3/5 ★ – kariyanine's review of The Last of Us Remastered.

I didn’t love The Last of Us when it came out seven years ago and I still don’t love it today. That said, going in for a second playthrough with the knowledge that I wasn’t going to enjoy the gameplay left me with a slightly different experience. Make no mistake about it, I still think The Last of Us’s gameplay is mediocre at best. However knowing that the gunplay would be excessively loose and innacurate, the stealth inherently broken, the AI incredibly stupid, and the combat encounters telegraphed allowed me to focus on the one thing that everyone raves about. It’s story. And The Last of Us has a good story. It is a well told story with strong characters. This isn’t inherently new to games, nor was it inherently new to games in 2013. The Last of Us was a refinement of the cinematic storytelling that had been emerging for the last decade prior to it. But it was one of the most competently and artistically put together. None of this came as any surprise to me though as developer Naughty Dog had been pushing hard in this territory for the entire generation, starting with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. And with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves they had maybe come the closest ever to achieving the perfect blend of interactivity with the cinematic experience. With The Last of Us they set a new bar on the cinematic experience side. The artistic and technical merits of The Last of Us can’t be bypassed. It was an amazing looking game in 2013 and still is today. The art design mixed with the technical know-how of the Naughty Dog developers and each area is finely crafted and adds to the visual storytelling that the game is doing in its interactive parts. Add in some great animation and top notch voice acting to go along with your solid story and you have something worthy of praise. My problem with The Last of Us in 2013 though remains the same in 2020. The Last of Us is not an adventure game where fine tuned mechanics aren’t always necessary. The Last of Us is a stealth action game and I don’t think it does either stealth or action particularly well. Check that, I do think the hand to hand combat in The Last of Us is top notch and if I could have fist fought my way through these games, I’d have enjoyed it a ton more. Instead though the game continuously put me in situations where it required me to be stealthy and if broken, overly punished me by forcing me to either succumb to death or use all of my resources to fight my way out, leaving me at a distinct disadvantage for the next encounter. And that isn’t to speak of the moments where the game forces you into combat and engaging with its subpar combat mechanics. The encounter design and shooting in The Last of Us is pulled straight over from Uncharted and while I also think it is subpar there, the difference is that in Uncharted ammo is rarely an issue. Miss a couple shots in Uncharted but take down the enemy and you can collect the gun your fallen foe had and replenish your supply to fight your bullet sponge pals some more. Enemies in 90% of the time in The Last of Us, enemies will have evidently fired their last shot at you just before you kill them. And I get it, it is a survival horror trope that has been with most games of that genre for a long time. My issue with that stance though is that, most of those games don’t see half a dozen enemies firing guns at you. And when a game’s combat encounters are designed and play out like it’s shooter sibling, the game should handle like a shooter. But enough about the gameplay I don’t get on with and back to the story… As I said, The Last of Us has a good story. It’s honestly nothing groundbreaking in the grand scheme of narratives but when compared against most other AAA video game narratives, it is way above the fold. But while I was able to better focus on the story Naughty Dog was telling here this time around, it also enhanced my opinion that there are major flaws in this approach to storytelling. Movies and books are passive storytelling mediums. Video games though are interactive by nature. You play them. You control the action on the screen. Your decisions, or inability to stay hidden because your playstyle is often that of a bull in a china shop, impact the game and how things play out often resulting in success or failure. More than likely the player embodies the protagonist. And a good game gets you on board with the decisions that the character has to make because you understand their motivations, because their motivations have been made your motivations. The Last of Us does this through 99% of the game. I’m on board with everything Joel and Ellie do except one thing. And no it isn’t his storming the castle to rescue Ellie, I would have done the same thing for one of my kids or one that I had taken on the guardianship for. The point being though, that one narrative decision I have no impact over spoiled the game for me. In a film or book, I have no impact on the story and as such am less invested. The good, the bad, it isn’t influenced by my interaction at all. Games are different and when you ask me to control a character for an hour or 15 hours, you are asking me to take on that persona. You are asking me to kill the countless people in my way as I progress to the stated goal but then when the hard stuff is done, you don’t give me the agency to make the decisions and personally, I feel they made a bad one. And after two plays now, it still doesn’t sit well with me. And when coupled with my dislike of the gameplay, this playthrough only pushed its ranking up a little bit. Aside from that though, I also played Left Behind. That was a cool little adventure. I don’t have any major issues with it other than the one area I felt was poorly designed and kind of bullshit. Overall though solid.