trivard676
At the risk of sounding just a little bit smug, I’ll say that without a doubt, writing video game reviews can be tough. It has its benefits, sure but it also has some serious pitfalls. I can write something and it can be seen by more people than I could possibly imagine if it goes through the right channels. With all of those extra eyes viewing your work, you have to be seriously careful about what you say. Your opinion matters, but it increasingly appears as if your opinion only matters so long as it’s the same as everyone else’s. Rock the boat with a review, and you’re in for a world of hurt. It doesn’t matter if your concerns are legitimate or not. If that opinion you’re hanging on to isn’t the same as everyone else’s, be prepared that your differing opinion combined with the anonymity of the Internet, will cause people to lash out over your review. Your credibility will be called into question and you as a person will be derided for being the scum of the internet community and trolling for hits. Yeah – the very thing that some people actually read your review for is suddenly cause for anger.
Why? Why can’t people have differing opinions and all be respected? One site giving a game an 8/10 doesn’t take away from your experience with the game. Not all people who claim that a game that didn’t meet their expectations are click-baiting. Legitimate concerns are legitimate concerns. That doesn’t mean that certain game reviews are wrong. Furthermore, it’s possible to like, even love a game while still acknowledging its flaws.
It seems right now, you can’t say that The Last of Us is any less than perfect without being hung out to dry.
In the two weeks leading up to the game’s official release, review outlets across the internet couldn’t keep up with the 10/10s or 5/5s or the “asaaasdf!!” regarding The Last Of Us’ story. With all of the praise and accolades going around, I was sure that this was going to be the best game I have ever played, not just for the PlayStation 3, but of all time, hands down. I hadn’t played the demo and had only really kept up to speed with the non-spoilery news to at least know what people were talking about, should I have had to write anything for the site. So I went into the game only really knowing what I’d gleaned from a few reviews.
On release day, I picked up the game as soon as the store’s opened, took it home and began playing. After a mandatory update (?!), I closed the blinds and was greeted with one hell of a long loading screen (?!?!?). I played through the introduction and thought it was great. Really! It was a pretty good hook to get you into the game, to introduce you to exactly the kind of heavy burden that Joel was carrying around with him and what happened with the world. I thought it was a pretty moving introduction.
To be honest, I thought that The Last of Us has one of the best first-hours since the outbreak scenarios I’ve ever seen. People were running for their lives and they truly looked and sounded scared. There was no one standing up above the crowd with health packs and shotguns strapped to their body shouting “You gotta shoot ‘em in the head!” because if you stayed and fought, even if you turned around for a second, you were done!
I liked the game, but that was the best part of it for me.
I thought it was engaging, with beautiful imagery and sound, entertaining game play and mechanics. A few glitches here and there, save for one minor save bug (no pun intended), and a story that was half decent. Yeah…the story that everyone is seemingly fawning over? Didn’t do it for me.
I looked online to see if anyone had shared my opinion, that the game was good, but that the thing had been over-hyped. I couldn’t find that many initially, but as the days wore on and more and more people played through the game, I could find more and more posts on different outlets that I visited stating just that. It makes sense that people who play the game after having read glowing, perfect reviews would expect it to live up to their expectation of what a perfect game is. People still play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time years after its initial release on the N64 and wonder what everyone was doped up on to give that game a universal 10/10. And those posters who felt The Last of Us was anything less than perfect were torn to pieces. Any outlet, any poster that gave the game less than a perfect grade were, met with some harsh criticism and their credibility shot. To the (I’m sure) vocal minority, this was the best game that they had ever played, and anyone who disagreed with them either a) is stupid b) is clickbaiting, c) is just wrong, or d) didn’t get it. What worried me was that the (I’m sure) vocal minority was very vocal, and… more of a majority than a minority.
While Jorge gave the game a ten, sites like Polygon gave the game a 7.5/10 and the author, the site entirely was torn to pieces over it. A 7.5/10 is still a great game. If they gave the game less than a 5, then…well. Any reasoning that the author brought up was considered stupid by the readership. Really? Really? I really like The Last of Us, so don’t get me wrong here, but…the game isn’t perfect. No one is wrong for thinking it isn’t, but you’re not wrong for thinking it is, either.
The relationship between Ellie and Joel is about as cliché as they get. Anybody who’s ever seen a buddy cop movie or television show can tell you what’s going to happen between them. You get the beginning, where they hate the idea of each other, almost actively resisting each other. Then you get to the stage where they are indifferent, but working together towards a common goal only because they have to. Then you get to the point where they are inseparable, would do anything for the other one, including risking their lives. It’s predictable, so The Last of Us throws a few forks in the gears to spice things up.
Despite this predictable pattern, the character development felt a little hampered. At the beginning of the starting to trust each other part of the relationship, there’s a gap where the player doesn’t see what’s happening. The bonding stage (I feel) is important. If you want people to actually believe that these two became so close of friends, why skip all that time? When we come back to Joel and Ellie, they’re friends, inseparable – but it’s hard to actually accept that without having seen it happen. It just didn’t seem all that genuine. The next break is fine, because they’ve already (apparently) established that relationship, so things that happen in the time that we don’t see them isn’t all that important.
Additionally, when Ellie kills her first man, the reaction that she has to Joel’s seeming indifference just…is weird! She’s not upset (or doesn’t appear to be) that she actually killed a person, she’s more pissed off that Joel doesn’t seem to care. Sure, she’s already stabbed a guy before that point, but killing a guy? That’s different. But fast forward to Davis’ scenario and she’s just torn to shreds about her act of violence and visibly changed for quite a while afterwards, despite the fact at that point, it’s not her first kill. Why the difference?
Those little character flaws I could accept in the end. It’s the ending that was extraordinarily unsatisfying.
Let’s put it this way. As soon as you realized that Ellie might have held the cure for the Cordyceps, or the key to some sort of vaccine, what did you think would happen to her? That they would run tests? Maybe do a biopsy? The Cordyceps is located in the brain, if you found that little slip of paper, close to the beginning of the game. So if you found that, you had to have known she was going to die for the cause. Everyone in the game had to have known too. So when Joel says that it’s still possible for them to go back to Tommy’s, Ellie looks like she knows what has to be done and that she wants to do it. For all of her friends that died, for everything that they’ve been through, it can’t all be for nothing.
In the final act of the story, the last 16 minutes or so, Joel turns from anti-hero to a creepy overbearing guy who doomed humanity to extinction so he could save Ellie not for her own self-interests, but his own. Even if you didn’t take away from previous conversations that Ellie would have sacrificed herself for a vaccine, she never even had a choice in the matter and if she did want to, it doesn’t matter; now, she’ll never be able to. To top things off, he lied to her about it and she knew he was lying. Everything about her behavior in the final scenes of the game showed that she knew he’d lied and was upset at that fact.
After everything, after everyone who had lost their lives, after all that they had been through; it was all for nothing.
What BULLSHIT!
I wasn’t expecting a happy ending out of The Last of Us, and I’m sure that people who might share my opinion weren’t expecting one either. But the way the game ended seems to have ended that way just to throw you off. Like the kid that says banana fifty times to suddenly say orange. You don’t expect it, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it.
Either that or it was to set The Last of Us universe up for a sequel. Which, I would ultimately look forward to.
You can still check out Jorge’s review if you need some kind of reaffirmation that there are people on this site who adore the game. Mind you, I didn’t say that I hated it; just…that it wasn’t all that it’s been made out to be. Have you got a game that everyone else seemed to love and you just didn’t get what all the fuss was about? Share your story in the comments section. I won’t judge.
