#hoo boy i did get everyone except the protagonists in on this didn't i

[a-student-out-of-time]

😮

//Hoo boy, here goes, hot take time

//The Last of Us doesn't deserve the acclaim it gets.

//Past its cinematic experience, it's a pretty vanilla entry in the zombie genre as a whole, and only really stands out thanks to its usage of Cordyceps zombies and its ending. Look past that, it's yet another story about finding and delivering the cure.

//Protag-man Joel also isn't a very likable or compelling character to me. All we ever really learn about him, we learn in the opening section. It's well done, don't get me wrong, but after the 20 year time skip, Joel is just an angry old man who never got past being a grieving father...and that's really it.

//I get that maybe that's the point, that we're supposed to read into Joel's character, but he never really talks about himself. He's defined almost entirely by his relationships, be it with Ellie, Sarah, Tommy, Tess, etc. Joel doesn't really have much of a character outside of how he relates to other people.

//If anything, he feels more like a blank slate for the audience to project onto and that really bothers me with the climax.

//TLoU is another game that tries to have a morally gray conflict and fails miserably. It's another game that tries to hammer it into your head that humans are the real monsters, how everyone is an asshole or a corpse, except for Ellie and Tommy, and by the end, the Fireflies, the people you'd been doing this mission for...just decide they're gonna kill Ellie to get the cure

//It's not built up, it's not foreshadowed, it's not hinted at, it just goes like this:

"We need to extract the fungal growths to make a cure." "But the fungus grows all over the brain" "I know. But she won't feel anything"

//There were so many other ways this could've been solved, so many better ways this could've been addressed, but no, we needed to shove in an action-heavy climax. One where Joel guns down a bunch of people who probably had nothing to do with this decision. Including shooting a man in the balls, repeatedly, and shooting a woman while she's down.

//I have to agree with Yahtzee's review, where it really feels like Joel's and Ellie's storyline is all that matters, while everyone who's not them can get fucked. Protagonist-centered morality as its finest.

//And yet Joel is still a selfish bastard, lying to Ellie's face about what happened just so he can have his new daughter, and even she doesn't buy it. I don't sympathize with Joel enough to say that what he did was okay, because the game doesn't give us enough information to work with

//The Last of Us thrives off of subjective emotional validation, where instead of giving us any kind of real tangible info to work off of, we're just given emotional beats that are meant to form the basis of our arguments and actions. Which is a problem for people like me, who can't get behind Joel or his actions, because he comes off as a self-centered asshole by the end of the game.

//I understand that it was intentional, and that it does go against a lot of the conventions of the genre, but I don't think they handled it well. All I know about Joel for certain is that he never got over his grief, and giving into that grief is how he could've potentially doomed the human race.

//Especially since, again, the climax feels rushed and poorly written just for the sake of having an action sequence. The Fireflies are underdeveloped as any kind of antagonist and just suddenly turn to evil by the end so you won't feel bad about killing them.

//At least until the second game, where you're supposed to feel bad for doing exactly that. But that game is one more people can agree on.

//Overall, I just don't like TLoU all that much. If you like it, you're more than welcome to do so. I just feel it didn't earn the overwhelming praise it received and still receives now.

//Here's hoping the show fixes these problems I have with it

#mod talks #a student out of time #ask game