The (Really) Great about The Last of Us

This entry is a giant sack of spoilers for The Last of Us. Do not read it unless you’ve played the game.

Since finishing The Last of Us, I find myself wanting to talk about all the amazing aspects of the story with anyone who’ll listen. Because so few of my friends have actually played and finished the game, I’ll take it all out on you. I know that in my review, I complained about the combat, what is essentially the game, and I did something very similar for Bioshock Infinite. In general, I think it’s a shame when gameplay doesn’t marry up to skillful writing, even if it might technically be well-executed, and I find myself at a loss to come up with why that is: laziness, checking a box, fulfilling a demand, or a combination thereon. I’ll give more credit to The Last of Us in this regard if only because the writers left no story element wasted. The backdrop of racism, xenophobia, and religious zeal in Bioshock Infinite was just that, and it ultimately served little purpose against the crux of the main characters’ stories.

Initially, I find it commendable that The Last of Us borrowed a page from The Walking Dead property as a whole and focused squarely on people instead of “zombies.” The outbreak of infection happened, it terrorized the world, and the plot hones in on people dealing with it as opposed to a scenario where droves of infected must continuously be thwarted in their paths. I also like that the player is forced to confront other people who are also trying to survive but are more aggressive about their efforts. Ultimately, by creating throwaway characters, such as the infected, a light is shone on the nature of man itself. It’s easy to speculate about how one would act in a similar situation, but like life, the game sometimes doesn't offer a lot of choice. (Of course, I just wish I got more of “survival lite” on the Easy campaign.)

The Last of Us also managed to treat a variety of subjects on a more mature level than the bulk of video games ever attempt. For one, the writers’ treatment of gay and black people is the best I've seen, period. After Joel concludes that he and Ellie need a vehicle to get to their destination, he decides to find an old “frenemy,” Bill, to assist him. Bill is crotchety and has set up something of a war zone for trespassers. While trying to find a vehicle of use to the pair, he ably tackles foes and uses his mechanical know-how to survive. Along the way, the characters find out that his survival partner, has died, providing for a somber moment when Bill both laments his passing and curses his existence. When Joel and Ellie finally do get on their way, Ellie reveals that she stole some periodicals from Bill, one of which is clearly a gay porn magazine.

Here, in a AAA game, we have a gay character who is tough and useful with little flair for the dramatic and who doesn't get killed by his own melodrama. Moreover, the nature of his sexuality is actually not relevant to his character. The game doesn't stop for the player to balk, “You’re gay?!” Instead, Naughty Dog offers up the implicit. The man Bill finds dead was possibly his lover, but players are not goaded into probing like an insecure teenage jock. Instead, you make of it what you will because the story has many other places to go before it is through. Joel and Ellie find out, but they don’t waste a minute on it.

The black characters, Henry and Sam, are introduced as Joel and Ellie try to evade the bandit tank chasing them down the streets. After a small scuffle, it is revealed that the men have similar goals of finding the Fireflies like Joel and Ellie, and in a snap, they decide to proceed together. Sam is a pre-teen aged like Ellie or below, who has tired of survival. This is not to suggest he wants to die, but he does clearly want to be a kid, evidenced by when he tries to knick a toy from a shop the group passes through.

Henry, his adult brother, is clearly as keen on how to manage this unsavory world as Joel is, and both lead their young partners capably. Although his personal story is not too fleshed out, Henry becomes a quickly likable character while avoiding many of the tropes that lead other black characters in games to just be “other.” He wields a gun upright and doesn't send off foes with a “motherfucker” in an Isaac Hayes-like voice. In fact, he doesn't play the funny guy at all. His hair is natural, but it isn't a kooky afro or corn rows; the writers are smart to realize that styling one’s hair is probably a survivor’s last concern.

It’s important for me to point out that there is nothing inherently wrong with all the things Henry isn't. People of all races run the gamut, occasionally exemplifying stereotypes. However, video games (and media in general) like to convince us that these stereotypes are all black people are and ever will be. They’d have us think that black men are all funny or badasses, and black women are all sassy, but more dangerously, they’d convince us that black people are sidekicks while white people do their thing. The Last of Us, though it does ultimately kill off these two characters, manages to make Henry and Sam whole people who are as capable of being helpful when times call for it as they are at looking out for themselves…like people do. When they die, it is not forgettable, but neither is it martyrdom. Their deaths are just more heavy material for this well-woven tale.

Finally, I’d like to address how well women are treated in The Last of Us, especially Ellie. When Joel’s adventure begins, before he meets Ellie, he is partnered with a woman, Tess. As they traverse the distances of her story arc, she also ably performs as a survivor in the infected environment. In fact, in one scene when they confront someone who betrayed them, Tess acts downright mean and vengeful, showing both strength of will and weakness of human nature – you know, like all people do. She isn't a femme fatale or a mystical being who can’t control herself. Tess is literally just a person trying to live, and her sex is not a commodity worth bartering with other characters or the player to do so.

Ellie’s shining time is during the Winter chapter of the game, which is so amazing and emotionally intense, it just haunts me. Thinking about it overwhelms me with emotion. At the end of the Fall chapter, Joel is severely injured, and Ellie is forced to aid him as the two try to leave East Colorado and continue towards Salt Lake City. But the chapter ends with Joel just falling off their horse, too sick to go on.

The Winter chapter starts with the player controlling Ellie, who appears to be alone, and trying to hunt a deer. As the beginning of this chapter transpires, Ellie gains weapons and shows off knowledge of the same tricks Joel used during the first half of the game. Realistically, her size prevents her from choking grown men to death, but she is still able to use her knife to take them down. It quickly becomes clear that during their journey, Joel has enabled Ellie to survive. And until the plot reveals that Joel is still alive somewhere, the player is given the genuine feeling that the rest of the game might be played through Ellie, something not previously revealed when Naughty Dog talked up the game. It was a nice but scary feeling, not knowing what became of Joel.

Eventually, Ellie is kidnapped by a group of men who either seek to use her body for sexual pleasure or eat her as they have done to others before her. This scenario, my friends, is where The Last of Us does something almost no other game bothers to do. Briefly after she is kidnapped, Joel wakes up in the garage where he has been fighting off infection in the bitter cold. Like any good partner (father figure or otherwise), he seeks Ellie out, leading to scenes  with similar combat and stealth as he’s encountered before, though travel is marred by heavy snowfall. But Ellie does not just sit and wait for her hero, nor does it even seem that she’s considered doing so. Using her wits and her notable feistiness, she escapes her small prison and begins trying to find her way out of the labyrinthine bandit town. At this point in the game, where the player is moved from one character to another, both Joel and Ellie are tasked with surviving the same scenarios with the same weapons and toolsets available to them. Joel and Ellie are equals, despite their age and differences in gender.

But amazingly, that’s not all. Ellie’s trials take a turn for the worst when she gets trapped in a hotel restaurant with her psychotic captor, David, who begins to set fire to the place. He is extremely aggressive and done with treating Ellie with even the faintest shred of tenderness. In something of a boss scenario, Ellie must jump David several times with her knife in the hopes of taking him down. The crescendo is when they are both heavily weakened, but David manages to stand over Ellie as she tries to crawl her way to a weapon to take him down.

In this moment, as he kicks and chides her, the writers forewent the lazy route, that is, having Joel barge in at the last possible moment and take David down as Ellie cowers on the floor. No, the player instead navigates Ellie to an unseen machete, which she uses to cut his leg before kneeling on top of him and stabbing him over and over. It is not until this point that Joel arrives, his only purpose to comfort an enraged Ellie. The fact is that here, Naughty Dog let a young woman fight for her own survival and escape both a sexually and physically threatening event in her life. They did not let the man play the hero. Instead, Ellie triumphs over her own adversity, and the player finally gets the satisfaction of seeing Joel play the father. This scene, Readers, is one of great impact and one of the best I've ever witnessed in a game.

I am thankful for playing The Last of Us. Typical gameplay elements aside, it just features masterful and mature storytelling that we, as gamers, not only craved but needed to get out of the funk of the status quo. It is also delivered straight until the ending, which is both smart and uncomfortable. However, this is not to say that it doesn't still borrow some tried concepts, which I will address in another post.

All images obtained from the official website for The Last of Us.

The Last of Us Review

Apocalypse, the Beautiful

Just look at it.

I hate to be trite and go on about how Naughty Dog's The Last of Us is one of those rare experiences in gaming. The gameplay is not particularly rare, but the story weaved and the treatment of each character within it are indeed quite special. The end result is a game that weighs heavily on the soul hours (or days) after the credits have scrolled.

The game starts in Texas during a climactic moment in the spread of a human variant of the cordyceps fungus. In reality, this fungus is known to possess insects until such time that it strays from its tribe, dies, and grows a large spore spewing growth from its head cavity. In The Last of Us, the fungus turns humans into a type of zombie, constantly desperate to perpetuate itself through bites and scratches. As time goes on, the fungal growth breaks through the skull, turning the person into a wandering drone, constantly clicking and using echo location to find potential victims. I won't delve into the introductory moments so as to avoid spoilers, but it's fair to say that those events dig their claws both into the soul of the male protagonist, Joel, and the player, establishing a somber tale for the remainder of the game.

Joel's story then continues with Ellie, a young woman whom he is tasked with transporting over amazingly large distances and mostly by foot. Ellie is a tough tomboyish character, obviously hardened by growing up in a world of survival of the fittest and witnessing the utmost in violence around her. Like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite, despite the purpose of the trip, Ellie is not simply being escorted and protected by her valiant hero. Instead, she is capable of participating in taking down foes, though to a lesser extent. Unlike Elizabeth, she doesn't randomly but predictably find objects to assist Joel in skirmishes, and she occasionally does need to be saved like he does. However, that latter fact is not an annoyance in the least and comes up rarely, especially if you know what you're doing. For the most part, Joel does his thing, and Ellie may or may not be involved.

Ellie, the girl

The Last of Us features gameplay similar to the Uncharted series – third-person shooting with a variety of weapons, some up-close melee, and a functional stealth mechanic. The difference in this experience is that the apocalypse has left the protagonist's approaches rather resource-restricted. You can waltz into a room shooting everyone, but ammo is moderately scarce, and your health is persistent, meaning you need to heal yourself with medical kits in order to recover from grave injury. Time is also a resource, though: healing takes a noticeable amount of time that isn't convenient for firefights, enemy characters change their patrol patterns over time, and silent kills take uncomfortably long.

There are two main sets of foes in this game: the infected and the bandits. (This is to imply that there are other foes, which I won't spoil here.) I've already explained the infected, and the bandits fit the common apocalypse story trope of the people who turn on their fellow men to survive. Where the game deviates from other such stories, such as that of Fallout or I Am Alive, is that Joel has played the bandit before, something that is revealed in an early conversation with Ellie. Although killing to survive is the name of the game you're playing, you are controlling someone who has killed to steal and stand his ground.

As varied and nuanced as Joel can be, his bandit nemeses in some scenarios are so large in population that they are as meaningful to kill as the ridiculous mobs of goons in the Uncharted games. A rudimentary understanding of the bandit archetype easily reveals that men (always men) of such violent and aggressive nature are probably unlikely to band together in such huge groups without attacking each other. Yet, there they are, the disposable people. Whatever weight this game was purported to lend to killing is continually negated as more bodies are thrown on the heap.

Joel, the handsome man...being killed by a clicker

I attempted a stealthy route through these killing fields, which had varying results. The biggest irritation was the false sense of completion to almost every scenario. When Joel murders the "last" guy, it's always signaled by a bolder takedown – instead of silently choking the man out, he will curb stomp him, for example. But over and over, as I begin rummaging for resources, suddenly, I hear the voices of even more men coming, and my heart would deflate. The new aggressors/victims fan out in unpredictable patterns with an almost GPS-like sense of Joel's and Ellie's location.

I suppose it is reasonable for this to happen once or twice, but the frequency was alarming. Joel comes equipped with his own version of Batman's Detective Mode from the Arkham games, lowering his ear near the ground and restricting his movements to listen for enemies' locations. Obviously, this ability is nigh superhuman in its execution, but it is remarkably stunted in its inability to pick up men beyond the door you are trying to reach or to hear the men shooting the breeze waiting for you to eliminate their brethren. This inconsistency is a frustrating immersion breaker. This isn't war; it's survival. You'd imagine that instead of filling areas in distinct waves, these disorganized foes may meander in and out sporadically, making it hard to tell if there even is a last guy.

Upon the second wave, I'd occasionally lose my cool or my own personal energy to maintain stealth, and let shootouts break out. Depending on available weapons and ammo, these controlled rather well. Fumbling with reloading guns and figuring out what to do when you completely run out of ammo for one lead to tense moments where you have to decide to run and hide or beat attackers senseless at risk of exposing oneself. Breaking stealth by accident or on purpose to handle enemies more aggressively worked well. It was during unavoidable shootouts that I'd wonder why I just wasted ten minutes acting stealthily if there was literally no way to proceed to the goal that way. Saving checkpoints are relegated to the beginnings of "encounters" no matter how many waves of enemies there might be, and restarting to try again is sometimes completely unpalatable.

Teaching a bandit to cha-cha!

I don't want to say I couldn't or didn't enjoy these encounters at all because that would be lying. Instead, it felt like I was playing a separate game until I could get back to the game I really wanted to play, which involved rummaging for supplies, reading unlucky victims' journals and letters, solving navigation puzzles, and listening to Naughty Dog's famous idle chitchat between characters. These moments when characters are interacting, either by helping each other cross gaps or by commenting on their surroundings are when the player is invited to bask in the world created for him or her. When Joel and Ellie had company with them, they'd carry on with their own conversations or even perform activities with or without his presence. It's nice to be reminded that there are people in The Last of Us.

There are some positive encounters in the second half of the game which managed to sufficiently blend the combat/stealth gameplay and the story effectively for me. These typically involved a deep sense of urgency for the characters to get to the goal or the next area safely, and I discovered that it was possible to survive some of these without killing everyone (or sometimes anyone). Much like the expected mechanics of the upcoming Republique, sometimes survival would come down to just getting out of there, which worked handsomely. I loved feeling the close call of leaving the scene, my heart beating out of my chest, in contrast to the feeling of eliminating everyone because it's impossible to open the gate without alarming everyone.

Resource collection comes in multiple flavors. On top of ammo, the player needs to find resources to craft items, such as medical kits and shrapnel bombs, supplements to increase various skill levels, generic groupings of parts to enhance weapons, and various memorabilia that enhance the story behind the setting. Opening Joel's backpack does not pause his surroundings, though, and crafting items takes time, so it is best to always be prepared. I played the game on Easy, and I found digging through each room I came across and looking in every possible corner yielded me a constantly full backpack, though some scenarios left me disparagingly low on certain kinds of ammo for quite a while. Melee weapons are all limited in the numbers of times they can be used, and despite the obvious existence of actual knives about, Joel frustratingly only utilizes limited-use crafted shivs to slash foes. It's an ineffective method the developers used to limit the player needlessly.

Getting Ellie to a nunnery was pivotal here.

Regardless, Naughty Dog managed to make the experience of playing The Last of Us unique through their entire presentation. Beginning with the graphics, they have managed to stay on top of this console era with their sublime mastery of the PS3's now seven year-old GPU. The game is, simply put, utterly gorgeous. Many games feature fantastic images of barren plains and sterile offices, made astonishing by effective character models and expert lighting. Well, this game features dirty, gritty, and object-populated environments, also effectively modeled and lit. Not since Uncharted 2: Among Thieves have I been this enamored with trash, but the way the graphics team rendered filthy, garbage-strewn, lived-in environments consistently for the entire game is once again worthy of applause. This game breathes apocalypse whereas some games only begin to emulate it. And don't get me started on the amazing seasonal weather effects, particular that of the snowy winter.

The accolades I can throw upon presentation don't end there, however. Sound design is excellent with realistic object collision sounds and voices becoming appropriately muffled as Joel puts walls between them and the source. (Small critique: if you don't face characters talking to you, they sound like they're coming through by radio sometimes.) The voice acting among the main characters is heartfelt and delivered with a lot of extremely necessary credibility. The personal connections required by the script would sound ridiculous otherwise. Award-winning composer, Gustavo Santaolalla, crafted a hard-hitting and really emotional score to complement the entire experience.

My final act of gushing has to be for the writers. I previously mentioned the absorbing chitchat between characters, but something else I loved was Joel's commentary after picking up letters and journal posts, adding gravitas to them by simple acknowledgement. The whole journal collection game changes when the character doing the collecting elects to voice how he feels about each item. It makes the objects less pointless to pick up. Also, a handful of the bandits would have conversations before beginning their patrols, such as chatting about whether or not the "boss" would activate an old movie projector. These dialogues were appreciated even if they were all we learned of the bandits' desires.

I had better luck than this.

However, the meat of the main narrative is simply one of the most touching and appreciable stories out there in gaming. Whereas I said Bioshock Infinite is worth its ending alone, every moment of The Last of Us' story is valuable and precious. As events degrade, as they are wont to do in these kinds of stories, the moments and interactions between the characters are very heavy and important. No character is introduced without the player getting a full sense of his or her motivations and personality, and certainly, no character is one-note. I could have simply heaped this praise over the opening events and those that unfold shortly after, but my true adoration is for the game's final act. Although the ending is nuanced and difficult and will keep you up at night mulling over, events preceding it are filled with such an emotionally taxing intensity that my heart could have stopped. The story alone sells the game, but even less than that, this section is a shining example of narrative and gameplay marrying to tell a personal tale. It weighs on me as a human being, and I expect it to do the same for others.

Although I would not call The Last of Us the complete package, I recommend it to everyone looking for a deeply and maturely handled story, filled with realistic characters and motivations. I've refrained from commenting on the relationship between Joel and Ellie because I seriously do not want to give away the turns it takes. Their tale, by virtue of them being the consistent factor throughout the game, is obviously the most important, but I also do not want to negate the other stories you'll encounter. I just hope the more typical aspects to the overly hyped gameplay do not dissuade you from taking the plunge.

All images obtained from Game Informer.