ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS The Last Of Us

[Music] hello and welcome back to video games I'm Tim Rodgers you are watching the action button review of The Last of Us a video game developed by naughty dog LLC and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the Sony Playstation 3 computer entertainment system on Friday June 14 2013 and on the Sony Playstation 4 Computer Entertainment System on Tuesday July 29th 2014 directed by Neil druckmann and Bruce Straley written by Neil druckmann with an original musical score by two-time Academy Award winner Gustavo Santaolalla starring Troy Baker as Joel and Ashley Johnson as Ellie for those lacking the constitution to view this review in full let us begin with the bottom line The Last of Us is a great game by default I don't mean to imply the game came without effort when I call the Last of Us great by default I simply mean that it represents the destination at the end of a path honest and true The Last of Us as makers made all 12 play hours of The Last of Us the way Ernest Hemmingway to have written a sentence except with more crafting ingredients and video game graffiti The Last of Us demonstrates the powerful result of a creative investigation aiming to locate the precise truths at the core of its superficial inspirations The Last of Us is a great video game composed out of provably true conclusions about other great video games when I announced in my video review of the Final Fantasy 7 remake that I'd review the Last of Us next I received many concerned questions and comments from viewers wanting to know why I'd picked such a quote-unquote normal game I'd like to reply to a lot of my Twitter DM s usually cryptically I told some viewers that all the ladders and the Final Fantasy 7 remake had reminded me of the Last of Us as puzzles I told others that after playing the Final Fantasy 7 remake I wanted to try reviewing a game with no filler one individual told me that when they hear the name The Last of Us they think of quote just another zombie shooting stealth game unquote replaced zombie shooting stealth with survival horror grimdark dad awards bait triple-a or prestige and you just about have the measure of the Comets now I won't directly disagree with any of these analyses however I'll apply to these concerns here in this video the same reply I offered to many twitter direct messages sounds what you should just watch my review anyway in this review I plan to go to exhaustive and exhaust ting length to communicate how the last of us amounts to a mountains worth more than the sum of its parts or the summary of its particular inspirations I hope to illustrate to you that the Last of Us is not derivative it is a video game made of video games The Last of Us is not just a zombie game no The Last of Us over achieves with shrill profanity upon the salted graves of each tired trope of those video game genres and subgenres that made it the Last of Us stretches down its majestic neck and clamps hard onto the lowest hanging fruits with teeth unbelievable The Last of Us is not just a dad game The Last of Us is not just a modern triple-a single-player Awards baiting action video game The Last of Us is the dad of all modern triple-a single-player Awards baiting action video games The Last of Us is designers scavenged video game history and took only exactly as much as they needed to make an objectively great video game in doing this they calculated an ironclad mathematical pathway connecting Resident Evil Metal Gear Solid and call of duty 4 modern warfare 1 therefore to study the last of us is to glimpse every crystalline particle of work that a game designer does today in other words I want to review the Last of Us because I consider it to be the perfect representative of the prestige era of video games we could call the Last of Us the The Sopranos of video games that'd make BioShock Infinite the the wire of video in a parallel universe where the wire isn't good reviewing the last of us a video game made of video games is probably the best possible way to truly begin my series reviewing great video games the connections we Forge here today between the last of us a great game by default and the Final Fantasy 7 remake a good game that I like despite its faults will finalize the building of the action button methods mysterious toolbox at last equipped with completed tools we can go on to assess my long quirky stupid list of favorite video games that I started this series so I'd have a paycheque 'red excuse to play them again all those reasons aside I want to review the Last of Us because the Last of Us is one of the few video games I actually own a physical copy of you've perhaps noticed by now detective that I am NOT like quote-unquote other youtubers most unimpressive Lee you will notice that I lack an overburden to shelf of shockingly / valuable vintage video games in my backdrop the more eagle-eyed in the audience might have already noticed that I present to you from a barren living room I did own a shocking mountain of then slightly appreciated now borderline priceless video games once in the far past basically I had in 2001 just about everything you'd see if you searched eBay for expensive video game today in 2020 I sold my entire appreciating game collection piecemeal for ridiculous bargain prices so as to afford an escape from the American Midwest because to be honest I was a privileged 22 year old recently college graduated American male and I believed myself entitled to a globe spanning adventure I accumulated another large collection of video games in my eventual new home of Tokyo Japan as an individual in my late 20s this second collection was quirkier and made up of less fiscally stressful though more spiritually valuable to me video games such as the complete Dragon Quest series pong katsu Roman dicots a geeky bond Peter Otto Zetas jetsam a Toshi - god odin break blow fists or twist our Modine berwick saga god hand dataset or ascendant a whole kernel taka hands same essential and various other video games I loved for reasons no one else had given to me I made those reasons myself well I lost that game collection in a philosophical accident in my new new home of Oakland California between 2010 and 2017 I accumulated another game collection mostly consisting of trash and handouts at some point either to indulge my precious minimalism or perhaps in a moment of dark reflection upon the trauma of having lost to equally massive differing Lee priceless game collections and diametrical II dissimilar philosophical accidents I began to build a digital library in 2015 I was the first American man in history to ever come home from a business trip to Japan with less than one full suitcase of vintage Japanese videogames in fact I only brought one game back with me from that trip Vader said of course an mentaiko cannot occur in same essential in 2017 I kohn-ma deed my physical video game collection I dumped the trash and handouts into the trunk of my decommissioned Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor I let a friend pick through them somehow he ended up taking all of them veto that was disgusting you need to clean your house I moved cross-country to New York City my belongings languished in a buddy's Californian garage until I'd found this apartment two months later my personal article has arrived from California videogames filled half of one of my six cardboard boxes between 2017 and today despite spending the better part of three years working at a job where I played a new free video game every day despite the publishers who put out the most games refusing to send digital codes and insisting on sending physical copies of their biggest limited editions I have somehow arrived at the present moment with a video game collection that occupies two-thirds of one Sterilite brand plastic storage tub from Target it's clear with purple handles it's behind my so and we keep the vacuum cleaner on top of it I can tell you off the top of my head - the contents of that box Panzer Dragoon Panzer Dragoon spy ASSA Panzer Dragoon RPG kawaii cochon no this is cool gaming no magazine Dragon Quest 510 Counahan Ayame complete in box for the Nintendo Super Famicom Dora conquest the 510 conohan Ayame for the Sony Playstation 2 Dragon Quest 510 conohan Ayame for Nintendo DS Dragon Quest 5 hand of the heavenly bride for Nintendo DS Dorado in quest oito Sora Tulum ito Daiichi tone or awara she/he McGee me for the Sony Playstation 2 Dragon Quest of shown and youngest oafish Aquino Don John for the Sony Playstation 2 godhand dragon quest 11 tsuki sorry she took you all moto mighty for Nintendo 3ds dragon quest 11 tsuki sorry she Tokyo moto-meter for Sony Playstation 4 better set of course intent a coconut akka in same essential Super Mario Brothers 3 complete in box for the Nintendo Famicom secret of evermore complete in box for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System got Odin break blow fist or twist slime Morty Morty Dragon Quest 1 for the Gameboy Advance 2 for the Nintendo DS and 3 for the Nintendo 3ds Saru gets you three or ape escape 3 for the Sony Playstation 2 20 for the game for the Sony Playstation 2 berwick saga Wild Arms 5 the beeth Vanguard it says beeth you see that veeth Vth a copy of landstalker for the sega megadrive signed by designer director Cognito all four volumes of the original doom novel series by Daffy adapt hew loaned to me by my good friend and Action Button partner Brent Porter Breath of Fire 5 dragon quarter Sopranos road to respect dragon quest one two and three for the Nintendo Famicom Dragon Quest 1 and 2 and Dragon Quest 3 for the Nintendo Super Famicom the nightmare of druaga mystery dungeon chronicles of dungeon maker 1 and 2 for the Sony PlayStation Portable for those about to say what about my English copy of lost odyssey inside of a Japanese case for lost odyssey I do have a small shelf under my television with a couple video games on it I keep it on their fantasy star 2 for the Sega Megadrive though admittedly just for the Japanese box art shining into the darkness and Shining Force 2 for the Sega Mega Drive cocka cocka do a stand alone complex for the Sony Playstation 2 a Japanese copy of psyops the mind gate conspiracy for the Sony Playstation 2 persona 5 2 copies of Dragon Quest eleven echoes of an elusive age for the Sony Playstation 4 Final Fantasy 15 Final Fantasy 12 zodiac age and the Last of Us remastered for the Sony Playstation 4 those last six games I got for free I paid for the rest I'll admit I get rid of a lot of the physical video games I get for free I know that as per the non-disclosure agreements I sign I'm not exactly supposed to throw away free video games lest some imaginary non credentialed dumpster diver chance upon a rollicking good time though I genuinely don't like having stuff in my house in fact I have in the past and recently so as to simultaneously satisfy my minimalistic urges while obeying NDA's to the letter transformed several blu-ray discs at once into dust with a hammer I didn't get rid of persona 5 either of the two English copies of Dragon Quest 11 or of Final Fantasy 15 and Final Fantasy 12 zodiac age for the PlayStation 4 because I liked those games and I liked their boxes three of those are steelbook cases two of those steelbook cases have original yoshitaka amano art on them and you cannot throw yoshitaka amano art in the trash even if you melt it down first in a cast iron skillet on the stove which I believe is most publishers is nd a specified method for properly disposing of a steelbook case I also need to point out real quick that the purple handled Sterilite brand storage tub from Target under my vacuum cleaner also contains a FedEx envelope containing a handwritten note from Yuji Horii as thanks from Square Enix for my dragon quest 11 video in addition to four more curious items a Jurassic Park coloring book a poster of Jim Lee's cover art for the blizzard game black thorn from an issue of electronic gaming monthly a laminated advertisement for the Capcom NES game codenamed Viper and an unopened iron-on image of the North American cover art for Super Mario Brothers 3 these four items were all birthday presents from none other than the video game history foundation's founder and insert credit podcast weekly panelist Frank sovaldi that guy knows how to give a birthday present that quote-unquote sparks joy Frank if you're watching I'm still looking for the right t-shirt and one of these days I will Google framing shops in my neighborhood for that black thorn poster probably after I move the week after uploading this video I look forward to being probably the only resident of Upper West Side Manhattan with a black thorn poster on their living room wall there's probably some other stuff in there too okay we don't have to like this sealed DVD of bloodsport for starring Daniel Bernard I will never open this because I already own it on iTunes I will keep this DVD and I will keep it sealed until the day I die that's a guarantee that we don't have to talk about all of it I only still possess the Last of Us remastered because delicious McCune gave it back when he beat it delicious McCune did not give back my copy of the Last of Us for PlayStation 3 or my copy of Uncharted 4 a thief's end for PlayStation 4 so that's why I don't have the Last of Us for PlayStation 3 or Uncharted 4 a thief's end for PlayStation 4 in the Sterilite brand purple handled plastic storage tub from Target 2/3 full of video games beneath my vacuum cleaner let me make you a promise I will never throw away or otherwise purposely get rid of a naughty dog video game having said that the Last of Us remastered is somehow the only Naughty Dog game I currently own let me tell you why I will never throw away or otherwise purposely get rid of a naughty dog video game because I would personally consider it apocalyptically bad luck I can't prove that anyone at Naughty Dog likes me though I can say the I have never paid for a naughty dog videogame I found rings of power for Sega Genesis in my school bathroom it was by the sink I played my dorm neighbors copies of Crash Bandicoot 1 & 2 a guy I worked with at the software etc College Mall in Bloomington Indiana in 1999 gave me way of the warrior for 3do and I didn't even have a 3do in 2003 I wrote a scathing dissection of the jak 2 demo disc for the website insert credit.com which somehow instigated a chain reaction leading to Naughty Dog to this day sending me every game they ever make for free my name got on a list and I think it's still on that list so while I can't say I have quote-unquote friends at Naughty Dog I can say that Naughty Dog does send me a Christmas card every year they even sent me Christmas cards when I lived in Japan so now that I've dug the chasm let's leap the logic listen I feel that it's partially my fault that the Last of Us exists exactly the way it does I'm not saying I deserve credit for any specific percentage of its awards or accolades I'm just saying that for a period of a few years I experimentally pontificated about several Spartan video game design principles on a website of decent traffic Action Button net at one point in a blend of textual performance art and genuine critical curiosity whose Lines's blurriness continues to confound me even today I composed what I jokingly and then unfortunately seriously named the action button dotnet manifesto this supposed ranked list of the 25 quote-unquote best games of all time served for most as an opportunity for me to write reams of unfettered positivity unto my website that had become mildly known for critical snip enos while simultaneously sketching the bones of a quote unquote perfect game within the paragraphs of each to pest rias 5000 word review all the meanwhile I've readied my secret weapon that this list counted down to none other than a revealed that number one was not Metal Gear Solid 4 once the aftertaste of the joke had washed away I revealed that the only video game which fit all of these skeletal criteria sketched across that hideous novel-length tapestry of typing was none other than out of this world known in Europe as another world and in Japan as outer world over 1 million people clicked on my review of out of this world most of them immediately clicked away though the game's creator himself Eric chahi did not he sent me a beautiful email I'd framed that email if I knew a good framing shop I later spent an afternoon with Eric chahi in San Francisco we discussed many topics you may have noticed for example that Eric chahi name alone makes up the special thanks section of Action Button entertainments video balls credits this is perhaps why Eric chahi is one of the six business cards I carry in my passport case every time I travel internationally we can talk about the other five some other time maybe at this point you want to ask what all this has to do with the Last of Us sort of a lot it's like this the action button net manifesto tumbled out of my idiot skull in parallel with the most personally frustrating professional exercise I had ever yet endured as of my late 20s at the time the action button dotnet manifesto project occurred to me as an idea I was in the middle of working on a game that was to be published by Electronic Arts EA was at this time branching out with a program they called EA partners their plan was to make a bunch of new big-budget single-player Awards Beatty action game intellectual properties maybe you played Mirror's Edge or Dante's Inferno or dead space every time the EA producers came to our office which required them to fly to Japan by the way they showed us the env Abul progress the developers of dead space were making we were really excited to work with the kind of budget they were offering us I remember one producer saying during a follow-up meeting after the EA boys were on their way back to the airport that and I quote we could Maker's Alta with this money then another guy said forget Zelda let's make something beautiful to this day I can hear his voice I recall his exact phrasing Zetter that was it at the lucky doll it's a cushy game it's good an icon and that man went on to make the Legend of Zelda breath of the wild game of the year 2017 that's not true after that meeting people in my office kept mentioning eco and Shadow of the Colossus somewhere during this Metal Gear Solid 4 came out the artistic aspirational zeitgeist of my professional environment bled into my hobby and yes I realized my hobby as a game developer was snippet Lee reviewing videogames on a purposely ugly website we can talk about the psychiatric ramifications of that later suffice it to say the action button net manifesto presented such strict dogmatic criteria for a quote-unquote perfect video game because I was at the time professionally trying to figure out what exactly perfect meant in the context of a bank transfer in an undisclosed Allura mount both of our games co-producers Resident Evil and god hands Shinji Mikami and No More Heroes and killer sevens go Ichi Sudha had never failed to call out of this world the best game of all time when ever an interviewer asked that particular mundane question other designers I admired such as echoes Fumito Ada and moon remix RPG Adventure chulip and true love roses yoshi doki moana spoke the same opinion so did a designer I wanted to admire myself perfunctorily out of this world arrived as the obvious thunderclap that concluded the action button net manifesto if you'd been following the list closely as I unveiled the reviews over the course of a month you knew it couldn't possibly have been any other game the gesture out of the bag my readership moved on my life flowed on when I consider the ensuing decade my memory Forks on the one hand my life became trash if I push out thoughts of that trash I can sketch a pleasant trail of friendly letters and enthusiastic handshakes many triple-a video game designers corresponded with me via email and greeted me in person at events such as the Game Developers Conference for a while I basked appreciatively and professionally needful e in many offers to have persons more intelligent and accomplished than myself buy me lunch many of them told me generally the same thing that they'd read action button and that I'd changed the way they think about such-and-such granular element of game design it was always a slightly different granular element of game design eventually they all brought up out of this world the truth is I peaked as a designer when I cracked the out-of-this-world code for an audience of over a million people most of whom didn't read past the first paragraph if they had read past the first paragraph they'd have seen a phrase whose drum I had banged elsewhere throughout the action button dotnet manifesto internal consistency out of this world presents us a holistic video game which marries cinematic aspirations to game design to level design in a perfect polygamist triangle out-of-this-world showed the world how far a game could get on the fumes of one man alone if it ran with the maxim of truth to itself I perpetrated no act of talent in spelling out the perfect video game I was just saying what a lot of designers at the time were probably thinking I said it because I didn't see anyone elses saying and I figured if I said at first a lot of people would pay attention to me I didn't have money so I took what I could get with my declaration of out of this world as the best game of all time by a labyrinth een set of hyper strict and quite frankly unfair criteria I peeked I had finally finished dumping my entire circuit 2008 game designer brain onto the Internet how far which crows carried its scraps I cannot Peru however I can say that the Last of Us represents the exact videogame the action button dotnet manifesto so painstakingly sketched five years before its release and thus the Last of Us represents the first and last video game that my admittedly limited imagination will perhaps ever perfectly understand any designer with or without formal training could therefore have designed the last of us in their head or on paper as far back as 2008 Naughty Dog's miracle was just such that they took this idealized notion of a perfect game and dedicated themselves to the years of daily work it took to make it I won't say that the Last of Us is exactly the same game as out of this world though I will say that it does feature a guy escaping from a submerged underwater car at one point out of this world begins with the player swimming up out of water the first zombie kill and the Last of Us happens in third person just like the monster kill in out of this world in the Last of Us the first action we perform when in control of our avatar Joel is kicking our way out of a car via repeated button presses just like how and out of this world we shake our way out of a cage out of this world has a climactic scene where the player character must cinematically crawl toward a weapon that will kill their enemy and the Last of Us also contains a scene where the player character must crawl toward a weapon that will kill their enemy The Last of Us is about a big guy with a small buddy and so is out of this world out of this world opens with an authority figure firearm idli betraying our suspicions of their friendliness and so does the Last of Us so I'm not saying out of this world into the Last of Us are the exact same game or anything I'm just saying the parallels are there and they are huge anyway look you don't have to take my word for it I mean to be honest I don't even take my word for it if you've never played The Last of Us and you think it's quote just a zombie game on what you're doing right there is judging a book by it's cover and you know what they say about judging a book by it's cover they say don't do that besides the last of us doesn't even have a zombie on the cover I mean if you really wanted to judge the Last of Us by it's cover you'd call it a teenage sniper girl game however you can judge a cover as a cover and how the holy heck are you going to argue with the Last of Us remastered up top graphic designed proud declaration of over 200 game of the Year awards that's at least two hundred and one Game of the Year awards if you come up to me and you tell me that you just won two hundred Game of the Year awards I'm gonna call a doctor for you I mean won Game of the Year award call your mom ten Game of the Year awards call your mom twice 200 game of the Year awards though buddy you might as well just die so why did the Last of Us win over 200 Game of the Year awards actually before we talk about that let's get serious did the last of us actually win over 200 Game of the Year awards how many Game of the Year awards are there like a thousand I checked during the process of writing this script I'm currently reading off my brand's new teleprompter paid for by generous backers of patreon.com slash action button and it turns out you don't need any kind of license to give out a game of the Year award me and action button researcher Alex Jaffe did a little internet speed logging in search of at least 200 and won Game of the Year awards for the Last of Us we ended up well almost immediately finding Cody picks blogspot.com which reports that The Last of Us in fact won 231 game of the Year awards making it the most awarded game in history in fact if there's 231 on this list chances are there are at least 230 one more out there maybe some of the award givers sent their awards to Naughty Dog in an email or tucked into a Christmas card actually this gives me an idea starting this year I will commissioned an illustrator to design a nondenominational holiday card themed around action buttons choice for game of the year I will not publicize this card I won't even announce my choice of the game of the year on Twitter I'll simply send this card directly to the game of the year's director if the director chooses to publicize the card they may again I won't publicize my choice of game of the year having said that if anyone from CD Projekt RED is watching this video my business enquiries email address is prominently featured in my Twitter profile so let's return to the more interesting question why did the last of us win quote over 200 game of the Year awards unquote what makes the last of us the most awarded game in history doesn't this distinction alone make it worthy of an action button review I'm being serious here I really do think this is a spectacularly good reason to review this particular game for this series so why did the Last of Us win more Awards than any other game in history why did it somehow lose the spike vgx award for 2013 game of the year and more importantly why would it definitely win Game of the Year at the Game Awards if it were released in 2020 to answer these questions I could read all the individual reviews of all the major mainstream publications that awarded the Last of Us Game of the Year in 2013 and I have though I promise I didn't do that until after I wrote all of this review before I went ahead and read all the individual reviews on all the major mainstream publications that went on to award the Last of Us Game of the Year for 2013 I typed up the following list of ingredients for video game Oscar bait after reading all the individual reviews on all the major mainstream publications that went on to award the Last of Us Game of the Year for 2013 I realized all my predictions had been correct so I didn't need to edit this section video game Oscar bait review symptom number 1 references to movies or books that won awards 5 or so years before the game was released in the case of the Last of Us those films would be children of men the road and No Country for Old Men and those books would be Cormac McCarthy's the road it's actually just one book I found that it generally takes video game developers five years to transform inspiration from a film into coherent game design a side note I actually didn't see any reviews for major mainstream media outlets that went on to award the Last of Us game of the Year 2013 mentioned No Country for Old Men even wants which is weird because there's a whole lot of Josh Brolin's Llewellyn Moss all over Troy Baker's Joel it ends with that that snap to black after a character says speaks a very short sentence come on there's there's a lot of parallels there video game Oscar bait review symptom number two allusions to the violence as uncomfortable critics love calling violence and violent video games uncomfortable critics love insinuating that the game is trying to make you feel uncomfortable to prove some kind of cosmic point let's face it discomfort is a shortcut to making violence meaningful just like an apocalypse is a shortcut for level design it's not the writers who like writing about post apocalypsis it's the level designers who now have a quote-unquote world's building excuse for all the furniture in the world to have fallen over before the player shows up the thing is if you drench a game enough in this kind of world building if you commit to really owning it the way the Last of Us does you got yourself a firecracker video game Oscar bait review symptom number three absolute awe at the aplomb with which Naughty Dog painted the portrait of a burgeoning friend elationship between an old sad dad and a girl who both reminds him of his dead daughter and doesn't this is anecdotal though all of the game critics I knew personally circa 2013 had either had a child or seriously thought about having one or they'd at least gotten married I had not done the first one had done the second one and just barely did not do the third one Nintendogs got a 40 out of 40 from feminine - in 2005 so that the last of us could win over 200 Game of the Year awards in 2013 I have this sentence in my script here and there's there's no period on it it's like I suppose I left an unfinished thought in there not a hundred percent sure what I was going to try to say no you know what I'm leaving it video game Oscar bait review symptom number four bursting appreciation of the idea of a complex female character in a video game Ellie is not a princess you have to save in fact she saves you several times at the time the Last of Us came out I don't think we had ever had a female video game character as complex as Ellie or at least as interesting and anywhere near quite the same way I'm being subjective here I know though I promise I racked my brain before writing that sentence the one a more objective note young human teenage girls possessing names voiced dialog gameplay agency unique gameplay mechanics and literary complexity in a believably realistic story set on planet earth did not actually exist as a thing prior to the Last of Us I realize I put a lot of qualifiers on that sentence though hopefully over the course of the rest of this video I'm going to show you so many numbers that you'll trust me about so many things that you'll loop back around to trusting me about this one as well video game Oscar bait review symptom number 5 dissection of the combat encounter design as requiring improvisational weaving together of stealth gun shooting and item crafting in moment-to-moment doses and encouragement of long-term planning due to item scarcity video game Oscar bait review symptom number 6 absolute all at the environment design particularly stressing the explosiveness of the game opening segments The Last of Us predates saturated Lee frequent critical usage of the word prestige to describe either a television series or a big-budget video game some of the Last of Us is most wowing portions consist of combat less violence on obstructed Muir traversal an injection of this flavor now and again in an action video game early in the 2010s always earned accolades today in 2020 I tend to call this sort of moment in a game a prestige tour The Last of Us employed them masterfully and their use probably contributed to the overall fruitfulness of the Last of Us this awards Hall Game Critics in 2013 unlike me in 2020 did not possess knowledge of the next seven years of video games so I today have a couple other theories about why the Last of Us conquered the idea of Game of the Year awards quite so sweepingly first of all its release window on the microscale The Last of Us came out in June of 2013 unlike with films the games that win the most awards tend to come out during the first half of a year games take a long time to play critics have better memories of games they finished critics play a lot of games critics have to finish every game they review critics don't review every game critics don't always have time to play the games they want to play critics don't get to finish every game they want to play I've proven this elsewhere with statistics the second half of the year is when you release a film you want to win awards the first half of the year is when you release a game of the Year contender my second theory as to why the Last of Us won so many Game of the Year awards in 2013 its release window on the macroscale The Last of Us came out at the end of the PlayStation 3 era just 5 months before the launch of the PlayStation 4 Naughty Dog has always insisted on displaying complete ownership of the technical aspect of video game presentation Naughty Dog masters Sony hardware faster than any other developer they made Uncharted 1 at the beginning of the PlayStation 3's lifecycle by the end of the PlayStation 3s lifecycle their power was unstoppable the Last of Us arrived looking as I recall several people saying on Twitter like a next-gen game it looked so much like a next-gen game in fact that they remastered it for the PlayStation 4 just a year later they probably did this because you couldn't play PlayStation 3 games on the PlayStation 4 and today wanted to make the recuperation aliy correct amount of money proportional to their massive development effort man what about all those PlayStation 3 games that didn't get remastered huh also game critics love nostalgia almost more than they love video games the PlayStation 4 came out in November of 2013 and the critical establishment at large was any mood to look back fondly at the entire PlayStation 3 what's better game to salute the entire console as memory than one by its Prodigal developer here in the last of us was a game emblematic of its hardware think about it how many games from the beginning of the PlayStation 3s lifecycle would you want to be remade for the PlayStation 4 heck how many games from the beginning of the PlayStation 4 would you even want to play on the PlayStation 5 at all I mean aside from knack and resogun reason number three that I today in 2020 suspect that the Last of Us in 2013 one quite so many Game of the Year awards The Last of Us was politically simple The Last of Us portrays a believably bleak yet comfortably fictional near future in which humans cower in militarized quarantine zones squabbling over basic necessities during a deadly pandemic that requires all persons to bring gas masks on any expedition outdoors rather than burrow into logistics and pontificate on politics the Last of Us drops us into its world as it happens to happen and walks us through a corporeal struggle in which we manipulate a man possessing sadness of an apolitical human variety you can celebrate the Last of Us for its quote-unquote uncomfortable violence or you can boast about how that quote-unquote uncomfortable violence I mean ultimately the Last of Us does ask a couple of uncomfortable questions the ethical gravity of which you'd have to be a freak to deny what can I say we got freaks in this world The Last of Us gives us hyper relatable characters allows us to spectate a superlatively believable relationship and hits us with an emotional cliffhanger of ending reasons I think the last of us won so many game of the Year awards number for the Last of Us makes its players think about level design in a way few 3d games yet had as of 2013 the Last of Us is simple instantly graspable aha situations elevated level design geometry to equivalent status with fancy graphics you didn't have to be a hardcore game player in 2013 to look at any of the last of us as Kombat set pieces and have a critical coin flip thought about opponent behavior int level pathways factors I in 2020 realize contributed to the Last of Us winning over 200 game of the Year awards in 2013 making it the most awarded game in history number 5 it's only competition was BioShock Infinite reasons I in 2020 think that the Last of Us in 2013 one so many Game of the Year awards number 6 The Last of Us presented a meticulously planned rigorously fine-tuned intertwining of game design and narrative one of my viewers who messaged me on Twitter to express concern about my doing an action button review of The Last of Us called the game an interactive movie this person also pointed out that they had not played the game friend I told you I'd answer your question in the video so here it is No The Last of Us is much much more than an interactive movie in fact I plan to dedicate the rest of this review to exploring exactly how seamlessly and magically the Last of Us combines narrative design and game design anyway even though the Last of Us one fewer than 300 Game of the Year awards I think it's safe to say that the games lasting legacy warrants at least a couple dozen honorary goatees between 2014 and now for example god of war 2018 oh is the Last of Us at least 11 percent of its goatees for its pioneering printing of the baby child big friend situation alone and yes I know that BioShock Infinite also technically presents a baby child big friend's situation and also stars Troy Baker as Daddy on the other hand BioShock Infinite isn't good with that let us begin the action button review remastered of the last of us the last of us presents multiple riddles to a critic in 2020 how do we review a videogame that likely resulted from the ether of reviews themselves when I review The Last of Us I wrestled with the dogmatic declarations of my past with the game's historical impact and with the established idea of triple-a prestige interactive electronic entertainment I've decided to the best tactic is to speak about the Last of Us freshly my primary concern is takeaways from the Last of Us we can take away several lessons that allow us to better understand the aspirations of present-day video games though most of these lessons also give us exciting windows into the greatness of past games as well a cynic might conclude that The Last of Us results from Naughty Dog's directors asking themselves what if Nathan Drake were real and then immediately answering that question with instead of climbing sheer rock walls he'd have to hunt for ladders in tall grass this theory doesn't strike me personally as impossibly far off the pursuit of quote-unquote realism and groundedness in fiction that had entered the zeitgeist as of 2005 s film Batman Begins had at the time of the beginning of the Last of Us as development begun to infect video games as well though at a glance in 2020 The Last of Us and uncharted 2 feel like two absolutely different flavors of video game I replayed portions of the first two Uncharted games for the purpose of this review and was able to find more universally applicable game design overlap then even I had anticipated The Last of Us is very much a game by the makers of uncharted much like Uncharted was very much a game by the makers of jak 2 tracing a path from jak 2 to uncharted 2 The Last of Us we can sketch Naughty Dog creative exploration expedition in search of a game as a holistic experience The Last of Us is that long expeditions ultimate fruit and internally consistent fusion of persistence narrative and game playing experiences orbiting around a core pillar of improvisational possibility spaces The Last of Us presents us dozens of story heavy problem-solving set pieces which we negotiate through our own uniquely improvised blends of strategy and action using weapons stealth traps and misdirection in any of a hundred slightly different combinations / problem as the level design geometry the enemies is positions and our persistent supply of scarce resources allows criticism often mimics the structure of the criticize at work and so we can dissect the last of us as pristine examples of game leanness using any of a hundred possible paths through the same destinations in the interest of simplicity and brevity I have identified three cornerstone Lee keywords for my analysis of the Last of Us I will address each of these keywords in a separate chapter of this video each of these keywords offers us a different opportunity to assess the Last of Us as a whole the keywords I have identified are cohesiveness replayability and minimalism to use a rock climbing analogy for some reason when faced with such a massive obstacle one first needs to identify the nearest handhold to borrow an old jeweler's metaphor only a diamond can cut a diamond and in order to cut a diamond into the shape of a tool one can use to cut another time and one needs a diamond of the proper shape for shaping another diamond into the shape of a diamond cutting tool in other words before I could begin to assess the last of us through the lands of each of the keywords I located I needed to identify the single elements of the game that can cut the diamond for a gameis cohesive and consistent and true to itself as the last of us identifying this element was a matter of objective analysis I won't bore you with the details of the analysis process I'll just say I have decided that the most important element of the last of us is without a doubt items scarcity so from the hand hold of items scarcity I shall cut the Diamonds of the last of us into three slightly similarly shaped reviews somewhere during these three reviews we'll get to the point and following these three reviews as always is the bottom line cohesiveness defines the last of us in the last of us a mutated strain of the cordyceps fungus has transformed much of the human race into homicidal mushroom zombies at least millions maybe billions have either died or succumbed to infection the remainders hunker and squabble and dilapidated cities and political misery they cling to each other and they sometimes hate each other many clinging Quibbler ZAR old enough to remember materialism even as they scrape to survive they argue over Goods and luxuries maybe just to remember wanting something so in addition to turning people into zombies the fungus has also turned earth into a prison therefore from the menu at almost any point in the Last of Us is playing time you the player can craft an improvised impaling implement aka a quote-unquote shiv in prison parlance if you have in your possession a blade and some tape you can use a shiv to silently and immediately kill any enemy if you catch them unaware if one of the clickers the most violent and deadly variety of infected monster touches you it's an instant game over unless you have a shiv in which case you can repel the attack eliminate the monster and continue to live yet using a shiv means losing a shiv like so many other prison murder weapons ships break after one use their business ends snapped off and embedded in a carcass dropped forever at the scene of the kill you can find a ship's ingredients blades and tape in addition to rags alcohol explosives and sugar by searching dressers lockers shelves boxes follow bushes piles and heaps among the debris and detritus of the late civilization The Last of Us drops us into a dilapidated world as shredded like pulled pork as its protagonists self-esteem upon entering any given grow defied water-damaged holding walls blown apart building our Father joel ceremonially utters to any listening companion see if there's anything we can use not one character in the Last of Us turns to face the camera and says to the player get used to this we solve puzzle number one in the Last of Us without noticing it early at Joel's friend Tessa's behest we scrounge an empty dwelling maybe after that we fight a battle during which we lose it consumable maybe after that we fight a battle during which we lack a consumable maybe we struggle hard and long and obtain a results that feels as much like a mistake as it does a victory maybe next time Joel says see if there's anything we can use we scrounge harder to use a shiv is to lose a shiv and to lose a shiv is to need another Shiv so to consider shivving is to weigh one's personal backpack economics to consider shipping is to reflect on scrounging your brain wordlessly says to you I once and recently scrounged to the blades and bindings needed to craft this Shiv it stands to reason when this current nightmare has abated I might again scrounge the blades and bindings needed to craft this ship's replacement thus and so the last of us works its most elegant trick we need supplies to craft we need the products of crafting in order to solve situations in ways that feel correct we need to scrounge during downtime to acquire supplies within a maximum of three core loops of scrounge fight scrounge the last of us has subliminally persuaded everyone except born haters to roleplay its protagonists game design graphics level design geometry and voice acted banter have conspired to materialize a daddy shaped spiritual Halloween costume around our minds cohesiveness defines the last of us every system is one system every aspect is one aspect the last of us begins assembly and moves simply each moment serves every other moment the last of us feels born of meditative conviction to a mission of mechanical truth in the name of accessibility the last of us compromises quote unquote realism with the exact calculated minimum amount of video game-like design required to facilitate the players role-playing without sacrificing crypto sysm witnessed the yellow shading that indicates the player's next objective to the last of us as holistically interested creatives a mini-map would quote unquote break immersion yet a player screaming in frustration after being lost in the level design labyrinth would break immersion even more so the designers begin by hanging the limp flappy yellow danger tape from seemingly inconsequential poles and ledges in 2013 as in 2020 exuberance cloth physics draw the game likers I as the game grows late the shade fades witness this year end time yellow paint likewise a radar Allah Metal Gear Solid would quote-unquote break immersion heating the cries of every then dazed blogger who boasted that they turned the user interface completely off in Assassin's Creed The Last of Us is makers made threat detection a part of its palpable world by holding your PlayStation 3 trigger or your PlayStation 4 bumper or your scuff Vantage to rear right paddle you can make Joel listen you can see what he hears this synesthesia doesn't shatter naturalism so much as it meets naturalism at a point likewise equidistant to video game we can't literally occupy this man's shoes or his ears we are doing the best our brain can given the screen barrier to gift us the visualized fruit of the fictional man's hearing the video game has condescended halfway to beef the one of our senses indicated in the name of its entertainment category here to the last of us as designers have chosen what upon scrutinizing analysis I have determined represents the only objectively correct solution to this particular design situation strict though not in excess realistic enough not to break immersion game design early enough to feel quote-unquote fun this defines the behavior of a mainstream media game of the Year Award winner to heal we must first craft we might cower in some dingy back room while yelling infected sufferers kick too much in the hall is all around us we find a rag and some alcohol we can use these same exact ingredients to make a first-aid kit or a Molotov cocktail presenting us two differently valuable craftable tools that require the exact same ingredients encourages us to hold on to the ingredients and craft when at last we know our needs live on one fist kill on the other subtly the game encourages us to either risk playing a psychological guessing game with ourselves and our in advance of our needs or craft these particular items in the middles of battles so often in the last of us we end up breathing in tandem with our daddy mans while he hunkers and crafts then we must endure the sometimes seemingly glacial timing necessary to apply the crafted bandage when we die a minute later we think maybe it would have been a better idea to burn all these freaks with a fire bomb hurled from the shadows instead of leaving those shadows to meet those freaks face to face joel is a real regular man with a real regular backpack joel is not a cop he does not have holsters if you want holsters for Joel you have to make them with scavenged parts collected slowly during world's build early scrounges you might find yourself expending the last round of a pistols immune while hunkering in a hidey hole dangerously proximal to some fear crazed human freak who'd prefer your blood make itself visible you have a different pistol with different ammunition in your backpack you can get it out however it takes a few breathless seconds to get it out here we see it again strict though not unto excess realistic enough not to break immersion game design early enough to feel fun done to unpretentiously to warrant for example a blog post about its kooky innovativeness yet working in concert with every other design decision and presentation element toward the common goal of winning over 200 Game of the Year awards someone at Naughty Dog must have knelt to rummage in a rucksack for perhaps a passport while in line at an airport ticket counter and thought hey this is an interesting conflict then thanks to the meditative creative guiding principle of restraint their co-workers did not let them make the jacket inventory interface from Ataris 2008 alone in the dark reboot over all this we have trinkets the last of us as trinkets make sense our regular real dudes regular real rucksack can only hold so much 20 years ago the world ate most of itself in a night and took this man's patience with it this man's materialism looks like a pencil nub right about now when Joel says see if there's anything we can use our interior armchair game designer does not even flinch at the glimpse with which the game demonstrates the positions of parts blades rags alcohol explosives and sugar 20 years spent hunkering and shocking fear will give a man a figurative heads-up display when it comes time for dumpster diving The Last of Us generously patronizes us players with a literal heads-up display between big fights and little skirmishes we walk a road through a crumbled world nature is working hard to reclaim I've seen a lot of people call the line of us a survival horror game though I wouldn't call it that I wouldn't even call it a horror game even though it's got monsters even though it's got nauseating moments of violence and even though we see Joel touched the bottom of someone's shoe 12 times yet we never see him wash his hands I think the Last of Us is better than a quote-unquote horror game I could argue this point for several hours though that would get extremely boring so I'll just say this I think that in order to actually qualify as a horror game The Last of Us would need to pepper its materials scrounging sessions with more jump scares only three times during the entire game do we have to contend with a monster during a dedicated scrounging session two of those three times occur during the same early chapter Bill's town most of the rest of the time the Last of Us leaves us ponderously alone with our principal characters as they delve nth rummaged the already ransacked dwellings of The Departed we hear them banter as they do so should we inquire deeply enough of the last of us will perform this banter speckled rummaging in character thinking about the future clicker we might kill with a shiv crafted out of the blade we found on a kitchen countertop moments before Ellie expressed disbelief at the concept of an ice cream truck some of the best trinket scrounging excursions yank us far from the path of the main narrative at points in its campaign The Last of Us offers the role-playing ly inquisitive player opportunities to obtain massively invaluable and dreadfully rare permanent upgrade items such as supplements and tools one of my favorite scrounging excursions occurs late in the game on this excursion Joel can find the monstrously powerful weapon the flamethrower reasonably far in advance of its mandatory placement in the story we can only find it if we jump off of the horse that we are sharing with Ellie and enter a suspicious building alone by this point in the story Joel has begun to trust Ellie to watch his back when he's not watching hers in a role playing lead a dish State of Mind we might think Ellie can wait here on the horse she can handle herself we spend minutes scavenging supplies we find the flamethrower and even while we're in here we see evidence of the people who were here before us the games artists blessed even these quiet optional moments with extra imaginative world building a person lived here a person was comfortable here they have gone now and I found blades and alcohol they didn't or couldn't take with them wherever they went no freak here jumps to scare us we are alone with our thoughts about the past story of this world the present state of our item inventory and the possible violence of our futures so yeah suffice it to say I would not quite call this survival horror I'd call it cinematic authored survival action minimalism defines the last of us small integers sketch the psychology of this world joel is a regular real dude with a regular real rucksack he's only looking for 5 types of thing he can only carry three of each and he can use these three things to make six types of item which require one of each of two of the five things he collects in every action conflict we use an average of three of these makeshift crafted tools between conflicts we rummaged the late civilization while our character's relationship for jingly banter we strive to top up our dwindling stock of ingredients a conflicts trinket expenditures inform the emotions we feel upon locating replacement trinkets in the next scavenging session if you turn up the difficulty the last of us gives you fewer trinkets now you can make fewer valuable tools now you feel worse when you break a shiv off in a killers neck when you could have instead thought a little harder and negotiated this situation wearing you could have strangled him without anybody else seeing you now you feel better when you make another Shiv later you look at your stock mid skirmish and wonder how you're going to solve this problem with so few tools on easy mode the integers are small ungrounded the hardest mode the integers are much smaller shrinking the integers amplifies the psychology achieving harmonious role playing the last of us is campaign revels and survival genre mechanics yet implements them with a board game design early restraint so perpendicular to other more procedural more online competitive survival games that we might as well give it its own genre cinematic authored survival action take melee weapons for example each of the available melee weapons can only kill so many enemies before breaking some types of melee weapon can kill more or fewer enemies than others in the crafting menu you can enhance your melee weapons sister ability by spending crafting ingredients thus every time you come across a melee weapon you consider the economics of your current melee weapons durability your stock of upgrade ingredients and the durability status of any currently applied melee weapon upgrades versus the base durability of the newfound melee weapon though perhaps no one element sums up the board game design early mission statement of cinematic author to survival as well as The Last of Us is bottles strew and littering each of the last of us is atmospheric dilapidated ramshackle conflict venues you encounter trash of the late world with tender checkers like minimalism the game designers left them here for you to pick up throw from behind cover and distract one enemy of your choosing or two or three enemies if you throw it well you can only carry one noisy bottle or slightly less noisy brick at a time thus in the bones of its spirit the last of us has more in common with a Dungeons and Dragons campaign than it does with Resident Evil here in parentheses I have or you can say it has as much in common with Shining Force - as it does with Metal Gear Solid rehe I'm not sure what I meant by my favorite example is the tool level in order to upgrade your guns you need to find parts which are plentiful and tools of which the game's entire campaign gives you only 5 finding a tool unlocks higher-level weapon upgrades the upgrades themselves expend parts though the last of us as designers had kindness enough to leave the tools and locations amenable to even the amateurish among scroungers it's possible to miss a tool or two along the way and arrived upon the story's final challenges possessing a lackadaisical Arsenal much more plentiful than tools yet still wickedly rare in comparison to crafting ingredients are the last of us as supplements using these we can permanently upgrade Joel's various attributes for example 450 supplements we can permanently upgrade jewels base health statistic 50 supplements is a lot and there are absolutely not nearly enough supplements in the entire game to max out every category I love this again as sid meier once said and everyone including me has paraphrased a billion times a game is a series of interesting choices The Last of Us is a game and the Last of Us is a series of interesting choices occasionally you manipulate Joel through a big beautiful triple a level design with the end goal being merely a heart-to-heart conversation with your saddened daughter figure le sometimes the knocked over furniture in the hallway leading up to said heart-to-heart conversation for bodes a shocking violent future conflict sometimes it doesn't sometimes the last of us as artists built this environment simply for two characters to have a talk in the Last of Us does not waste your time any complaint of time wasting is immediately defensible as world building conflict free zones feed the story with dialogue and the future action scenes with crafting supplies yet either in an effort to secure over 200 game of the Year awards or out of the earnest exuberance of top-tier game makers the last of us does indulge in the occasional extravagance yet even then displays a restraint unheard of among its then-current peers and imitators The Last of Us features a playable scene in which a character tracks and hunts a deer with a bow and arrow yet it features no hunting minigame complete with copal meat and stockpile about venison the Last of Us does not even present players a tutorial informing them that they can follow the blood trail on the snow to find the deer The Last of Us simply expects you to be paying attention The Last of Us has a horse riding mechanic without a vast open overworld these varied moments contribute to a brain pleasing texture of completeness bigness and roundness most players perceive the last of us is a complete game many players perceive it as a big one yet my recent replay after not playing the game in six years took me only 13 hours 46 minutes 23 seconds and 17 frames I should mention that in this playthrough I explored obsessively enough to naturally encounter most of the optional hidden Firefly pendants I should also note that one hour 17 minutes and 43 seconds of that time I spent theaters or standing and staring at walls and such for the purpose of having clean static b-roll footage for this review so we're actually looking at a play time of 12 hours 28 minutes and 40 seconds The Last of Us is creative dedication to minimalism informs this feeling of scale how many other triple-a prestige video games features cinematic camera cuts to get our main character and his quest giving Big Brother outside of a building that the game has already given us the pleasure of walking persistently into most Triple A games insist on keeping takes long so as to quote-unquote impress the player with the grandiosity and connectedness of their various level segments despite its having just theatrically immersed us on a walking and shooting tour through this Factory the last of us cuts us outdoors when it needs to wasting none of our time in these storytelling segments I'm saying that for example if this were a big huge luxurious open-world game your brother would be like I'll talk to you outside when you're done meet me near where we keep the horses how many other triple-a single-player Awards baiting video games own the fiction writing gumption to present their narratives as a series of short stories each chapter of the Last of Us has a beginning a middle and an end each character we meet inspires growth immediately intermediately and long-term lee in our principal characters we bring our macrocosm face to face with many microcosms how many other triple-a single-player Awards baiting video games present us chapters of such irregular length seriously the Pittsburgh chapter alone accounts for 28% of the game's length that's not quite a third though it is more than a quarter how many other triple-a single-player Awards baiting action games position slightly expanded regular combat encounters in lieu of boss battles actually I guess call of duty 4 modern warfare 1 kinda made that a thing everybody noticed way back in 2007 huh how many other triple-a single-player Awards baiting action games can you think of that feature exactly one one on one boss battle in The Last of Us life on planet Earth is a boss battle how many other triple-a single-player Awards baiting action games so purposefully devolve into perfunctory challenges as the narrative crescendos The Last of Us pays little mind to the conventional action game design idea of steadily increasing difficulty The Last of Us pepper's its plot with situations of naturalistically fluctuating complexity two-thirds of the way into the game you might find yourself breezing through multiple encounters in a row in the name of character development The Last of Us possesses the cold-blooded fiction writing gumption elephant-sized balloon guts necessary to present us situations that Joel and Ellie face with nonchalance they've been surviving together for almost a year why should everything be getting harder for them action button method patron saint Gordon Ramsay would describe the last of us as a simple local rustic meal consisting of four to five flavors on the plate so let's go ahead and get into the last of us is game flavors game flavor number one prestige tour The Last of Us presents pioneering prestige tours released in the same year as gone home which is one entire game length prestige tour The Last of Us admittedly slightly less innovatively incorporated conflict-free pressureless Stressless traversal segments into its action game in a way that has altered the fabric of triple-a game design for the better in fact The Last of Us actually gives us three distinctly different sub flavors of prestige tour I've already killed one of these sub flavors is hoarse so let me beat it for a second the mostly optional scrounging materials rummaging moments count as prestige tours albeit once more seamlessly integrated into an overarching game design system of systems than we'd actually ever seen in video games at that point I'd kind them as survival scrounges the second sub flavor of prestige tour is puzzle solving The Last of Us gives us plenty of slow breather II moments wherein Joel and his buddy or buddies must search their immediate surroundings for a ladder hiding in tall grass or a makeshift raft pallet stuck in an air pocket underwater not a single one of these puzzles requires any actual thinking universally the solution is look everywhere it's possible to look these so called puzzles possess more or less the challenge level of a hidden object game that your great-uncle still has on his iPhone 4s yet their simplicity hides a beautiful purpose these mechanically simplistic puzzle breathers exist to make you feel fully in charge of a situation for a few busy working minutes during which the characters banter and develop this is ingeniously good design the third sub flavor of prestige tour is your classic walk and look the last of us revolutionized this particular form by somewhat blatantly invoking recollections of the virtuoso long takes of Alfonso Cuaron 2006 film children of men however Alfonso Cuaron has said that video games such as half-life did in fact influence children of men so the last of us is borrowing this technique back makes more than perfect sense as a side note in the two years before the last of us came out every single triple a game designer I knew was flying to New York for a weekend coming back to California and raving about Sleep No More in case you don't know what Sleep No More is it's perhaps the drama world's most famous example of the immersive theater art form I don't know for sure though if one or more Naughty Dog developers were among this zeitgeist II crew of immersive theater goers I wouldn't be surprised shout me out in the comments if you want to see the action button review of Sleep No More despite living in New York City I've never been there and I wouldn't mind having an excuse to go Lord knows I need an excuse to do later really anything I do these days actually before we move on to the next game flavor let me talk about these immersive theater segments for a second if you've been around the internet you've probably seen people credit the Last of Us with pioneering these segments however I've also seen arguments that call of duty 4 modern warfare 1 might have done it first there's that mission right at the beginning where you're riding in the back of a car and then you realize that you're about to get executed and then you get shot in the face remember that get shot in the face remember that whatever the case may be I remember an avalanche of game critics heaping praise on the Himalayan village segments of uncharted 2 among thieves 16 chapters into a 26 Chapter game Nathan Drake finds himself in a pinch he awakens convalescing in a Himalayan village for a brief glorious chain of minutes the player Basques in the violence 'less atmosphere of this quiet himalayan community for the first time in the playable game we see children and firearm less women the critical establishment at large lauded uncharted twos Himalayan village segment for a small variety of reasons chiefly because it came after 15 chapters have non-stop over-the-top popcorn pop gun violence bomb explosions and building crumbling x' critics called chapter 16 where am I aka the Himalayan village a breather I recall someone using the word masterstroke when I first played The Last of Us I recalled the Himalayan village almost immediately right from its very first playable instant The Last of Us plays with the form of digital immersive theater I remember thinking in 2013 that Naughty Dog had listened to critics today in 2020 I realized that Naughty Dog had actually listened to themselves in the spirit of investigation I decided to stream the game uncharted drake's fortune on a quote-unquote quest to find the last of us as DNA I put on my strongest spectacles and prepared to go 100% dr. Livingstone I presume Jewess all over drake's fortune uncharted drake's fortune begins with a cutscene which a gunbattle immediately follows smartly the gun battle takes place on a small boat our enemies arrive on other small boats the game tutorial eise's shooting cover melee and grenades in a matter of moments when this short battle is over we see another cutscene this one depicting a globe-trotting lee drastic change of venue then we have a playable unobstructed stress-free cinematic traversal segment during which Nathan Drake and his old friend Sully walk through a jungle then we see another pre-rendered cutscene to be perfectly honest I couldn't believe it less than nine minutes in to uncharted drake's fortune we had encountered a prestige tore sandwich on cutscene read uncharted drake's Fortune released just 15 days after call of duty 4 modern warfare 1 in November of 2007 had with supreme confidence wielded a brazenly trinket free violence free prestige tore less than nine minutes into the game following the cutscene we learn how to climb we solve a couple puzzles some of which require us to shoot an exploding barrel with our gun and 44 minutes later we encounter deadly enemies that's almost an entire first hour of a big-budget triple-a single-player Awards bathing action game featuring just one fight so while the Last of Us and uncharted are deeply different animals the DNA sharing is rampantly apparent and doubly as rampantly apparent in uncharted 2 among thieves The Last of Us presents a critics shattering prestige tour as its very first playable moment uncharted gave us a gun fight first because it came out in 2007 the year of call of duty 4 modern warfare 1 and Bioshock by immediately transitioning from gun tutorial to a non violent yet meaningfully playable full first hour Naughty Dog was declaring their revised mission statement loudly and clearly congratulations Naughty Dog you've been certifiably big prestige since at least 2007 game flavor number two infected battle The Last of Us is iconic fungus zombies simultaneously overwhelm the players with their numbers and reassure the players with their reliability the infected fall into a number of discrete categories you can always count on each individual member of an infected category to care about the same things the same way you have runners who stand around audibly and thus helpfully moaning until they see you at which point they run at you screaming alerting other infected zhh you have clickers who are blind due to fungal overgrowth obscuring their eyes they prowl clicking for echolocation clickers cannot see you unless you make a sound if a clicker senses you and touches you you die unless you spend a shiv finally we have odors bloaters are big dumb jerks who launched weird explosive spore bombs at you make a lot of noise kill you instantly if you get too close and can eat a lot of bullets before dying you should burn them later battles ask you to deal with unavoidable noisy bloaters while accounting for runners and clickers though most battles in the last of us achieve miraculous design harmony using just a few clickers a few runners some sparse crafting supplies and level geometry infected battles primarily challenge your puzzle solving and situational awareness mechanisms infected battles feel less like a first-person shooter level and more like pac-man the movie the video game the movie the video game game flavor number three human battles in addition to fighting infected you also must on occasion kill your fellow man your fellow man can be a real jerk early battles in the Last of Us pit Joel against straggling scrap hugging pig remnants of the United States federal government later battles require the player to outsmart near feral quote unquote hunters on their own turf humans are much smarter than the infected they can communicate with one another they freak out appropriately when they see one of their buddies as dead bodies they have guns you can treat each human encounter like a puzzle game an action game a stealth game or a mix of all three you can toss bottles to distract your opponents long enough for you to slip by kill them with secret disposable knives or make big gun noise and that's it the Last of Us has exactly three game flavors even more impressively it delivers all three of these flavors in a vertical slice starting 16 minutes into the game and lasting exactly 44 minutes in length that's the length of a networked prestige television episode I'm sure someone in the comments will say stealth is a flavor though it's actually not outside of tutorials The Last of Us does not present any mandatory stealth stealth is a tool not a mode how does a game with so few flavors get the entire critic establishment yelling well simply put it does this by blending those flavors and by playing with dynamically authored difficulty fluctuation for example one of the final challenges you face in the last of us requires you to transport a ladder from one location to another location in the same room you've done this several times before you're going through the motions now basking in the characters is banter Joel and Ellie are professionals in a world that does not pay them their miserable lives consist of situations of limited variety we've only seen them do a couple of different things because they only do a couple of different things now that's what I call a monotonous apocalypse by the end of the story we're good at all of these things because they're good at all of these things the Last of Us isn't just giving us quote unquote another ladder puzzle this close to the very end of the game The Last of Us is giving us one last long opportunity to hang out with these characters to eavesdrop on their conversations to palpate the growth of their relationship The Last of Us this final ladder puzzle is longer and more complicated than any ladder puzzle we've seen yet in the game though even so we don't even flinch at it we purposefully and dutifully blow through each step of the process looking back on the last of us as ladder puzzles in 2020 remembering how some players I know personally made fun of them back in 2013 I finally realize their genius with its slow paced room traversal puzzles The Last of Us treats players to simply visible problems requiring stress-free solutions for seven point nine seven percent of its 12-hour 28 minute playing time The Last of Us treats us to semi mundane nonviolent problem solving situations completely inside our control The Last of Us is famously uncomfortably violent combat meanwhile seeks on levels both aesthetic and mechanical to impress upon the players situations out side their control handling combat in the last of us well requires us to negotiating Lee earn a feeling of control combat stresses the player the heck out traversal puzzles lend the player temporary security alternating these dynamically opposed sensations puffs up the players impression of the last of us as a big full game slyly inching the difficulty down and later back up in widely spaced battle encounters makes the game feel like one the player has been playing for a very long time of course the last of us is strategically calibrated to difficulty plateau eventually leaps up into a final encounter that does in fact feel drastically different from every other action encounter in the game you paint yourself into a corner when you design a game this way and I gotta say when you handle it right that corner owns as Robert McKee says in his screenwriting Bible story wow them in the end and you've got a hit don't just take my critical analysis is word for it take my analytical analysis is word for it as well yes my friends it's time to enter the data zone The Last of Us possesses so tastefully few flavors that I found it appropriate to make a couple pie charts let's start with a complete breakdown of every frame of my normal mode playthrough this includes an other category representing all of my time spent being lost using photo mode admiring the graphics or simply standing around staring at animals for the purpose of having a nice long video clip to display blurred out underneath the pie chart later in this segment I consider this an organic play experience it was my first time playing the game in 6 years so my rustiness with the level design shows in the data I took longer to stealth my way through battles then I might have 6 years ago and I also spent more time hanging out in the world during the down key moments for scientific reasons related to the subjective nature of video games as entertainment I've decided that this exact playthrough presents the best example for breaking for our structure atlas if we subtract the hour and change of error time the data cleans up a bit and looks like this I should point out that this data reflects deaths and restarts in combat I consider dying and restarting an organic part of the game experience I chose warm colors for violence flavors and cool colors for non violence flavors cutscenes I've represented as grey cutscenes occasionally depict violence though they just as occasionally do not I did perform a quick analysis of violence versus non-violence in the last of us as cutscenes and came away with an estimate that the cutscenes are over 70% nonviolent however my data is presently inconclusive I plan to conclude it as part of a later video in this series though as you can see if we subtract error cutscenes fully account for sixteen point six percent of the time my mind palace profiles quote-unquote average player spends with the last of us that is a lot and the interest of further cleaning up the data let's subtract the cutscenes and look only at the playable portion of the game as you can see we still have a gray wedge here this represents time spent in crafting menus or at work benches in non-violent moments of the game these crafting moments do in fact represent preparation for violence though they're not violent in and of themselves and do occur exclusively during the explicitly nonviolent parts of the game so for now let's call them a gray area I should note that any time spent backpack rummaging or crafting items during battle contributed to its respective categories battle statistic seeing as every action in the last of us happens in real time and the danger does not pause while you craft this seemed indisputably appropriate however it seemed so indisputably appropriate that I found it acceptable to roll down time crafting and workbench moments into the nonviolent category so let's actually combine all three flavors of prestige tour and the two flavors of combat into two categories non-violence and violence let's leave cutscenes in here as a gray wedge we can see that remarkably the last of us is a mostly nonviolent video game if we subtract cutscenes from this and focus on just the playable parts of the game it's even easier to see the balance of non-violence and violence now let's get into a gray area in a game as enormous Lee cinematic as the Last of Us we cannot justify not calling the cutscenes a core feature even if you skip the cutscenes and you're later perfectionism chasing playthroughs chances are huge you're going to watch all of the cutscenes as a player of the Last of Us at least once if anyone out there watching this skipped any of the cutscenes on their first playthrough of The Last of Us I do not know how to help you with literally anything so in order to obtain a true violence versus non-violence number we need to include cutscenes for this argument I'd say that quote-unquote violence in a video game only counts when the player perpetrates it through control commands I understand this is a tenuous argument though I did also lump cutscenes in as nonviolent for the Final Fantasy 7 remake stata even though those cutscenes also display violence into action I'm going to presume that Toma no Bui de gakki designer director of Ninja Gaiden black one of the 10 best games of all time probably would agree with us that cutscenes can't be considered nearly in the same category as game action so let's go ahead and consider this an action versus inaction ratio if we want also to get perfectly technical let's reflect for a moment on how most of the combat in the Last of Us doesn't actually involve shooting and stabbing as much as it involves mindful watching and waiting all that said including cutscenes as non action skyrockets that non violence number look at that The Last of Us is officially sixty three point eight five percent nonviolent for those keeping score the Final Fantasy 7 remake was only sixty one point one three percent nonviolent I gotta say I did not expect them to be this close though I did somehow get the impression that the Last of Us would win I mean it was that hunch that made me want to do this review as the next review and yes I realized that my numbers for the Final Fantasy 7 remake do in fact reflect 45 hours of play time versus 12 hours 28 minutes and forty seconds of the last of us though you gotta admit that's a striking comparison it's almost like some executives ordered a research study to workshop and mathematically quote unquote good ratio for player satisfaction perhaps we'll follow up on this in a later episode in which I revealed that one of the most stereotypically quote-unquote violent video games in human history is actually more about being lost than it is about killing anything at any rate it's easy to look at these two final pie charts and think that the Final Fantasy 7 remake and the Last of Us represent all Triple A video games and encapsulate the games industry at largest formulaic nature though here's where I deploy my favorite vocabulary word I learned in that one screenwriting class I took 23 years ago pacing if we look at this marked and sorted timeline showing the entire duration of the Last of Us from title screen to credits we can see how finely chopped and gingerly mixed its elements are we're the Final Fantasy 7 remake borrowed from ancient PlayStation 1 games and modern television programs The Last of Us flows much more like a miniseries or a film where the Final Fantasy 7 remake was a tossed salad The Last of Us is a melting pot the Last of Us is primary pacing trick is to enter battle flavor loops for entire chapters of the game The Last of Us puts us only in battles against infected or humans interspersing these encounters with precision targeted hyper brief battles of the other flavor this delicate blend is just one of these psychological ways the Last of Us makes 12 hours of play duration feel huge the other is the environment designs they're as big as levels can get before you start to wonder why you can't go in every door if you ask me The Last of Us is large open ish levels are more exciting than most luxuriously vacant open world games I've ever played though we can talk about that some other day after enough cycles of infected battle and human battle the player begins to bleed the tactics together both battle flavors been a uniquely from the same small selection of craftable items the player starts to categorize the differences and similarities in the battle types until eventually each is informing the other stealth skills you experimentally sharpen against the unintelligent infected benefit your performance against humans the relatively exploded complexity requires you to level up these skills you proceed to take these leveled up skills with you into your next battle against the mindless zombies the zombies make the humans more interesting the humans make the zombies more interesting the infecteds almost 8-bit Megaman boss like predictable patterns elevates them above other game zombies they're familiar reliability generates shocking contrast against the human battles in this way The Last of Us uses its two distinct battle types to pull off a sort of magic trick if you ever thought dom bees in a game were boring it's probably because that game didn't also have encounters against dynamically artificially intelligent human opponents as I've already covered in two exhaustive detail The Last of Us is prestige tours present story context saturated opportunities to scavenge trinkets usable to craft consumable items the exact dollar value utility of which we come to perfectly understand as the game's brutal heavy realistic combat encounters pummel our psyches so the Last of Us rolls on alternating these two combat flavors around prestige tours of varying depth and magnitude working for and earning the narrative beats that pull the game's story forward each of these three flavors feeds the other generating the food from out of thin air I'd say each of these hands washes the other though that'd make three hands also nobody washes their hands in the Last of Us yes the action is quote uncomfortable by design unquote however that doesn't mean we can't enjoy it we can enjoy thinking about it we can enjoy planning for it we can derive genuine pleasure from admiring the gumption of its craft and furthermore I know I personally can enjoy something while of feeling something in summary the last of us shows us a bare bottom minimalist vision of to give an extreme example the Japanese role-playing game with all its armor stripped away it reveals that all narrative games are more closely related to then you might think between prestige scrounges we have a hyper small number of memorable battles in geometrically interesting locales the fights and the Last of Us are so memorable that I didn't even need to scrutinize my footage to count them I simply sat on my sofa stared at my turned off television and counted oh man it says here that I should count them in my head on camera idiot it says count them in your head on camera idiot I sort of purposely avoided counting them and I told myself while I was writing the script that I would challenge myself to count them in my head on camera I mean I'm not just gonna leave the whole counting process in here uncut so you're gonna have no idea how long this took me twenty infected battles and 27 human battles I think we're just gonna go with that number of course I won't even pretend that I can count off the top of my head exactly what percentage of the game consisted of which element so despite the Last of Us is highly memorable nature and brevity I did in fact need to apply the action button method for video game analysis and criticism in order to answer a few questions before my first 20/20 replay of the game I hypothesized that the infected battles and human battles would roughly balance each other out yet add up to less than 50% of the game's total length I banked on prestige tours and cutscenes adding up to 53 percent or more of the playable game selfishly I wanted to trinket scrounging to account for 21 percent of the playable game my memory of the Last of Us prior to replaying it was that it featured heavy trinkets scrounging made boundlessly meaningful by atmosphere and convergence of minimalist game design systems my experience with the Final Fantasy 7 remake which consisted of 4% trinkets scrounging had inspired me a curiosity could a game feature Quinn tupple II more trinket scrounging yet somehow feel less laborious than the Final Fantasy 7 remake s' 4% I wrote this hypothesis down in sublime text 3 and saved it as hypothesis dot txt after my first replay up The Last of Us on normal mode I looked at the hypothesis and thought well ok then I replayed the game once more on easy mode I had never played through the Last of Us on easy mode in my review of the Final Fantasy 7 remake I distinct a claim that the perfect game will have no difficulty modes and I intend to elaborate on that a lot in upcoming reviews for now suffice it to say that I wanted the data points from easy mode I theorized that the combat portions of easy mode would be faster than normal mode though not by any more than 5% here I should note that I have played through the Last of Us on ground into difficulty before and I have based most of the subjective design analysis in this video so far heavily on that old experience with this easy mode playthrough I was looking for something new I wanted the experience of betting the other way easy mode helped me facilitate a role-playing exercise with easy mode I was able to borrow the experience of being a person who has played all the way through The Last of Us a hundred times when really I've only played through it 6 times I wanted to blow through easy mode for the purpose of collecting objective data I have logged in a secret spreadsheet and we will talk about that secret spreadsheet in a later review after my easy mode playthrough I analyzed my data even with the fresh knowledge of having just completed a normal mode playthrough my easy mode playthroughs total battle time only shaped 7% off my normal modes total combined battle time that's not bad as for the moment-to-moment structure of The Last of Us we can see that as I hypothesized it's relatively well pureed the twenty infected battles account for 17.5% of the game time the 27 human battles account for 25 point 5 3 percent of the game time prestige tours of the cinematic traversal variety account for twenty four point six percent of the game time survival scrounges account for 17.9 3% so I'd say my hypothesis was pretty close why did I tell you all these numbers first of all because some people like numbers if you don't think these numbers are interesting now please wait till you see what I'm going to do with them later and secondly I told you all these numbers because they helped me make the decision I'm going to declare at the end of this video Wow this section on minimalism sure ran long huh Wow replayability defines the last of us at one groundbreaking moment in their relationship Joel trusts Ellie with a gun it's not just any gun it's a sniper rifle that's the daddy of guns after a brief lecture about how to shoulder the stock he tells her to make every shot count this is premium dad-ish gun advice nobody trained soldier or not goes into combat specifically intending to take any shots that don't count by this point in the game we the player guarding over the burgeoning mutual respect of these two really interesting fictional individuals know this game's definition of the value of a dollar we know that bullets are rare just like blades and alcohol and sugar and explosives and rags maybe at this point in the game we the player have not made every shot count if so we are making a cutscene Joel look like a real do as I say not as I do sort of dad so by this point whether for reasons game mechanical or related to our pride in our own performance we've already considered a replay through maybe once or twice how we play how we manipulate Joel has at the latest by this point become a genuine part of the story yes my friends gameplay is cutscenes the Last of Us is a game designed to be replayed the Last of Us offers significantly trippy atmosphere within each of its varying scenes though undeniably plot pulls the experience relentlessly forward we roleplay as a man who wouldn't know how to stop and smell the roses if the roses shot him in the face so why does it inspire so many of its players to soak in its juices more than once to replay a game is to Reaper form when I say performance I mean both technically the way a sports athlete performs by more meticulously manipulating the mechanical and theatrically when we play The Last of Us a second time we know Joel's full story we have rehearsed we can handle situations the way the full man that we know would handle them we carve out a play style worthy of Joel's drama The Last of Us offers myriad flavors of replayability most players who wind up playing The Last of Us a second time do so because they want to play it again on a harder difficulty which coincidentally also mathematically encourages deeper role-playing while writing this review I talked to several friends many of whom played The Last of Us a second time back in 2013 on the same difficulty one non hardcore game playing friend voiced their reasons for a replay like this I just wanted to play it better I loved that furthermore we can replay the Last of Us to perform it for someone else who doesn't want to play it themselves few video games are as filler free time waste lists and easy to exhibit to a game disinterested companion as the Last of Us back in 2013 I played The Last of Us to completion for an audience of two game agnostic friends over the course of two weekend sessions I think my sloppy gunplay didn't annoy them and they seemed to genuinely enjoy shouting out strategies or encouraging me to search such-and-such upstairs bedroom during a trinket scrounge we all fell dead silent for the duration of every cutscene I also rewatch two seasons mornin's two of Game of Thrones with those same two friends on the two other weekends of that same month so even before they officially announced a The Last of Us HBO series The Last of Us has pretty much been the HBO series of itself that many people have told me they replayed The Last of Us simply for the joy of witnessing the story again is a powerful notion on its own people are out there treating this game like a movie that's great I'm personally most interested in the mechanically somewhat sinister ways the Last of Us compels a player to play again while they're in the middle of their first playthrough in the spirit of every other element of its design and presentation the last of us positions regret as a game mechanical cornerstone our hero is old and sad and full of regret audible within his cutscene vocabulary and even in his bantering size maybe his attitude subtly infects us even in the middle of an individual encounter maybe the instant we past the point of no return shifting the odds firmly into our favor we're thinking about how we'd handle this if we had to do it again it's not just Joel's dramatically heavy fullness with regret that inspires this thinking in us the last of us presents level design geometry and enemy encounter design of such immediately graspable simplicity than even the most casual player seeing a gun game for the first time will immediately Osmos the relevant history of multiplayer shooters survival horror and tactical stealth espionage immediately after their first death even the newest of game unacquainted players understands they can solve any encounter in this game with at least a hundred subtly different method combinations the last of us presents players with experimentation encouraging White Castle slider sized situations galore with Moorish Ness it's up to you the player to decide how to mix quiet action and noisy action it's up to you the player to decide if and then when to break stealth early in the game you might think that went pretty bad there at the end aybe replayability seed has planted itself owing to the scarcity of resources how you handle one situation can influence how you handle a later situation eventually you find yourself in the middle of one situation reflecting on an earlier situation you think if only I hadn't used that Shiv on that guy you especially feel this on the grounded difficulty where crafting supplies are Blood Diamond too scarce thus The Last of Us plants a louder seed of replayability here even as you grind your nose against the difficulty ceiling you gret micro decisions that occurred literal hours ago you scrape by in your current encounter declare battle do and then leave the situation behind because of the narratives relentless forward poll maybe your first playthrough looks like a birthday clown playing Metal Gear Solid on easy mode with the DualShock made of balloon animal balloons your second playthrough you scrounge more you luxuriate in the world you roleplay deeper here we come back to my personal favorite example of the Last of Us is minimalist tabletop II design restraint the tool level the first time I played through the Last of Us I missed one of the tool level upgrades yes I was that Punk to whom I previously alluded who arrived upon the story's final challenges possessing a lackadaisical arsenal my second time through I found them all that alone made it worth playing through the game a second time and on a harder difficulty on the micro level the game subtly encourages replay psychology and its players by way of a few tiny dirty tricks most pertinently The Last of Us has a real knack for auto saving immediately after you break stealth if you die the enemies are already alerted so it is that even on easy mode The Last of Us encourages you to take stealth seriously if you're going to even try stealth at all and yes I know you can restart the encounter though sometimes you don't want to restart the whole encounter you just want to get through the encounter and through the game right this is a Loki game design masterstroke I guess I I typed the word masterstroke in my script a few hundred words after making fun of other video game reviewers for using the word masterstroke strict without being excessive game design early without breaking immersion these tiny tricks masterpiece Ashley add up ultimately congealing into the inimitable flavor of over 200 Game of the Year awards I'd say it's about time we got to the point the point today involves a discussion of one of my favorite video game tropes to talk about the baby child's big friend situation The Last of Us so succinctly marries its narrative and it's game mechanics that when I met Troy Baker in person at a party at ign.com offices that day the game came out in 2013 I told him dude your performance was so good that the day after I beat the game I literally went out shopping for backpacks Troy Baker looked me right in the eye and said and I quote okay man Troy I was not joking in fact I got so into backpacks that today June 12th 2020 I happened to own ego ruck gr one rucksack that's Navy SEAL uniform compatible in my continuing pursuit of rugged American istic apocalyptic readiness I even ended up purchasing several sugarcane work shirts a pair of sugarcane 1947 jeans and even a pair of red wing iron Rangers I'll admit I'm a privileged idiot whose career path and lifestyle shields me from most of the world's ills yet somehow thanks in part to logistical II meticulous apocalyptic fictions like the Last of Us and death stranding I've become enthralled by to give one example buy it for life non-biodegradable dead stock US military heavy nylon twill flight jackets I've spent the better part of my life finding entertainment and visions of apocalypsis as of 2013 I'd tried watching one episode of AMC's The Walking Dead and didn't like the dialogue in 2020 I watched a full season of The Walking Dead because I like Norman Reedus now while brutally ill with the coronavirus and I found it too realistic to enjoy back in 2012 I'd played Telltale's game The Walking Dead and loved its tasteful application a post Kojima narrative trickery and in 2013 I played The Last of Us and got for the first time my life something that I had never realized post-apocalyptic fiction had always been passing up an opportunity to give me the walking dead videogame had shown me game of the Year award winning Lee that an extreme world situation does in fact provide suitable background for a story depicting the interactive relationship blossoming between two human individuals however the last of us gave me more maybe I'm telling on myself that I'm some kind of ignoramus when I say this though here it is I think the last of us impressed me with its story of fatherhood as much as it did because it made me deal with so much paraphernalia scroungy crafty video game design stuff in the middle of it if the Last of Us is main character Joel hadn't been wearing such a visually prominent backpack if he hadn't had to kneel so many times to dig around in that backpack if his friend tes hadn't said so early in the story there's your backpack maybe my mind wouldn't have opened enough to let the Fatherhood narrative all the way in it occurs to me today that Naughty Dog has always been good at making its playable characters feel like characters I realized this might not sound like a huge achievement so let me try to explain what I mean the player stars in the lead role of the Last of Us is a story one of the Last of Us is most sublime accomplishments is how it instills in the player empathy for the protagonist Joel if not sympathy the game's mechanics pummel us until we feel like Joel tired old desperate and sad as we violently solve struggling problems in view of Ellie our young desperate sad companion Ellie's daughter figure ish Ness in the Last of Us impressed critics so much in 2013 because up until then Naughty Dog had conditioned players to enjoy the questionable complexity of uncharted Snaith and Drake a man who was really good at being alone in uncharted drake's Fortune Naughty Dog realized a rich character in Nathan Drake sure he was a bit of a shallow little brotherly adventure style dude though his quips and manner is through enough dry sticks onto the fire to Kindle imaginations of an interior world okay I realize I called Nathan Drake a rich character a couple seconds ago though I'm talking about 2007 here okay Nathan Drake was definitely a richer character than 2007 Super Mario galaxy's Super Mario in both 2007 and in my 2020 replay of the original uncharted drake's Fortune I felt the distinct sensation that Nathan Drake was the star and I the player was his trophy girlfriend giving up my time and my life to cheer him on in his endeavors it's like this how often do you refer to a character in a movie by the actor's name I love those Mission Impossible movies and I know what the hero's name is Ethan Hunt though I always call him Tom Cruise on the other hand nobody I'd want to hang out with calls han Solo or Indiana Jones Harrison Ford meanwhile I don't call Nathan Drake me I don't say I shot a bunch of dudes in that level I say Nathan Drake shoots a bunch of dudes in that level I don't mean this as an insult I find this genuinely interesting I can't think of too many other video games where I call the protagonist by name what I'm talking about my play experience even with a character action game I don't say Dante fights a big monster I say I fought a big monster I don't say Bayonetta guillotines a bunch of angels I say AI guillotined a bunch of angels always subtly shifting the game experience into the past tense with the Last of Us is second person companion Ellie Naughty Dog exercises their character building storytelling experience to make Joel game design idli feel like our parent and has a 41 year old person I can tell you that eventually whether you like it or not you do start to remind yourself of at least one your parents I won't spoil when it happens though just trust me that it does happen thus onto the whole birth of the Last of Us Joel's daddy is nest say long shadow that darkens and hardens every mechanic every cutscene every optional dialogue every tucked away optional world-building cranny every strangle of a desperate freak every squeeze of a gun trigger and every meticulously level designed corner of level geometry we call him Joel he is us though he is also a person most simply and molecularly we call him Joel because Ellie calls him Joel she says Joel at least once every five minutes of the game this is instantly hallmark II character architecture this fourteen-year-old girl is so tough she nonchalantly addresses a middle-aged man as she would an office colleague slowly without calling our attention to it the narrative shows Joel begin to trust Ellie in one mid-game cutscene she saves Joel's life with the very gun he previously denied her in the name of safety shortly afterward after half a game's length of asking her to quote unquote wait here and don't touch anything while he solves a busy working environmental puzzle Joel asks for Ellie's help in pushing a piano shortly after that he lets her have a gun Ellie covers Joel with sniper fire during one monstrously pivotal action scene without calling our attention to it any more than it has to the Last of Us starts letting Ellie perform melee kills with a knife by the time the story hits a twist and suddenly we're playing as Ellie stalking a deer in the forest of a winter we trust her the way a daddy might trust his daughter the walking dead the video game had shown us Clementine BioShock Infinite had shown us Elizabeth the Last of Us showed us Ellie and Joel as the third game of the daddy-daughter trilogy the Last of Us was the first one to really flesh that daddy out with narrative design beef ever since the last of us happened if you throw a rock in a room full of people who are talking about video games you've am one in four chance at least of hitting someone who just finished saying literally every game and nowadays is about us sad dad oh yeah is every game nowadays about a sad dad name five of them The Walking Dead was 2012 BioShock Infinite and the last of us were 2013 god of war 2018 was 2018 that's four that's all I got Max Payne doesn't count near doesn't count Red Dead Redemption doesn't count heavy rain doesn't count The Witcher 3 doesn't count Octodad doesn't even count the child figure has to be present for at least 80% of the gameplay or it does not count as a dad game the way I look at it we've only got those four real dad games and you know what I don't even think we should call them dad games dad leanness isn't even really the key factor of these games these characters may be dads with children either biological or adoptive though I'd argue that the far more hook ish element here is the protector protected dynamic having a mobile relatively helpless danger magnet present in every action encounter adds a clean thrill stretch with me for a second if we consider dies if they take enough damage to be one of the core pillars of the definition of player character that makes the character we're supposed to protect in a video game escort mission at least partially a player character right seldom does a game like her utter the phrase escort mission without bookending it with expletives when a game throws us an escort mission we usually have a bad time however few people hesitate to declare Fumito away does game eco one of the best games of all time eco is a game length escort mission between eco and BioShock Infinite someone modded Warcraft 3 and called it Defense of the Ancients game designers everywhere started thinking critically about pass companions minions somebody on some triple a single-player Awards baiting video game development team somewhere maybe without saying it out loud asked what if the character you're escorting wasn't completely helpless give a minion a name and you've got yourself a baby child BioShock Infinite happened Bioshock Infinite's baby child Elizabeth sprints around with a big dumb Disney Princess grin on her face through every bullet spraying skirmish and occasionally helps with a small set of abilities I've honestly dis remembered to the details of because they were so boring The Last of Us gives us a baby child named Ellie helpless at first eventually pulling in a healthy percentage of the kills like Elizabeth she too is undetectable by enemies for some reason the story does not bother to justify occasionally the game decides that an enemy should endanger her adding a pending game over token to the players task list save Ellie or die five years later God of War 2018 gave us Cray doses skill tree upgradeable Sun at raius whom we can equip with a variety of armors and specialized bows with arrows kratos is a real big big friend and at reyes is an especially minion esque baby child God of War 2018 cracked the dad game code the dad wasn't what players loved players loved the development of a character sketched game of the Year award winning Lee in game design cutscenes and scrounging banter also sketch Ellie though three sketches make a portrait and her subtle growth into a player character forms the entire lumbar portion of the last of us as backbone without a skill tree without upgradable LevelUp Abul abilities without purchasable outfits and equipment Ellie levels up game wise as narrative Lee the hard world tries and fails to beat her down she changes outfits off-camera between chapters according merely to the taste she possesses in her fictional brain subtract from this any parental sentimentality and look just at the numbers you're looking what I call a baby child's big friends situation think of your favorite fictional adoptive parents who educate their younger companion in character building ways the hound and Arya Stark in Game of Thrones there's a real good example off the top of my head a baby child's big friend situation works well in video games because the medium of video games so often imparts its loudest catharsis in numerically provable character development The Last of Us provides us small integers when it comes to crafting recipes inventory space for ingredients clip sizes for our weapons and even the number of enemies in any given combat encounter you know what I'm going to go through my footage and count exactly how many enemies you encounter in The Last of Us I didn't do it before writing this script I'm writing this so that when I filmed this and edit this part of the video I'll remember to go through the whole game and count all the enemies I'll put a number on the screen to report to you exactly how many enemies the player encounters in the entire length of the Last of Us quite frankly I'm interested in seeing how many it is the player encounters so few enemies in each encounter of the last of us that when Ellie finally kills one of them without any input from the player the baby child's big friend situation pops off like a brain chemical 4th of July when you really think about it a little too much which it has always been my unfortunate habit to do we have here objective proof that Ellie is in fact the main character of the Last of Us think with me here the first kill that happens in The Last of Us we witness in third person while we control Joel's late daughter Sarah we stand by while Joel kills the first person shaped life-form he's probably ever killed in his life from the very start The Last of Us is making a loud statement about looking at our companion about the starring nature of someone else in our lives The Last of Us shocked critics with its sophistication because we critics didn't take time to slowly enough unpack all the subliminally exact naívi narrative and game design tricks it executed to make us into such enthusiastic spectators of Ellie's character development all God of War 2018 had to do was give this its own menu and there you have it every game like her and their little brother was saying every game is about dads now do something well enough once and everybody starts calling you everybody in summary want to make a below-average action game at least pretty good give the player character of MacGuffin who's also a person and also a minion give that minion a name and a voice congratulations you just made a baby child make the baby child a sad loser at the beginning of the game make the baby child eventually score one kill inch that number up if you can figure out a way to have the baby child take damage and die permanently affecting the remainder of the story you've got yourself a couple hundred go DS and that's the straight dope and now it's time for the bottom line The Last of Us is a great game by default the Last of Us shows us a world built for videogames every fallen over dresser in a house or piled up rusted to solid car on a mossy Highway makes sense as both level design and story The Last of Us is uncomfortable heavy action violence belongs in this terrible world the harmonic resonance of its two protagonists sadness and regret blesses us with magical hope amidst all the ruins of the late civilization with ginger systems and small integers the Last of Us sketches a psychology our brains need work only minimally to complete and where it does not require our imaginations it pummels us with the beauty of nature reclaiming a destroyed world it's top tier graphics Wow us though beyond mere technological muscle it was us with subliminal artistic thoughtfulness look how Joel's position relative to the camera conforms even seemingly unimportant traversal segments to the rule of thirds with relentless commitment to story locomotion the Last of Us shows us new situations with new dramatic payoffs at a pace texturally similar to literature The Last of Us is a remarkably clean game made seemingly by the sheer substance of a thousand game designers as loneliest unspoken dreams back in 2013 when I originally reviewed the Last of Us for action button dotnet I assigned at the bottom line The Last of Us is a glue wet gun by this I meant that the game's design and narrative work in such seamless concert that sticking to our guns isn't even an option the gun is sticky already we only need to pick the gun up we stick to the gun because the gun sticks to us this conviction to itself define the Last of Us a game that so superlatively combines and intertwines game design and narrative that you don't even have to like the game design or the narrative to admire their combination way back in 2003 Naughty Dog touted the best PlayStation 2 game of all time Jack twos multigon Rene Chur Jack 2 had platforming on par with super mario 64 it had precision driving on par with Ridge Racer or at least Grand Theft Auto 3 it had shooting on par with Ratchet and Clank it had skateboarding on par with Tony Hawk and it had a plot on par with the sort of Saturday morning cartoon that my big brother wouldn't make fun of me for watching ten years later Naughty Dog had made a third jack and two uncharted and now we had the Last of Us Naughty Dog's multi-genre fusion mission had matured and crystallized where once the visibility of Jack twos striations had impressed us now we had grown up and appreciated the smoothness of the last of us is gradient puzzle strategy survival action shooting stealth and exploration fused into one smooth experience permanently sure of its convictions a gun that becomes part of us when we pick it up by virtue of its contextually relevant trinkets alone and their presentation within luxurious optional prestige tours complete with companionship banter and visible world building The Last of Us is as of June 2020 action buttons pick for the number one best video game of all time edging out previous contender the Final Fantasy 7 remake spoilers the Final Fantasy 7 remake is definitely going to stay at the bottom of our list probably forever unless enough backers of patreon.com slash action button or members of discord GG slash action button dare to beg me and messages to review Bioshock I'll do it I don't even care I just need 200 patreon backers or 600 discord members - personally asked me to do it The Last of Us one 231 Game of the Year awards according to goatee pics blogspot.com making it the most awarded video game in history yet despite listing several websites that I'm pretty sure don't even exist goatee pics blog spot.com fails to list action button dotnet in any of its goatee lists I did declare the Last of Us 2013's game of the year back in early 2014 though I did so on my personal Twitter even so shouldn't a website bold enough to call itself Gogi pics dot blog spot.com have located and tabulated my vote via twitter i would like to end this review by entreating whoever runs Goudy picks blog spot.com to add action button net to the Last of Us game of the Year awards list two of those Game of the Year awards made that number non-prime the least I can offer is to make it a palindrome also I would like to take this moment to entreat the Game Awards voters to vote for Gustavo Santaolalla for the award for best musical score for the Last of Us part two this year to make up for the spike vgx Awards snubbing the Last of Us part 1 in favor of Grand Theft Auto 5 for the best musical score award in 2013 seriously that was embarrassing oh and while I'm making requests hey Naughty Dog if you're watching this can I get a code for uncharted 4 my buddy delicious McCune borrowed the physical copy of uncharted 4 you sent me back in 2016 and I don't think he's ever gonna give it back I just kind of want to play it a little bit again for the sake of my secret spreadsheet and I've got a pretty good streak going with my never having paid from one of your games I'd take of the Last of Us part to code as well because Sony didn't send me one that's why I had to make this video instead of one about the Last of Us part 2 my video about the Last of Us part 2 was gonna be so good dude I was gonna say they should have called it some more of us actually that was probably all I had not the last of us part 2 and this has been all I have to say about the Last of Us part 1 we hold these truths to be self-evident that video games were created awesome that I was born stupid however I will not die hungry video games forever action button [Music] Fibby Babis isn't a naughty dog he's a good dog well that's the end of the video we've we've come to the end of yet another Action Button review said it was going to be remarkably shorter than the Final Fantasy 7 remake review I think depending on your definition of remarkable you could say this one's shorter it's definitely shorter if you look at the time stamp I will say this one was much easier to make since it was a game I've been thinking about for 6 7 years first of all I would like to thank Naughty Dog for sending me the game uh seven years ago and six years ago I would also like to thank my good dog for just being there for me he's not a naughty dog he had a game company it would be called good beast software I'd like to thank Josh Watson for helping me do a huge portion of the editing who's very helpful this time around I should probably pay him some money that's a joke of course I'm gonna pay him some money actually and as soon as I finish editing this epilogue segment I'm going to message you on discord and talk to you about getting you paid for all the wonderful help that you've given me I mean by the time you were seeing this we've already had the conversation so a little bit weird I want to thank Fred wood for he's at that's my trunks on Twitter he's real good at Twitter check him out on Twitter he did two incredibly good photo shops for me that I kinda don't want to spoil because I know a lot of people would love to skip around YouTube videos you might have skipped here to the end to see just the ending segment that I made he did two of my favorite parts of the video which is just two little screens that I showed twice he did two really good photo shops when I put the one he did for the Last of Us part two when I lined it up with my joke about the last of his part two I i lolled real loud real hard it was pretty good I want to thank everybody who backs me on patreon which is again I still think that's weird I think you I think you're you're a bunch of that there are several thousand people with peculiar tastes who prefer to see videos like this over videos by people who were popular in high school or I don't know I just I I don't know why I'm disappointed in myself next videos about doom and I know that as soon as this video goes up I'm gonna get a million questions about which which version of doom am I going to review all will be answered in time let me just say that the video I have in mind which I see as the first real Action Button video I don't know if you thought this video was real and you thought the Final Fantasy 7 video was real thank you though this next one will probably shatter your mind because I shattered my minds just thinking about it it's a lot more interesting than the question of which version of doom am I going to review or focus on I will say no more and all will be revealed soon you might have noticed a significant portion of running time remains in this video so let me tell you about that I originally planned to have a segment about story in here about the story of the game to lay out the themes and dissect the character relationships and talk about why I think it's a good story first of all and second of all why I think it's a good video game story I did talk a lot in this review somewhat repetitively about the way game design and story intermingle and mesh together in ways that I think are genuinely interesting and I know the Last of Us gets talked about a lot people say it's the Citizen Kane of games I've heard that before gets talked about a lot I think we've probably talked about the Last of Us for we've got about a hundred years worth of discourse has happened in the last seven years since this game came out over 200 Game of the Year awards most awarded game in recorded history I think there's probably been a lot of really really smart conversation about the Last of Us is plot and it's it's intermingling of its plot and game design and narrative design that I might not have seen or I might have missed I didn't want to be too redundant part of the goal of this review was to actually establish a sort of core loopy rhythm somewhat structurally reminiscent of the game that I was reviewing which is why I ended up reira viewing the same points multiple times in the video hopefully somebody saw that and and thought oh I bet that was on purpose and now you know it was on purpose I do a lot of stuff on purpose I do plenty of stuff on accident let me tell you make a lot of mistakes don't make mistakes I repeat mistakes been saying that for a couple of years now so I don't just repeat mistakes I repeat this stuff I say this game integrates game design and narrative design in a way that I think is is genuinely worthy of a little bit of more of an academic study than this I think critics could look at if there's any critics watching the practical value of your crafted tools makes you reflect on the scarcity of the ingredient items which makes you reflect on the length of the scrounging sessions between missions which require you to witness visible tangible audible world-building which requires you to roleplay as the character Joel and I said a couple times in this video that the Last of Us has more in common with the Dungeons & Dragons campaign than it does with Metal Gear Solid or whatever and I said it in maybe a way that you might think sounds kind of jokey though I really do think that and I really do think that's interesting I think talking about a game player as an actor in a role is interesting we say role-playing a lot when we talk about role-playing games though we don't always really granularly talk about the player as an actor and that's what I was gonna talk about in my story segment which would have been very eloquent so I was gonna do a big old part about the story and then I thought you know what I think in the ether of my review it D really tenuously my story commentary is there and I don't I don't really need to add any more then on the last day of editing which was Sunday the the June 14th coincidentally the seventh anniversary of the release of the original The Last of Us on PlayStation 3 I accidentally looked at Twitter and I saw that there was a full-blown raging forest fire of discourse happening about the Last of Us part two comparing it to films comparing it to books some people hate it apparently they think it's too dark and some people love it and are saying it's one of the greatest games of all time I must say I'm very interested I love when a game is is polarizing I'm gonna play this game probably tomorrow probably gonna spend all day playing it tomorrow maybe I'll even stream it who knows if you're watching this gears later you don't even know what tomorrow means now I don't know how disappointed I should be and myself that I did not expect the is Games films conversation to rise from the dead cattle-prod resurrected jolted out of its sarcophagus it's happened about fourteen times in ten years as I've been a dude on the internet a person in the world who yells about video games for others is entertainment even if you come to these videos because you hate me let's face it hate is entertainment sometimes bright so I thought what can I add to this and I thought I gotta add something I gotta add a segment so I went to patreon and I said I had an idea for a segment as I've sat here polishing and finishing the video and fixing all the audio and making sure there's no loose frames this idea that I had when I glimpsed the tip of the discourse iceberg had blossomed and I just had this full idea and I really wanted to do it and I wanted to try my best at it so I asked you all on patreon I said if 100 of you comment on this post with the phrase spend a day and do the thing which sounds kind of like a like a BioShock Infinite reference it's not a BioShock Infinite reference spend a day and do the thing I said I would do it and I ended up with something like 400 comments before I stopped looking I did spend the day and I did do the thing and then I spent a day reckoning with the thing I'd done so let me tell you about the thing I did basically before I replayed The Last of Us and conducted my analysis and did all my mathematical breakdowns and filed a bunch of data into my secret spreadsheet before I even played the game I wanted to do a little bit of homework II research so I replayed portions of the game uncharted 1 drake's Fortune and uncharted 2 among thieves which I mentioned somewhat extensively in the review the one thing I didn't mention in the review which I probably would have found an occasion to mention in the section about the story which I cut was that I also prior to replaying the game to get into the mood to get into the last of us playing mode i re-read Cormac McCarthy's novels the road blood meridian or the evening redness in the West and No Country for Old Men and I rewatched the film's children of men No Country for Old Men a whole lot of men going on in my literary life over here I didn't rewatch the movie the road because I don't like that movie it's got Viggo I love Viggo Mortensen he's the Lord of my rings just don't really like that movie I think it's kind of a janky movie no offense to it if you like it that's ok you can like whatever you want I think the Last of Us is a better game than the road the movie is a movie so I reread these these books and then I proceeded to not dissect the plot and themes very deeply at all in this video I do say at one point that The Last of Us deals out plot beats in a manner texturally similar to literature and I was coming off having just reread the road and blood meridian immediately before playing the game I'm not gonna make any sort of a bold statement and I'm not I'm not here to generate any sound bites though I gotta say in terms of plotting and pacing and structure it's pretty good The Last of Us is pretty good in terms of just fiction writing storytelling I iced I think I call it gumption at one point I say it has fiction writing gumption to present its story as a series of short stories the whole plot occurs over for big chunks that one of which is much much longer than the others pittsburgh's like three hours of the game I've always been a big fan of the fix-up novel nor the fix-up novel is it's a fiction writing term that the short story writer has stitched together the short stories so that they flow into something resembling a novel I've always been a big fan of that particular template of novel and I feel like The Last of Us doesn't exactly fit that each of those little short stories does flow together really well and I just do think it's it's got a I like to think if there's like a cuisine elements the way there's just little so yeah rather than saying it's Citizen Kane or whatever let's say it's it's a fancy meal so I had read all these books and I just sat on the experience of having read these books and I did nothing with it and while I when I when I glimpsed the tip of the discourse iceberg I thought man how cool would it be if I just wrote a Cormac McCarthy novel based on the Last of Us if I just wrote the whole plot out like beat for beat shot four shot just wrote the whole thing in the exact style of the road I was like I could do it I could do it give me two weeks I could do it however I only asked you from one day so rather than write a novel I wrote some kind of a monstrous short story I think it's about like 5,000 words long it's not super long comes up to about 31 minutes of spoken word recording and I wasn't able to get Cormac McCarthy's style 100% channeled into my writing I do write my own fiction please do not judge my own fiction which you have not seen by the quality of this whatever it is that you're about to see like any self-respecting person I keep it my fiction to myself someday when I think I can do good in the world by doing so I will publish a piece of my fiction as prominently as is possible until then I'm just gonna keep on keeping it to myself know so I wasn't able to get Cormac MacCarthy style a hundred percent I like elements of his style let's let's face it he's it's a little bit silly sometimes it's so grim and it's so dark and it's so sad and hard and declarative and godlike that it's it's just a little bit hilarious I actually think he has a distinct sense of humor that the Coen Brothers very much got in No Country for Old Men when they show for example situations that are funny actually funny only for the viewer not for the people involved in the scene Llewellyn Moss trying to get across the Mexican border talking about doing his his service in Vietnam with the guy trying to get back into America that's an uncomfortable conversation for those two people but for us it's funny Anton Chigurh and the gas station attendant when he asks the gas station attendant to call the coin toss that's funny for us not for the gas station guy I think Cormac McCarthy's got a whole lot of intentional silliness a lot of it is unintentional and I realized that and became very aware of it while writing and I now have a newfound understanding of the particular texture of that guy's writing and there's a lot of stuff I like about his prose style dudes everybody know the there's this Gary Provost lesson this this sentence has five words looked at up this sentence has five words it's a it's a quick easy impressive lesson on how to vary eight intense length and within a paragraph so that you keep the reader moving along micro pacing Cormac MacCarthy is like the the sophomore year class version of that he doesn't just very eight sentence length and word complexity he will kind of punch you in the stomach with sudden changes from concrete to abstract and there's this this neat texture to it I'm not gonna say my attempt is is good at being him I'm saying I don't want to be him if you uh locked me in a room with a bunch of money I could probably fake it decently so what you're about to see by no means represents a final product I wrote it fast off the top of my head and then me and Josh Watson as quickly as we could lined up footage it's about 31 minutes long I would have loved nothing more than to make a two-hour long post-credits sequence for you that would have been it's a great great joke I would have loved it to be one second longer than the actual review didn't have time for that five days we could have had time for it kind of wanna see if I can go five more days now maybe I'll make a patreon post that's a joke I'm not gonna do that now while writing this thing I was I was cackling I was yelling Mao I was louder than the neighbor's dogs and then when I when I sat down to record the voiceover and I did record the voiceover and I was like FUBU says pretty cool and then I I was listening to it with the the game footage lined up in the music under and I'm like oh my god there's no jokes in here there's there's just no there's no room to breathe it's just this suffocating sort of sort of horrible thing it's just torturous weird thing the music is good though because I used the official music from the game two-time Academy Award winner who stopped with some thought yeah he's there in the video so check it out for him no we're gonna want a google fair use when this is over now if you haven't played the last of us part one and you want to and you don't want to be spoiled this video is going to spoil absolutely everything about it so don't watch it if you want to play the game for yourself someday you have one day before the sequel comes out comes out tomorrow probably gonna play it tomorrow again if you're you're watching this years later you have no idea what Morrow is if you have played the last of us part one and you'd you'd like some kind of refreshment remember the game and to reflect upon the experience before you play the sequel I'd say check this one out there's probably some five minute to minute three minute you can summarize this game in two minutes probably I thought I was gonna do it in 10 minutes I thought it was gonna write 1,500 words and then I started writing the beginning part and I was just having way too much fun so I ended up it just gave it give it the 5000 a nice even treatment one one nice coat didn't edit it at all so there's that there's probably some five minutes six minute three minute to minute eight minute nine minute for minute IGN GameSpot polygon Kotaku somebody probably has some sort of the summary I didn't watch any of those I didn't need to because I've done played the game very recently twice and I I don't and then ruminated upon volumes gigabytes of recorded footage I don't need to watch any sort of summary so I made my own and I did it me style and I did a McCarthy style and I would not have even thought to do this had I not had a venues such as patreon where I can ask people hey would you guys like it if I did something weird I didn't even tell you what I was gonna do you all asked me to do it anyway I said I got something and I can't tell you what it is though if if you tell me to do it I'll do it I did it and I guess I've introduced it long enough you should probably watch it now and I'll see you next time with doom gonna be a big one gonna be a weird one gonna be a good one and I hope you thought this one was a good one too and if you didn't maybe the next 30 minutes to change your minds if it doesn't truth is I can't change your mind about anything the world ate itself on his birthday night his daughter on the couch looked at the clock it wasn't midnight she gave him a simple strong watch as a present he asked her how do you afford this and she said I sell hardcore drugs and he said good you can help with the mortgage after that he put her to bed and what she dreamed is still between her and God she woke and spent the rest of her life fearing she never saw her father again the man she saw in her father's clothes and skin had a desperation that belonged to gnome one she had ever known and everyone he would ever know after her father's brother came and they tried to get away together and no one could get away the city was burning a gas station exploded you can't get away from something nobody's ever seen nobody knew yet not to trust anybody second that years later feel like minutes to think about past in the question was dark the world changed in a night that night and he stood riding the edge of that change his watch had broken when he fell if time heals all wounds than what he had either wasn't a wound or time had wounded itself and time can't heal itself for years nightly and morning Li he would go on to recollect his inaction n't genuflect toward regret and always finally settle outside himself on a notion that if the world had changed only a little faster for 20 years he ate and felt the knowledge that who those years had made him would have changed a little faster than the world's did that night a wound can also be a part of you a scar is a body part his partner woke him from it she poured a drink she did not enjoy it she had information someone who had done them wrong had to become vulnerable to a worse roan the man did not hesitate scraps of civilization and gray and hard vehicles louder than speech some governments like remainders were taking temperatures someone tried to run the man watched them get shot they traversed a courtyard nature was working hard to reclaim he did not oh this place reflections it wasn't ever his home before upstairs in a broken red brick building he saw nature had decided to retake even man's imitations of nature there were gas masks and traversed a yellow basement dark an individual had fallen there and breathed in some spores he begged the man to kill him the man killed him without sadness for darkness the man didn't reflect any more on how life used to never ask him these questions at some point before becomes a shorter forever than after in the city the people like clothing and made it their enemies pretended they wanted to talk really nobody wanted to talk his partner didn't want to talk they spoke instead the cave man's language now their ultimate adversary wanted to talk he told the woman and the man of an opportunity to make some money to live a little closer to whatever better was they killed him they met the woman who'd offered to their dead enemy the alleged smuggling job something electric about her a particular desperation she brought them to the package the package was a girl they planned to take her out of the city and away from the vehicles and firearm cacophony of the broken authorities by dark fall the man didn't know yet - let the girl remind him of someone the man spread out on a couch alone recognizing neither himself nor his ghosts the girl no more precious to himself than himself in loud rainy dark they inched through mud and fear the straggling clutches of law wielded their authority they were taking temperatures violence happened on its own accident the man and his partner learned - the girl was infected even a child had the capacity to betray the girl said the bite had happened three weeks ago when they didn't believe her they were treating her like they treated everybody they thought to walk away wagging need and fear they decided to their job would only last the night any way all they had to do was hand to the girl off in an old subway station and then a disused museum and they negotiated action lessly with hate rates everybody had changed forever some people changed differently they could see the golden dome of their destination like a halo without an angel their contact was dead already the authorities didn't appreciate tricks the woman told the man to take the girl and run to take her to the doctors in what used to be Colorado the woman told the man the girl was the Cure and he asked her when she started to believing anything she showed him she'd been bitten when his eyes had not pointed at her her life had changed completely in a painful instant small actions and big movements both can happen when a man isn't looking in the end she decided to die believing in one thing he saw in her the very top of man's hope and buried that hope in every afterward breath the girl spoke to him later and he did not hear her because he had long ago deafened himself to every word resembling apology the man into the girl together now a week farther from the city grade became green the world here paid no mind to the color of human hearts the man didn't tell the girl how he knew the person he knew here hunkering rates to gone inside themselves to eat each other sprang into hunger for the man and the girl the man's friend found them struggling the man's friend knew of a truck the man and the girl could use they needed to battle through a dilapidated high school and crack fallen hollow neighborhood to get to the truck they battled against many of the yelling husks sometimes during this morbid routine of kill the Wraiths is predictability and ignorant to one another appealed to the man like a loyalty forever is forever there's darker than his though forever all the same nature makes romance where it can where it has to in the man's friends friend's house they found the man's friend's friend hanging dead upstairs the man found a letter the man's friends friend had left the world hating the man's friend reacted without reacting the man thought one way is as good as another a scar is a body part they pushed the truck out and down a hill toward orange Twilight and the girl turned the key and the truck didn't start and they pushed it again as the yelling husk subjected to life and life fought back until the truck started the man told his friend you could come with us and the man's friend said he'd rather leave himself to himself and the man knew especially that he didn't know what anyone meant to themselves they pointed to the truck west and drove with desperation that at some silent moment within passing hours transpired into routine the sky gray black the cracking asphalt wet reflective and the window glass rain speckled the man let himself feel tired behind him the girlís cabbage to the rectangle of available civilization she found artifacts a magazine with naked men embarrassed the man and she now knew he could be embarrassed a comic book told a simple story of capability and hope that she knew people in the time before her time had known she found a cassette tape and asked the man if it was from his time and he told her it was from before his time and now she knew that there were times before the time before her time the truck came to life with the ancient music alive for a while he knew that every time was before her time and that her time was not the time at all soon in a sense only the cold part of the world understands anything that is now will be before everyone's time he chose to pass through rather than around a small metropolis a human in stress begged assistance and the girl expressed sympathy infinitely disproportionate to the man's he had guests at the bottom of man's desperation before and did not wish for an objective answer today there were more of them they attacked the truck crashed and became forever useless in a brew instant the man awoke and interrupted consciousness later he might have missed an hour or a week desperate men argued for his and the girls lives and belongings by reflex the man's struggle ended in success alive again they walked a day through the grass blasted asphalt of a downtown broken buildings with more windows than walls foliage here strikes like a kind of rot itself the breath of God grazing the earth and fogging it green an old river infesting a daylight street the girl couldn't swim he could he found her a raft he delivered her to the lobby of an old hotel she asked little questions about cafes and he told her he had liked to drink coffee at cafes and he did not think she would never drink a coffee at a cafe wallpaper peeling wood stinking floors creaking the hotel packed with ancient loot magnetising squatters every useful artifact a new necessity necessity as distinguishable from greed as greed distinguishable from breathing whispers passing each other in a forest before language recognition of another life the same as anger again he struggled with a gun in his hand again senseless success they came to a decrepit mould stinking elevator shaft he helped the girl up a Ledge and before he could help himself the ground gave way a large pain broke his concentration and now he was in water in a dark basement the girl above him picture framed and back lit he told her he'd find her and he didn't see the look on her face when she believed him the basement mustered dark hey gas masked to ward away up when the fungus came it made men as immortal as hungry he reckoned again that they didn't need the food they sought that what owned them sustained to them itself and that some mere speckle of ancient sport or remnant affection alone drove them to kill here these husks had hunkered in this foodless seclusion for so many years as to have grown blind he knew that to think a kill a mercy put kindness into it and he did not need kindness the man in the hotel kitchen did not need kindness either whispers passing in a forest before language locking eyes and conjuring sacrificial ritual hate he made the mistake of foreign instant forgetting an animal's fear of heights an assailant at a ladder top crashed him to earth one of his minds content to drown in a nose his depth of water the other stretching fingers for a firearm before he could take it it lifted itself toward heaven a silent Ascension a thunderclap his now forever nameless enemy language lessly dead the girl gripping the gun fingers still danger craving ly precarious upon the trigger I killed the heck out of that guy she said and he said you did and he made her give him the gun because it was his gun though now he knew what she could do with it if she had to and that moment architected an unfortunate this is how he recognizes her in his forever forward memory she begins to him by reminding himself of himself he talked easier to her now in a disused Ballroom drenched in decorations of a forgotten celebration he asked and appreciated her help in pushing a piano so they could climb higher in a crow's nest now he trusted her to watch him he gave her a meticulous gun and told her to help him clear the downtown he told her to hold her shoulder high and forget to hesitate he didn't see the look she gave him when he turned his back an expression of both trust and fear desperation didn't go away it did however change from time to time perched high like an angel she saved him again with a loud and invisible voice they moved again toward the outside of the city there - whispers passed to other whispers in that forest before language and all four hesitated in what very well might have turned into danger they'd found friends a big brother and a little brother as wary of the others as the man and the girl were the little brothers eyes fell on a tall from before his time and his brothers time and the man spectated the little brothers Big Brother reject as probably always any attempt to manufacture on owned sentimentality they ventured to the boys's refuge and basked for an afternoon in the grace with which the moment had given them companions and considering an enemy by nightfall they killed their way toward the city limits the enemy thickened the man was too slow clambering to his safety the brothers left him to his own they urged the girl to follow she left them the man incredulous at her dedication he'd long ago given up the art of expectation she followed him in his fast crawl under unnecessary attack from civilisation resembling fear fearing faceless hate husks they fell from a bridge into dark water and woke on a beach under a blanket of quiet the man saw the big brother he couldn't stop anger he pointed a gun the big brother said he knew he was going to be okay and the man knew the boy had known no such thing because nobody knows any such thing anymore he allowed the boy his innocence for a while because some fragment of him no longer wanted to see the bad in everything they walked a beach by night and scavenged a run aground boat some people back then had avoided eye witnessing the fullness of the depravity by way of a coincidental boating vacation the force be locked into an old sewer tunnels dark and warm they saw homes of the run aground boaters people had been comfortable here they had had children here children had been comfortable here they had died comfortable here children had died here scribbled on a nursery floor a shame flinching death letter by a shocked gone parent disclaiming to future archaeologists that they didn't suffer he saw now the bottom of man's hope he imagined someone who if they died he'd want to die too he recognized wanting and doing as different darkness some once human monsters showed themselves in the dark again a successful stroke they burst out of the darkness into the light and saw RIT on the wall around the door which they had exited a too late warning that danger lurked inside now they strolled a rotten suburb empty of life he found alcohol rags sugar and blades in a tattered house loud red painted letters on a white house warned off looters an alphabetical ghost stopped in the grass blasted road stood a dead ice-cream truck the girl asked what it was and the man told her it was a truck that drove around and sold ice cream to children and the girl laughed and didn't believe him and he knew she'd never bought anything from anybody face to face and friendly and that she'd never seen ice cream neither at the distant end of a long row of houses a faceless hate shouted with the powerful firearm the man offered to slip ahead and building shadows and behind walls and through kitchens and basements to stop the sniper he snuck upon an expecting enemy he killed he manned the gun to exterminate the Friends of his dead enemy eventually the hate of the old gone world bubbled up and struck and he sent as many of them to oblivion as he could the man the girl the big brother and the little brother slipped through a fence and to the place the boys had promised to meet their friends the man had forgotten the nature of that place he knew now that they've been traveling with the boys only because their general directions were the same the boys as friends didn't show up and probably wouldn't they passed an easy night with canned food and conversation the girl and the little brother alone in a room she offered him the toy his brother had refused him I picked it up she said she told him nobody has to know he didn't thank her she left him at last reject full of nostalgia for a time before he was at some time when no one's eyes had pointed toward him a husk had bitten his leg which now festered he spent a hot night appreciating alone a mastery of one small forever only while he owned the next morning the man and the big brother cooked breakfast and talked easily the girl went to wake the little brother he was gone and standing the man aimed to kill by reflex the big brother lashed out the big brother shot his little brother who now died again on the floor beneath the man's mind he remembered an ocean think about one who'd die and leave you wanting to die too he saw now space below the bottom of man's hope they both saw it he wished that she hadn't see the man and the girl together now a season at least four months acquainted and talking easier walking in a forest of an autumn that some forgotten time change it into warmer found garments long and slow their conversations in a misty forest they found a grave no bigger than a child in the woods and she wanted to talk about what they'd seen together as she sometimes did and he didn't want her to he didn't consider the preciousness of the place she now occupied what she reminded him of he took her to his brother his brother and more of us struggled less unpleasantly then the man had lately in an old factory the girl who saw a horse and the man and the girl talked of horses like friends the man's brother gave him a photograph the man didn't look at the photograph the man gave the photograph back the brother boasted that he and his optimistic friends had managed to reinvent electricity in this building the man alone with his brother confronted him with a request you owe me something the man told his brother everybody knew nobody owed anybody anything anymore the man told his brother to take the girl the man knew his brother knew the people who wanted the girl the people who were looking for the Cure the man's brother couldn't comprehend the man's desperate need to be rid of the girl the man didn't comprehend it himself and had no chance to because hate broke in as it often did and the man and his brother had to kill opportunistic Wanderers who had in greed spectated to the reinvention of electricity their enemies killed they took stock the girl had deduced the man plan and fled on a horse the man knew she'd want to be alone however alone was danger in this life the man and his brother took to horseback and followed to the only path the girl could have along the way some ramshackle squatting venues appropriated by desperation they killed again in routine reflex they chanced upon a ranch house and saw the horse the girl had taken they hitched their horses and went inside he spied a fallen over dresser in the hallway had the divine in terrierist again designed him a geometrical refuge against the unexpected he found her in a disappeared girl's bedroom reading a book and wandering aloud about the simplicity of old life he told her to come with him and she expressed unease and he told her she was going to go with his brother and she exclaimed his daughter the man's brother's wife had told her about the man's daughter she said I'm not her and he said no you're not and he had never hated anything with such unli thil consumptive ferocity hate had followed them and its arrival quashed a speakable epiphany and in the routine of the killing he reckoned all of his for Evers some longer than others the ones after longer than the one before and he achieved some peace he never spoke back at a vantage overlooking his brother's abode he told the girl to come with him he apologized to his brother for the horse he was about to steal his brother allowed it now much later on horseback across grass blasted asphalt they came into Colorado with an optimism he told her this is a university she occupied a precious place now behind him on the horse he told her children became adults while living here and learning he trusted her to wait on the horse as he crawled through muck and mustard dust and contented with predictable monsters and gasping and gasps masked darkness he found alcohol and blades and other useful items in a garage he saw lawn chairs two of them and new people were once comfort here before going somewhere he did never live to understand they saw monkeys in the courtyard she had never seen monkeys he had he didn't wonder why they were seeing monkeys now and here they were looking for a building they heard looked like a mirror they found it and they entered a laboratory whom they had expected to meet there was gone in a probable hurry every distant whisper a quiver of fear rattles and clatters monkeys making innocent noise in an old lab occupying the piratical posture of ghosts in all that Hollow they found evidence of where the levers had left to Salt Lake City they had a little further to go now the man into the girl and knew why the levers had left drastic are mad envious attacked with a desperation tanta mounting anger God's wrath flowing down and filling up everyone in a situation turgid he struggled as always in routine a cascade of momentary reflex successes than a disaster he fell a rusty spike impaled him clean through he knew it had missed his vital organs because part of him over slow years had learned how to tell right away if you've survived she descended to him he felt his speed bleed out of him he fought his best now she occupied a precious place in front of him he did not see himself so much now as a man or a figment he saw now one child with two or more ghosts and he lost himself in a hot comfort seeing this in the forest of a winter now the girl hunted with a bow and arrow she killed a rabbit and then saw a deer she shot the deer clean it survived and bled she tracked the sensible beast until it struggled away from life she came across two men one older and bearded and the other younger and clean-shaven they stood over her kill discussing meat volume she greeted to them with the sort of threat she slowly learned they offered to trade she said you can have the deer if you bring antibiotics she demanded that the older bearded man's day while the younger clean-shaven man ran off to their camp to fetch the medicine the girl and the bearded man waited together she stopped his attempts at conversation some of the old dead attacked and the girl and the bearded man defended to themselves in a cold shack with reflexes sharpened by perfunctory wisdom she did not trust the bearded man she did well not to he and his companion closed on her with invisibly sinister intentions she broke free after managing to grip the essential medicine she ran back to the man as he lay convalescing quiet beneath heavy blankets in a frozen basement and she injected the antibiotics that might save him the men came for her she escaped on her precious horse who soon died gunshot beneath the snowy hill now she alluded to the men in a snow decrepit lake resort and killed when she could they took her soon and caged her and she began to suspect their nature the man awoke with his usual fright he called to the girl he might have dreamed of her for a long time he became quickly aware of the notion of lurking others blind in snow wind he struggled forward in this new place some other men tried to kill the man however time had not offer to the other men the same opportunities to learn from desperation the man subdued the other men and made them beg for impossible' of mercy amidst the prisoners is begging the man extracted information he killed his prisoners and continued moving meanwhile the girl found herself on a kitchen table and the evilest of the men with a broad knife she shouted her infection she said I'm infected she asked them to roll up her sleeve to look at her scar in their shock and confusion she escaped now she found herself in a vast banquet hall her aspiring killer and scramble had knocked over a flame Lantern and an accidental arson had begun to unfurl itself she evaded him when she could she glimpsed him vulnerable she stabbed him her old knife meanwhile the man battled through the loud wind of snow and into a dark foodservice backroom he saw a paper scrap with a list of poundage 'iz and volumes he saw many pieces of old luggage occupying a shelf their bearers now part of the wind he saw the girls backpack he took it he entered a freezer room and saw human bodies hanging dead and preserved fresh for a grim later an unthinking chaos later she lay prone in view of a knife her oppressor taunted her from above begging her to take the knife he thought her will gone he thought wrong flames shrieked with invisible strength unbelievable her mind complete she hated him again and again with the blade the man found her there a long moment later struggling in victory below him as he had once struggled in defeat below her he touched her then and she said don't touch me he knew he needed her he had seen the bottom of men's souls she had not seen it she had however had occasion to perfectly imagine it and imagining it was worse a season later they reached Salt Lake City she gave him the photograph his brother had tried to give him in Wyoming he took it and thanked her he loved her now without saying it or thinking it love a wisp of spirit to dissipate upon casual utterance he spoke his daughter's name to her he told her that she and her would have been friends the girl grew distant she did not respond to words for a short while she then ran off scaring him in shock he chased her now he saw what had surprised her a tribe of giraffes had occupied the city center she had never seen a giraffe maybe he hadn't either hey giraffe came close and he petted its face and told her it was like a big horse they stood looking out at a peaceful world for a while and talked to each other like friends or relatives might together they dealt with the darkness of the one last tunnel between themselves and their long gold some miserable remnants subjected to their crossing and they conducted to the same grim routine as always talking easy they came through a flooded to concrete chamber and into a flooded to stretch of tunnel capsized and submerged vehicles made a loose bridge and they traversed with caution until caution didn't suffice she tried to save him from drowning and fell in the water herself she still couldn't swim he thought time and again that someday he would teach her after he hadn't taught her after wasn't here yet he clutched her body and let the water tow them like a missile until a dirty cracked asphalt shore men in uniforms with guns confiscated to the unconscious man and to the unconscious girl he awoke in a hospital the woman who'd given him the girl greeted him he hadn't seen her in a year she said she'd given up hope she thanked him she told him the girl was in an operating room she told him they had to remove the girl's brain he saw himself from afar he boiled the woman turned on him with the hostility inherent in one who'd just received a great favor and escort eagerly assured him outward why wouldn't they at least let him stay unthinking his reflexes struggled into their accustomed pattern lights loose and shadows swaying in that old dust smelling a public labyrinth he killed until he found her he hesitated for longer than long ago he'd have guessed he ever would before he shot the surgeon who was about to cut her he held her the way he had held her as he ran toward the elevator in a fever he did not consider danger he was already dead he was already alive in the garage the woman met him she told him she didn't blame him he shot the woman in the stomach he told her he'd knew she'd just come after girl whether he knew that for certain or not is his and God's business he didn't rationalize until later though he never did give words to those eventual rations maybe if we can't save one of us we can't save the rest of us he put her in a car and drove fast she breathed later and it sounded like the perfect truth she awoke again after many hours he spent wondering if she'd known all along and if she did whether their lives now would become a game or a fight he lied to her that the scientists had said she wasn't special and that they hadn't needed her after all and that the doctors had in fact determined that no one would ever get better he looked her in the eye in the rearview mirror and he told her they'd given up on finding a cure he told her nothing could fix us and that we'd all just have to deal with it together she either believed him or she didn't somewhere where his brother was more of us were figuring out how to be just fine and he knew where that was and he considered loving it so he took her there on the precipice of settlement the girl spoke to the man of her self and in a way she never had she told him about the day she received her useless wound she said her friend had been with her then and her friend had gotten bitten too and together they promised to tell no one else of their grim sentences they promised each other affectionate spectating her gone friend had said we'll lose our minds together the girl's friend lost her mind alone and the girl said she still waited for her turn life warming and green at the air delicious he could see a home after wasn't here yet the man thought we all lose our minds all the time though not always in the sense life makes us expect she asked him again if he'd told her the truth and he told her he had and she looked him in I and she told him she believed him

Channel: Action Button

Views: 373,208

Keywords: the last of us, playstation, video game, review

Id: MGSTEKapIAg

Length: 184min 4sec (11044 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/JollyGreen67]

I am 27, Tim Rodgers is 40. How does he look like he’s 5 years younger than me?

[u/scredeye]

At some point, we as a species have to come together and agree that a review that is longer than a standard movie shouldn't be called a review.

[u/[deleted]]

Hey reader, before you leave that comment about how stupid a 3 hour video is, consider the following:

You don't have to watch it. You literally are not obligated to watch the video. There will be people who want to watch all 3 hours of this. Alot of people. Some people enjoy Tim Roger's long ass videos.

But you do not have to watch it.