The Last of Us (Spoilers)

[toups]

why did they choose take on me for the verbed out “cinematic” music. do they just pull this shit from a hat?

[dedede69]

i believe joel or ellie did a sad acoustic cover of it in the last of us part 2
(im not joking)

[hellojed]

I HATE IT. I HATE IT. I HATE IT. I HATE IT

[parker]

I love it, can’t wait

[Father.Torque]

Gotta be at least as good as the See season 2 finale, right?

[parker]

let me tell you season 3 was not great. even the sighted gal getting a 1911 wasn’t enough to make it good

[parker]

If you thought I was in the tank for the Last of Us before, the show moved the timeline back ten years so the world ends on my 18th birthday (Joel’s 36th), we’re even more psychically fused than ever before now

[parker]

the last time the world made sense…

[boojiboy7]

This show seemingly having two different Game of Thrones monarchs for the two leads seems like weird HBO self commentary.

[Broco]

“One cross plus three nails equals four given!”

I want to see a table of how each translator dealt with that one

[Broco]

Watched 2 episodes of this so far. The first one was pretty good, but the second one I found partly boring and partly disorienting because it so closely followed familiar videogame beats. Like the safe path turning out be blocked and the characters deciding they need to take a more exciting, dangerous shortcut.

And that one scene in the flooded hotel lobby where Joel is trudging forward while Ellie goes off to ring the bell and have a mock dialogue with an imaginary clerk. I couldn’t watch it without being acutely aware that the knee-deep water is there to slow down the player character to give the NPC time to complete their scripted environment trigger. Except it’s real actors in a real prestige TV show none of it needs to work like that!!

[parker]

that was the druckman directed episode. they even cling to cover when going through the upstairs. I don’t think he can switch it off. third episode was the best one so far

[Broco]

The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation

Regarding a long, claustrophobic shot from inside a moving car as Joel flees the zombie outbreak with his daughter, Sarah (Nico Parker), one otherwise admiring critic reproached The Last of Us for aping the interactive format of a game, noting it was “hard to resist the feeling that you should have a controller in your hand to choose which way they should turn next.” Yet in the nearly identical sequence from the game’s prologue, the player is responsible not for the car but just for the in-world virtual camera, which they may swivel uselessly from Sarah’s terrified face to the dark road ahead to a neighbor’s house burning in the distance. Indeed, the feeling of helplessness is the whole point.

It’s true that The Last of Us often resembles a game that doesn’t want to be one. But this tension, which the television adaptation is at pains to relieve, is precisely what made the original game such a compelling study in powerlessness. Its protagonist, after all, also doesn’t want to be one. In early cutscenes, Joel is vehemently opposed to becoming Ellie’s keeper, his fatherly grief masked as stony pragmatism; when gameplay resumes, players may feel they are pushing Joel forward against his will, overriding his reluctance with their own desire to progress in the game.

[vodselbt]

the original game was a study in powerlessness!?? I guess it is by the standard of like basically any triple-A game since Far Cry 2 or something, but come on.

[Felix]

andrea long chu is so fucking good

I love it when people are actually able to do real cross-media criticism. so rare

[vodselbt]

The observations on storytelling and gameplay here are excellent and true, but the analysis of TLoU here is so far fetched.

[hellojed]

more like Neil DRECKman

[Broco]

It should’ve been hedged by a mention that it paradoxically coexists with a power fantasy, but it still rings true to me

I really like this way of thinking about ludonarrative dissonance. It gradually inverts over the course of the game: in the beginning you’re pushing him forward to adopt Ellie over his objections, in the mid game you feel aligned, and at the end it’s Joel dragging you towards an ending you don’t really want to see.

The aesthetic of helplessly being dragged forward also helps clarify for me why I tend to agree with C. Thi Nguyen’s view as games as being above all devices to communicate a certain experience of agency, and yet I liked TLoU as a game anyway. It’s an aesthetic of desperately wanting agency but only having a hollow, insufficient version of it.

[Father.Torque]

Very happy to see an excellent writer elucidating my “what is the point of this” thesis

[parker]

The point is Pedro Pascal is way cooler than troy baker doing an impression of llewelyn moss