Hello, readers. Been a long time,
hasn't it? Yeah, that's my fault. I got caught up with school, work,
and a bunch of other stuff. I simply haven't had the time to watch
the movies I wanted or to play the video games I've wanted. But
that's done, now! And today, I come at you with a new review!
June 2014 marked the release of a game
by Naughty Dog Productions, the makers of Uncharted.
The Last of Us was a
tonal departure from the more light-hearted, adventure oriented
series the studio had made it's name on, but still focused on
adventure and story telling with a smattering of action. Violent,
gory, and dark, The Last of Us earned
it's name not for it's unique take on zombies or the few
survival-horror elements it put in (which are indeed few and far
between, surprising for a zombie apocalypse game) but for it's two
lead characters: Joel and Ellie, played by voice actors Troy Baker
and Ashley Johnson. Both delivered powerful performances, bringing
the two leads to life.
But
before we talk more about Joel and Ellie and what I think about the
story, let's talk a little bit about gameplay.
The gameplay in The
Last of Us
is very similar to Uncharted
3
(I have not played the other two instalments, but I imagine it's
fairly similar) combining quick time events with a party-assisted
puzzle solving and exploration, something I very much enjoyed in
Uncharted 3
and found equally immersive and entertaining in The
Last of Us.
Combat is a combination of stealth and cover-based, with different
zombie enemies having unique mechanics surrounding how to take them
down. While many scenarios allow you to sneak by without engaging
opponents, I found many of them also forced you into conflict.
However, the stealth sections of the game are particularly exciting
and surprisingly well executed, with Joel's ability (and in the few
sections where you control Ellie, her ability) to focus his hearing
to detect the position of enemies so he can either evade them or take
them down from stealth.
The
gameplay is fast moving and entertaining, and whenever I did mess up,
I always felt like it was my fault and not the fault of the controls,
but there are some issues with the Party AI. Rather famously, Ellie
and other party members that might be following you don't seem to be
bound by the same rules of stealth that you are, which can be
immersion breaking if you're trying to sneak through a room full of
Clickers—zombies who use echolocation to spot you—and Ellie is
busily running back-and-forth right in front of one. However, I was
playing the remastered version and only saw this happen on my second
playthrough, as for the most part despite being followed by Ellie and
others they generally hang back off screen during stealth scenarios.
During Combat, Ellie and others will help you take down enemies, and
sometimes require your aid when locked in melee grapples, though it's
during puzzles that your party members become most involved.
Sometimes, you give them boosts to reach higher locations so they can
help you up, or they might hold a heavy sliding door open for you
while you crawl underneath. You may need to help Ellie across bodies
of water because she doesn't know how to swim, or she might help you
find a board or ladder as a form of in-narrative hint if you're
taking too long to solve a puzzle.
The
puzzles are usually simple and the game is good about moving you
along if you're taking to long to solve them, so even at their most
frustrating they never serve as the roadblocks that they did in older
generation video games.
Graphically,
The Last of Us
Remastered
is complete eye-candy. The skin in particular looks fantastic, moving
far away from that past-over-wireframe look of games on the PS3, and
definitely using the PS4's improved hardware to the fullest. And that
brings up one of the major technical problems I do
have
with this game. As this was the first game I owned on my PS4, I
honestly thought something might have been defective with my console,
as the fan would run extremely loudly while playing The
Last of Us.
However, upon doing some research I was surprised to discover that
this is actually a common problem with copies of this game. The game
is so intensive, it really pushes the graphics and processing cards,
causing them to heat up more than usual and as a result the fan runs
faster and louder than it would on, say, Zen Pinball. That said, it's
a minor annoyance at worst, and the console itself doesn't seem to be
getting dangerously hot. In fact, I've had laptops that run hotter
than my PS4 does, meaning that the fans are loud simply because
they're doing their work well—cooling the console.
Finally,
that brings me to the part of the game that I am honestly most torn
about. The story.
As
I mentioned, The
Last of Us follows
Joel and Ellie. Or, rather more appropriately, it starts out by
following Joel and make no mistake that this game is Joel's story.
Ellie is an important character in Joel's story, but it is
his story.
Joel
is a grizzled, angry white man with brown hair. He's a character
we've seen time and time again. He has a personal tragedy when the
world ends, and he can't quite get over it making him into an angry,
bitter old man. There's a brief prologue where we follow him through
his tragic backstory from the point of view of his daughter, at least
until his daughter breaks her leg, then we're controlling Joel as he
carries her to safety. The game starts in earnest 20 years later, as
we're introduced into the militaristic society of the Quarantine
Zones, and after some shenanigans, Joel is tasked with escorting
Ellie, a fourteen year old girl who happens to be immune to the
mutant fungus that turns people into zombies.
Ellie,
as a character, is fantastically written, fresh, and a unique take on
the character in her role. Normally, younger female characters like
her when cast alongside our obligatory grizzled angry white guy are
passive, ideal daughters who will break through that crusty exterior
and give him something to live for again. Ellie subverts this by
being a crass, violent teenager who can handle her own. In many ways,
it's hard to focus on Joel's story because quite frankly Ellie's
story is just so
much more interesting,
but this is NOT Ellie's story. This is Joel's
story, and thus Ellie exists narratively to highlight something about
Joel. Namely, despite being crass and violent, she exists to break
through Joel's crusty exterior and give him something to live for.
Now, I personally feel this is actually quite subverted and turned
into a dark twisted reflection of itself at the end, but you'll have
to play through the game to find out why.
That
said, the game sometimes falls to hard on the Big Tough White Guy
saves the Princess archetype too quickly. For instance, after we see
Ellie slash a guy's brains out with a machete, Joel rushes in and
pulls her off his dead corpse and she breaks down sobbing in his big
tough-guy arms. Now, given other facets of the game and it's DLC in
particular, I don't think it was their intention to further the
stereotype of the “sobbing survivor” of female characters (an
archetype brought to the fore in the latest instalment of Tomb
Raider), rather I think their intention was to highlight the loss of
innocence being suffered by a child in a world where she has to,
yanno, slash a guy's skull open with a machete. The only problem is
them introducing this scenario so late, as before she was managing
just fine stabbing guys in the jugular vein with her pocket knife. It
worked better when Joel and Tess killed the guards that Ellie thought
they were simply going to disable when she stabbed one of them in the
calf, or when Ellie saves Joel by shooting a man in the head. It
simply comes too late in the story, and if it had come earlier the
theme of Loss of Innocence, rather than simply sobbing survivor who
just needs a big strong man to make her feel better would have been
delivered more strongly.
In
the end, I think the story would have been better if it had been
Ellie's story, rather than Joel's. There is a silver lining here, and
something that makes me thing Naughty Dog was just afraid to take too
much of a risk too quickly. This is first seen in the character of
Bill.
Bill
is a xenophobic scavenger who lives by himself in a little town
outside of the Boston Quarantine Zone. He likes to set traps, is good
with a shotgun and a bow and arrow, and is extremely resourceful. He
lost his partner, someone he cared a lot for, after an argument about
whether or not they should leave the town. Bill didn't want to. His
partner did.
His
partner was his partner.
As in, the man he lived with. What I'm saying is that Bill is gay.
It's surprisingly well handled, as it's never really made a big issue
of. Bill is gay, it's just a part of who he is. His sexuality has no
bearing on the story—aside from the back story, but even that's
delivered mostly through implications by Bill and small notes written
to Bill by his partner. It's a small part of the game, but it's
something that Naughty Dog did a fantastic job handling. But handled
even better was Ellie's sexuality. See, Bill isn't the only
not-strictly-heterosexual character in the game. Ellie is, too.
This
is revealed in the DLC Left
Behind,
where we see what Ellie was up to while Joel was unconscious after
having a piece of rebar shoved through his guts, as well as being
delivered through flash backs the events surrounding Ellie being
bitten. According to Naughty Dog, the DLC was meant to be a romance
story, and quite frankly they delivered it fantastically. The
flash-back story surrounds Ellie with her friend Riley, as Riley is
fraught with indecision over whether or not she should leave to join
a resistance group in another city. The story displays an intimacy
between the two characters without coming straight out and describing
what their relationship is (or was). During this, we also see Ellie
as she goes through a different mall, trying to find first aid
supplies to help Joel. The story is told exceptionally well, and is
proof positive to me that the main game should have been about Ellie
the entire time. Her story is simply more interesting than Joel's.
Joel's
story was better handled in Tell Tale Game's The Walking Dead Season
1, which follows a lone survivor trying to hang onto the last rays of
hope in a world gone mad. He, like Joel, finds himself taking care of
a young girl who gives him the hope he needs to hang on and survive.
But the story is handled in a much more intimate and unique way than
The Last of Us
handles
Joel, who suffers the fate of being a type we've seen done time and
time again, in everything from Metal
Gear Solid
to Dead Space,
or even Resident
Evil
if you make him slightly more effeminate looking. Joel doesn't really
bring us anything new to the gamepad, but Ellie brings more than her
fair share.
Over
all, The Last of
Us
is a landmark game if only because of it's DLC, which is the first
Triple A release in which you the player control an openly
non-heterosexual character (I'm not entirely convinced Ellie is fully
gay). The gameplay, graphics, and for the most part story telling
come together to create an entertaining expierence, and it's
certainly worth checking out.