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| Drums. |
Ya, I'm back. After a billion years of not posting anything. But I read somewhere that for a blog to exist, you just have to churn content, so here I am. Sans vomit.
Anyways, why am I even using the word "necessary," here? First I'd have to lay down some context. Also, this is gonna be random so brace yourselves.
This is not a review and I am assuming you've if not played the game, seen enough Let's Plays in youtube to know the whole thing.
The Last of Us is a video game. An action-adventure videogame that focuses its narrative through a comprehensive prism of layered environmental exposition (and holy shit is it layered over gameplay) and cutscenes. For some reason this earned it the term cinematic.
The player mostly controls Joel, a surly fifty-ish old crusty dude with an almost pornographic fascination for being a SURVIVOR. Because, fuckit, when the world goes to shit and you stick around even after heart rending tragedy you are really in to stick it -- not win it, because nobody wins in this fucked up, godforsaken cesspool of a world twenty years after the fungal apocalypse.
Joel is eventually paired with Ellie. A smart fourteen year old girl who has no concept of the world other than "It is shit." For her, this fucked up, goforsaken cesspool of a world twenty years after the fungal apocalypse is all there is or ever has been. She likes comic books, whistling, and bustin' Joel's balls. And she's a badass.
Also, she is, likely, one of the best realized female protagonists the medium has ever had the luck of experiencing. So awesome is she that if you were to pit her versus the Hungar Games' Katniss Everdeen in a fight for the last can of soup in the world, Ellie would gut her before blurting "Endure and Survive."
Reminder: Here Be Spoilers, motherfuckers. Please be warned.
But, back to Joel: Old coot is basically, for gameplay and story reasons, stuck in what appears to be a perpetual escort mission where he picks up items, does some pared down Nathan Drake heroics here and there, shuts his mouth lest he be bit by fungy monsters, and moves shit around to facilitate companions moving around. This is also deep, deep stuff, surprisingly. Think Uncharted but with a lot more moving stuff around, less acrobatics, way more horrific, and bloodier/deppressed.
Over the course of the game some shit happens (Joel gets Crofted) and the player is forced to take control of Ellie, alternating between both characters afterwards and until the end of the chapter where crusty old bastard returns to being the defacto avatar of the player. This adds to the familiar artifice of the on-rails narrative that is weaved throughout the whole experience and into a game.
The on-rails narrative construct is the one where the player is taken by the hand and placed within a developing plot without say or consequence in its eventual conclusion. It is one inherited from the older forms of storytelling we are all familiar with and the one that is easier to implement in the medium.
It is, also, being abandoned as gaming slowly shifts to arranging experiences around more and more open ended and procedural settings. If you are a child gamer from the eighties, you likely came to notice it around the same time you first began playing the original Super Mario Bros. in 1985, where that fucking princess was always in another fucking castle. Until she wasn't, and the game just ended.
It isn't anything new, but, in this instance Naughty Dog made use of it not just well, or great, but Real Fucking Batshit Awesome Good. So good that this game is, effectively and without hype or exaggeration, the very artistic cusp of what has been and likely will ever be achieved using this particular setup. This alone justifies its weird uber-metaphorical title, in an odd way.
The Last of Us.
Now, why is a sequel neccessary? Especially considering what an accomplished piece of work it is. Well, because gameplay. Or rather, the complete lack of it. yeah, I know...
Follow me down the rabbit hole, if you will, 'cuz it gets weird...
Quick plot dump: the whole crux of the story revolves around Joel taking Ellie in a cross-country trip from hell to meet a group of anti-government resistance fighters that call themselves The Fireflies. Becuase they are supposedly working on a cure to the plague that nigh wiped the human race since, it turns out, Ellie is the only known immune human being in the world of the fungal apocalypse -- Basically: the exact sort-of-layout of the movie CYBORG sans Van Damme, characters hilariously named after musical instruments, or just, you know, CRAP/AWESOMENESS (your mileage may vary).
The plot demands that shit be taken seriously when it comes to the amount of leeway it has to do away with. In game time, the trip takes months and months. Stuff does not get resolved quick, lending an episodic vibe to the proceedings. Because of this, Joel and Ellie grow closer and closer in an organic non-manipulative way that is respectful of the audience's intelligence. Their relationship evolves to resemble the one between a parent and his child/partner. Basically, Joel becomes The Boss to Ellie's Snake, sans the awkward, murderous sexual tension.
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| Swap the sexes and pretty much everything else save the basics, but just, if not more, dramatic. For realsies. |
When all is said and done and they find themselves at journey's end, shit hits the fan and all seems lost (Ellie, who can't swim, falls to the water and almost drowns) yet they unwittingly manage to make it to the fireflies (and on accident, no less).
After taking a rifle butt to the face and passing out (because dramaz), Joel wakes up in a hospital, where the Fireflies have shacked up, to be greeted by Marlene.
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| Her. And No, she's not a crewmember of the Battlestar Galactica. |
She, stupidly, informs Joel that he can't meet with Ellie 'cuz she's getting prepped for surgery, so all's good, right? Fuck no. Turns that for the scientists to be able to synthesize a cure from Ellie's mutated fungal infection they'll need to scramble her brains. Permanently. With a scalpel, because that's where it spreads to. For great justice.
So, what is Joel, a worn, battered, but still very much a dangerous killer, whose feels have been rekindled, to do? Fuck shit up. Hard. That's what.
And shit up does he fuck. Depending on the player's playstile, the Fireflies get mowed down by Joel's self-righteous indignation, to varying degrees, as he saves Ellie's life. And here is where The Last of Us goes full meta. Because it is a game. An interactive experience whose main driving plot point is the notion of choice between the extremes of the human condition and its consequences -- Why do we choose to bother with helping others? If we can't deal, can't cope, why not choose to end it all? Is choosing survival for survival's sake really moral?, etc.-- and then it takes it all away from you entirely.
It forces you to doom the human race. Because Joel. Becuase his feels.
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| Dramatic rendering of the Event. |
Post insane last chapter, a recently awekened Ellie is fed an outlandish story of how the Fireflies failed one too many times to make a cure that they stopped trying, reeks of utter crap. And it tastes like bullshit. Because it requires that she believes that there were dozens others like her already there. Because it requires that she believes that after nearly drowning and passing out she then, conveniently, woke up in a car with Joel at the wheel. Because it requires that she believes that, whatever went on during sleepy time, it didn't have anything to do with Joel murdering anyone for her sake, even though she knows that's what Joel does.
Yet, she passively chooses to accept it. Because he's Joel and he loves her as she loves him. So despite some hard earned self reliance a part of her is still made to do as the Big Man says.
Putting things in perspective: she's a girl who has lost everyone dear to her because that's just how shit is, and there's fuck all to do 'bout that so all there is to do is keep going...
Ellie symbolizes the every-kid of the post fungal apocalypse, except she struck the post fungal jackpot and it turns out that she's special. Suddenly she has somebody that gives not half a shit, or two shits, but all the shits. To hell and back. For her. And he means it.
This is evident by her feeling down just before the fateful meeting with the fireflies. She knows that, whatever happens, her raison d'être --she's the kid that carries the cure-- is just about to expire and there's an insecurity that it all might go away bound to that realization, even though Joel goes on and on about future plans like a proud dad.
It is at this point when Ellie's personal drive through the whole game becomes horribly apparent: she just doesn't want to be meaningless the same way everyone else is meaningless in this world.
Having known her all her life Marlene knew it, and so she was convinced that Ellie would be willing to go full Messiah if she had to -- an argument that doesn't sit well with Joel, so she gets some lead in her head. He never gives a second thought about what is really at stake here.
We are shown that Quarantine Zones are getting abandoned by the military, that the infection is spreading, that people are resorting to cannibalism to survive, and that the single most important person in the world just dug some bullshit story and surrendered all her agency to the needs and demands of the most powerful authority figure in her life.
Joel, on his part, is unable to part with Ellie, not after going through so much, doing so much, culminating in his finally finding somebody to fill the black hole of his daughter's death. Her mere presence makes him feel truly alive again and rekindles that sense of manhood he lost after the apocalypse hit.
Thus Joel, the ultimate nurturer, doesn't just want to live, not for himself. Joel wants to live for someone else. He wants to teach Ellie how to swim, just like he taught her how to shoot a rifle, wield a knife, or be quiet when quiet is all you can be. And this is the single most selfish thing in the world.
Ellie gets to be as close as a kid as can be, finally, and Joel gets to look after her, while the world burns. There are two objective wrongs here, one of action and one of omission.
And the game ends.
Ellie once alluded at wanting to make the ordeal count, no matter what.
"This can't all be for nothing."
Yet it was not enough. Love purportedly kills mankind in the slowest of ways.
Or does it? Continuing the metanarrative argument, The Last of Us is not only the cusp of the "on-rails" narrative construct in video games but also both an interesting, if simplistic rendering of parenting and being parented that, ultimately, culminates in the latter. You, as the player, are reduced back into the child you once were when you were playing Mario, when you still took the word of your protector for what it was. The Word.
Even if the you of today is not entirely okay with it.
But, does it have to be? Not really. There's enough development and drama sprinkled on the piece to make an argument of necessity twards continuing said overarching meta narrative.
It is true that the game prevents the player, just as it did Ellie, from carrying out an important choice -- Joel, as the parent, takes it upon himself, and the player just follows along. In doing so, Naughty Dog creates a powerful dramatic representation of the power dynamics between the adults and the children they look after. It also manages to dodge the bullet of having the plot collapsing into a bad gaming crutch (choose ending A or B. Game over), or even having it devolve into controversy of having Ellie's agency as a fully formed female character completely stripped away only for a man to decide whether she lives or dies.
Were there to be a sequel, and judging from both commercial and critical reception, that is likely the case, it would open the doors to interesting things. But not just for any sequel. We are at a time where video games have sort of begun to move beyond a prolonged stage of post adolescence and begun to stress the confines of what traditional narrative structures can afford. If there is a story that deserves to be tackled in different, potentially more fulfilling ways it is this one.
Creative director Neil Druckman wanted the game to be about something and he made it happen. Now, fully weighting the merits of the existing piece, what The Last of Us was to "on-rails" narrative and childhood, the sequel ought to be to actual, palpable "choice-based" narrative and coming into maturity -- this just hasn't been done yet.
Why not? The story of letting agency slip away has already been told.
I say let Ellie make her choice. As an adult.
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