PART 1: The Criteria for a Good Game
I'm a game snob. That, I'm sure, is what a lot of people assume. The truth is I just expect a game to be good. You might say I'm "jaded", but I'm really just "experienced" and so I've come to expect a lot out of a game. I've matured, and while I enjoy Super Mario Bros. and many modern Nintendo games, my tastes have mostly matured so that I only buy and replay games that challenge me. So that I don't go too far with my expectations, I temper them with just a few rules when it comes to reviewing a game:
1) The game must be a GAME and not merely a story you follow along with amazing graphics, its developers must have kept the concept of interactivity in mind and not focused SOLELY on story (though I love a good story), because the difference between a movie and a game is that a game is INTERACTIVE.
2) The game must be tremendous fun and engage the player, not just a time waster.
3) The game must have re-playability. This is incredibly important to me, because games cost $60 while going to a movie costs $15 and DVDs cost, at most, $50, and that's with special edition stuff shoved in. Therefore, a game had BETTER be diverse, and present new experiences and challenges with at least ONE additional playthrough.
4) The game must not rely on online gameplay to "make its case" for awesomeness. It must be playable by someone that doesn't have access to the Internet. This is because I believe a game should be playable by oneself, not dependent on others logging on with you.
5) And finally, the game must not be just for idiots. It doesn't have to be as mind-bendy as Inception, but it has to at least make you think and/or engage the player's imagination, if not with the story then with the gameplay, preferably both. I'm not trying to be elitist, just talking about quality here.
With all that being said, I'm happy to say that The Last of Us measures up in every way imaginable. After spending so long in what I call a draught of games that could come even close to all of the above criteria, video game developer Naughty Dog has met, and may even have surpassed, even my lofty criteria.
PART 2: The Last of Us, what's the deal?
Very briefly, The Last of Us is set in the not-too-distant future where a plague has been set upon mankind. A spore known as Cordyceps unilateralis (a real thing, look it up) that once only affected certain insects or anthropods has mutated so that it now affects humans, too. Cordyceps is a fungal infection that destroys the mind and drives people insane. People can be changed into a "zombie" by merely breathing in the spores, or by the classical bite method.
The Last of Us opens in those first moments, when your main character Joel and his daughter are trying to outrun the plague. Long story short, things don't turn out so well.
Fast-forward twenty years, Joel is on his own and is living inside the QZ (quarantine zone) and working as a supply smuggler. He's on a routine job, or so he thinks, when Ellie, a young girl, is thrust into his life. He is told that Ellie is somehow immune to the Cordyceps fungi, that she's been bitten but hasn't turned, and that her blood may be the key to making a vaccine for all of mankind.
With that, the game sets you loose upon the world. It says "Go!" and now you're off across the country, just you (Joel) and Ellie against the military, bands of rapists and marauders, and, of course, hordes upon hordes of zombies.
PART 3: The Review
Where to begin? Well, let's start with that first rule of mine: the game must be a GAME and not merely a story. It must be interactive enough so that the other rule of mine, the one about re-playability, is also met.
While The Last of Us isn't open-world in the way that Skyrim is so wide and vast, it is no less extremely interactive. While my only (minor) complaint is that some areas are extremely linear, the game more than makes up for it in areas where, yes, you are in a kind of "corridor" of a wide-open street, but the ways you can get around it--perhaps climbing through a window, passing around a car, hiding behind a decayed bus before sneaking around a baddie--are variegated enough that you'll have plenty of fun figuring out which way works best for you.
You can manipulate many different objects, creating weapons and throwing bricks or bottles as distractions. Most importantly, though, is that you decide for YOURSELF how to take out any and all enemies, or if you just want to sneak around them entirely, so that you don't get annoying cues from the game telling you, the gamer, how to game. One thing I can't stand in a game is when a certain situation calls for only one solution. Even Pac-Man gave you the option to go AROUND some of the ghosties, you didn't HAVE to eat them. I'm happy to say that, with only one exception I can think of, The Last of Us let's you take charge of each and every situation.
You can level up your character in a few different skills, and here I'm gonna have to give more applause to the game developers. I'm glad that Naughty Dog kept this leveling system simple and not convoluted. Leveling up so often overtakes the rest of a game, and the very notion of "leveling up" has become such an obsession with modern gamers that many developers just throw heaps and heaps of the crap onto the world to appease such gamers, much to the detriment of fluid gameplay, casual gameplay, and story.
It's that last part that really makes The Last of Us shine. The story is, well, incredible. And not just for a game, but for any medium, be it book, comic book, TV show or a film. Upon first hearing of this game, I admit I had an eye rolling moment when I thought, "Let me guess, it's gonna try to be all super epic all the time and there's maybe even some kind of prophecy tossed in about a girl who'll save us all, just to give it religious overtones, or else the banter is gonna be super cheesy (annoying) all the time."
Nope! Not at all.
In fact, this is probably the most subdued piece of storytelling since Shadow of the Colossus. Many times, The Last of Us uses that rarest of all storytelling tools to tell its story: silence. There is much left unsaid, and nothing is shoved down your throat. Joel's connection with Ellie is striking! For instance, at the beginning, he is not interested in telling her anything about his life before all the madness. By the end, she doesn't even have to ask anymore, he's just letting it all come out in casual conversations that happen while you're a-traveling.
This plays directly into my rule that a game must not be for idiots. It's not just for stomping around and lighting things on fire just to watch the "kewl graphics," and it's not the kind of story that demands wanton destruction. In fact, if you try hard enough, there's a way to sneak past nearly EVERY piece of opposition in the game.
I find that a game is vastly more engaging when you can set standards/goals for yourself. For instance, in games such as this, I find it really ups the tension if I decide to approach it realistically and try to AVOID fighting as much as possible. I've got friends, however, who love a good fight, and are enamored of combat mechanics. I'm happy to say that ALL OF US came away satisfied with The Last of Us.
This game achieves the nearly impossible. It gives an engaging story without forcing on too many cut scenes (looking at you Metal Gear Solid 4), all while propelling you forward and telling the story while your characters are in transit. Cut scenes are actually pretty rare, which keeps it a VIDEO GAME and not a movie, and yet the story dwarfs a great deal of what's available on Netflix. How did they do that? Very carefully, is the answer.
And that ending...well, let me just say, it's not what I was expecting, but it's what I wanted. Joel, having come to view Ellie as a daughter, has to make a hard decision. The hardest decision. And the lie he tells to cover it up, well...my father once told me that as a parent, you have to lie. You lie to cover up the hard truths of the world, hoping that your child understands when they're older. Honestly, this game couldn't have had a better ending.
And finally, there's my rule about the game needing to be worth the money. My friends, if there ever was a game worth spending $50 - $60 on, it's this one.
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