Late to the Party - The Last of Us

As the coronavirus has quarantined us and forced us all to stare at our family members for much longer than we’d like, a lot of people have picked up useful hobbies to pass the time. Whether you’re learning how to play guitar, learning how to cook without using a microwave, or watching even more mind-numbing TV than you were before, it’s good to find a way to stay occupied.

As for me? Since our future demise is inevitable, I decided to get a glimpse of what June will look like by playing The Last of Us for the first time.

Yep. The Last of Us, the same 2013 game that became the most awarded video game of all time, has been collecting dust on my video game shelf, having never been played.

I knew it was phenomenal game. My friends have been telling me to play it ever since, well, 2013. I have a bad habit of finding a reason to skip out on popular and critically-acclaimed TV shows, movies, and video games, and The Last of Us was chalked up on that list. To me, The Last of Us looked like Uncharted with mushroom-faced zombies, and the gameplay didn’t seem fun enough to convince me to spend several hours on it.

And now for the rest of this blog post, I will explain how unbelievably stupid I am for waiting this long to play this game.

I did not expect to cry within the first three minutes of putting the disc in.

The Last of Us hits you in the feels from the very start, as we watch the main character, Joel, try to escape the dangerously infected Austin, Texas with his 12-year-old daughter, only for her to (spoiler alert) get shot and bleed out in his arms. From the beginning, we have an emotional connection with Joel and try to understand his thinking as we jump twenty years down the road. Now a smuggler in the remnants of a pandemic-washed society, Joel is gifted the role of escorting a teenage girl, Ellie, who is apparently immune to the deadly fungal virus. (I don’t really know why I’m telling you the story since you, unlike me, were probably smart enough to play the game when it came out.)

First off, The Last of Us is a visual cinematic masterpiece.

How a video game can so accurately encompass a real-life world that doesn’t exist yet, I do not know. The way the vegetation swarms over buildings, strangles the abandoned vehicles, and takes back control of its planet once humans are out of the picture is astounding. The landscape of the world has collapsed, with sink holes erupting and tilted buildings leaning on one another to keep from falling. Even the skyline background of the cities we visit – Boston, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City – is meticulously presented and even relatively accurate, just in case the player wants to focus on an unimportant building miles away. Even the soundtrack captures the game’s ambience by being rustic and distant, soft yet harshly reflective to the world and storyline the characters are living.

The Last of Us may have the most exciting gameplay I've ever experienced.

If the visuals weren’t convincing enough, the gameplay sure is. Most video games have so many items scattered around that you can’t help but laugh when you find a full magazine in a random NPC’s refrigerator. The Last of Us, however, is a survival game in every aspect. Finding ammunition is tough, and you have to really earn it by playing hide-and-seek in every room you enter. And even when you luck up and find three shotgun shells, you’re reluctant to use them, because they’re precious in damage but a nuisance in stealth. Finding materials are the same way, and you often have to choose between spending your valued scissor blades on either crafting a shiv or on an explosive nail bomb. With that said, the simple thrill of finding and rationing alcohol so you can craft a Molotov, then sending said Molotov into the ugly, stupid face of a Clicker is addictive. (I swear, I’d get an adrenaline rush every time I shot an arrow and it didn’t break.)

This feature of constantly weighing what is more valuable now turns you – the gamer – into a survival strategist, as you have to carefully consider how you’re going to kill each villain you face. Finish him easily with a shotgun blast and wake up the neighborhood, or risk getting caught by sneaking behind him and giving him a quick stabby-stab in the jugular? Decisions, decisions. And if you’re facing a Clicker, the tension pulses through the screen, as just one small slip-up gives you a cutscene of Joel (or, God forbid, Ellie) getting his/her throat chewed open. Yum.

The riveting and emotion-fueled plot far exceeds anything your local The Walking Dead writer would dream of writing.

The Last of Us has a simple premise: Ellie is immune to the deadly fungal virus, and Joel must take her to the Fireflies to find a cure for this disease. Yet, Naughty Dog doesn’t unnecessarily throw two or three dozen characters in only to fill-in dialogue and waste our time. The story revolves around the evolution of Joel and Ellie’s relationship together. With each city and with each introduced character, we watch Joel and Ellie gravitate toward each other closer and stronger. In a textbook example of character development, we watch Joel go from a bitter and calloused smuggler to a caring father-figure again. Ellie, on the other hand, is hard not to adore from the beginning. When she’s following you around while you’re curiously searching for items, she’ll playfully attempt to whistle or tell you cheesy jokes from her joke book. Naughty Dog does such a tremendous job creating a character who knows only the violent and dark life during the apocalypse, yet still maintains that youthful innocence that gives you hope that a better future is, somewhere, down the road for our characters.

My Final Verdict

I’m gonna be honest… I’m not a huge video game guy. In fact, I bought a PS4 like four days ago only because I was bored out of my mind in quarantine. But The Last of Us has that spark that makes you fall in love with a story, no matter if it’s from a video game or a best-selling book or a movie.

The Last of Us is, in every aspect, a remarkable, classic game. I don’t have much expertise to claim this, but I might even say that in terms of entertainment, The Last of Us is a perfect video game. Watching the trailer for The Last of Us Part II makes me itch for the next chapter in this story, but with the coronavirus causing delays in logistics, Naughty Dog had to move the game release back two months. I, of course, want to be angry, but if the Rona wouldn’t have trapped me in my house, I probably wouldn’t even have played the game in the first place. As long as Part II comes out before I turn into a Clicker myself, I’ll be happy.

My final score: 10 graphic Joel death scenes/ 10