R3VEWWz (of Video Games!) | The Last of U... Damn, man.

"We're shitty people, Joel. It's been that way for a long time." 

Developer: Naughty Dog
Creative Director: Neil Druckmann
Game Director: Bruce Straley
Lead Designer: Jacob Minkoff

There's not much to say about this thing that hasn't been said already. I'm only saying those things that everybody's been saying because you don't finish playing a game like this and have nothing to say about it.

That being said, the ending of this game left me pretty speechless.

Rightfully so. The folks that brought us the Uncharted series, with each installment pushing the "games as art" debate into more mixed, ambiguous and dangerously arguable territory with its state-of-the-art cinematic ability at the time. 

No question here, that if Uncharted 1 through 3 were a testing grounds of how to push gaming technology towards untapped potential, The Last of Us is a product of that endeavor. 

Game mechanics, level design, art, UI, AI, multiplayer, DLC, content distribution, back-end, front-end, and all that other crap - yes, that's the bones of any video game anybody's ever made, from Candy Crush Saga to Heavy Rain. 

They're the innate bread and butter. Without one or the other, it's not a game. At least Metacritic won't say it's a good one. So what do players look for in a good game? What's missing from the bread and butter? It's not rocket science.

It's called storytelling. 

We're taught that a good story puts characters in a place they recognize. And by the end of the story, everything about that place has to be flipped up-side down, or else the character or characters have not actually, properly finished that story. 

In The Last of Us, the player is flipped over constantly. Sometimes, literally, they are flipped upside down, or flip between characters, or flip their shit over a Clicker zooming into your face to share its spore-laden saliva with your throat. 

This story is jarring, it's uncomfortable, its heart-wrenching, and its brutal. As many who've wrote about it and played it said, it is not a fun game. And that is the best possible choice the developers could have stuck to. 

One other game has given me the opportunity to witness all of the other ingredients - the bread and the butter - being there to singularly, relentlessly, serve the story. That was The Walking Dead. I had similar feels there, too. 

I think the brilliance of this game is that at many parts, I thought the screen was just going to cut to black and it'd be over, just like that. I was uneasy the entire time. There wasn't a moment through my first playing that things ever felt "okay". 

The game starts off with things severely not okay. It also has such an intuitive way of beginning the game; I'm not going to spoil anything, but when you come back to the beginning after finishing the game for the first time, it makes that opening that much more significant. 

From the gate, it starts with a gut-punch that stings long and hard; the lingering kind. And from there, it's a slow recovery process. Not just for our main character in Joel; the gruff, damaged soul you have to grow to care for - there's just no way not to, but it seems, for the entire broken landscape you traverse during the game. 

It brings you drastically different places and divides its story into very recognizable acts, but at each turn, I didn't know what was going to happen next. It emotionally exhausts you from the first scene, so the only thing you know that is coming is that it won't be anything particularly good. 

Which, ironically, is the best thing for the game to do from the start.

If I can define this narrative in one word, it'd be grueling. I didn't know when the story could just end on me, in a second, and I'd be left in tatters. At the same time, I wanted the story to end for me, so I wouldn't have to see these characters go through the shit that they have to go through.

An important, core technical decision from the get-go? The cinematic cutscenes. Naughty Dog knows how to do them well. Not only is the art, acting, performance capture phenomenal, these are bridges in the story where it forced me to sit back and be disassociated from the characters. 

We play as them, but we are not them. When we play games as a character, we fit into a role, a role that usually has power. You can do things as this player-character that you cannot do yourselves. Shoot guns, stab zombies (technically not zombies in this game, but let's say they're zombies), and maybe even cry because you just "can't deal" and all (not Joel, just me). 

And then, BAM! You're watching them act their own, have their flaws, hide their feelings, and play off each other in front of you. Again, it's jarring. Jarring in the best possible way. 

These cutscenes may have been a crux or a compromise to some critic's perspectives; that it disrupts the flow of the game. Certainly, it bookends or instances many of the combat or stealth situations, and makes you antsy between them. But that's the very reason they're there. It's so important that this game creates a distance between the player and the characters. 

Ultimately, I knew why. You'll know why when you finish that final scene too. 

The consensus is that The Last of Us incorporates many post-apocalyptic and zombie tropes of stories past. Among them, the highly acclaimed novel The Road, and personally, I found a lot of influence from both game and comic versions of The Walking Dead.

You can probably deduce the similarities. These are stories about humans in constantly inhuman and inhumane situations. And as common in any of these stories, we watch, or we play, or we read these characters have their souls, or their bodies, or their purposes for surviving, chipped away piece by piece.

And God, if I don't relish in that horribleness. 

What The Last of Us did more cleverly, perhaps more pervasively than these others, is how it showed us those moments we as players, and they as characters, cannot collectively take back. The unrelenting linearity of it all. The consequence. 

That disassociation comes back into play. At times, I yelled at my television screen, "Joel!" or "Ellie!" followed by expletives and useless pleas as I helplessly watched a scene unfold. It peels your eyes back and forces you to stare at the slow burn of their struggle. 

Great storytelling makes it clear what's at stake, and shows you what it's going to throw at the story's heroes to prevent them from getting what they want. 

And when they do, a good story, like a sadistic torturer, displays what's left of us and our characters when they finally do "get what they want." 

With such negative connotations, how can I have positive things to say about this game? Well, every emotional beat, Naughty Dog had hit. Either with its art, its writing, its frankly incredible performances, or the pacing of this story. 

I tried grabbing at what Joel and Ellie's inner monologues were throughout the narrative, and when I couldn't, I let it out on the Clickers and Infected and Hunters and everything I had in my power to destroy. 

But I couldn't change what needed changing to alter the course of these two characters. I helped them survive, but I felt I didn't, and I couldn't, save them. 

Is there any chance for saving, and chance for salvation, in this story? 

It could be a central theme posed by Neil Druckmann and his writing staff. I wasn't in that writer's room, but damn, would I have squealed like a girl breaking this story out on a whiteboard. 

It's one of the many questions I came across during the game, and especially after, as the credits rolled. The mark of a good piece of fiction, is that you think about it immediately after it's done. You think long and hard and hurt your brain over it. 

It's the undeniable test to see if a story was worth it. If you can't get over it, it was definitely what it wanted to be. 

Joel's path and Ellie's path were shown to us very consistently that they're intertwined; at times, inseparable. But at the various points in the game, the forces that be often work to upset that. The bond between them is a driving undercurrent. It solidifies their efforts, excuses their actions, and absolves them of their ghosts or demons. Only so much, though. 

Once I understood that, I understood why the story ended up where it ended up. I got why I had to kill all those Clickers, all those Infected, all those people, to get where I got. But was she supposed to? 

It doesn't matter. She's a fictional character. 

When I forgot that, I smiled. A really sad smile. Because I invested so much in their journey. Because good stories make you face the hard questions yourself, and those people you play as, and fight as, they're just shoes for you to stand in as you do it. 

Gamasutra, the website resource for intelligent discussion on video games, has a an amazing analysis about the game by Leigh Alexander. Lot of things I left unsaid because I addressed my pretentious obsession with video game stories. 

I addressed that side, because I love stories. I know them. When I experience a good one, I get happy whatever emotions they force out of me. This is an expertly crafted game, down to Gustavo Santaolalla's mesmerizing score, to the insanely clever crafting system, to the art team's impeccable rendering of beautifully overgrown urban sprawls. It's all just a feast for the eyes and ears and mind. 

But at the core of everything, absolutely everything about what makes this game this great to play, is that this story did not hold back once.  

It shoved me into this world and it held me down. 

It said, "Look at this. Take it in. And survive." 

And I did. Despite all the suffering, all the loss, everything I made these characters do, everything they made me watch them do, I did. 

And for those two, I'd do it again. 

Oh, and one more thing: Ellie is what a female game character should be... 

A PERSON.