Is Last of Us a good game?
Quote from: Mordo on May 07, 2020, 02:57:07 PMYouTubethis is the most powerful weapon i've ever been bestowednow anyone who disagrees with ANY of my star wars opinions, they have to put up with knowing that they agree with ben shapiro
so are there any zombies in this game or
All right, I beat the first game, so here's some thoughts on it. Gonna leave spoilers untagged.Gameplay was aggressively mediocre and repetitive. Not unserviceable, but not very fun. None of the guns feel great to use, and you don't get rewarded enough for headshots (which should always be an instant kill, as far as I'm concerned). The gunplay in general is really bad before you start getting better weapons and good upgrades for them. Non-combat sections where you're just walking around, climbing ladders, and floating rafts over to Ellie (because she can't swim) are all very dull and tedious.There's somewhat of an emphasis placed on realism, which is fine, but it also draws attention to the game's less realistic elements and put my suspension of disbelief to the test on a number of occasions. Working with limited resources is the game's bread and butter, yet there are still parts of the game where you have infinite ammo. The stealth mechanics are also undermined by the game's terrible AI for ally characters, who seem enjoy recklessly zipping around all over the goddamn place in situations that would almost certainly fuck you over, but conveniently, they're set to never get caught, even though it's super distracting, super silly-looking, and takes me right out of the experience every single time it happens.The story is okay at best. I like how cinematic it feels, but the only two characters I actually cared about (for the most part) were Joel and Ellie. They're decently likable, possessed a pretty good dynamic, and shared some well-written, believable, and occasionally funny dialogue. The top-notch performances given by their VAs also helped in this regard. I could take or leave basically everybody else, though. I don't even know anyone else's name.I've seen this game referred to as a "cinematic masterpiece," though, and "the Citizen Kane of gaming," and to be perfectly honest, I find both of these statements to be utterly preposterous. When strictly considered from a moment-to-moment basis, this game is a slightly above average movie at best. If you genuinely think it could go toe-to-toe with some of the best films ever made, then you probably just haven't seen very many movies.My favorite parts of the game have more to do with specific scenes, rather than the story as a whole. The outcome of each and every ensuing death scene is highly predictable, but nonetheless manage to be emotionally effective somehow. The game's tragic intro, for example, is probably one of my favorite prologues to any game I've played in the past ten or so years—when I first saw those explosions from outside the window, I could feel my heart sink. Very powerful opening. The long and drawn-out scene where Joel gets near-mortally wounded is excellent. Having to control an injured and stumbling character in a gun fight is one of my favorite tropes, and the music that plays during the part where he collapses off the horse after escaping is probably the best in the game. Other moments that stood out to me include Henry and Sam's deaths, as well as Ellie's killing of David, which was the most viscerally satisfying and cathartic scene in the game.On the whole, though, I honestly didn't really like where the story went. In spite of the game's premise and genre, you actually end up killing about five times more non-infected humans than you do zombies, which is a little uncomfortable, even if it's ultimately justified because they're "bandits" or whatever. This discomfiting theme sort of comes to a head in the game's ending, where Joel goes full psychopath and shoots up the hospital that Ellie was left at in order to save her, because in order to create the vaccine they've been gunning for this whole time (you know, in order to save the fucking world), Ellie essentially has to die, and because she's basically become a daughter to Joel at this point, he decided that he's having none of that. The game even forces you to kill a (practically) helpless and unarmed doctor just for standing in your way, which made me feel really gross.I'll just come right out and say it: I don't agree with Joel's decision at all—which would be fine, because the protagonist doesn't always have to do the right thing every single time, and it's perfectly within Joel's character to make such a crude and selfish decision. But in this specific case, considering how it was executed, I think the story is ultimately worse off. There was a point where I was honestly getting into the story for a little bit, but the ending sort of ruined that for me. If Joel's decision was framed in a morally ambiguous way, rather than purely heroic, I'd have less of a problem with it. In fact, Joel probably should've died trying to save her, or something. That would've been more satisfying, because the gesture of his actions (and however you personally interpret them) remains intact, and Ellie's death (however you'd feel about it) would still have resulted in hope for a cure. That kind of ending is bittersweet—the ending we got instead is just bitter, especially when Joel had to lie about what had happened.Overall, I'm feeling a 6/10 on this. You can feel however you want about the story—it has some praise-worthy moments, but I wasn't impressed with how it panned out. In any case, I think it would be tough to deny the mediocrity of the gameplay.For my money, this is the most overrated game of all time, knowing how many 10/10s it got when it first dropped. I can't imagine what kind of normie state of mind you'd have to be in to consider this game anything more than "okay," even if you do love the story, but I've never really been into zombie games in the first place, so I'm definitely biased.
Don't you think the ending was where the game was naturally headed? It's not a game about zombies, it's a game about a father daughter relationship. Joel loses what he had at the beginning and spends the whole game building it back up. It doesn't make sense for him for him to lower his walls and accept Ellie, only to have him give her up. Also the cure plays very little into the game's theme except to serve as motivation for side characters
Quote from: Ingy on June 19, 2020, 09:47:24 PMDon't you think the ending was where the game was naturally headed? It's not a game about zombies, it's a game about a father daughter relationship. Joel loses what he had at the beginning and spends the whole game building it back up. It doesn't make sense for him for him to lower his walls and accept Ellie, only to have him give her up. Also the cure plays very little into the game's theme except to serve as motivation for side charactersI don't know if it "wouldn't make sense"—it would just make for a very depressing ending, which I guess just wasn't what they were going for (probably just so they could leave the door open for the sequel). People would find it just as upsetting, probably—just in the other direction.But yeah no, I totally get it. As I mentioned, it's perfectly within Joel's character to do what he did—I just didn't personally enjoy having an active role in his choice, because it's probably the only moral decision he makes that I outright disagree with. I've been on Joel's side the whole time, and although killing hordes of uninfected people (who are mostly just trying to survive like everyone else) made me apprehensive about Joel's morality, I was able to brush that off as, "This is just self-defense. These people are violent thieves; our cause is for the greater good of humanity."Basically, if I didn't see Joel as a hero, I saw him as an all-around good guy who's willing to do the right thing. He has a tendency to go overboard with the violence, but it's not like he's a Grand Theft Auto protagonist or some shit. He's just trying to survive, and if he does survive, it means the rest of humanity gets to survive as well. I was fine with this interpretation—so when the ending happened, and he decided to break Ellie out of that hospital, it's not like I didn't see it coming, but the bad taste it put into my mouth came more from how the scene is executed rather than the scene itself, because based on what actually happens during that part, it almost felt to me like playing as a totally different character, and one that I didn't recognize or like very much.So what I'm saying is, you can have it so the story ends in this direction, because I don't necessarily mind it in a vacuum—what I struggle to get behind is the specific way that they went about it. I think there's probably several small things they could've changed for the better while essentially telling the same story.The moment that pushed it over the line for me was having to shoot the doctor. It's the first time in the game where Joel kills somebody not out of self-defense, but out of cold blood. It was completely unnecessary, and made me feel pretty gross, especially considering that they were innocent people. The one doctor who I let survive called me a monster, which made me feel even worse.I know that's the probably the point, but if this is supposed to be a story about Joel's moral decay (and not the player's), I'm not really sure what forcing the player to engage with Joel's questionable decisions contributes to this story. They could've just given us the option to back the doctors into a corner by threatening them, or even scare them away by firing a few rounds at their feet or something. That wouldn't have been out of Joel's character, in my opinion, unless you think he's just a complete psychopath or something, which wasn't my read on his character at all.If they really wanted to go out with making the player feel like shit, though, why not make it so the players have to shoot Marlene to death at the end, rather than just have it play out in a cutscene? The fact that you don't leads me to think that the entire hospital scene could've just been a cutscene, too. That way, we get to see Joel commit to his deeds without having to be complicit. Alternatively, with that idea in mind, they could've had it so Joel tried his hardest to save Ellie, but wound up getting gunned down in the process. Again, that would certainly downer of an ending, but it leaves the character's arc perfectly intact while also having a more emotionally impactful ending that makes you feel for everyone involved. It would also be consistent with the game's overall tone, which is very bleak as it is.Killing the doctors in cold blood just felt needlessly rash—especially in a zombie apocalypse where doctors are extremely valuable, even if you don't like what they're doing.I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Does my perspective make more sense now? I didn't hate the ending itself—I just think they chose to handle it in an egregiously video game-esque fashion that was significantly less thoughtful and nuanced than the rest of the game's story, when I felt they could've handled it with a bit more tact and nuance.
So, The Last of Us 2 leaks....
