Almost eight years have passed since the release of The Last of Us back in 2013. A year in which we lost Nelson Mandela, in Spain the fateful train accident took place in Santiago de Compostela, the attack in Boston, Paul Walker threw his last career, the youtubers were booming …
And in the middle of this apocalypse appeared a young Neil Druckmann who had already made his first steps in great titles like Jak 3 or the favorite by many, Uncharted 2 . Naughty Dog changed course … again. Druckmann took the baton because he decided to risk by restructuring what he had apprehended so that the company’s discourse went in a completely new direction; They no longer did platforms or simple adventures with cinematographic overtones, they wanted to be the first to take the next step in the history of video games.
Praised endlessly by critics and the general public, The Last of Us was an all-in in the world of video games that raised the bar, showed how far this medium could go and set numerous guidelines that other subsequent titles have adopted . The more than 200 prizes it accumulates and the fact that we have been talking about it since then only confirm what everyone who has played it knows: that The Last of Us was something great. Now, with its second installment so close, we wonder if this video game that many consider the best of the decade is capable of keeping the type and continuing to impress years later.
Two players, one who had already passed the original and has recently played the remastered version and another who takes Joel and Ellie’s shoes for the first time , share their experience and opinions on the Naughty Dog title.
Veteran player
Returning to this adventure so many years later thanks to the remastering of PS4, has been a bit … cold .
In the first place and leaving aside what I consider less valuable to share these impressions, let’s talk about its optimization. Both the Uncharted trilogy and this The Last of Us , move to 1080p at sixty frames per second or thirty , depending on what we want.
The game moves well, it feels good, but in the time it takes to load I’ve had time to write the introduction to this article, let’s leave it at that.
Let’s get into the game itself: I understand the ideas that are proposed and why they are executed in one way and not another , but the script exercise after these years results in a succession of slow and clumsy steps.
The relationship between Joel and Ellie is much better transmitted on the diegetic plane than on the extradiegetic plane , let’s start with the first. When you cover yourself in a cover with Ellie, Joel positions himself in such a way that the girl is always protected from any shot; when Joel is in a pinch, Ellie takes advantage of the distraction to stab our target, reminding me a lot of Elizabeth and Booker’s relationship in Bioshock Infinite , even though she only gave you supplies.
When I speak of diegetic, this is what I mean, how the mechanics transmit an internal narrative without the need for a script, creating small moments that reinforce what is being told to us through the narrative per se .
The script, together with the cinematics and the scripts, would rather fall within the extradiegetic , which has to tell us in its entirety both the story and the relationship between its main characters.
Although we see throughout our departure how Joel changes that perception he has about life – that of a man who has lost everything and only thinks about himself – and who is gaining more and more appreciation for Ellie, it is something that from this plane – the diegetic one – is seen exclusively in the final section of the game.
At this point another factor enters that I have considered introducing it between the diegetic and the extradiegetic planes, the optional dialogues . These are appearing as we arrive at certain locations and we stop to look according to what scenarios; they are small conversations that even if they involve anodyne talks superimposing them on top of each other ends up outlining both Ellie and Joel as individuals much better, as their pseudo-parental relationship better than any cinematic or script movement.
At one point Ellie stops to look at a poster of a model and does not understand how thin she is – remember that she is looking at the poster of an earlier time where food should not be scarce – to which Joel explains that some people “did not eat to take care of his appearance ”to which Ellie responds” What idiotic! “. Ellie has lived through a time in which there is not a single second to worry about one’s image , the simple fact of being able to live another day leaves everything else in the background, in an absurd one. Moreover, she does not understand the concept of personal image, making it clear that she is not superficial, she does not know how to be.
And like this example there are many.
Obviously when we speak of diegetic and extradiegetic we speak of what is directly or indirectly affecting our gameplay and our approach to the work.
It is something captivating to see how you can narrate more through the gameplay than through the script itself , thanks to the new ways of narration that the video game offers us.
This comment is not intended to criticize or point out how it should have been, but rather that we should take a closer look at where we are pointing.
Many say that video games are appearing more in all kinds of conversations thanks to those who advocate a more cinematic experience, but what if it is precisely the exclusive axes of the video game that are launching new narrative elements towards the cinema and without realizing the videogames are now more cinematic thanks to the videogame itself and not by appropriating formal elements typically typical of the big screen?
What I’m trying to say is that video games are not creating interactive movies, as they are often referred to in a pejorative way, but that video games are creating new tools for storytelling.
Elements such as optional dialogues, a priori, are insubstantial in a medium with such a limited duration as cinema, they are unthinkable unless the genre in question gives rise to it. However, it is there from where we can begin to create bridges as the current series have already done, which drink so much from the seventh art and have eaten so much ground in some cases.
As has happened with all the arts (literature, painting, cinema, architecture, music …) all of them are in constant dialogue, merging with each other have resulted in that mammoth complex that we call culture, this concept, of course, refers to more nuances.
The Last of Us is another work that is calling with great insistence to that select club of which it is not yet a full member but as little as the blows can be heard, they only accumulate, the reverberations call out to others; the door is about to break.
And dialogue video games, you know for a while.
Rookie player
When The Last of Us hit stores in 2013, I didn’t have a PlayStation 3 on hand to play it on and I had to settle for gameplays, web analytics, and the odd mission on a borrowed console to just get a taste of that phenomenon. everyone spoke enthusiastically. Time passed, things changed and recently I found myself with a new generation console and a series of games among which The Last of Us Remastered was one of my priorities.
As I completed that intro in which we see how Joel’s world collapses in a few seconds I thought that it would be impossible for me to be objective with this game, that I could not forget all the comments and praise that I had heard for years and that the weight of the awards it would end up conditioning the reality he was seeing . But all that noise ceased to exist as soon as I got into the story (which was about minute two) and I began to meet the characters, to feel the same fear that they must have felt when listening to the clickers or to get excited when contemplating the characters. small rays of sun that still seeped into that world of darkness in which I found myself. The Last of Us absorbed me.
Let’s focus first on the technical aspects and mechanics of the game. Aesthetically, the game passes with good marks the test of the passage of time and although it is true that the characters turn out to be a bit flat and that the environment loses part of its strength when we have already got used to the quality of more recent games, they work enough well enough to enjoy our comings and goings through the ruined world before us. Joel’s movements are somewhat orthopedic and the enemy’s artificial intelligence seems to have a tendency to ignore Ellie when they pass by , but no game is perfect.
In the gameplay, for its part, Naughty Dog opted for “less is more” and kept the controls and mechanics simple, achieving a rapid learning that is not enough to overcome some of the toughest moments in history and forces the player to take those actions that you have available and give them a twist or use them intelligently and creatively to move forward (in my case, for example, it took longer than I would like to admit to discover that with a brick you could distract the clickers but also beat them to death ). While more recent titles have accustomed us to a… feeling of free will in video games, The Last of Us formula shows that it is not always necessary if what you get is enough.
Let’s talk now about the story, the characters and those details that form the soul of this game. In the narrative section is where Naughty Dog brings out its full potential and shines. Not only is it well written and structured, but it also has an enviable execution. Joel’s eyes (and Ellie’s in an indirect way except for the brief period of time in which we handle it) show us a world that has gone down the drain, in which people have to face the monsters that lurk and his own demons and in which the moral norms and convictions that once existed in our society are falling into the abyss. Each character, no matter how secondary, is perfectly defined through their gestures, their actions, their appearance or their words and we get to know them by spending just a few seconds with them. There are no blacks or whites, the world is an infinite blanket of gray .
The use of music, camera movements and cinematics reinforce the idea that the narrative of video games has changed forever and has the same force as literature, art or cinema (something that we have seen in numerous cases from throughout the decade). Joel and Ellie have a lot (in their own way) of Jean Valjean and Cosette and the construction of scenes and action works in introducing the player to the story, making them tremble when they see a large group of infected, who are Get your heart racing when human highwaymen corner you or feel like all is lost if you run out of ammo. The Last of Us may be one of the best cases of symbiosis that I have experienced with a video game .
Almost eight years later, anyone who plays it will be able to see the many virtues and defects (perhaps some more than those that were noticed when it came out) of The Last of Us , but time also allows us to see a new facet that in 2013 was impossible to foresee: the effect it would have on the industry and the games to come . Without The Last of Us perhaps Cory Barlog would not have shown us the facet as father of the brutal Kratos in the last God of War or many projects that shone for their narrative and development would have gone unnoticed.
The Last of Us aimed high and, even with its things, time has shown that it was a risky but necessary gamble.
