souls.
So as I was playing the game (on easy, because I was more focused on content rather than challenge for my first playthrough), I was watching Joel very closely. I knew that continued exposure to Ellie was going to change him. That was inevitable. Why put him with a child if no growth was going to occur? What I wanted to see was how it changed him. The nature of their conversations, her reactions to his actions. The evolution of the relationship and the potential rebirth of his soul. These things were foremost in my thoughts from a narrative standpoint because I knew, at the end of the day, they were the meat and potatoes of the game, the thing that would give it substance and, hopefully, help it rise above.
Having finished the game and having seen how things turned out, I am strangely numb. Not uncaring, mind you, but I feel like something inside of me died, even only if for a brief moment due to the way in which the story affected me. I was not expecting an 'up' ending, but the vehicle in which the ending's irony was delivered to me comes from a wholly unique perspective. At least, for video games.
And that may be the thing that died in me when I finished The Last of Us: my expectation for the protagonist's role in gaming.
There are two important moments in the game which help to illustrate how the lines are blurring between the mutants and the humans. One is where you are forced to fight a crazed human enemy in restricted confines with limited resources. This encounter is fairly transparent in its attempts to show how survival has transformed this individual into a monster who only pretends to be human when it suits his fancy, and his deranged outlook on life forms an interesting relationship dynamic between him and one of the characters.
The other, and vastly more impressive, scenario is far more subtle and doesn't revolve around any kind of preconditioned boss fight. This is when you must make the most important decision of the game. It's not what you think it may be based on what I'm saying, and doesn't even revolve around Ellie's fate even though the game intentionally misleads you into believing that she's the one hanging in the balance when it is, in fact, JOEL who is standing on the edge of the abyss. This moment symbolizes everything about the doom we bring upon ourselves and the harsh way in which the game looks upon the player's preexisting emotional responses. We ennoble ourselves as the protagonist. Even if we are making tough choices and killing people left and right. Even when on the surface, the tough choices seem to revolve around some moral imperative which feeds our need to be heroes, this does not mean we are heroes and neither does it mean we do things for noble reasons.
We cannot 'be' Joel. We can only be the agent that advances his story. We are not making choices for him. We are only driving him towards the choices he makes as an individual, and the reasons for those choices are the epitome of dystopian future stories. He breathes and consumes because the world that made him will not permit him to die. At the end, when he makes his choice, he finally decides to rail against the forces that have dictated the course of his existence. He has finally done something FOR himself. The prologue event even shows Joel living in difficult times and difficult circumstances, a man on the edge and ready to fall off with just a slight nudge. Twenty years pass between the prologue event and the proper start of the game, and in so many way it ends as it began: with Joel running away from danger and towards an instinctive need to survive. The difference is that last time, the world punished him for it. This time, he's punishing the world back.
And that is what makes Joel human. That is what separates him from so many other characters in video games. He chooses to live and to have things for himself rather than existing to make life more plentiful for others. He has, in a significant and beautifully told way, remembered what it means to live, and to exist among all the black, white and gray areas contained therein. Ellie is the metaphor for the bittersweet fruit that is born of truly living life, rather than existing like both the mutants and most humans do.
Ultimately, I can only give the game an 8 out of 10 because of those climactic sequences where the devs change the game from what it was to ramp up the tension. Some will forgive The Last of Us for these crimes because they're engrossed in the story and will justify the reduction in mechanics because the narrative has dictated that. I can't do that in this instance. There are tines when it has worked (the sequence with Jake in RE 6 where he has no weapons, ironically, is one of the few things that I actually liked in that game). Not so with The Last of Us. Ultimately, however, the game is well worth a playthrough if you enjoy the genre at all.
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i'm still trying to get a hang of the gameplay
i'm playing it on the hardest setting you can pick at the beginning, and it's been a while since i've played a game that was based around stealth, so i haven't gotten into the groove of it yet
i'm playing it on the hardest setting you can pick at the beginning, and it's been a while since i've played a game that was based around stealth, so i haven't gotten into the groove of it yet
genjiglove
So Many Posts
No Time
For Games.
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*slight spoilers*
I'm at this part where I am swimming around in an old abandoned subway tunnel. How far would you say I am into the game? I'm playing a rental so I want to know how much longer I have.
I'm at this part where I am swimming around in an old abandoned subway tunnel. How far would you say I am into the game? I'm playing a rental so I want to know how much longer I have.
- Joined
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If it's your first time swimming underwater, you have a long way to go.
