The Last of Us

[IDDQD]

Hollywood has drilled it into popular culture that we need a resolution of plot, melodrama, that things have to wrap up one way or another. Not just Hollywood- shitty novels have been doing this since the late 1700s.

 

 

What The Last Of Us does is resolution of character. Like all the greatest novels- Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, A Clockwork Orange, The Crying of Lot 49 - and all the greatest movies - There Will Be Blood, The Godfather(s), Pulp Fiction - characters are the centre of the story,  not the plot. Ie the events don't matter, and how they wrap up doesn't matter. Only the characters and how they change, or don't change, is what matters.

 

 

 

 

Hmm, you make a good point there about those movies. Inception or The Road come to mind as a couple of more recent examples of this in film. Indeed their resolution is centered on characters, while leaving further events open to debate, because, well, this is life and life goes on. At least 'till you die, which means that if character dies, then story ends as well.

 

And even though it's true, the characters in those movies or books are mostly someone who I could identify with or understand at one level or another. For Joel I felt nothing, for Ellie, partly. Which is something that I somewhat tried to pass on previously - player's reception of the game completely depends on whether he's invested in the character's motivations and their success. There are people who don't like Pulp Fiction because they find dialogue pointless and characters boring. I don't understand them either, but hey, that's why we don't see eye-to-eye, right? So what I'm trying to say is, I couldn't give two shits about Joel and Ellie because I don't understand them. On the other hand, take two characters from first act - Henry and Sam. Their motivations were pretty clear cut and they weren't complete assholes like everyone else. This made them easily likeable and their deaths so effective. They were the best thing about this game, as far as I'm concerned (with Ellie vs David as a close second).

 

 

 

 

It often gets attributed to 'the writers wanted to be edgy by being downbeat and depressing' but I think as you mature, you tend to appreciate the nuance between grimdark and just... life is shit, people be people.

 

Well, maybe I'm too idealistic for that. Again, game rides on the characters.

 

I just noticed IDD, I (and no doubt everyone here) did not meant to put down your opinion. Your opinion is yours and I can totally empathise.

 

Hey, no problem brother - I love polemics.

Edited November 25, 2014 by IDDQD

[SomTervo]

 

 

There are people who don't like Pulp Fiction because they find dialogue pointless and characters boring. I don't understand them either, but hey, that's why we don't see eye-to-eye, right?

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah I guess that's the thing. It's a testament to good writing that Druckmann and Straley managed to create characters so specific and well rounded psychologically that we can actually disagree with them, their attitudes and actions, to the extent that we barely even understand them and feel emotionally bothered by it.

 

I just finished Grounded mode, my 5th or 6th finish of the game, and I still saw new stuff throughout I never noticed before.

 

For example, did anyone read the very last comic you find by the empty car chassis in the very last moments of the game? More generally, did anyone notice that the plot of the Savage Starlight comics (written in blurbs on the back) mirrors the game's, providing subtle thematic background and suggesting little things we wouldn't otherwise think of? I didn't twig this until now.

 

 

The very last one, by the car chassis. The ending of Savage Starlight is that the two protagonists, the woman and the man, escape this catastrophic event in which they kill all the bad guys (the bad guys symbolic of the Fireflies). The two of them survive - but while the protagonist man is coming back being lauded as a hero, the girl secretly feels awful survivor's guilt after they have committed genocide, dooming a whole race to death. (This parallels Ellie knowing that Joel killed all the fireflies, and worse, potentially doomed a race (us humans) in the process.)

 

The question which the comic poses is... How long will it be before the other human survivors realise the man's lies? It's only a matter of time before they find out he doomed everyone to death, and then what?

 

 

Jesus, it's food for thought.

 

 

Would Joel's deceptions come back to haunt him in coming years? I can imagine him being hung out to dry, should the others find out he killed all the fireflies and the last known brain surgeon.

 

 

Edit: also Grounded is phenomenal. It's like you don't really know how to play the game until you complete the game on this difficulty. It really forces you to learn every single inch of every single encounter. One pretty horrible aspect is that there are half as many checkpoints in Grounded as in Survivor and below. I died once at the very last fight of the very last level and got kicked back to the very beginning of it after you wake up... Was horrible. Like 20-25 mins lost. Really forces you to up your game.

 

I 100% stealthed 5 or 6 encounters I didn't even know you could 100% stealth. And lots of little emergent things happen when you do so. The whole last level?

 

Stealthed it. You're forced to find the perfect, step to step method of killing everyone without being seen, conserving your resources. I wasn't seen once and had a flawless rhythm of distracting guys, dragging guys, choking guys, nailing all of them flawlessley. And I struggled with this bit so much in my first playthroughs of the game.

 

Stealthed the whole thing except the last dude near the door who waits for you. There's even a bit where guys you would normally alert go running past looking for you and miss you entirely. If you follow them you'll find them all standing at the ready, looking the wrong way, and you can nail them all with ease.

 

 

You genuinely get better at The Last Of Us the more you play it, which is something people never associate with linear games like Naughty Dog's. It's very true of TLoU and Uncharted 2, though.

Edited December 22, 2014 by kenshi_ryden

[TCP]

YES WE HAD TRUMP. AND DAVID BOWIE, PRINCE, GEORGE MARTIN ALL DIED BUT... 2016 IS REDEEMED!!!!!!

 

[deanb]

Ellie dies.

[CorgiShinobi]

Joel dies, Ellie learns the truth, and Bill is still looking for his missing porn.

[deanb]

I kinda like at the start how they drop into animation n back out again into t-pose when another Ellie attacks. It reminds me of something (though for the life of me can't think what, my brain drifts to Agent Smith but they all attack at once or just one on their own).

Other than that, it does get a bit disturbing after a while.

[deanb]

On 12/3/2016 at 9:31 PM, The Cowboy JRPGing Poet said:

YES WE HAD TRUMP. AND DAVID BOWIE, PRINCE, GEORGE MARTIN ALL DIED BUT... 2016 IS REDEEMED!!!!!!

 

 

 

 

So this only took 4 years to come out

 

Like Trumps first full term is almost up, and also an actual plague has riddled the earth.

[TheMightyEthan]

1 hour ago, deanb said:

Looks like Trumps first full term is almost up, and also an actual plague has riddled the earth.

 

[TCP]

Damn. Four years?! Remind me to temper my expectations next time I get all hyped like that again.

[TheMightyEthan]

I learned that lesson when I bought a PS3 following the announcement of The Last Guardian.

[TheMightyEthan]

I have some follow-up to my thoughts I posted in the the Games You Beat thread, but I decided to bring them over here instead of continuing to clog that thread.

 

I was listening to the What's Good Games TLoU2 spoilercast, and one of them said something that really clicked with me. She said that even though this game has its flaws, it made her really think about its themes and analyze it in a literary way that no other game ever has before. Obviously this isn't the first game to do that, or even the first major game (Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind), but I think she's largely right. I still stand by my criticisms and everything I said in that thread, but I don't think I was giving it enough credit for the fact that it did a good enough job exploring its themes that I was able to say it fucked up that exploration. 99% of games, and especially AAA games, I just engage with on a surface level, but this one actually got me to think about the points it was trying to make and engage with them in an actual thoughtful way.

 

I think it's kind of an uncanny valley-like effect. Most games are such thematic messes from a literary point of view, or else just so shallow in that regard, or both, that you don't even bother thinking about them. So the fact that TLoU2 did a good enough job exploring its themes that I felt the urge to discuss them, even though that discussion was about how badly they were executed, is a win for games, and is pushing the medium forward. They definitely deserve credit for that.

[FredEffinChopin]

Pardon me just randomly popping up after a pretty long absence from the forum, but I wanted to see what people here were saying about the game. Looks like it's just the (last) two of us, Ethan, so I guess I'll speak to your comments directly, in addition to the mini-essay I'd like to share. 

 

I was curious, and checked my response in this thread after beating the first game seven years ago (JFC), and find that I feel exactly the same about the sequel. 

 

On 7/15/2013 at 2:51 PM, FredEffinChopin said:

...I'll just say that I think TLoU is one of the finest achievements ever to come out of the medium, in my humble opinion. I was totally unprepared for the ride I was taken on. II expected a quality game, but this handily exceeded any expectations I was entertaining. Standing O for Naughty Dog.

 

Since video games started taking cinematic approaches to storytelling, they have been trying to reach or catch up to cinema in terms of quality. The first TLoU is one of the first games, in my opinion, that could make the argument that the medium was finally beginning to bang that door down. I'm not much of a consumer of zombie-themed shit at all, but from my limited experience with it, TLoU's premise, plot and execution was about about as good as you could ask for from that genre. While it didn't exactly do a whole lot new throughout most of it, it was totally competent, thoroughly engaging, and actually presented the best kind of question that you can leave a player/viewer to contemplate at the end of its story - the only point in the game that actually demanded some thought from the player (though much of the game that preceded the end did lend itself to some literary analysis) - a question that just doesn't have a right answer. Sure, you could weigh in with one opinion on the matter of Joel's actions in the Firefly hospital, but whichever side you take (and you do appear to have taken one, Ethan, from looking at your post in the other thread), I could take the opposite side and present a strong argument. I'll do some of that later in this post. 

 

What TLoU2 does, on top of delivering another narrative/execution that can stand tall and look cinema directly in the eye in most respects, is work within that cinematic-type framework and deliver the kind of narrative experience greater than that which cinema can possibly create - a potential that has long existed in gaming, but that has only barely been touched upon previously, and which typically involves complicating the storytelling process in some fashion in such a way that a cinema snob who doesn't game (as well as some who do) is likely to turn their nose up in response to. Choice/agency would probably be a go-to for most people who are asked what ways a video game can deliver a story that a movie or series cannot.

 

In Mass Effect, you can make your protagonist act like a dick or a saint throughout the game. Consequently, the decision to put the player of control of a protagonist with that kind of flexibility required that they build a story that was largely indifferent to the protagonist as character, and sacrificed the kind of plot that could develop that character in any meaningful way. Fallout 3 introduced you to a universe wherein you could destroy or set up shop in the first town you encounter. The result being that the introduction to that town didn't represent anything especially significant to the broader, hard-wired portion of the story, and you knew it immediately. You didn't have to pay especially close attention to the goings-on there, or consider the role of the people you meet in that part of the story, if you can even call it that. Heavy Rain tried to have it both ways, and hard-wire an underlying story throughout most of the game while letting the player's choices determine how much of it and how they experienced it, as well as impact some points of it that could lead to substantially different endings - not just different endings to the same final scene that everyone experienced regardless of previous actions. It did hit the mark of creating a bond between the player and avatars by giving them a sense of agency and empathy the likes of which is difficult to create in a passive media experience. It's one thing to watch a man on a screen cut his own finger off, but it's another to be expected to choose which grisly manner in which you would have to watch it play out, and either perform corresponding actions to complete the terrifying action or decline and suffer other consequences for it later that would be even worse to witness. Nothing happened until you made a decision. Still though, stories rely on things like pacing, events, sequence, and development, and the integrity of that was threatened by the player's agency in events, and resulted in a lopsided and/or unsatisfying experience for many people who played Heavy Rain. I'd still call it the first example of a cinematic experience (that did fall short in several respects in that department) that goes beyond cinema. VR for the soul, but ultimately, with very limited application possibilities for future titles.

 

TLoU only flirted with the idea of moving beyond cinema to beat it at its own game, and only near the end. Like many if not most good narratives in movies/series, it wanted to tell a specific story and leave you asking yourself and others who played it specific questions or coming away from it with specific takeaways, and so it couldn't let you move things around, as much as some players would have liked to have had some say in how events played out in the operating room. What they did, rather than give you agency, was offer the passing semblance of it in that operating room, but actually only use your input to make you complicit in Joel's actions - actions which maybe made him heroic to us who are sympathetic to him, having walked 10-15 hours in his shoes, but that also made him a villain to almost every other living person in TLoU universe who was aware of what he did, including Ellie to some extent. They could have played the operating room scenario out in a cutscene, but they did not. They made you go in there and butcher a doctor that couldn't have done much to stop you from taking Ellie away even with his knife, and made you want it on some level because of the perspective-based bias they instilled in you, even if you intellectually questioned the actions in the moment or shortly thereafter. I imagine most people's most immediate, reflexive instinct was more along the lines of "I'm going to tear this motherfucker limb from limb before I let him take another baby girl from me," and then they did any contemplating after that reflex has passed or after they played the scene or game out completely. We can make all sorts of arguments on his behalf to justify his actions, but Joel didn't do any of that. He acted from a place of, at least partially if not mostly or entirely, personal interest and instinct - not as the result of any philosophical meditation that we may have engaged in. He's a character, not the author.

 

Having completed a fresh playthrough of the prequel right before release, I expected much of what TLoU2 ended up doing in that many of the (even more) surprising elements were among my expected possibilities for the sequel as I watched the credits roll in the first game. It was still a shock when I played through TLoU2 though, as I didn't think ND would have the balls to actually go through with much of it, never mind to the degree they did.

 

TLoU2 takes this idea of using the notion of complicity and the bias resulting from it to the next level, and bakes it into the every crevice of its stories. I believe that's why, in the end, aside from people who were mad because they spend all day bitching about "SJWs" and believe this game pushes an agenda because it features gay people, and aside from the people who had already decided on the basis of spoilers that TLoU2 sucked and whose playthrough amounted to an exercise in figuring out how each scene sucked the moment a new one began, the game rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It doesn't want you to feel secure or comfortable at all. It doesn't want you to recognize the beats or be able to separate it neatly into acts. It doesn't want to give you things to think about and/or second-guess at the same time that it ultimately gives  you the expected, satisfying conclusions that most people may want or expect. It's unsettling, jarring, disorienting, and can even come off as insulting to some. It wants to threaten the very notions that the beginning of the game as well as its prequel made players comfortable with. The gamble here is that while some players would doubtless reject it altogether, others would reflect on their own initial rejection of several of the story's characteristics and be interested enough in the ends that they might be in service to to keep an open mind and give the writing some benefit of doubt.

 

The truth is, while many gamers love the idea of gaming being as good as cinema, they really only want a summer blockbuster. Or at least that's what they expect, maybe is more accurate, and they become flustered when they don't get it, and instinctually feel like something is wrong with the game and/or story. Even an ending or element that is unsettling on some level should feel good on some other level, and uncomfortable events are expected to resolve in a way that makes some kind of immediate, intuitive sense and results in some form of satisfaction. On top of that, we have basic formatting expectations that were among the numerous conventions that TLoU2 threw right out of the window with full force. I'm sure it's no accident that most cinematic action games live in a 10-15-hour-long window. There is probably good research that suggest it is a comfortable space for people to enjoy that genre of game in. I think many people were thrown in that respect in TLoU2, and where ND hoped players might wonder if it was justified later, many people who did stick around to find out were dragged to the finish line kicking and screaming, and were too dug into their initial assessments by the end to reconsider any of it at any point - a response which, to your credit, Ethan, you did not box yourself into at all. I'm speaking generally here.

 

Some cinema lives outside of the norm though, and if there was one game to stake out that territory in the medium of video games, I can't think of a more appropriate title then the follow-up to the final events of TLoU, where we (Joel) end(s) up lying to Ellie because we (he) know(s) she would completely reject our "saving" her, and where she looks us in the eye, knowing we're full of shit, but can't do anything about it or even to prove it to herself. 

 

Seeing as how I printed this massive wall of text, I won't get too into the weeds of your comments in the following, much smaller spoiler section, Ethan. I don't even know how likely you or anyone are to see this, let alone read it, let alone have the desire or stomach to reply to it, and I get that, so I'll save any further dissection of the characters and events for any replies that might appear. Honestly, I could talk about this game for days. 

Spoiler

 

I did want to speak to the Spec-Ops reference though, as I also recalled that game during my TLoU 2 playthrough, and I've seen others mention it for having a "are we the baddies" angle to it - as well as, as you pointed out, it being a game that lends itself to some literary analysis. Where that game and other games operate though, is still mainly from a single perspective. It's not uncommon to see antagonists humanized or justified to some extent, but it's usually right before or right after we kill them. They still remain antagonists by and large, only a little more complex, and we are victorious over them. Even if the narrative tells us it's more complicated, and even if we do legitimately feel for them. I think an even closer likeness (maybe not in terms of especially lending itself to any kind of textual analysis but in terms of questioning the acts you've been engaging in throughout the game) is Lair on the PS3. Bet you didn't see that coming. Like TLoU2, rather than tell us things are more complicated, it spends more time showing us by making us actually walk a mile in everyone's shoes. I can't speak to the quality of the story, as it's been a very long time since I played that (or Spec-Ops), and the fact that I couldn't recall much at all about it may have as much to do with my forgetfulness as it does with the story being forgettable. TLoU2 intends to pull the player around much more violently though, and make that whiplash hurt when it pulls us in the opposite direction, and I really respect the intent behind the decision as well as the risk that making it involved. It's one thing to make you play on two sides of opposing armies, but another entirely to ask you to understand the death of one of the two most beloved characters in a prequel, make you willingly complicit in the increasingly self-destructive obsession of the other beloved character, to the point where she will become a boss later in the game, where you are then asked to control the agent who initiated the current game's events, and who you are nowhere near done passionately hating. 

 

I also have to say that I disagree with the notion that Mister Jack shared in the Games You've Beat thread, that this is a story we've seen a million times before. I've seen that comment printed a million times, and have not seen one example attached to it. At best I see it being called "another revenge story," and if that's our measure for suggesting that a game is doing nothing new, not only should we be writing off all stories that involve revenge from now on, but we should write off all stories, as they tend to fall within the "seven basic plots" scope of analysis. I feel like TLoU2 contains the most difficult narrative to find an analog for, at least in the world of video game narratives, and we should be comparing apples to apples here. Furthermore, this isn't just another revenge story by any means. As much as if not more than revenge, it's a story that deals with concepts such as justice vs. retribution, forgiveness and regret, trauma and loss, subjective morality, tribalism, the characteristics that define humankind and how they play out in various social contexts, and the simultaneous destructive and essential roles that those characteristics/instincts play in our decision-making. Where many stories that touch on or explore these themes are often didactic, TLoU2 is more interested in leaving us with an array of questions that make the ending of its prequel look like a junior high school blunt cipher. It requires some measure of active intellectual participation from the player in order to work properly, which is where I think it failed to resonate as universally as the first game did - its setup is so uncomfortable in several respects that a lot of people shut down rather than open up. 

 

When I beat the game and allowed myself to look at news/reviews about it, I found myself on the hunt for a positive YouTube review, and came across this one here that I think is worth watching for anyone who completed it.

 

https://youtu.be/bh5gzGs-63Y

 

It's maybe more observational than analytical, and spends some time addressing what I personally think are some of the dumber complaints floating around about it, but it makes some really concise, eloquent points about it, the former of which is something I obviously struggle with. The "ego-death" line in particular resonated with me, and I loved the framing of: the game you're playing with your controller vs. the game ND is playing with the player, and the attached idea of a challenge that can't be beaten with a controller. 

 

 

[TheMightyEthan]

I don't have a lot to say in response to that right now, but I wanted to say I read it and it has me thinking.

[Thursday Next]

Hello. It me! Wanted to pop on here and see what others thought of TLoU2. In terms of game mechanics, it was all more of the same, which is fine. I think the only new thing was throwing ropes around (could be wrong there, idk). My only gripes mechanics wise were: 1. You can't drop a bottle/swap one for a brick. This is annoying and dumb and I'm sure you could do so in the first game. 2. It's annoying when your super hearing arbitrarily doesn't work so that you can get a scripted jump-scare in.

 

Story wise, I hated Abby at first, but felt that she became more sympathetic as the game progressed. Yes she started it (although Joel really started it if we want to get down to it), but I think her reasons were good, based on her own morality.

 

Spoiler

As a child Abby says that she would volunteer if she was the cure even if it meant her death. My read on this was that she didn't even hesitate, as if it was the only answer and it was what anyone would say, so she believes Ellie would do the same without even knowing her. At the end of TLoU it's pretty clear when Joel doesn't tell Ellie what happened that he suspects that she would demand to go back because she would sacrifice herself too. So Abby and Ellie's morality is aligned here that the Fireflies were doing the right thing.

 

This means that Ellie's objections to Abby killing Joel are: 1. Joel is part of her tribe, and so untouchable to others; and 2. the brutality and desecration of Joel's killing. It's not the absence of Joel that keeps Ellie up at night, it's his screams. It's fair to assume that if he had just been shot in the head, quickly and cleanly she would have had an easier time getting over it and may not have gone to Santa Barbara.

 

At first we don't know anything about Abby so her murdering Joel, after Joel and Tommy saved her life seems even worse due to being ungrateful. Most stories, arguably most cultures have a concept of a "life debt". If someone saves your life, you owe that person until you can return the favour. Traditional story telling would have us think that in payment for saving her life Abby would let Joel go this time with a "we're even, if I see you again you're dead" farewell. I like (in retrospect) that the game upends that trope, at the time it made me hate Abby. 

 

I appreciate Ethan's view that the reset after Act 1 (in his numbering) was jarring, I agree it was. However over all it worked for me. Spending a solid block of time as Abby helped to round out her character rather than having her as secondary party. I liked her interactions with Lev and watching her character grow. If we hadn't spent as much time with them, I don't think it would have made as much sense when Lev stopped Abby from killing Dina.

 

When Abby let Ellie and Dina live at the end of Act 2 and we went to the farm I genuinely thought that was the end of the game, and would have been quite happy with that, I feel like SB was more about setting up another game, it established the Fireflies still exist. Abby will let them know that Ellie is still out there and Ellie is looking for a purpose. That all feels like breadcrumbs for Ellie to either go to or be captured by the Fireflies, ultimately fulfilling her purpose as she felt it in TLoU.

 

Santa Barbara confirmed that the revenge arc was complete for both characters. Abby appeared to have given up on her quest for revenge at the end of Act 2 and in SB it's clear she has a new purpose to travel with Lev to the Fireflies. This is confirmed when she is found by Ellie and has to be forced to fight by Lev being threatened. Ellie realises as she is drowning Abby that killing Abby will just rob her of her purpose again, so either way Ellie loses, she tries to reclaim some humanity by letting them leave and returning home.

 

My only criticism of the story arc is that by the end we don't know what Ellie's purpose is. It's not revenge anymore, and Dina and Potato seem to have gone, what is she living for now?

 

[TheMightyEthan]

I'm not tagging this because it's only spoilers for the first game:

 

To me it doesn't matter whether Ellie would have sacrificed herself willingly for the cure (though I agree she probably would have), the Fireflies didn't even give her the option, and that puts them in the wrong.

 

About the ending of Part 2:

 

Spoiler

I also thought it was ending at the farm, and I would have been satisfied with it too. I actually think that would have been the better ending, because I think it would have fit with the overall tone of the game better. Sometimes you don't get resolution, that's just how it is, and you just have to deal with that as best you can.