The Last of Us

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Rigel
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The Last of Us

Post by Rigel »

Finally grabbed a PlayStation earlier this year so I could work through the exclusives, and I just finished The Last of Us last week.

Gotta say... It's going to be hard for the TV show not to be better than the game.

It's a mediocre stealth game with mediocre 3rd person shooting and atrocious 3d platforming. But a good story that holds it all together.

The setting is a zombie apocalypse 20 years later, and the creators take a very dim view of humanity; you know, the red state wet dream of killing everyone you meet before they can say two words just so you can loot their corpse. My MIL used to laugh at us for not having guns and say "when the rapture comes your neighbors are going to kill you and steal your food!" (can you guess why I'm divorced?). Yeah, that kind of person is pretty much the only type you meet in this game. You can talk with a handful of them, but most of them are cannon fodder.

The zombies themselves are based on the cordyceps fungus that infects ants in the real world, but mutated to infect humans and exaggerated for effect. The story kicks off when you, as the main character, are tasked with transporting a young girl who appears immune to infection across the wasteland to one of the few labs still working on finding a cure.

Coming out in 2014, this game is recognized as one of the harbingers and/or highlights of the Dad era of modern gaming. Video game developers at the time were, by and large, in their mid-30s, and found themselves confronted with the challenges of raising children (surprise, surprise - don't get me started on the culture at video game companies, if you want to know how out of touch or dysfunctional they are you can google Activision/Blizzard for the shit-show currently on display). This was reflected in games like The Last of Us, The Witcher 3 (which focused on Geralt and Ciri's relationship), and That Dragon, Cancer (about an infant girl who passed away). There were several others at the time, but it marked a distinct shift in the style of stories that were told in AAA video games, as they focused less on saving the world and more on interpersonal relationships.

The main focus of the game is on Joel and Ellie as they trek across the country, and... it was just OK. I'm definitely looking forward to the HBO series (being filmed right now), which I expect will do a better job telling the story like this.

Also, I was rather bothered by the gore in the game. When you're confronting other humans, the game will frequently do close-ups of you basing their head in, or against a wall, or some such, and... Yeah. I don't mind fantasy violence, but I avoid excessively gory titles such as Doom, and something about the melee in this one felt more visceral to me. Enough that I might skip the sequel entirely.
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Post by Avatar »

I think I got it as a free giveaway form somewhere. Never played it though.

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Post by Cagliostro »

I played it, and enjoyed it for what it was, as that isn't my usual favorite type of game. I started it a while back, and got very sad from it and realized I didn't need that sadness at that time, and stopped playing for a while. Then I picked it up a year or so later after everybody went on about how great it was and such. I ended up finishing it, and it was good enough for me to finish, but I have absolutely no desire to play the second and get into what I suspect is an even sadder story. Especially with the ending of the first one.
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