Crash Bandicoot (1996)
Jak and Daxter (2001)
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (2007) 5/10
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009) 6/10
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (2011) 5.5/10
The Last of Us (2013) 7/10
Left Behind (DLC, 2014) 6.5/10
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016) 5/10 +
The Last of Us Part II (2020) 7.5/10
Fresh out the summer-blockbuster action of the Uncharted series, Naughty Dog aimed to please a more masochistic audience, so they released The Last of Us, an aggressively bleak survival narrative set in a zombie apocalypse.
By design, the game is structurally about the same as Uncharted, with third-person adventuring, over-the-shoulder shooting, optional stealth sections, escorting NPCs with banter, indulgently long cutscenes, etc. The only practical changes would be the inventory/crafting systems and the updated control interface to suite it. Yet the color and emotional tone of the two series could not be any more stark.
During the game's production, the cultural saturation of zombie media hit a peak when The Walking Dead became a TV hit, and its emphasis on drama over the action, horror, and splatter of typical zombie narratives had definitely left an impression on the development team. Though the transmission of the zombie disease is unique (toxic spores that infect the brain of its host), much of Last of Us could have very well been Walking Dead fanfiction.
But imitation is an art in itself, right? Especially when translating mediums. Even if The Last of Us were some soulless Walking Dead knock-off, it is an admirable feat regardless to think that a group of artists found an artistic statement they resonated with and successfully transmitted it into a different medium. That's hard to execute well, but I think Last of Us did it.
But thankfully, The Last of Us is actually more than a Walking Dead clone. Its deeper vision unfolds as the story concludes, a vision less derivative and more focused. The universal suffering of the outbreak becomes a reflection of the protagonist's inner turmoil by the story's climactic end, and its morally apprehensive delivery seals the story's legitimacy as its own creative identity.
The two protagonist's stifled relationship warming up to its inevitable father-daughter kinship is immediately obvious and predictable, and is, in fact, a big reason why I found the game underwhelming on my first playthrough. This improved as soon as I played it a second time, knowing the journey's final destination. I thought their arc of friendship was the only thing the story had going for it without the context of what fateful ending was incubating in the process.
An expansion pack called Left Behind
With the hype of its predecessor (as well Uncharted 4 ), Naughty Dog's development of The Last of Us Part II suffered intense scrutiny by fans, and was met with polarizing reactions in both fans and critics upon release. The sheer volume and ferocity of the negative reviews particularly shocked me. Some just hated that the story involves a transgender adolescent and a lesbian couple, but these opinions were thankfully ridiculed. The more coherent diatribes described ideas that intrigued me rather than offend. The death of Joel and the redemption arc of his killer are both subjects I could get behind. Then my visceral experience of playing the game was instantly wonderful, I'd never been so hooked on a game story in years.
One specific improvement from the previous game's narrative is the lack of Joel and Ellie's predictable friendship arc (which videogamedunkey has described as "Zombie Up"). The story instead jumps straight into the complicated tension and drama within the cast of characters. As Joel is killed near the beginning, the story immediately subverts the one thing players expected to be consistent across its plot, which was Joel and Ellie's relationship. It also illustrates how indifferent the writers were in taking outrageously deadly turns for any character's fate. Players realize that if the writers are willing to kill Joel, then they're willing to kill anybody. The long mourning and lingering angst over his death even compels the player to realize the apocalyptic devastation that one death can bring, as vengeful hatred corrupts Ellie as well as Joel's killer, the new protagonist (and part player-character) Abby.
The journeys of their two narratives are not the most focused, but do maintain a consistent array of drama, sentiment, and action.
Its heavy anti-violence message despite participating in an inherently violent media was similarly criticized from audiences of Spec Ops: The Line. The aesthetic clash of morality here didn't bother, because it reminded me of the film Sonatine by Takeshi Kitano. In the history of Kitano's career as a yakuza movie star, he would often portray cold and violent gangsters. And yet Sonatine is a gangster movie but then it's a slice-of-life navel-gazer of all these violent gangsters laughing and playing childish games on the beach.