FrediPy_ Posted November 8, 2021 Share Posted November 8, 2021 Textbook write-up, I really liked the format of going through the whole series, it helps putting your opinions in context and it's been a good read being (possibly) my number-one childhood series, lots of memories there. I have to say I agree with practically everything, especially… On 6/11/2021 at 2:35 AM, GonzoWARgasm said: Ratchet and Clank [2016] The rant continues! Oh boy, this was such a disappointment. Like for you, RaC3 was my favourite game of the original series back when I was a child, it was perfect, felt like a game that still belonged to the Ratchet and Clank concept but had more of everything… more sick weapons, more bosses, more action, more bolts, more Clank side stuff, more humour, more everything! But as years passed and the remasters came, I too started appreciating the first game better, because it was more in the details you maybe don't get or realise as a child: The unique atmosphere to each planet, one-shot characters with true personalities, such a true relationship development between our antiheros Ratchet and Clank, an amazing soundtrack. Definitely one of the best games from the PS2 era. I couldn't believe all of that was gone in the remake. Played it (not having read critics and stuff) with lots of expectations given how much I liked the game it was allegedly based on and I truly felt deceived. The characters felt plain, the relationship between our reinvented disney heroes was non-existent, unimaginative plot, no memorable worlds, dull music… at least it feels good to know I am not the only one ? If only this series went back to where it started, mate. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Platinum_Vice Posted November 8, 2021 Author Share Posted November 8, 2021 (edited) On 11/8/2021 at 4:31 PM, DrBloodmoney said: First of all, I want to say: I love the "Series Review" angle! Seriously, this is a really interesting approach to the checklists, and I think sets yours apart completely from most of the ones I follow and gives your write-ups a completely different flavour to most others. I also really like the heavy dispersement of images in them - more than any other thread, your series reviews feel like a write up in a magazine, where I find myself reading faster to get to a section because the splash image has already caught my eye! Dude that is EXACTLY what I am going for. Truly: thank you. Quote On the Ratchet Series - I agree with a lot of your points, though I think for me the enjoyment graph would be a little more up and down, rather than the slow decline you experienced. Your opinion here is definitely in line with what appears to be the majority of the vocal opinions. Everybody seems to love ACiT. When you look at the full series (I actually did not. There's another two games in the last half-dozen years - Full Frontal Assault and All 4 One - that I just refuse to look into), the graph would look more up-and-down because ACiT and Nexus are considered to be leagues better than those. Quote I'm still trying to finish up my reviews of the two I played recently - Crack in Time and Nexus - and while Nexus was fine, though a bit short and a little throw-a-way, I actually think Crack in Time is the first one with a genuine shot of competing seriously with Going Commando for the top spot for me. Setting aside the "Chosen One" angle (which, yes, you are right, does retrofit a letterboxed interesting concept onto the franchise,) I think the actual level design, variety and weapon set in A Crack in Time is up there with the best of the games, and the one area it manages to outdo all others, is the Clank sections. I generally have never cared for any of the Clank sections in any of the games, but those time-rewind / duplication clone puzzles are the highlight of the game for me - especially the "optional" ones later in the game, required to get the gold bolts. Frankly, I would pay full price for a game that was entirely based on those kind of puzzles! Of course, I'm looking forward to your reviews as always. It appears I may have entrenched you further into an appreciation of ACiT? ? Here's a spicy take I didn't think to mention: I find the Clank sections in Nexus to actually be among the best in the series! The gravity puzzles were refreshing as a change-up for his involvement in the series. I found the ACiT Clank sections to just be too much of a pace killer ultimately. As you said: you'd buy a whole game based on the puzzling mechanic, but that's because you and I love puzzle games. We HAVE bought games based on this mechanic. But I didn't like the gear change (pun intended) in a RaC game. The aesthetics and "Chosen One" plot points for these Clank sections were other factors why it didn't vibe with me. But I concede to being in the minority, and more power to the people who enjoy it mate. Thanks for checking in Doc. On 11/8/2021 at 8:11 PM, FrediPy_ said: Textbook write-up, I really liked the format of going through the whole series, it helps putting your opinions in context and it's been a good read being (possibly) my number-one childhood series, lots of memories there. I have to say I agree with practically everything, especially… Ratchet and Clank 2016 Oh boy, this was such a disappointment. Like for you, RaC3 was my favourite game of the original series back when I was a child, it was perfect, felt like a game that still belonged to the Ratchet and Clank concept but had more of everything… more sick weapons, more bosses, more action, more bolts, more Clank side stuff, more humour, more everything! But as years passed and the remasters came, I too started appreciating the first game better, because it was more in the details you maybe don't get or realise as a child: The unique atmosphere to each planet, one-shot characters with true personalities, such a true relationship development between our antiheros Ratchet and Clank, an amazing soundtrack. Definitely one of the best games from the PS2 era. Preach it man. RaC3 felt like the G.O.A.T. when it came out. Having a critical eye can be overrated; enjoying the game from start to finish, that's what truly matters. Agreed - Ratchet's character in RaC1 was refreshing. The PS2 had SO many good games but this was up there. Quote I couldn't believe all of that was gone in the remake. Played it (not having read critics and stuff) with lots of expectations given how much I liked the game it was allegedly based on and I truly felt deceived. The characters felt plain, the relationship between our reinvented disney heroes was non-existent, unimaginative plot, no memorable worlds, dull music… at least it feels good to know I am not the only one ? If only this series went back to where it started, mate. Deceived is the right word. Deceived by the devs for calling it a remake (blasphemers!) and deceived by reviewers even more on my part. It really opened my eyes to the lack of personaly integrity that goes into big name reviewers (seriously, HOW does the game get universal praise when it's even worse than the movie, which received universal admonition?), OR indicates a lack of taste with what they consider to be a good game. Edited December 31, 2023 by Platinum_Vice 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrBloodmoney Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 10 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Here's a spicy take I didn't think to mention: I find the Clank sections in Nexus to actually be among the best in the series! The gravity puzzles were refreshing as a change-up for his involvement in the series. Those were actually good fun, I totally agree - I think they just didn't stand out as much to me, as I have definitely seen that mechanic before in other games, where the CiT ones felt really fresh - even playing 10 years after the fact, I couldn't think of another game that had done that mechanic - at least, in a puzzle setting. Super Time Force Ultra certainly did it, but that was as a pure action game. I even put out a status update shout, asking the site if anyone was aware of any games that had done similar puzzles, and came up blank ? 10 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: I found the ACiT Clank sections to just be too much of a pace killer ultimately. As you said: you'd buy a whole game based on the puzzling mechanic, but that's because you and I love puzzle games. We HAVE bought games based on this mechanic. But I didn't like the gear change (pun intended) in a RaC game. You know - as much as I loved those puzzles, that is a fair point. The pacing is an issue with them. I didn't feel it negatively in the first playthrough, but in a game that requires at least one NG+ playthrough for the platinum (I needed almost 3 full playthroughs to upgrade everything), you definitely notice the pacing issue with the Clank puzzles. In NG+ you are absolutely tearing through the Ratchet stuff, with all weapons upgraded, and decimating everything, but each Great Clock section does drag at that point, and bring the screeching pace to a screeching halt! That's the problem with any puzzle game I guess, once you have solved them, just going through the motions does feel rote in the second (and third) playthroughs. I actually think they might have been able to solve that by adding some kind of timed challenge element to them in NG+, maybe with additional unlocks for meeting them, but as they are, in NG+, those are always the sections that remind you to check the clock and see if it's bedtime yet ? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Platinum_Vice Posted November 9, 2021 Author Share Posted November 9, 2021 1 hour ago, DrBloodmoney said: ... even playing 10 years after the fact, I couldn't think of another game that had done that mechanic - at least, in a puzzle setting. Super Time Force Ultra certainly did it, but that was as a pure action game. I even put out a status update shout, asking the site if anyone was aware of any games that had done similar puzzles, and came up blank You want The Talos Principle for a game of just puzzles like this. Like if you recorded Chel moving a companion cube and did the level twice. Or on a smaller scale, you've already beaten The Sexy Brutale, and there's 12 Minutes. Both of those make a game out of just one puzzle, obviously reminiscent of Groundhog Day & Edge of Tomorrow, expanded out on a macro scale with narrative. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrBloodmoney Posted November 9, 2021 Share Posted November 9, 2021 Just now, GonzoWARgasm said: You want The Talos Principle for a game of just puzzles like this. Like if you recorded Chel moving a companion cube and did the level twice. Interesting.... ....takes note... ?? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Platinum_Vice Posted November 15, 2021 Author Popular Post Share Posted November 15, 2021 Update: Thanks for your support everyone. It’s really encouraging to receive so much love when stepping out of the comfort zone and having a crack at presenting something myself. A quick update in lieu of getting the Uncharted series review out: My TV: for a start, my TV is fully *fcuked*. This is the pause screen for Shadow of the Colossus as well as the TV output: I’ve had it for three years. It’s a 70inch Sony that cost be $2194AUS (about $1300US). I contacted the distributor and they had Sony contact me. They offered to take it back and offered two TV options as a replacement (one worth about $1600US and one worth $2000US, each with a discount of about $600US). I sent them back a polite ‘not good enough,’ citing that for three years of use for a $1300US product, a straight-up replacement would be more appropriate, and cited my loyalty to the company. I also told them that I had bought a 60inch Bravia in 2011 for $900US which came with a PS3, because both of those products are still boxing on strong. They just told me they’d deliver the new 75inch KD75X85J in a week for free provided that I exchange it with the faulty 70inch. The new model is not top of the line but neither was the 70inch. So I took the offer. Let it be known: Sony ain’t all that bad y’all. Meanwhile, Hyper Light Drifter's Dash Eternal still got me crying. I'm giving this a total of an hour per week at the moment. Recent record: 421. Not close to my actual record from when I last put the game down a couple of years ago but making progress. Next barrier: consistently hitting 400 (the halfway mark). I think if I can hit 600 consistently then the 800 will just be an above average attempt. Chip, chip, chip away. Moving Out: finally had some time with Mrs Gonzo to delve deeper than the most superficial attempts that we had with this game a fortnight ago. It is fucking hilarious. Stomps all over Overcooked. We’re about 33% in. I can’t help but giggle when playing this. If you like couch co-op that will offer your partner (who is not a regular gamer) a good time too, this is a must-have. God of War PSP ports: I finally got a copy of the PS3 Origins Collection delivered ($70AU later – oh my god) because I like having physical copies. The disc was too scratched. No matter how much I cleaned it, I couldn’t progress due to the quality of the disc. This was particularly frustrating as the disc arrived at the perfect time where I was staying up late to get into a later sleep pattern for my night shift week. Had me like this: So I had to buy the digital copies. There’s good news now: I’ve got the platinums for the digital copies (Trophies Against Cancer event ticked!) and the seller of the physical copy is accepting a refund request (I’m not the complaining type despite giving two examples of it in one post, I swear!!!) Mirror’s Edge was giving me grief with its speedruns. Fortunately I seem to be getting the hang of it finally to a point where I think I can tackle this UR without much more stress. I ticked off one of the hardest speedruns (Chapter 2! (2!!!)) and hope that the struggle will have elevated my skill to be able to keep pushing forward. I’ve nearly finished the NG+ Ultra Hard run of Horizon Zero Dawn and am very grateful to have the shield weave outfit and 15,000 shards from my first playthrough. I’m doing just the main questline and running past unnecessary conflicts. I’m more keen to get to the Frozen Wilds afterwards and see what new enemies await. ...aaaaand I’ve added Braid to the backlog. No self-respecting The Witness fan can ignore the creators prior outing, and the PS3 is supposed to be packed away by the end of the year, so I’m committing! Now: back to getting the Uncharted reviews out! 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted November 15, 2021 Share Posted November 15, 2021 11 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: My TV: for a start, my TV is fully *fcuked*. This is the pause screen for Shadow of the Colossus as well as the TV output: Dude, that's wack. About the TV I mean, not Scott Morrison. With that hard hat and vest?? He can GET. IT. I'm glad to hear that Sony ultimately treated you right! Spending so much money just to watch something take a shit.. there must be cheaper alternatives if that's what you're into! 11 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Moving Out: finally had some time with Mrs Gonzo to delve deeper than the most superficial attempts that we had with this game a fortnight ago. It is fucking hilarious. Stomps all over Overcooked. We’re about 33% in. I can’t help but giggle when playing this. If you like couch co-op that will offer your partner (who is not a regular gamer) a good time too, this is a must-have. Yo that sounds dope! I accept this homework assignment? 11 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: So I had to buy the digital copies. There’s good news now: I’ve got the platinums for the digital copies (Trophies Against Cancer event ticked!) and the seller of the physical copy is accepting a refund request (I’m not the complaining type despite giving two examples of it in one post, I swear!!!) 11 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Mirror’s Edge was giving me grief with its speedruns. Fortunately I seem to be getting the hang of it finally to a point where I think I can tackle this UR without much more stress. I ticked off one of the hardest speedruns (Chapter 2! (2!!!)) and hope that the struggle will have elevated my skill to be able to keep pushing forward. I’ve nearly finished the NG+ Ultra Hard run of Horizon Zero Dawn and am very grateful to have the shield weave outfit and 15,000 shards from my first playthrough. I’m doing just the main questline and running past unnecessary conflicts. I’m more keen to get to the Frozen Wilds afterwards and see what new enemies await. ...aaaaand I’ve added Braid to the backlog. No self-respecting The Witness fan can ignore the creators prior outing, and the PS3 is supposed to be packed away by the end of the year, so I’m committing! I don't even know Mirror's Edge but I'm already terrified of it. The way you said the number two reminded me of the original Resident Evil 2's opening, like I could actually hear you saying "TEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWW." How do you like Horizon? That and God of War 2018 are probably the biggest titles in my backlog, and obviously I'm familiar with GoW but I know next to nothing about Horizon. The Witness... crap. My character is currently standing in front of the turntable, waiting for me to get the nerve to spend an afternoon with the challenge. I didn't realize that once you get down there, you have to solve yet another series of puzzles to even get to said challenge. I did, however, do the thing on the mountain with the river, it blew my freakin mind! Definitely looking forward to the post-plat business, that shit looks crazy! Er, back to what you were actually talking about (sorry for vomiting all of that in your lap!), I've heard good things about Braid. My PS3 backlog is thankfully small, so I may end up joining you on that one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rjkclarke Posted November 15, 2021 Share Posted November 15, 2021 (edited) I don't think I commented on your Jak series review but I really should have - that was an awesome read.... I really despised Jak II when I played it when I was younger - not actually because of the difficulty (although it did kick my arse,) more because it was such a drastic change from Precursor Legacy - I really loved that game, and I still do. Thankfully Jak 3 kind of balanced the first and the second game quite effectively. I also agree with your hot take by the way - that a modern Jak title or a reboot just wouldn't quite work nowadays - I'm sure there's ways it could work, but I just don't see it myself. I did read these Ratchet reviews at the time too - but I'm a bit late to the party getting to these too. Those were some very interesting takes on Ratchet- post Deadlocked/Gladiator. I don't think I was as bothered about the tonal shift as you were, although I do feel like they did probably get a little oversimplified. Not sure I 100% go along with the fact that Ratchet and Clank 2016 is a bad game. It's a bad remake (so much was left out, or ignored completely,) and a bad reinterpretation of that first game - half of that is down to the film I expect - which I honestly just don't care to watch to find out if it is actually decent (it doesn't look it,) but it just really lacks something. Except in its gameplay. Ratchet and Clank 2016 has some really top notch gameplay - that I think boosts it up so much in that area, that you can never truly call think of it as bad. I just thought I'd put that bit in bold really - just for the haha's Don't worry about being harsh about the Uncharted series! I'm sure my inevitable reviews of them will be enough harsh for everyone. ?...... Don't panic I do like them, quite a lot actually. I'm just very much the antithesis of the "OMG THEY SO CINEMATIC" Uncharted fan. So I'm looking forward to reading your perspective on them - that should be super interesting! On 15/11/2021 at 6:49 AM, GonzoWARgasm said: My TV: Ouch - sorry to hear about your TV man - that sounds brutal, but Hey at least you'll have an even bigger TV to look forward to..... ....... So is your front room like the hallway from The Shining? Because holy beached whale Gonzoman. If I had a TV that size...... ...... My eyes would look like this, all the time On 15/11/2021 at 6:49 AM, GonzoWARgasm said: God of War PSP ports: Jesus man - that is a steep price for those games - is now a bad time to say that I paid like £10.50 for those. They seem to have shot up in price everywhere, because even over here I saw a copy of them going for a stupidly high price, and I think even then my eyes might have turned into the above dudes Congrats on making progress with Mirrors Edge - I've been meaning to play that at some point, but for some reason I just never start it. You'll have that nailed down in no time,if you've got the hardest part done! On 15/11/2021 at 6:49 AM, GonzoWARgasm said: Horizon Zero Dawn and am very grateful to have the shield weave outfit and 15,000 shards from my first playthrough. I’m doing just the main questline and running past unnecessary conflicts. I’m more keen to get to the Frozen Wilds afterwards and see what new enemies await. I did that entire NG+ run in one sitting on Ultra Hard - the sheild weave outfit kind of trivialises everything right? Skipping through everything and just doing the main quest really hammers it home how tight and well paced that main story in Horizon actually is. You're in for an absolute treat with the Frozen Wilds DLC by the way if you've never played it, that's really top quality DLC! On 15/11/2021 at 6:50 PM, YaManSmevz said: How do you like Horizon? I know this was not directed at me - but Horizon has my seal of approval, and as far as Open World games go its actually a decent length too, one that doesn't ask an unreasonable amount of your time! It absolutely has my thumbs up anyway. Edited December 28, 2021 by rjkclarke 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Platinum_Vice Posted November 16, 2021 Author Share Posted November 16, 2021 (edited) 17 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: Dude, that's wack. About the TV I mean, not Scott Morrison. With that hard hat and vest?? He can GET. IT. Quote Yo that sounds dope! I accept this homework assignment Yeeeeesssssssssssss. Quote How do you like Horizon? That and God of War 2018 are probably the biggest titles in my backlog, and obviously I'm familiar with GoW but I know next to nothing about Horizon. Argh! I've typed out a response to this a few times but can't condense it down to a reasonable size... might have to save my Horizon thoughts for a full review. They both 100% deserve to be experienced before jumping into the PS5 generation though. God of War would definitely benefit from having played GoW 1, 2 and 3. Experiencing the full force of Kratos' rage against the Greek Gods is not necessarily a pre-requisite, but students taking on the 2018 semester will benefit greatly from the recommended reading. ? Quote The Witness... crap. My character is currently standing in front of the turntable, waiting for me to get the nerve to spend an afternoon with the challenge. I didn't realize that once you get down there, you have to solve yet another series of puzzles to even get to said challenge. Truth. The descent into the mountain to get to The Challenge is probably the best that the game has to offer for challenge variety and puzzle combinations. I think of the one in the big white chamber where your solution line generates a walkway for you to traverse between the two sides of the room as being a highlight. Quote I did, however, do the thing on the mountain with the river, it blew my freakin mind! Definitely looking forward to the post-plat business, that shit looks crazy! Was this the first instance of this for you? Have you noticed anything else like this or was it the prompt in the guide that made you do it? Always keen to hear peoples' experiences with this moment. Quote Er, back to what you were actually talking about (sorry for vomiting all of that in your lap!), I've heard good things about Braid. My PS3 backlog is thankfully small, so I may end up joining you on that one. No problemo. My PS3 backlog is down to Mirror's Edge, MW3's DLC, Enslaved, Braid and one last run through of GTA V to get some low-hanging fruit (campaign trophies) with a bevvy in hand. That's it. I'll probably boot up Braid in early to mid December if that helps. 14 hours ago, rjkclarke said: I don't think I commented on your Jak series review but I really should have - that was an awesome read.... I really despised Jak II when I played it when I was younger - not actually because of the difficulty (although it did kick my arse,) more because it was such a drastic change from Precursor Legacy - I really loved that game, and I still do. Thankfully Jak 3 kind of balanced the first and the second game quite effectively. I also agree with your hot take by the way - that a modern Jak title or a reboot just wouldn't quite work nowadays - I'm sure there's ways it could work, but I just don't see it myself. Thanks mate. ? For such a strong change of direction I can see an argument for two opposing sides to get riled up about which direction was a better one, but kudos to Naughty Dog for pumping out three genuinely strong games IMO. I just like them all. I really can't help but shake a middle school analogy that Jak went away for the holidays and when he came back his class is shocked by how hard he was hit by the puberty bus. The change came out of nowhere for me as I wasn't surfing the net or subscribed to magazines for previews yet. Quote I did read these at the time too - but I'm a bit late to the party getting to these too. Rude ? Quote Those were some very interesting takes on Ratchet- post Deadlocked/Gladiator. I don't think I was as bothered about the tonal shift as you were, although I do feel like they did probably get a little oversimplified. Not sure I 100% go along with the fact that Ratchet and Clank 2016 is a bad game. It's a bad remake (so much was left out, or ignored completely,) and a bad reinterpretation of that first game - half of that is down to the film I expect - which I honestly just don't care to watch to find out if it is actually decent (it doesn't look it,) but it just really lacks something. Except in its gameplay. Ratchet and Clank 2016 has some really top notch gameplay - that I think boosts it up so much in that area, that you can never truly call think of it as bad. See even if I stripped away everything I didn't like about the plot and characters, I still am not that fond of the gameplay. It boils down to one thing: I wasn't challenged or excited. The enemies weren't fun to blast away at and the weapons were more of the same so it felt a bit 'been there, done that.' There's no impact to using them and there's no new ideas. This was compounded by the Groovitron trophy requirement because every skirmish started with me deploying the Groovitron which immobolises enemies allowing you to deal damage without any returning fire. When they are returning fire it is predictable and avoidable.The platforming was... serviceable. And puzzles? Serviceable. And NO ONE SHUTS UP. I just didn't like it. As I said to DrBloodmoney with ACiT: if you like it, more power to you. These just are not for me. I'm pulling the hipster card and remaining a purist on this series. ? Quote Don't worry about being harsh about the Uncharted series! I'm sure my inevitable reviews of them will be enough harsh for everyone. ...... Don't panic I do like them, quite a lot actually. I'm just very much the antithesis of the "OMG THEY SO CINEMATIC" Uncharted fan. So I'm looking forward to reading your perspective on them - that should be super interesting! And I'm looking forward to giving it to you! I do remember that you're a big fan. Is it your favourite series? Will you put out a review on them soon? The biggest fans give the best reviews: gushing on the positives, critical on the negatives and often plenty of better ideas of what could have been... nay, SHOULD have been. Quote Ouch - sorry to hear about your TV man - that sounds brutal, but Hey at least you'll have an even bigger TV to look forward to..... It's pretty rude. TVs this big are still not big enough ? Oh this gives me a great idea.... juicy! I will keep it to myself for now, but stay tuned! Quote Jesus man - that is a steep price for those games - is now a bad time to say that I paid like £10.50 for those. They seem to have shot up in price everywhere, because even over here I saw a copy of them going for a stupidly high price Physical PS3 games that didn't 'go platinum/greatest hits' are stupid expensive at the moment online. Anything not within the PS4 gen is overpriced. It seems to me that there's a real sweet spot of about 5-7 years for lowest prices on second hand games. I made this purchase probably at the height of the pendulum swing but I wanted to get it done. I bought it for more than it would have cost on the shelf new on release. To add insult to injury I found a price tag on the case for $5US!!!! ? Quote I did that entire NG+ run in one sitting on Ultra Hard - the sheild weave outfit kind of trivialises everything right? Skipping through everything and just doing the main quest really hammers it home how tight and well paced that main story in Horizon actually is. It's so weird only doing a main quest line!! I've only done it to a few games (for trophy reasons) and it's so eerie to be actually chasing down the McGuffin instead of putting it on the back burner to collect 10 bulbous weedroots for a struggling healer in the far reaches of Yurkle. Edited November 16, 2021 by GonzoWARgasm I wanted to put the hard hat gif in this post again. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rjkclarke Posted November 16, 2021 Share Posted November 16, 2021 (edited) 7 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: For such a strong change of direction I can see an argument for two opposing sides to get riled up about which direction was a better one, but kudos to Naughty Dog for pumping out three genuinely strong games IMO. I just like them all. I really can't help but shake a middle school analogy that Jak went away for the holidays and when he came back his class is shocked by how hard he was hit by the puberty bus. The change came out of nowhere for me as I wasn't surfing the net or subscribed to magazines for previews yet. Haha! That's a great analogy - and yes I like them all too. Even Jak X ?..... ......The thing is I actually rather enjoyed Jak II when I played it in I think 2019, I'd never actually finished it before, so I hadn't seen all of it play out yet. So Jak 3 was also completely new to me when I got around to playing that one, and I really dug that one too. 7 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: See even if I stripped away everything I didn't like about the plot and characters, I still am not that fond of the gameplay. It boils down to one thing: I wasn't challenged or excited. The enemies weren't fun to blast away at and the weapons were more of the same so it felt a bit 'been there, done that.' There's no impact to using them and there's no new ideas. This was compounded by the Groovitron trophy requirement because every skirmish started with me deploying the Groovitron which immobolises enemies allowing you to deal damage without any returning fire. When they are returning fire it is predictable and avoidable.The platforming was... serviceable. And puzzles? Serviceable. And NO ONE SHUTS UP. I just didn't like it. As I said to DrBloodmoney with ACiT: if you like it, more power to you. These just are not for me. I'm pulling the hipster card and remaining a purist on this series. That is a completely valid criticism too........ It really isn't challenging for practically all of the reasons you listed. Don't get me started on the fact they never shut up either - although there is a really good YouTube video by Gamingbritshow about that, that I think I may have posted in Doc's thread what seems like an age back. Particularly Mr Zurkon - a useful weapon, but man is he annoying - for some reason he always made me think of a bit from The Simpsons when Homer goes "Homercles cares not for beans" or something to that effect. He really never shuts up. But I still did pretty much enjoy the gameplay - and I could never quite see it as a bad game. It might be a fact that when I played it I was like one of those smokers who used to chain smoke constantly, but then go full cold turkey. I played I think 8 Ratchet Games in a very small timeframe and then played Ratchet and Clank (2016) about 6 months later...... So I was that person that when offered a cigarette goes "yeah why not, one won't hurt." Then you are instantly enjoying them again. That's kind of how I was with the Ratchet remake. Nowadays I neither really love it or dislike it,it's just there. I don't think it'll ever be worse than Full Frontal Assault - which is not too good or bad (irrelevant but it has a terrible trophy list), but never something I'd really rush to recommend to people. I also did enjoy Crack in Time - nothing wrong with being an R&C purist man - you aren't the only one. 7 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: And I'm looking forward to giving it to you! I do remember that you're a big fan. Is it your favourite series? Will you put out a review on them soon? The biggest fans give the best reviews: gushing on the positives, critical on the negatives and often plenty of better ideas of what could have been... nay, SHOULD have been. That is genuinely making me think of this Nah - in all seriousness though - no it definitely isn't my favourite series - or even remotely close..... But I do like them quite a bit, I'm just not rabidly in love with the series like a lot of people are - and the characters I seem to like the most in them, like Elena - most people complain about haha. ...... I think Nathan Drake also suffers from the same problem Ratchet and Clank do in the R&C remake........ Nate never shuts up - like, ever!.... Sometimes that's fine, but if I was Elena - I'd be constantly wearing earplugs Ironic really, because I absolutely love this guy : "GUYBRUSH THREEPWOOD - MIGHTY PIRATE!" Who equally never shuts up - but he's much more charming in the process. I don't know when I'll get to reviewing Uncharted - I might go review them whenever I get around to leading up to playing Lost Legacy. As I haven't done that one yet. I am genuinely looking forward to reading your thoughts on the series though - because it's always great to read more perspectives on any kind of game series. 7 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Physical PS3 games that didn't 'go platinum/greatest hits' are stupid expensive at the moment online. Anything not within the PS4 gen is overpriced. It seems to me that there's a real sweet spot of about 5-7 years for lowest prices on second hand games. I made this purchase probably at the height of the pendulum swing but I wanted to get it done. I bought it for more than it would have cost on the shelf new on release. To add insult to injury I found a price tag on the case for $5US!!!! That's a great point - I really don't want to disclose the amount I had to pay to get my grubby hands on that last Harry Potter PS3 game I played the other month - you're right about there being a 5-7 year sweet spot, there's games I picked up really cheap - that seem to sell for silly prices these days. I bet that was a price tag you ripped off pretty quickly and set fire to! 7 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: It's so weird only doing a main quest line!! I've only done it to a few games (for trophy reasons) and it's so eerie to be actually chasing down the McGuffin instead of putting it on the back burner to collect 10 bulbous weedroots for a struggling healer in the far reaches of Yurkle. That's because trophies have conditioned us to do that kind of thing without hesitation now right? It is weird I agree - feels particularly jarring when you have to focus on just the story in games with a lot of (admittedly good) side content in it like Horizon. Enjoy your time with Frozen Wilds though, it's a very fun time! Edited November 16, 2021 by rjkclarke 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted November 16, 2021 Share Posted November 16, 2021 5 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Hawt. Also giving him a reprise was a wonderful stroke of comedic genius. This man deserves our attention! 5 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Argh! I've typed out a response to this a few times but can't condense it down to a reasonable size... might have to save my Horizon thoughts for a full review. They both 100% deserve to be experienced before jumping into the PS5 generation though. God of War would definitely benefit from having played GoW 1, 2 and 3. Experiencing the full force of Kratos' rage against the Greek Gods is not necessarily a pre-requisite, but students taking on the 2018 semester will benefit greatly from the recommended reading. Fair enough. Besides, me and a PS5 ain't gonna happen for a miiiinute - I've got plenty of time to get to those games? I've played the first two GoW games but never did get to the third - I stopped gaming around 2010, and as my prodigious use of Google has just informed me, that was when the game came out, so makes sense. Damn.... he does look like a total douche, doesn't he? All he's missing is the Tapout T-shirt! 6 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Truth. The descent into the mountain to get to The Challenge is probably the best that the game has to offer for challenge variety and puzzle combinations. I think of the one in the big white chamber where your solution line generates a walkway for you to traverse between the two sides of the room as being a highlight. Was this the first instance of this for you? Have you noticed anything else like this or was it the prompt in the guide that made you do it? Always keen to hear peoples' experiences with this moment. No problemo. My PS3 backlog is down to Mirror's Edge, MW3's DLC, Enslaved, Braid and one last run through of GTA V to get some low-hanging fruit (campaign trophies) with a bevvy in hand. That's it. I'll probably boot up Braid in early to mid December if that helps. It was the first instance like that for me, and I noticed my save file now says +1, which fascinates/intimidates me. I was kinda having a bad attitude at the time - I'm a classic guy in that if I'm not good at something or just struggling in general, unless I'm in the right headspace I'm gonna get a bit grumpy. So there's that panel at the top, yes? I do it. Nothing seems to happen. Whatever, no big deal. Can't figure out how to get the hatch into the mountain open. I find the little cassette player and listen to that, and think "well wasn't that fuckin enlightening." Try the hatch again. No success. Back to the panel. Why the fuck is this panel here?? Then, I see the river looking EXACTLY like the panel, and suddenly my frustration finally shuts up. I had yet another "No...." moment (so many, this game has given me), tried it and it worked! To be clear, I still have no real clue what it actually did, but I know it did something. It absolutely re-fueled me, and it gave me the encouragement to keep going. That walkway wasn't too bad. The puzzles were incredible - they all seemed like they were malfunctioning and just generally falling apart, which I thought was a great touch. The second walkway though, right before you get down to the area where the game ends, gave me a lot of trouble - gettin that one path right took quite a while, not gonna lie. I was referring to the puzzles after the end (which by the way, WTF) in the cave - I didn't expect so many. I also opened all the doors down there (I think) so once the challenge is done I'm ready to go out and look for dots and lines?????☹?? Wow. Didn't realize how much I wanted to talk about all that! Enslaved is on mine too! I played the first hour or two on the 360, and was heartbroken to find it wasn't available on the PS4. Oh well. A used PS3 solved that. Suckers! Hah! AHAHAHAHA!! 21 hours ago, rjkclarke said: I know this was not directed at me - but Horizon has my seal of approval, and as far as Open World games go its actually a decent length too, one that doesn't ask an unreasonable amount of your time! It absolutely has my thumbs up anyway. Nice! 3 hours ago, rjkclarke said: It might be a fact that when I played it I was like one of those smokers who used to chain smoke constantly, but then go full cold turkey. I played I think 8 Ratchet Games in a very small timeframe and then played Ratchet and Clank (2016) about 6 months later...... So I was that person that when offered a cigarette goes "yeah why not, one won't hurt." Then you are instantly enjoying them again. That's kind of how I was with the Ratchet remake. Nowadays I neither really love it or dislike it,it's just there. I miss smoking? I quit after a solid twenty years, from ages 15 - 36. My gramps and my wife's grandmother both passed within a few years of each other because of that, and I figured it was finally time. Two years off now, and I have no intention of starting up again, but man.. every time I walk past somebody smoking, that odor hits me in the same way that my wife's perfume does? 3 hours ago, rjkclarke said: I don't know when I'll get to reviewing Uncharted - I might do review them whenever I get around to leading up to playing Lost Legacy. As I haven't done that one yet. I've been thinkin about when I'll get to reviewing Drake's Fortune... finally over the burnout that hundo came with and starting to eye Among Thieves. I've no doubt Gonz's review will push that along nicely! Jesus, I'm a chatty old broad today... 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Platinum_Vice Posted November 17, 2021 Author Share Posted November 17, 2021 8 hours ago, rjkclarke said: That is a completely valid criticism too........ It really isn't challenging for practically all of the reasons you listed. Don't get me started on the fact they never shut up either - although there is a really good YouTube video by Gamingbritshow about that, that I think I may have posted in Doc's thread what seems like an age back. Particularly Mr Zurkon - a useful weapon, but man is he annoying - for some reason he always made me think of a bit from The Simpsons when Homer goes "Homercles cares not for beans" or something to that effect. He really never shuts up. But I still did pretty much enjoy the gameplay - and I could never quite see it as a bad game. Very very fair. That video by the way is possibly one of the most 'took the words right outta ma mouth' video essays I've ever seen. 8 hours ago, rjkclarke said: Nah - in all seriousness though - no it definitely isn't my favourite series - or even remotely close..... But I do like them quite a bit, I'm just not rabidly in love with the series like a lot of people are - and the characters I seem to like the most in them, like Elena - most people complain about haha. Elena = best girl. I'll die on that hill. ? 8 hours ago, rjkclarke said: ...... I think Nathan Drake also suffers from the same problem Ratchet and Clank do in the R&C remake........ Nate never shuts up - like, ever!.... Sometimes that's fine, but if I was Elena - I'd be constantly wearing earplugs *has a How I Met Your Mother glass shattering moment* 8 hours ago, rjkclarke said: I don't know when I'll get to reviewing Uncharted - I might go review them whenever I get around to leading up to playing Lost Legacy. As I haven't done that one yet. Please consider it 8 hours ago, rjkclarke said: That's a great point - I really don't want to disclose the amount I had to pay to get my grubby hands on that last Harry Potter PS3 game I played the other month You don't want to, but should you?? ........ 5 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: I've played the first two GoW games but never did get to the third - I stopped gaming around 2010, and as my prodigious use of Google has just informed me, that was when the game came out, so makes sense. Hmmm... maybe a video to refresh on the plot might be more suitable for you then, an "everything you need to know before you start GoW 2018" or something like that. 5 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: It was the first instance like that for me, and I noticed my save file now says +1, which fascinates/intimidates me. I was kinda having a bad attitude at the time - I'm a classic guy in that if I'm not good at something or just struggling in general, unless I'm in the right headspace I'm gonna get a bit grumpy. So there's that panel at the top, yes? I do it. Nothing seems to happen. Whatever, no big deal. Can't figure out how to get the hatch into the mountain open. I find the little cassette player and listen to that, and think "well wasn't that fuckin enlightening." Try the hatch again. No success. Back to the panel. Why the fuck is this panel here?? Then, I see the river looking EXACTLY like the panel, and suddenly my frustration finally shuts up. I had yet another "No...." moment (so many, this game has given me), tried it and it worked! To be clear, I still have no real clue what it actually did, but I know it did something. It absolutely re-fueled me, and it gave me the encouragement to keep going. That walkway wasn't too bad. The puzzles were incredible - they all seemed like they were malfunctioning and just generally falling apart, which I thought was a great touch. The second walkway though, right before you get down to the area where the game ends, gave me a lot of trouble - gettin that one path right took quite a while, not gonna lie. I was referring to the puzzles after the end (which by the way, WTF) in the cave - I didn't expect so many. I also opened all the doors down there (I think) so once the challenge is done I'm ready to go out and look for dots and lines?????☹?? Wow. Didn't realize how much I wanted to talk about all that! Dude I want to know everything about your journey with this. Please keep me updated!!! Here or on your checklist or by PM, whatever, but it is definitely something I'm keen to hear about! 5 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: I miss smoking? I quit after a solid twenty years, from ages 15 - 36. My gramps and my wife's grandmother both passed within a few years of each other because of that, and I figured it was finally time. Two years off now, and I have no intention of starting up again, but man.. every time I walk past somebody smoking, that odor hits me in the same way that my wife's perfume does? I've not smoked but was around smokers at a very young age. There's about two or three brands that I will smell on occasion and they smell very familiar and comforting. However, the smell of old smoke in carpets, blinds, clothes, government buildings... *vomits* 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted November 17, 2021 Share Posted November 17, 2021 4 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Hmmm... maybe a video to refresh on the plot might be more suitable for you then, an "everything you need to know before you start GoW 2018" or something like that. Dude I want to know everything about your journey with this. Please keep me updated!!! Here or on your checklist or by PM, whatever, but it is definitely something I'm keen to hear about! Mos def! I'll definitely be buggin you and the good Doctor when I can open it up a bit more. Does the post-game have a needle-in-a-haystack feel to it? Because I'm a little worried about that, but I need the closure.. otherwise, that ending is mildly frightening! I'm getting out! Wait, this is.. Have I been... How did I... ....fuck!! Also I'm glad to hear that the previous GoW games will have some relevance in the reboot. A refresher is a great idea, because very few of the memories I have about the first two games were about the story! 5 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: I've not smoked but was around smokers at a very young age. There's about two or three brands that I will smell on occasion and they smell very familiar and comforting. However, the smell of old smoke in carpets, blinds, clothes, government buildings... *vomits* My wife's like that too, she hates cigarettes but she loves the smell of certain cigars and says the same thing you did, that there's a pleasant familiarity there. For the most part that old smoke smell doesn't bother me, but in high concentration it can be utterly rancid. I remember in high school going to a party at a house built in the 50s that had a bomb shelter, we were drinkin and druggin and chain smokin down there, and I remember the clothes I wore retained that smoky smell for WEEKS. That shit was straight ? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Platinum_Vice Posted November 17, 2021 Author Share Posted November 17, 2021 3 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: Mos def! I'll definitely be buggin you and the good Doctor when I can open it up a bit more. Does the post-game have a needle-in-a-haystack feel to it? Because I'm a little worried about that, but I need the closure.. otherwise, that ending is mildly frightening! Try not to stress about it. Once you're past The Challenge and explore a bit more and get clued in a little more to the post-game, you may find that there is a pretty reliable way to get hints. If you ever need us to give specific hints or be straight-out direct at any point, shout out. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Platinum_Vice Posted December 10, 2021 Author Popular Post Share Posted December 10, 2021 (edited) 04 Series: Uncharted #24 (PS4) Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, 7/10 #27 (PS4) Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, 8/10 #33 (PS4) Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, 7/10 #14 (PS4) Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, 9/10 #55 (PS4) Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, 8/10 Hot takes: - Uncharted 2 cannot be the best game in the series when we live in a world where A Thief's End and Lost Legacy exist. The PS4 games are just in a different class to the PS3 games (and I’m going to convince you of that). - Chloe is great. Really. But come on... Elena... Elena is "best girl." What is the Uncharted series? The Uncharted games combine three main elements: 1) A plot consisting of Drake and his friends hopscotching their way along a set of long-lost clues to find legendary treasure; 2) Exploring a hidden pocket of the world that has history, an abnormally high amount of freeclimbing footholds and large-scale monuments that are actually puzzles with more moving parts than the hadron collider; and 3) Shooting 500 blokes in the dick. So I’ll use that holy trinity of elements as a framework to review this series. Plot: (...you should know me by now; this section will be the longest part of this review) *Inside Naughty Dog HQ when brainstorming game ideas, circa 2005* - Time traveling angsty protagonist in a futuristic action/adventure dystopia with hoverboards, fantastical elements, prophecies, themes of classism, a wise cracking sidekick and some zoomzoomboomboom races to top it off. Generally considered to be GTA III for teenagers. [4 games, total sales: 15 million] - Indiana Jones. But with guns. [5 games, total sales: 42 million] All three PS3 Uncharted games feature the same plot: Drake & Co. must find hidden treasure before some megalomaniac beats them to it and/or kills them. When Drake fails to do this it is implied to the player that Drake's friends and his girlfriend Elena are actually the treasure he’s needed all along. Basic stuff. And yet they’re riddled with some incredibly illogical twists and turns such as: *clears throat while lengthy scroll unfurls, hits the floor and continues to roll away* - Sully takes a bullet to the heart at point blank range early in Drake’s Fortune, but it turns out he was protected by the diary of Francis Drake in his breast pocket, which has all the breadth of a small brochure. - In Drake's Fortune, our heroes search South American islands for El Dorado in a race against three separate villains (THREE villains! Do you remember even ONE of them?) Our heroes stumble across Nazi bunkers and supernatural beasts before coming to the discovery that the lost treasure is cursed Columbian gold that turns people into my mother-in-law. - Upon successfully escaping the cursed gold of El Dorado, Sully surprises Drake with a boatload of treasure that he found somewhere off-screen despite establishing that the city of El Dorado wasn’t real. - In Among Thieves, we’re a few years behind Nazi explorers again, and again, the treasure is a substance that turns people into supernatural and mindless beasts when that treasure is consumed. This would have been bad enough, but it turns out these beasts have their own society and dress up in yeti costumes, leading to a goofy Scooby-Doo type reveal upon Drake's realisation that the yetis aren’t yetis, they’re... mutated beasts... but, w-why though? - The treasure substance is tree sap from the heart of Shambala/Shangri La, a large city in the heart of the Himalayas with a wide open sky and multiple large structures. To say that China and Russia would have knowledge of this area in the modern world is an understatement. - Also, that tree sap that turns men into beasts when consumed is actually highly flammable, and you know what we always do with flammable materials? We drink 'em. Obviously. - Drake's Deception has more issues than almost the rest of the series combined. - Who (or what) the hell is Talbot? He appears and disappears by supernatural (or at least unexplained) methods. The game specifically addresses them as mysteries, like the time that he vanished after walking around a corner. - A dead man with a suit matching those worn by Talbot's ranks of fodder is specifically pointed out by Drake and Sully during a cutscene about a quarter of the way into the game. They note his late stage of decomposition (he looks like he’s been dead for multiple years). I noticed that his clothing has not decomposed at the same rate. This mystery is never addressed again despite Drake and Sully spending minutes talking about it in a cutscene made specifically for setting it up. - Drake and Sully fly from France to Syria to rescue Chloe and Cutter because they haven’t returned their calls. Drake and Sully fear that the baddies they’ve been fighting the whole game have captured or killed their friends. It is revealed that Chloe and Cutter didn’t answer their calls because they didn’t charge their phones. - A large city, the ‘Atlantis of the Sands,’ is found in the endgame. It has apparently been protected in the eye of a massive sandstorm for centuries. We don’t have centuries-old sandstorms on this planet and again, if we did, we would have extensive satellite pictures of it, and the city would therefore have been discovered. - Drake does hallucinate in the last act of this game, but none of the aforementioned mysteries take place after his hallucinations begin. - Elena is shoehorned into Among Thieves and Drake's Deception by unbelievable coincidence. It’s only forgivable because Elena is incredible ? There is a semi-well-known theory among Uncharted fans that the cutthroat politics between Naughty Dog’s creative leads circa-Drake’s Deception is to blame for the loose plot threads and unexplained mysteries. The characters are searching for a djinn (translation for non-Europeans: a genie) in the Atlantis of the Sands. They find a large pot that is leaking a chemical that causes hallucinations, and the story leads the player to believe that the chemical is misinterpreted to be that djinn, and therefore, that there is no real djinn out there. I believe that Talbot was actually going to be a djinn in physical form and that he had a master plan to break free. I believe that infighting amongst creative leads at Naughty Dog caused last minute changes where the plot wouldn’t follow such a supernatural bend as the prior games and that mysteries amongst completed (and expensive) cutscenes were left unexplained as a result. The narratives of the first three games challenge me to figure out what is worse: U1) Supernatural curse -> Nazi zombies. U2) Supernatural tree sap -> supernatural tribe of humans wearing yeti masks for no reason (with Nazis, because... Nazis). U3) Hallucinations of supernatural beings and a main character that might be a genie. Actually, I can’t pick. YOU tell me which is the worst one. Another issue that I take with the plot of Drake’s Deception is its pacing. It has a particularly slow early game. For a bombastic spectacle-based series, there sure is a lot of plodding about in this game: flashbacks to Drake's teenage years, trudging through sewers, underground caves full of spiders and a desert marooning featuring forced slow-walking and dehydration. Compare the slow opening of Drake’s Deception with the intensity of Among Thieves’ first level - hanging from a train over a cliff with a bullet hole in your guts - and you may agree that I have a point. And then in complete contrast – A Thief’s End. The engine that is this game’s plot is actually the slowest in the series to start firing on all cylinders, but I completely accept this unlike my admonishment for Drake's Deception, because this game's engine is the genuine driving force responsible for the forward momentum in this non-stop rollercoaster ride. I therefore am perfectly happy with it taking a few chapters to get going before Drake starts the rootin' tootin' shootin'. Being slow to get going is actually one of the best examples of A Thief's End’s ludonarrative consistency. Drake is living a normal life with less adrenaline and adventure and that is the root of a growing discontent he has been feeling. The player's desire to get into the action is perfectly aligned with the character that they are playing which equals top tier game design. A scuba-diving section where you think you’re swimming for gold but its a fake-out and you’re actually just in your local river diving for copper? Sure. A shooting tutorial in disguise during an attic search that also doubles as a reminder of Drake's treasure hunting history with Elena? Yeah cool. Having dinner with Elena for genuine moments of character building, development and foreshadowing with a little bit of Crash Bandicoot for dessert? I'm in like Flynn. Haha, too right Drake. A Thief's End is twice as long as any other Uncharted title and the introductory period is therefore extended. I can therefore easily forgive a slower starting speed. In the PS3 games it is implied to the player that golden-haired Elena is the treasure that Drake has stumbled upon and should be cherishing, but Drake does not truly know this himself. He continues to seek out a sense of adventure that comes with hunting down hidden clues for gold in exotic locations. In A Thief’s End, a more story- and character-driven outing than the PS3 games, Drake comes to realise what the player already knows: Elena is his real treasure. Drake and Elena's interactions in A Thief’s End were easily my favourite part of this game. The dialogue is more realistic than ever for the series. The motion capture-based animations benefited from the widespread positive reception to the reliance on that method for The Last of Us in the same way that a more grounded narrative boosted the relatability of the characters and their struggles. Directly following the game's high point of adrenaline-fueled spectacle (at the halfway point of this story), the laughing trio of Drake, Sully and Sam return to their apartment to find that Elena has figured out that Drake lied to her about where he was and what he was doing, and that she had deduced their location and had come to see just what exactly was going on. Walking in on her poring over Drake’s maps successfully nailed a “oh fuck I’ve just been caught cheating" vibe (or at least how I imagine that would feel), and again A Thief’s End has flexed it’s ludonarrative consistency. On a secondary playthrough Sam can be seen shrinking into the background at that moment as he has an additional layer of guilt than Drake. Like a good movie or a good whodunnit novel, repeated experiences pay dividends due to Naughty Dog's attention to detail (and due to Nolan North and Troy Baker bringing their A-games to their motion capture). I can't see Nathan and Sam without seeing Nolan and Troy's faces, though, and now that I've performed a little magic trick on you, you'll likely have the same affliction. The exploration of New Devon, the pirate settlement where historic clans were undone by their greed, is a perfect setting for Nathan and Sam to be exploring because both of their motivations in A Thief’s End are driven by greed. While on the subject of Sam Drake, I find that his injection into the Uncharted universe to be very out of place (I don’t see why it couldn’t have been Sully that had debts that needed to be paid. I think Naughty Dog just wanted to keep milking the Troy Baker cow post-The Last of Us). Despite that, it serves as a further opportunity to praise the writers, actors and animators for bringing him to life with such a vibrancy to the point where he was just as believable of an entity as Sully is to me. The epilogue of A Thief’s End provides notable contrasts for dissection. To start with, Drake’s treasures aren’t holed up in the attic anymore collecting dust, they’re instead displayed alongside pictures of Elena and Sully as cherished memories of their past adventures. Playing as a tween girl is comparative to the opening scene of The Last of Us. Players inherit unconscious comfort and security playing this epilogue in contrast to the danger that threatened Sarah because the gameplay (or at least, the minimalist style of story-based gameplay that Naughty Dog is sometimes willing to employ) in both of the levels are parallel despite having juxtaposed tonal and plot differences. The inclusion of the Crash Bandicoot level Boulders in the earlier dinner scene at the beginning of A Thief’s End and in the epilogue might just be my favourite wink from a developer. Bookending A Thief's End with Boulders is a genius move. Boulders is the fourth level from Crash Bandicoot and it broke the mould for platforming at the time (1996) by requiring the player to make Crash run towards the screen instead of away from it while a large boulder chased him in the style of Indiana Jones. Including this into A Thief’s End is fitting as Uncharted was obviously significantly influenced by Indiana Jones. The dialogue between Drake and Elena is perfectly meta: Elena: "You have to jump over the pits and obstacles." Drake: "Psssh, that's like my thing." *Falls into pit* Drake: "He should have climbed out. I would have climbed out. He should have learned how to climb." *Later, when talking about picking up 100 Wumpa Fruit to get a life* Elena: "No, he's not stealing the fruit, he's collecting. You should know the difference." It is clear to me that A Thief’s End was intended to be the swan song for not just the Uncharted series, but also for Naughty Dog at the time. Boulders highlights this because it shows how far they’ve come in developing that one game mechanic of running towards the camera over the course of their development catalogue.... er, dogalogue. Two Crash Bandicoot levels: Boulders and Boulder Dash Two Crash Bandicoot 2 levels: Crash Crush and Un-Bearable From Crash Bandicoot 3: the level Dino-Might In Jak II: Renegade, Daxter runs from a boulder before it comes to a rest and a giant spider attacks him. He runs towards the camera jumping over obstacles and then also jumps upwards to escape. Nolan North killing it in Among Thieves. Drake's Deception: running along the corridors of a rotating cruise ship as it takes on water and begins to sink. The gameplay mechanic culminates into a 15 minute chase that is the highlight of A Thief's End. You can see why Nolan North and Troy Baker keep signing on with Naughty Dog. Also, another small detail: Nathan and Sam's Jeep has a rental sticker on the doors that Crash Bandicoot fans may enjoy: So: if any developers want to risk a 'look at me' throwback to one of their ancient classics, A Thief's End using Crash Bandicoot is where the bar has been set. Lost Legacy’s story does not match up to A Thief’s End but it is better than anything in the PS3 generation. Chloe’s quest to locate the tusk of Ganesh is given context in her retelling of an ancient Hindu tale of how Ganesh lost his tusk. Ganesh's struggles echo Chloe's issues with her father, and she has inherited his unfinished quest to locate the tusk after he died. In addition to that, the villain has greater depth than the B-movie trope baddies from the PS3 games, and there were very few moments when I was pulled out of the story to scratch my head in bewilderment with how illogical things were becoming (a notable exception: no gorgeous Indian waterfall is going unexplored in the modern world. Skyscraper-sized metallic elephant statues can’t hide in that corner of the world for long.) I also enjoyed playing as Chloe. She was witty, intelligent, charismatic, tenacious, brave and pragmatic. I have absolutely no issue in the slightest in playing as her instead of Drake. She was well written, animated and acted. Chloe’s relationship with Nadine (strained at first before evolving into witty banter and then to a point of close friendship) echoed my journey with Nadine. I quite liked her by the halfway point in the game despite Lost Legacy receiving frequent criticism for Nadine's inclusion. When the games in this series are so similar it is actually easy to compare them. Based on my descriptions above, I rank the plots of the Uncharted series like this: 4 > LL > 2 > 1 > 3 Exploration: If you’re not watching a cutscene or trading fire with your enemies, Drake & Co. can be caught doing the following: - Picking up knick-knacks, - Climbing cliff faces, - Solving puzzles, and - Climbing on really big puzzles. Picking up the treasures (collectibles) is a colossal waste of time and that’s a damn shame. The Last of Us has some of the best collectibles in gaming and yet Uncharted can’t even put in the time to give each item a description. Why put in the developer resources for the collectibles' research, planning and concept art, creating them in engine and hiding them in the game when they literally have no purpose. Who actually goes and hunts down every one of these without a guide? It is an outdated platforming relic that only serves to artificially inflate playing time. There’s something like 100 of them in each game. That’s more than enough for Drake to sell some (to cover the cost of his expeditions), and to donate some to museums, AND to keep some as mementos, but this is never integrated into the story at all. Climbing cliff faces occurs too often so there’s no dramatic tension when you’re dangling off of the edge of one of them. This could have been changed to require some element of skill (and therefore some challenge), or at least these should have been decreased in quantity. I can only suspect that they are loading screens in disguise. Likewise, a puzzle is not a puzzle if you just have to look in Drake's notebook to find the answer. I definitely would have liked these to be more complex so that the players feel a bit more pride in solving them. I don’t say that to cite my own puzzling ability, but because I have faith in the intelligence of players in general and believe that even a puzzle novice can make easy headway with these. The spectacle of the large mechanical puzzles – often in a large underground chamber – is always a highlight for me. It’s one of the things this series is known for in addition to the God of War series... but I think that God of War does these better on average. They may not be as shiny as they are in Uncharted, but they are more spatially complex and they don’t suffer so much with Uncharted’s bipolar nature of wanting to be grounded in reality and not. And none of the large-scale puzzles make any logical sense of course. They feature centuries-old parts that have been stuck in place without movement (sometimes frozen by ice). Unlike Kratos, Drake does not have godly strength to turn the giant gears. There’s no one in these underground locations to tend to the moving parts during the centuries of their unused history. Exploration highlights for me in the PS3 games include: Drake’s Fortune: - The M. C. Escher dungeon level. Among Thieves: - Climbing around in the urban streets (on street signs, balconies, collapsing floors, flagpoles and rooftops – sometimes while avoiding helicopter fire). - The “Path of Light" structure where Drake climbs up large triangular shards that come together to form a large dagger/key (“phurba”) to match the pocket-sized one Drake has been carrying around. Lowering the building-sized phurba into a hole in the ground opens up the route to continue your adventure. There’s a lot of climbing ancient statues in this one which I do actually like. - Pretty much anything in icey Tibet that involves your new friend Tenzin was charming. Drake's Deception: - The puzzle with a bunch of limbs that need to be moved into beams of light so that full figures of fighting warriors can be projected onto walls. There’s another one of these in Lost Legacy too. PS4 titles benefited from innovations to exploration. Sliding sections, a grapple hook and a Jeep (+ winch) all beef out the length and breadth of A Thief’s End. All of those developments return to some degree in Lost Legacy (and the winch physics are developed for The Last of Us 2). These are just more factors in my preference to the PS4 titles over those on the PS3. Puzzle/grapple hook/exploration highlights on the PS4 include: A Thief’s End: - The crucifix puzzle in underground Scotland. - Climbing up and falling down the clock tower. - Using the winch on the Jeep in Madagascar (there’s a few moments where cliff edges crumble underneath the car during these). Lost Legacy: - Climbing up the oversized Ganesh in the Indian waterfall with the grappling hook. - The open world chapter is my favourite part of this game, and, I argue, of the series, because it’s the first time where you’re given a map and told as a player: "go explore. Go chart your journey." The dialogue between Chloe and Nadine is given more breadth and their relationship is given opportunities for them to start to bond. There are pillar puzzles that require you to jump onto platforms while nearby statues move through stages of axe swings in attempts to kill you... these are fantastic. To compare games purely on their components of exploration, I rate them like this: 4 > LL/2 (tie) > 1 > 3 Combat: Ludonarrative dissonance. It’s real with this series. It’s real with a lot of series. If games can go without it, all the better, they’ll slowly continue to change perceptions on the artistic capabilities if this medium. Until then, I’ll just keep shootin'. Let’s move on. The gulf between the PS3 and PS4 games continues with comparisons of their combat. In the PS3 titles, Drake spends WAY TOO MUCH time in cover. Every single encounter in those games (with some exceptions that I’ll go into) is spent hiding behind cover and popping out momentarily to trade bullets with one enemy at a time. Once you take damage the screen goes black and white, so every encounter pulls me out of the beautiful, detailed and COLOURFUL environments and interrupts the suspension of my disbelief. This is no good. Fortunately, there are a few exceptions: Among Thieves: The train level and subsequent climbing section as you dangle off the climb are some of Naughty Dog's greatest moments in their history. The train weaves and bucks and zigs and zags along a track towards disaster that we know is coming (as the game had started with providing the player with the information that it will crash). Climbing aboard the train fills you with dread because you already know it ends in disaster. It is also a metaphor for Naughty Dog’s PS3 games in general: you’re a shooter on rails (pun very much intended) but there’s so much flash in the pan around you while the game requires you to push on bit-by-bit that you repeatedly forget that you’re being funnelled into a predetermined endpoint. You start in the jungle and platform around the train dodging obstacles on the left, the right and above while trading fire with a hundred baddies as you take cover behind seats and freight crates. As you push forwards the train continues to weave on long curves that open up different lines of sight between you and the enemies. On a big left bend an enemy may be safe from you (and you from him) while you pop in and out of an exchange with his buddy. On the next right bend the buddy is tucked away just prior to you being able to pop off that headshot and the first guy’s line of fire has become a new and direct threat to you. The train moving affects your battlefield which adds exciting challenge and change to the gameplay. This enemy was in cover when the train was turning left. Now it bends to the right and both the enemy and Drake have been angled out of cover. The train continues through mountain vistas as you push onwards. The environment around you turns into snow-caked valleys where attack helicopters start to open fire on you. You have to shoot some of their missiles out of sky before they reach the train while chipping away at their armour from large swivelling machine guns. You take a bullet in a cutscene (which means you have finally been shot in canon) and the train derails. You climb up and out of it while it dangles over a cliff. Other than the train sequence, there was also a combat sequence just before the train where Drake climbs up onto a large signpost in the middle of a city square. There are signs extending from that post in multiple directions and you are required to hang on and climb all over them while shooting baddies who are coming in from multiple directions. This is an example of Naughty Dog integrating the cover system and climbing system into the combat and I give it two thumbs up. I also like the sequence where you escape a tank -> kill the tank -> countersnipe laser-wielding snipers in tall, ancient Chinese towers and bring one down -> run across a collapsing wooden bridge. This is in the late game and it’s just cool. Drake’s Deception: It appears to me that pre-production for this game focused on figuring out what was going to be the next macrosequence to top Among Thieves' train bombast. The ship graveyard -> cruise ship sequence is the result. Environmental changes to lines of sight between Drake and enemies is again a crucial factor here (always a big hit with me and with critics) although instead of lines opening to the left and right (yore) like on the train, in Drake’s Deception, water mechanics lift small vessels and wooden structures to affect lines if sight upwards and downwards (pitch). Cover is temporarily useless when the enemy's boat is at a greater height while the swell catches it as you are left in a dip and the enemy shoots over your cover. This enemy will soon be able to shoot Drake in the head and shoulders as the swell dynamically affects the height of cover. It is a shame that this is so shoehorned in to Drake’s Deception like everything else. There’s no plot-driven reason for being in a ship graveyard. Drake literally wakes up from being knocked unconscious and finds himself in this location, and his motivation for going through the level is based on a very bad lie, and completing the levels have no affect on any characters or the plot. The cruise ship sequence that follows the ship graveyard is even better (from a gameplay standpoint). You travel through the ship for the first half of the level before it starts to sink and rolls over as you try to re-tread your steps in the now-sideways and upside down level as the water chases you. You wake up on a beach after escaping a storm (somehow) and that is the end of the nautical theme. It comes and goes without any real reason to exist. Combat: big tick. Themeing: big fail. Later, driving along a runway to jump onto a plane’s wheel as a means to get on board mid-take-off is baller move. The ensuing gunfight and famous skydiving sequence is another genuine highlight for the series. You're falling out of the plane and grabbing a hold of some webbing, and then climbing back in to the plane, and then maintaining cover behind moving freight pallets that slide from side to side in the hold of the twisting plane, and then again falling out of the back of the plane, and then angling towards a pallet with a parachute while freefalling. It is SO FUCKING INSPIRED despite seeming so ridiculously cliche at the same time. Cover moving side to side (roll) --- knew we’d get that third axis of movement in there somewhere. There's now not many ways that the series can do big setpieces like this without being compared to it's past efforts... planes, trains, automobiles... boats... camels... But the plane sequence really is great, and I'm not surprised in the slightest that the Tom Holland/Mark Wahlberg movie will use it to tentpole a second or third act in the upcoming movie. It's a shame that Samuel L Jackson already beat them to it. Sammy J has had it with these mother-ducking Drakes on this mother-ducking plane. An issue with Drake’s Deception's combat is the inclusion of the ability to throw back grenades. The inability to do this in prior games meant that you had to leave your cover occasionally. Now you just stay in the same spot and pop up and down over and over because you can throw grenades back. This caused a reduced interactivity and the ability was actually confirmed to have been removed in A Thief’s End for that exact reason. A Thief’s End: - Combat in this game is greatly enhanced by widening more skirmishes into open areas with more verticality and greater options for cover. - The grappling hook's use in combat on lower difficulties is a fun improvement. - The tagging system has been developed and now there are better indications of enemies' alertness which improves combat on higher difficulties. - All guns feel better to shoot with improved sound design, targeting systems and reticle redesigns. Notice how these improvements relate to combat across the whole game and that I’m not just pointing out a few cool set pieces instead of the PS3 titles? Lost Legacy: This game was originally conceived and developed as a large DLC for A Thief’s End. It was then marketed in previews as “standalone DLC.” Come release, it was developed with the length of a full game (it’s as long as the PS3 titles whereas A Thief's End is twice as long as the other four games) but it retailed for only $40US. The result is that the combat in this game received little change, and I have no issues with that at all. It wasn’t broke and so I’m glad they didn’t break it. And the grappling hook returned! Stealth is a more viable option than before with the implementation of long grass into almost every encounter. There’s another set piece on a train that attempts and succeeds to out-do Among Thieves. In addition to everything that made that game’s train set piece great, this one requires a baller use of the grappling hook and for Chloe to jump on and off the train into pursuing vehicles flanking the train at both sides. It's like a combination of Among Thieves' train sequence and A Thief's End's armoured truck sequence. I love it. So I'll rate the games based on their combat: 4 > LL/2 (tie) > 3 > 1 Final thoughts: In my real life circles I’m the gamer guy. When people ask me what game they should play, there’s two that I recommend regardless of who asks me: GTA V and i. They aren’t my favourite games, but they are total crowd-pleasers - especially for casual gamers. Naughty Dog were a very well-known developer before Uncharted but it was this series that cemented their place as an industry leader, and then the one-two punch of The Last of Us and A Thief’s End elevated them to 'Industry Titan' status. The attention to detail and character depth and development in those two games (and the spectacle of A Thief’s End) are examples of Naughty Dog grabbing the AAA sphere in this industry with two hands and pulling that fat, lazy bitch forwards by force. Meanwhile, Lost Legacy emulates successful aspects of the series but doesn’t push it forwards in any meaningful way. The PS3 games have significant glaring issues but Among Thieves holds up the best of the three. Regarding the soundtrack, Drake's theme is a total banger, AND it's memorable. Here it is being performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. I love that Drake & Co. visit so many exotic locations across the series. My eyes have been treated to some beautiful greens and blues. I would have loved for the series to have integrated more real-life locations and history, though, as that would have assisted me to really become invested in these adventures. Here are all of the countries visited by Drake & Co. throughout the series, and maybe you'll agree that there weren't enough actual sightseeing of historic landmarks: I also believe that some actual orienteering, clue following/genuine puzzle solving would greatly improve the series, too. Some map and compass use like in Firewatch, or some clue-to-clue problem solving like a scavenger hunt/The Amazing Race/National Treasure would be awesome (National Treasure is awesome even though Nicholas Cage is in it, don't @ me ?). Personally, leaning away from Indiana Jones and towards National Treasure would change the soul of the series but I know I’d prefer that hypothetical evolution. Trophy talk: The PS3 trophy lists in these games are great introductions to trophy hunting because they are standard fare but they don’t support playing the games in the most enjoyable manner. They require multiple playthroughs including a hardest difficulty. Collectible hunts only test your ability to follow a guide and then there’s standard kill-based trophies too. The DLC trophies for the PS3 trilogy are also controversial. Many hunters struggle with speedruns (in order: 2.5hrs, 3.5hrs, 4.25hrs, 6hrs) and the added Brutal difficulty feels like it was simply untested. If the game hasn’t finished fading in from black after death before you get shot down and killed again, that means things are blatantly unbalanced. Many sections require luck after ten of those failed respawns to even have a chance at fighting back. In my opinion the PS3 games are more fun on easy difficulty because Drake isn’t repeatedly bogged down in cover. The gunplay (and Drake’s personality) are better suited to a run-and-gun playstyle. Couple that with my aforementioned frustration with the lack of purpose of the collectibles in these games and the result is a trophy list that doesn’t supplement the gaming experience. There’s an exception to that collectible ruling: optional conversations. A Thief’s End, Lost Legacy and both The Last of Us games implement these and I really like them. I also like the “use every gun in the game" trophies, and challenges like “get 20 headshots in a row,” “make it to the end of Chapter 5 without using a weapon,” and “get through all 3 axe puzzles without a mistake.” Trophies like those are all throughout the PS4 games' lists and they’re examples of how to do trophy lists right! And I have to give a shoutout to how beautiful Lost Legacy’s trophy images are. Do I/did I have a desire to play these after achieving the platinum? Well, I didn’t when I first played them; the trophies required 3+ playthroughs so I was worn out by the end. Five years on though, I definitely could happily pop A Thief’s End back in right away. I would also do another Among Thieves run without much fuss. It wasn’t that long ago since I completed Lost Legacy so I’ll need a bit more time before jumping into that one again. Drake's Fortune and Drake's Deception can wait another ten years at least. Bring on the PS5 remasters of the PS4 games, I say! *exhales deeply* Well this series review not only took WAY LONGER to finish that expected, but it's also WAY LONGER in actual length than planned. Thank you for reading it, I am very aware of how much I've put up here, and your enjoyment and opinions are important to me. Please consider leaving a comment to let me know your own thoughts!! Merry Christmas! ? Edited June 21, 2022 by Platinum_Vice 13 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted December 10, 2021 Share Posted December 10, 2021 WOOHOO THE NEW ISSUE OF GONZO IS HERE!!! Awesome stuff, man. First of all, what most needs to be said is that your Scooby-Doo Doo image won the whole post. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules, they weren't even explained to me. But them's the breaks. Loved how systematically you broke down each aspect, and ranked the games - very handy for someone like myself, who's only completed Drake's Fortune. I remember while first playing it early this year, wondering how the hell I missed out on this franchise, and thinkin about how I can't wait to play the rest in the series, how I'm gonna be inorganically bringing up Uncharted in conversation for years to come, and that I'll force my wife to be Elena to my Drake for every Halloween... then before I even got deep into the Brutal campaign that infatuated bluster went poof in a cloud of "nah I'm good." It's exciting to consistently hear about how well Among Thieves has held up, and though my Uncharted malaise is yet to fully clear up, it's in my near future for sure. Anyway, enough about my ass! Agreed on the puzzles. It was like in Resident Evil, where you have to track down hints and necessary pieces to solve them, except... they're already there. The whole "hey, this looks just like some dumb shit I already drew" thing was definitely a source of disappointment. Like an uncle who's terribly at wrapping presents, and hands you your fairly obvious gift and before you even start opening it he's like "yeah it's a book." It was cool to see a map of places you visit in the series - another reason I still want to work my way up in the series is because even after having played the oldest game, I think it's stunningly gorgeous and a joy to explore (y'know, when you're not being shot at by fifty meth-addled lunatics at a time). The latter part of DF was kinda weird, how all of a sudden it goes survival horror with the uh.. Nazi monsters? Sidenote: they should've had those little hats the officers wore, would've made them more fun to shoot, no? I thought it was an interesting turn at the time, but now seeing that that's to be expected in each game makes it a bit less charming. Like they ran out of Indiana Jones/Tomb Raider ideas and went the way of that family guy gag about Stephen King. "A uh... A LAMP MONSTER!! OOOoooOooOoooo..." Also, agreed on Elena. I didn't even know she got hate from players until recently! I was like does she try to kill Drake in the third game or something?? Reminded me of how people watching Breaking Bad hated on Skyler because... she uh.. ruined all the men's fun? Who knows. Great read, my dude? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Platinum_Vice Posted December 11, 2021 Author Share Posted December 11, 2021 6 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: Awesome stuff, man. First of all, what most needs to be said is that your Scooby-Doo Doo image won the whole post. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules, they weren't even explained to me. But them's the breaks. ? 6 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: It's exciting to consistently hear about how well Among Thieves has held up, and though my Uncharted malaise is yet to fully clear up, it's in my near future for sure. Anyway, enough about my ass! It certainly holds up better than the other PS3 games. U3 has about four or five chapters at the 50-75% mark that are worth playing for the sake of gameplay and spectacle but otherwise the constant issues that I had with the story kept rearing an ugly head. The PS4 games are really the ones that are most worth playing. 6 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: Agreed on the puzzles. It was like in Resident Evil, where you have to track down hints and necessary pieces to solve them, except... they're already there. The whole "hey, this looks just like some dumb shit I already drew" thing was definitely a source of disappointment. Like an uncle who's terribly at wrapping presents, and hands you your fairly obvious gift and before you even start opening it he's like "yeah it's a book." ? Yes it is a lot like that! 6 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: Also, agreed on Elena. I didn't even know she got hate from players until recently! I was like does she try to kill Drake in the third game or something?? Reminded me of how people watching Breaking Bad hated on Skyler because... she uh.. ruined all the men's fun? Who knows. Um I think it comes from her being too realistic of a wife in U4 and skunting Drake for going off on a dangerous adventure without telling her. There's a lot of immaturity that comes with the gaming community sometimes. Considering that she's been smoking scores of fools with Drake for three games beforehand and is a successful investigative journalist in her own right, she probably could have done with an invite. I'd say less like Skyler and more like Hermione (don't have a good comparison to make off the top of my head, Hermione will have to do) who is a 'partner in crime' and capable and independent on her own. Skyler was conceptualised as a universally-unlikeable bitch for a different reason: making Walt more sympathetic, like Tony Soprano's mother. Kind of how his son is disabled to make his goal of bringing in cash for his family before he dies was conceptualised as a means to assist in helping the audience justify him cooking meth. 6 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: Great read, my dude Glad you enjoyed it mate!! You are one charming dude. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrBloodmoney Posted December 11, 2021 Share Posted December 11, 2021 You’re Uncharted Symposia is awesome man! I’ve read the whole thing twice already ? I’m on weekend ‘confined to phone’ status, but expect some more specific praise come Monday! ? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Platinum_Vice Posted December 26, 2021 Author Popular Post Share Posted December 26, 2021 Before we head into the New Year, I wanted to put up a quick update and to make some resolutions. Hyper Light Drifter: Today I finally beat Modern Warfare 3's DLC which was giving me a bit of grief earlier in the month due to a requirement for beating the levels on the hardest difficulty. I applied the closest thing that I can get to performance enhancing drugs - two coffees and a Christmas donut sugar rush - and proceeded to steamroll the last remaining six levels. Call me Lance Armstrong boi, because I have no remorse for breaking the rules. Coming off the back of that dopamine high and with a gut full of confidence, I stepped back into the ring in the post-apocalyptic realm of the Hyper Light Drifter to get that fucking Dash Eternal trophy. I felt genuine elation during a delusion of "I'm getting this tonight, too. I came for a fish, caught a shark and now I'm going to take home a whale," and nearly made it to my record. I gave up after another half an hour where I didn't even come close to that again. I'll get this thing soon. My TV: My issue with Sony has been resolved: they have replaced my TV. They agreed that my blue TV sucked and suggested that I give it back and take a $500AUS-ish discount on a new Sony TV. I told them to do better. So they replaced it with a new one. And it's 5 inches bigger and worth $1000AUS more than the last one. It is also brand new. We take those victories, boys. We take those. For real, I'm like 90% grateful and only 10% "well I deserve it because the last one broke too soon." Christmas: As I get older I obviously don't expect much in the way of presents anymore, so I was politely excited to have received so much. What do you think? New Year's Resolutions: I haven’t really believed in making resolutions before because there’s really no better time to start working towards something than the present. In fact, I’ve only had one proper New Year's resolution before; watch all of the James Bond movies as I’d not seen any of them (I made that one a few years ago - the goal was to watch about one a week). I wanted to go chronologically and I think that going about it that way was ultimately my undoing. I got about three movies in and gave up. Anyway, anyway: as this year was the year where my gaming has been cut in half due to family responsibilities, setting the following goals for 2022 has genuinely made me optimistic about mythical free time that I'll be getting to spend more time with for this hobby. So here goes: At home: - Obtain 15 platinums. - Pull my profile completion percentage up from 88% to 91%. - Finally finish up the last handful of games sitting there unplayed for my PS3. - Save up to buy a PS5 by Christmas 2022. On PSNP: - Upload at least one review per fortnight to this checklist. I think I'd like to have a few more followers and I’m applying a 'Field of Dreams' mentality: “if I build it, they will come.” - Complete Tier 1 for Copanele's UR Clean Up (and therefore finally complete some URs that are mocking me in my sleep). - Generate a good idea for hosting a community event on the forum for either the back end of 2022 or for a year long 2023 event. Not fully sure about this but giving it some thought. Wish me luck ? To any and all out there: enjoy the holiday season and have a happy and healthy 2022. I'll see you there. PS: Coming very soon: The Last of Us. Finally. 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shrooba Posted December 26, 2021 Share Posted December 26, 2021 29 minutes ago, GonzoWARgasm said: Hyper Light Drifter: I stepped back into the ring in the post-apocalyptic realm of the Hyper Light Drifter to get that fucking Dash Eternal trophy. I felt genuine elation during a delusion of "I'm getting this tonight, too. I came for a fish, caught a shark and now I'm going to take home a whale," and nearly made it to my record. I gave up after another half an hour where I didn't even come close to that again. I'll get this thing soon. Keep at it man, you'll get it! HLD is a tricky game from what I hear, but you'll get it done soon enough. I see you have the Trackmania Turbo plat (a fucking beast of a plat at that, well done mate) so you definitely have a lot of patience! ? One day the trophy will come. ? 32 minutes ago, GonzoWARgasm said: On PSNP: - Upload at least one review per fortnight to this checklist. I think I'd like to have a few more followers and I’m applying a 'Field of Dreams' mentality: “if I build it, they will come.” Did you say you wanted a new follower? ? I guess I'll welcome myself aboard! I follow a fuckton of checklists so I might not be as up to date quickly, but I may pitch in my thoughts every now and then! For example, glad to see the TV issue was resolved! 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted December 26, 2021 Share Posted December 26, 2021 3 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: I felt genuine elation during a delusion of "I'm getting this tonight, too. I came for a fish, caught a shark and now I'm going to take home a whale," and nearly made it to my record. I gave up after another half an hour where I didn't even come close to that again. I'll get this thing soon. There's nothing quite like that feeling, when you're locked in and like "you can't hide from me, you're mine." You got this, homie! 3 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: My issue with Sony has been resolved: they have replaced my TV. They agreed that my blue TV sucked and suggested that I give it back and take a $500AUS-ish discount on a new Sony TV. I told them to do better. So they replaced it with a new one. And it's 5 inches bigger and worth $1000AUS more than the last one. It is also brand new. We take those victories, boys. We take those. For real, I'm like 90% grateful and only 10% "well I deserve it because the last one broke too soon." Yeah Sony better take care of you, I'll fuckin blast those fools! That's awesome, dude! Sometimes that persistence doesn't really go anywhere and you just end up kinda screwed, but when they blink first and hook it up, it's somethin else. Like the previously mentioned feeling, it's very much its own thing. I'm glad for you, man! 4 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: As I get older I obviously don't expect much in the way of presents anymore, so I was politely excited to have received so much. What do you think? I'm lovin those Lego heads you scored... also aaayyyyy a whiskey man! I don't expect (or particularly want) much as far as presents go either... but it's still nice? 4 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: I haven’t really believed in making resolutions before because there’s really no better time to start working towards something than the present. In fact, I’ve only had one proper New Year's resolution before; watch all of the James Bond movies as I’d not seen any of them (I made that one a few years ago - the goal was to watch about one a week). I wanted to go chronologically and I think that going about it that way was ultimately my undoing. I got about three movies in and gave up. Were you not able to get into them? What made you want to launch into those? Personally I never had much interest in those movies, but I've never cared for the Star Wars movies either, so who knows how valuable my opinion is? 4 hours ago, GonzoWARgasm said: At home: - Obtain 15 platinums. - Pull my profile completion percentage up from 88% to 91%. - Finally finish up the last handful of games sitting there unplayed for my PS3. - Save up to buy a PS5 by Christmas 2022. On PSNP: - Upload at least one review per fortnight to this checklist. I think I'd like to have a few more followers and I’m applying a 'Field of Dreams' mentality: “if I build it, they will come.” - Complete Tier 1 for Copanele's UR Clean Up (and therefore finally complete some URs that are mocking me in my sleep). - Generate a good idea for hosting a community event on the forum for either the back end of 2022 or for a year long 2023 event. Not fully sure about this but giving it some thought. Wish me luck Mah man! I love all of this, good luck!! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Platinum_Vice Posted December 27, 2021 Author Share Posted December 27, 2021 7 hours ago, Shrooba said: Keep at it man, you'll get it! HLD is a tricky game from what I hear, but you'll get it done soon enough. I see you have the Trackmania Turbo plat (a fucking beast of a plat at that, well done mate) so you definitely have a lot of patience! ? One day the trophy will come. ? Thanks mate, I agree: if I can do that, then I can surely do this. I'm so ready to get past that hump to get back into such an incredible game. Quote Did you say you wanted a new follower? ? I guess I'll welcome myself aboard! I follow a fuckton of checklists so I might not be as up to date quickly, but I may pitch in my thoughts every now and then! For example, glad to see the TV issue was resolved! You are a G. Thank you. ?? 4 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: There's nothing quite like that feeling, when you're locked in and like "you can't hide from me, you're mine." You got this, homie! For real. The smell of the hunt. I turned off the PS3 and turned on the PC to hop on the forum and thought: "damn that feels good. I feel SHARP... oh I'm doing The Dash Eternal. Oh yeah it's mine." ...aaaaand then it wasn't but that's ok. ? Quote I'm lovin those Lego heads you scored... also aaayyyyy a whiskey man! Yeah it's a puzzle! A puzzle with Lego heads ? Quote Were you not able to get into them? What made you want to launch into those? Personally I never had much interest in those movies, but I've never cared for the Star Wars movies either, so who knows how valuable my opinion is? Just bored and disappointed. Was expecting Sean Connery to be so good and for more action, more spectacle, more cool, and more "ooooooh, that's where that cliche comes from." (That's why I tried to get into them). But apparently all of that doesn't come in until Pierce Brosnan. I think I'd enjoy Brosnan and Craig but I'm loathe to watch them out of order. Quote Mah man! I love all of this, good luck!! Thanks bro ? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Platinum_Vice Posted January 14, 2022 Author Popular Post Share Posted January 14, 2022 (edited) 05A Series: The Last of Us #18 (PS3) & #36 (PS4) The Last of Us, 10/10 #86 (PS4) The Last of Us: Part II, 9/10 Hot takes: Part 1 is greater than the sum of its parts. Part 2 is less than the sum of its parts. Where Part 1’s success is primarily due to the strength of its characters, Part 2 has an inescapable flaw due to subverting its characters. What is The Last of Us: Part I? The Last of Us follows Joel and Ellie on a journey across North America 20 years after Outbreak Day, when a cordyceps infection began to use human brains as a host for its life cycle resulting in an outbreak of zombie-esque creatures. While it does feature zombie tropes, the post-apocalypse is primarily just the catalyst for combat and it’s not the central aspect of the game; The Last of Us is so popular because the characters’ attempts to survive physically are just a setting for the central theme - emotional survival in the wake of loss. I love this game. I must have played it somewhere in the realm of a dozen times when I add them all up... there was the original playthrough, a secondary playthrough a few months later on a harder difficulty, the inevitable PS4 Remaster playthrough (and additional playthrough on Grounded difficulty), and then revisiting them as a trophy hunter for a couple of playthroughs per console to obtain both platinums, and again once more in anticipation of the sequel. That makes it the game that I’ve finished the most amount of times within my adult life. A by-product of that is having opinions and insight into aspects that other players may not have. [Editing note: I started drafting this post a month ago by just listing my thoughts chronologically by memory and figured I’d rearrange it into a better structure afterwards, but I strangely think it works as it is?] In case you haven’t noticed it with my prior reviews: there will be spoilers, and you’d probably need to have played these games at some point to be able to follow along with this... what is it?... essay, I guess. Oh, and... it's going to be three posts long, so... put the kettle on, mate. Beginning the game as Sarah was a stroke of genius because Naughty Dog is following storytelling RULE #1: ensure the player relates to the playable character. Sarah is discovering the horrific apocalypse as the player is, and the opening level is masterfully crafted to draw the player into the same anxiety that she is feeling. When wandering into Joel’s room, you see a TV that is broadcasting the news. The reporter’s feed cuts out due to an explosion behind her, and half a second later the same explosion is visible a couple of kilometres beyond Joel’s nearby window. This very successfully ensures that the player feels like danger is both real and close by. Naughty Dog are masters of bringing a character’s house to life. We can see in Sarah’s room alone that she plays guitar and has prepared a birthday card for Joel. This is also the first time we see a giraffe; this series’ motif for youthful innocence. The first major cutscene at the 10 minute mark features an award-winning performance by Troy Baker. This scene and this character made him a name in every video gaming household. Compare TLOU1's opening cutscene with the first ten minutes of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune... Drake: you know how to use one of these? Elena: it’s just like a camera; you just point and shoot, right? *they kill dozens of pirates in a shlocky action sequence involving gunfire and fisticuffs* Drake: you alright? Elena: nothing years of therapy won't fix. ...The Last of Us actually wants to be taken seriously. After having a few minutes to digest what happened, you begin playing as Joel 20 years after Outbreak Day. He is living in a quarantine zone in Boston. It functions under martial law but suffers semi-regular attacks by a nationwide guerrilla organisation that call themselves “The Fireflies,” which to this day continues to make me scratch my head. Does anyone else think the name is ridiculous? "You guys are like... a team? What do you call yourselves?" "We're the Ducklings." Joel and the player meet Ellie, a surprisingly upbeat 14 year old who we soon discover to be emotionally resilient and resourceful beyond her years. She is brave, compassionate and reasonably profane (but only to an extent of attempting to appear older than she really is). She reminds Joel of his daughter, and he has not emotionally accepted her death during the past 20 years. When Ellie notices that Joel is wearing a broken watch (the birthday gift from Sarah to Joel on Outbreak Day), the game is trying to make that extremely clear to the player, so that when more subtle moments take place such as this one... … we are then led to believe that Joel sees his daughter in Ellie. I love storytelling like this. During this scene, Joel asks Ellie “is this what you were expecting?” and she says “Jury’s still out. But man... can’t deny that view.” Joel discovers that Ellie is immune to the cordyceps infection. He is reluctantly convinced that he must deliver Ellie to his brother Tommy in Jackson, Wyoming, because Tommy is an ex-Firefly, and Joel suspects that the Fireflies are working on a cure for the infection. Setting off for Tommy is where the game begins to fire on all cylinders. Throughout the journey you come across gorgeous recreations of already-evocative concept art, such as this collapsing skyscraper which you enter and descend, dodging infected and scrounging supplies. You meet the clickers for the first time in here and they are both awesome and terrifying. The lore underpinning the clickers is that the infection has outgrown the host’s brain and blossomed outwards over the eyes preventing vision. They ‘see’ via echolocation and so they make clicking noises from the throat to facilitate that process. The resulting silence that the player must maintain to avoid detection heightens the tension. Being low on supplies is an ever-constant point of anxiety for the player while simultaneously enhancing the post-apocalyptic theming. [A small tip for Survivor and Grounded difficulties: ammo doesn’t drop in pre-determined amounts like the crafting materials, pills and gun parts. Ammo drops according to how much how already have in your inventory. If you’re nearly out, you’ll conveniently discover that some infected have been shelving some spare rounds, so ignore the anxiety and fire away! Conversely, if you have a lot of ammo, you won’t get much more because the game wants to make you dance, boi!] You soon meet Bill. He is one of the most fleshed-out characters in the game. We spend a couple of hours with him where we are fed tidbits of his personality, motivations, strategies for defending himself from clickers, a different strategy for defending himself from humans (using a perimeter of clickers!), his failed relationship with someone that you find deceased, his habits, his fears and his past interactions with Joel. He is very well-realised. There is a gameplay highlight in Bill’s Town where you get caught in one of Bill’s traps and have to shoot infected while hanging upside down. Later, you meet Henry and Sam, and they accompany you while running the gauntlet in the city of Pittsburgh and the neighbouring sewer and suburban area. In the same way that Bill functions as an indication of how lonely and mad Joel would be if he was alone, Henry and Sam are a warning to the emotional stakes at play when characters fail to apply themselves whole-heartedly to the necessity of watching out for each other. There’s also a moment in a toy store where Sam attempts to loot a little Voltron-esque figure but is stopped by Henry. Much later (at the end of The Suburbs), it is revealed that Ellie picked it up off the floor when Sam left it behind. There’s a lot that we could explore about that moment from a character development perspective but the part about it all that I like the most is that Naughty Dog programmed Ellie to actually pick it up while in that store... you just can’t overtly watch her do it. To see it, you have to go around a corner to a place where Ellie shouldn’t be able to identify that you’re spying on her, and then she’ll look around before bending down and pocketing it. It is such an incredible little detail and I think it’s really cool. As I travelled through the area after Pittsburgh (The Sewers), I discovered a rare instance of enjoyment in hunting collectibles. Starting from a beached boat, written notes from a person named Ish are chronologically tucked away for you to find as you explore what used to be a home for a small group of people. I’ll put them below this paragraph for you to read if you’re interested instead of me explaining it all. It’s refreshing to hunt collectibles that are actually interesting. They flesh out the world instead of just artificially inflating play time. Most importantly, the written words on the collectibles legitimately read like they were written by an actual person, instead of sounding like the same two writing staff every damn time. Kyle’s final note is left beside an adult skeleton with a bullethole in its skull. The skeletons of two children sit beside him, each with a single bullethole to the head as well. Beyond the sewers and the adjacent suburb (again, another location to stop and smell the roses/take in the details while systematically looting the place dry) is Tommy’s community in Jackson. I really like Tommy and again, kudos to the dialogue and acting teams in this game because the scenes in this level reach a level of realism that 98% of entertainment media wants to achieve. Scenes between Joel and Tommy (and Joel and Ellie when you rescue her from an old house in the woods) shine, and the resulting story beat is that Joel commits himself permanently to what he first considered was a temporary role of ‘chaperone’ to Ellie for the subsequent leg of their journey to Colorado. By this point, the conversations between Joel and Ellie have progressed from an initial refusal to converse -> reluctance to converse -> minimal sentences -> emotionally distant dialogue -> familiarity and a relative degree of comfortability -> talking about some endearing memories and future hopes. The natural progression of those conversational tones is a core strength for this game and is a key factor in the relatability of the characters. In Colorado, Ellie attempts to understand the rules of football and Joel recalls his student days and a desire to be a singer from a young age. He tells her that he will teach her how to play the guitar someday. They’ve named the horse that they took from Tommy’s Damn “Callus.” An aside: throughout my time with TLOU1 I always thought the horse was called “Callous,” meaning ‘emotional hardening/uncaring/unempathetic,’ which I obviously thought was relevant to the game’s central theme (emotional survival in the wake of loss). It wasn’t until playing through TLOU2 (when Joel starts teaching Ellie to play guitar and she complains about the pain of plucking and Joel says “you just need to build your calluses up”) that I realised I had been misinterpreting the wrong word. A ‘callus’ is a build-up of hardened skin. My brain exploded at the simultaneous realisation that I had the wrong name in mind the whole time, and that the words both refer to ‘a hardening,’ so the emotional meaning behind the name not only works either way, but now more emotional weight was added to the name of the horse with this additional meaning. I like to think that both Joel and the writers at Naughty Dog had probably made the same connection. This directly ties back into Joel’s characterisation and the game’s theming. It is a wonderful use of the English language. [Editing note: upon doing some further research now, it turns out that both words have had a unique history since they split from the same word (‘callus’) approximately 500 years ago]. It is in that level in Colorado that Joel falls onto a piece of rebar and the player is left on a cliffhanger regarding Joel’s fate as Ellie attempts to escort him away from human raiders. In the next section we play as Ellie. This was kept secret from players on purpose when advertising and promoting this game prior to its release. Naughty Dog repeatedly denied that we’d play as Ellie so that it would be a surprise. I will reference this later. I have a hard time suspending my disbelief that Joel would be up and running after a few hours of being injected with antibiotics near his gut injury from that rebar. It’s a very Nathan Drake thing to do and not at all in keeping with the ‘grounded world and narrative’ that Naughty Dog have been asking us to buy into for the whole game. We meet another character in this chapter – David. The subtlety in Nolan North’s portrayal of him succeeds in giving off an eerie vibe. Being drip fed snippets of information and subtext about the full scope of David's evil designs for Ellie (in addition to the size, strength and activities of his raider colony) unfold with perfect pacing. The whole chapter is so captivating and is like a mini-adventure away from the rest of the story but yet it fits into the broader scope of the narrative like a final puzzle piece. Nolan North portrays the chilling role of David Ellie bites David in this chapter. Ellie is a carrier of a mutated version of the cordyceps infection. My mind races with ideas and questions: when Ellie kills David with the machete, does she strike him in the head or the chest? Is it possible that his brain is intact? Did David take on the infection when Ellie bit him? Was he therefore infected with the mutated infection? Was he therefore likely to be immune? Could Ellie’s immunity be passed on to others by her biting them? If not (and if his brain is relatively intact) could David become a runner? These are questions that Naughty Dog created in me that keep me up at night. Bringing David back as an infected would have been a great opportunity for Ellie to overcome some of her trauma. Regardless, Ellie successfully outsmarts David and kills him just as Joel manages to find her and take her into his arms. Joel calls Ellie “Baby Girl" when he comes to her aid at the end of this section. “Baby Girl” is what he called Sarah when she died in his arms... In some part of Joel’s subconscious, the adoption is official. Throughout TLOU1 you’ve been interacting with Ellie to use ladders in explorative sections to progress through the levels. In the Bus Depot locale near the end of the game, Ellie breaks that routine by dropping a ladder and walking away as she discovers a tower of giraffes. You/Joel can’t see the giraffes and are left wondering what could possibly be so important to break what has become a routine with the interactive ladder gameplay. This is Naughty Dog using gameplay (or more specifically, changes in gameplay) as a means to relate the player to the playable character and to interact with character development. A+ game design. Bravo. Ellie had been despondent prior to this scene which I attributed to her emotionally digesting what happened with David (we don’t know exactly how much time has passed since that scene in the game; as a player, only 20 minutes has passed, but in the game, we’ve transitioned from Winter to Spring). Upon repeat playthroughs it is clear that Ellie is actually dreading what she knows is coming: the headquarters of the Fireflies, and therefore, their destination; in her words, “After all we've been through... after everything I've done... it can’t all be for nothing.” Giraffes represent the innocence of youth in this game. This moment is a reminder that despite everything that Ellie has been through and despite how many people she’s killed with you, she’s still a 14 year old girl who has never seen a giraffe before, and she is still capable of innocent child-like wonder. Joel and Ellie echo their conversation at the beginning of the game: “this everything you were hoping for?” “it’s got its ups and downs. Can’t deny the view, though.” In 10 or so hours, TLOU provides multiple gameplay-based moments where you as the player interact with Ellie and grow to love her on a journey in harmony with Joel. You know her sense of humour, her fears, her hopes and dreams, her trauma, her interests and you’ve each been essential in keeping each other alive as you journeyed across America. In addition to this, you also know Joel’s key experiences, priorities and cynicism towards humanity, and you may also have deduced the lack of organisation or competence of the Fireflies due to their total mishandling of every situation that the player has seen them involved in... So when Joel makes a monumental decision at the end of the game to interrupt a surgery during which Ellie will die to give humanity a chance to engineer a vaccine, you can see how he can justify his decision-making to himself even if you don’t agree with him. Sarah was a sacrifice paid by the few for the benefit of the many, and Joel does not want to be 'the few’ again. He is willing to sacrifice the chances of a vaccine for his own emotional survival. You could argue that a vaccine could not be engineered in such a limited laboratory with such an uneducated and under-resourced group, which is clearly so backwards that they have withdrawn from two cities to the player’s knowledge and couldn’t smuggle Ellie away from Boston themselves. You could argue that killing Ellie in surgery on the same day as her arrival is extremely hasty. You could argue that even if they did diagnose, design AND manufacture such a vaccine, they do not have the ability to test it, distribute it nation/worldwide or convince other humans of its efficacy. But Joel never even thinks about that anyway. He’s just simply not going to lose another daughter. And so, he shoots the surgeon, picks Ellie up off the operating table, and in the same manner in which he carried his daughter in his arms on Outbreak Day, he carries Ellie to safety away from the danger of masked military men with rifles and flashlights. Spot the giraffe! The characters in this game are so well-realised over the course of this journey that my disbelief was suspended more than any other game that I’ve played. The characterisation, dialogue and acting are so incredible that it sometimes feels like Joel and Ellie (and Tommy, and Bill, et cetera) are real people. The Last of Us benefits from extreme attention to detail in the environmental storytelling and theming. The soundtrack is superb and befits the melancholic and bittersweet tones of the narrative. The gameplay was not overly complex even at the time of release. The weapons available to the player were staples in zombie-based media and were not inherently innovative. While the combat was incredibly fun, it is more ‘functional’ than ‘outstanding,’ but I don’t care. The combat is fun and that is more important that it being complex in a game where the story takes centre-stage. Art by Patrick Brown [Instagram] I like the quick select menu. It seems to pay homage to Skyrim’s inspired attempt. I understand that one woman worked on it for the entirety of TLOU1’s development as the singular role of her employment at Naughty Dog. It pays off. It is simple and makes logical sense and it refuses to allow players to pause the gameplay when crafting materials, which in itself creates a great risk vs reward dilemma during combat if you’re under-prepared. You might be saving alcohol and a rag so that you can make a dynamic decision later whether you need those materials for a molotov cocktail or a healing bandage (which is a reasonable thing to do on higher difficulties when resources are scarce) but God help you if you need to craft during combat, because you’ll have to make it in real-time and then (if it’s a bandage), apply it in real-time too. Grounded mode removes the HUD which is a genuine disadvantage, except that you can’t manually check how many rounds you have or exactly how much health Joel has. This is important information that is necessary to inform your decision making. It doesn’t actually increase immersion because if you were in Joel’s shoes, you’d know how badly you were hurting, and/or you would check your magazines if you had lost count of the amount of ammo on-hand. It’s more of an artificial difficulty increase than its intended function of being a tool to make the game more immersive. Exploring abandoned toilets for stray pingers never got old. Apparently Joel’s pill addiction continues to plague him in the post-apocalypse. The very first upgrade that anyone should be considering is reducing weapon sway – Parkinson’s disease is an odd thing to be programming into a shooter, but it does result in artificial tension when your reticle slides away from a clicker’s head and you drop a shot regardless of your skill level. As I see it, the Left Behind DLC is a bar-setter for AAA studios who have more to add into their releases. It provided more context to the base game, it was a narrative spin-off that would have been out of place if inserted into the base game, and it added new gameplay elements to the combat while staying true to the core experience. Briefly, on the multiplayer: It's awesome. Almost all combinations of perks and of gameplay variations for your own playstyle have value. The pacing was perfect. The amount of shots required to kill was low but the time that it took to shoot was high, so all firefights had tension. There was also a genuine risk vs reward for sprinting. It had 17 maps which I found to be extremely reasonable for a secondary game mode. Trophy hunting accentuated the multiplayer for me because the amount of games required to unlock trophies gave me a lengthy experience without it overstaying its welcome. Unlocking new skills and perks came at a perfect pace. There was always some new thing I had to pick up and master to harmonise with my own playstyle. You had 13 perk points and different unlocks cost different amounts of those perk points, so no build was ever truly overpowered. Cosmetics were unlocked based on skill. It was just fun. Edited April 29, 2022 by Platinum_Vice 10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Platinum_Vice Posted January 14, 2022 Author Popular Post Share Posted January 14, 2022 (edited) 05B The Last of Us: Part II Teeing off... This game gets A LOT of things very, very right. A lot of things... like the thick and inescapable atmosphere, and the impeccable acting and dialogue, and how insanely fun the gameplay is with multiple improvements upon TLOU1’s systems, and how gorgeous the game is, how crazy the SFX are, how long it is even though it’s a linear experience, and how the options for accessibility are setting new standards for the industry. But there are some blatant foundational issues with this game. ... but straight into the rough. Rule #1 for developing story-based video games: Use gameplay to create a connection between the player and the character they’re controlling. If the journey of your playable character is the same as your audience, everything that happens will resonate, the player will be emotionally invested, and conflict and decisions will have weight and tension. So if, for example, the first game in your series is lauded and sends shockwaves throughout the industry primarily because you successfully created that bond between players and TWO main characters, it’s a really really really bad idea to twist and wrench one of them into decision making and actions that oppose what the player wants to do and wants for that character, and to kill the other of the two main characters off, and to force the player to take control of the character that happens to have murdered one of them despite the player not yet having the context as to why that might be justified. If you had not played The Last of Us: Part II, I’m sure you’d be quite concerned by that idea and might suspect that I’m talking in extreme hyperbole. However, even players who LOVE this game should agree that, in theory, I am right about what I’ve posited so far... at the most foundational and theoretical level, you shouldn’t break Rule #1, especially when you previously prioritised it and that was what resulted in your initial success. So many fans have expressed frustration and sadness about their consequent disconnection to those two characters. Far too many of those fans made death threats to developers, actors and reviewers who were publicly expressing positivity for the game at release. And that is extremely poor behaviour by those fans. However, my armchair psychology and cynical nature can’t help but draw a parallel: if you have two characters that have a strong bond between each other, and a playerbase that has a bond with each of them, having players and one of those characters witness a BRUTAL and confronting murder of the other character is extremely dramatic and traumatic. And as a developer that then makes the surviving character act immaturely, ie: abandon reason and safety to travel across the countryside to go on a murderous rampage that destroys every other character she meets, how can that developer be truly surprised when members of the playerbase react with the same immaturity? It is reasonable for Ellie to react poorly to Joel’s death and travel across the countryside seeking revenge, but immature players emulating Ellie’s behaviour by threatening to do these things is... unexpected? Life imitated art in this case. I believe that the connection that players did have to Joel and Ellie was grossly underestimated at Naughty Dog, or at the barest minimum, it was not considered to be something worth safeguarding and sustaining. The more rabid members of the playerbase did go too far with that immature behaviour. You can’t make death threats and slander developers, actors and reviewers or make them feel unsafe. Obviously. I don’t condone that behaviour. Those are criminal and unacceptable acts. It is equally hard for me to stomach Ellie's actions, Abby's actions and Naughty Dog's decimation of Joel, Tommy and Ellie as characters. Their humanity, hopes, dreams, motivations, personalities and potentials (all of which we had fallen in love with) are no longer recognisable. Ellie is no longer cheeky, funny, charismatic or rambunctious... She’s not brave anymore - just reckless. Gone is her wit, compassion and spirited nature. I just don’t like who she has become. I also can’t relate to her decision making. When she finds out that her girlfriend Dina is pregnant and that Tommy is alive, in Seattle and probably in danger, Ellie makes no effort to rescue Tommy or to remove Dina from danger. She abandons them and chases Abby into unknown territory (the aquarium) where she kills a pregnant woman by stabbing her in the neck. Her entire motivation (and ours as the player) is to exact vengeance upon Abby - but not at the cost of Tommy or Dina’s lives. However, the game repeatedly pushes us to go out and hunt Abby down. But then we don’t even get to achieve that goal. Ellie brutally murders hundreds of people in this game but then right as she is about to kill Abby, Ellie sees a flashback of Joel and she remembers that she was on the cusp of forgiving him, and channels that forgiveness to change her mind about Abby and allows her to go free... Blueballs, mate. It was a distinctly unsatisfying ending. I can force myself to buy that ending because I genuinely don’t hate Abby and do find her relatable (for reasons outside of those the game actively uses to formulate a bond between her and the player), and because this ending does echo that of TLOU1, where Joel had escorted Ellie to the Fireflies to have her sacrificed for a vaccine but ultimately changed his mind at the eleventh hour and subverted our expectations. Those two minor consolations help me swallow the bitter pill that is this ending, but I’m still left very unsatisfied as a whole by Ellie’s unsatisfying revenge arc. Abby isn’t the only woman in TLOU2 that likes G.O.L.F. (Get Out, Leave Family); here's Ellie throwing away a life that Joel and Jessie died for. Ellie’s journey in this game has caused her to lose everything including her loving relationships, her sanity, her humanity, the adoration of the playerbase at large, and then, at the end, she even lost touch with her motivation to avenge Joel. _________________ Fortunately, I do not yet have a large experience with losing family members and friends. I can count the amount of times that death has affected me on one hand due to being blessed with relatively healthy people around me. It took me about a month of very unstable emotions while playing TLOU2 for the first time and the subsequent weeks afterwards to actually realise why I was so upset: I was grieving Joel's death. It is an understatement to say that coming to that realisation surprised me. What a strange phenomenon... Grieving the passing of a video game character? That’s cringe, bro. Yet, it happened. It did not help that the murder was so well-designed and executed cinematically resulting in it being genuinely traumatic. I have seen a lot of very injured people in my life and Joel’s bloodied face was fiercely realistic. Ellie’s reaction to watching him get murdered was very well acted too. The scene was extremely impactful. It was certainly more impactful to me than Sarah's death and I say that as a father, and this is because as a player I am simultaneously Joel and Ellie; there is just so much more gravity in Joel’s death than Sarah’s as a result of that. And it makes me sad that this is compounded by the fact that I related to Joel and wanted more TLOU with him in it. I’m not convinced that his death was justified from a storytelling perspective; it recontextualised what we knew about the death of Abby’s father (the doctor attempting to create a vaccine) but Joel’s death was not necessary to achieve that goal. This series had more potential with Joel in it, and I fear that the series had more potential when Ellie herself had more potential as well. Everybody loves a girl with caddy issues: Abby. Oh Abby. At the halfway point of TLOU2, Ellie’s story is about to reach a climax and it is full of tension: Abby has arrived at the theatre and killed Jessie, and she has a dominant position over Tommy and Ellie. Abby points her gun at Ellie and then... The tension and pacing comes to a screeching halt for us to play as the person that we have been hunting for eight hours. Despite the fact that I enjoyed Abby’s half of the game more than Ellie’s, and despite that I liked Abby more than TLOU2’s version of Ellie, this was a complete misread of the audience’s expectations by Naughty Dog. I can’t help but have Snape’s backstory from the Harry Potter books evoked with this jarring change in perspective; the pacing and tension of the story is abandoned to go back to multiple events in time, and regardless of how impactful those moments may be, abandoning tension for context can only be pulled off in very particular circumstances. This technique of switching perspectives is best utilised in movies where pacing can more easily be maintained because the person experiencing the film isn’t limited to the speed that they can read – they can instead receive audio-visual information in seconds. That’s why heist movies, whodunnit movies and others using similar non-linear techniques (The Shawshank Redemption, The Prestige, Fight Club) have a greater chance to achieve that effect than The Last of Us Part II or Harry Potter. However, notice that in those types of movies where the editing technique is actually successful, it's because the flashback information is always told in a relatively speedy manner (often a montage), not a drawn out sequence lasting half of the story. Further, introducing new playable characters in sequels is in itself fraught with danger unless you use them sparingly. In 2004, Halo 2 received criticism for the inclusion of the Arbiter as a playable character because his levels heavily featured the Flood enemies which weren’t as fun or interesting to fight compared to the Covenant. He had a lot going for him (such as being a vehicle to build upon the universe’s lore and the ability to wield an energy sword) but everybody still wanted to play as the Master Chief at the time. If the Arbiter had successfully killed Cortana at the beginning of Halo 2, there would have been an even bigger negative reaction to his inclusion as a playable character in Halo 2. In 2015, Halo 5 received extreme criticism for almost entirely removing the Master Chief as the primary playable character and replacing him with Spartan Locke (who is extremely unrelatable). In 2018’s Spider-Man by Insomniac Games, can you really tell me that you enjoyed the sections where you played as Mary Jane or as Miles Morales? The pacing came to a halt for each of them while you completed stealth sections with no tension or story development. Nobody wants to play the character who killed Joel, especially when we only just saw her do it. Blind Freddy could have seen that, so why charge ahead with that decision? I actually didn’t know that the whole second half of the game would be from Abby’s perspective as I avoided spoilers. When we were given control of her I expected a quick flashback and that I’d then be back to playing as Ellie. It wasn't until Day 2 began as Abby that I actually fully understood that I was playing the whole three days from her side of the story. I had gone through denial, bargaining and anger before sadness upon that realisation because I had such a visceral negative reaction to the idea. Naughty Dog had kept her inclusion as a playable character secret (going so far as to moratorium critic reviews) so it was a surprise for me. In TLOU1, we were pleasantly surprised when we took control of Ellie. Subverting expectations only works when the surprise is better than what the audience expects. In Abby’s defence, her gameplay sections are actually the best part of the game. I like that she’s so powerful. It’s fun to play as her. Her Day 2 sequence is my favourite part of TLOU2. It has the moment where Abby crosses the skybridge and it has the descent through the hotel filled with infected. I hate coming to this hotel – the towels aren’t clean, the food is out of date and the bellboy is a zombie. Abby’s Day 2 also has the gripping hospital basement level against Seattle’s Patient Zero – referred to by Naughty Dog as the “Rat King.” That part is fucking terrifying. I was down there just giving it my inventory. Uncharted 1 pit me against many Mother-In-Laws, but TLOU2 introduced me to the Super Saiyan Mother-In-Law. There are a few things that I don’t understand about Abby and her part of the game, though, and they primarily come down to decisions made by the developer. It is jarring to have Joel’s shooting of Abby’s father get subtly retconned so that the operating theatre is cleaner in white and blue instead of murky green in TLOU1. Abby’s father is slightly more emphatic in his plea to Joel in TLOU2’s retelling too. Those are cheap tricks that underestimate the intelligence of the playerbase. Abby and her father’s attempts to rescue a zebra is a very poorly-disguised effort to make them more sympathetic. A similar example is the requirement to play catch with a dog (twice) as Abby to progress her gameplay (and to be forced to kill that dog as Ellie). The 'flipside’ of Ellie’s kleptomania is that Abby collects coins. The symbolism is pretty on-the-nose. The ends that Abby goes to in her attempts to save Lev and Yara are extreme and not without an over-extension beyond reasonable/logical grounds. I understand the change in her dreams and her motivation to begin her pursuit of Lev and Yara to assist them after they save her, but the way she so easily does the dirty on her friends and members of the WLF community are noticeable. Lev is trans, and it left me wondering if Abby might be trans as well, because a kindred connection might explain her zeal in wanting to save them at such high costs. If she is, fine, but commit to it, because as it is I'm struggling to reconcile her motivations with her actions. And Abby randomly fell ass-backwards into Joel’s presence at the beginning of the game? The one person that she’s been hunting appears before her while he only has one ally and is otherwise defenceless? Really? And Abby allows that ally – Joel’s brother, mind you – to live, in addition to Ellie, who is watching the murder and swearing to Abby that she’ll kill her... Those are the contrivances that are the catalyst for this plot? I did find Abby’s pragmatism refreshing compared with Ellie’s loose and emotional plans, and I find it odd that despite the parlour tricks that TLOU2 employs to make Abby likeable, the things that actually succeeds in making me like her is having played as Ellie’s miserable ass for the first ten hours and being ready to play as someone less dogmatic, not because I wanted to play as Abby. But upon the end of her Day 3 portion of the game, Abby finally catches up to the cliffhanger scene in the theatre, and any semblance of kinship and empathy that I had built with Abby for the past eight hours of her gameplay went immediately out the window because she shoots Tommy in the back of the head without any hesitation. I really liked Tommy. The game forces you (as Abby) to then chase down Ellie into the back of the theatre where you engage in a stealth-based boss fight against her. This is actually a great idea but the glimmer of brilliance is just overshadowed by the disconnect that I felt between the gameplay and the story: I still didn’t want to kill Ellie and I was not okay with what Abby had done to Joel, Tommy and Jessie. At the end of the fight Abby shows a malicious desire to kill Dina despite the knowledge that she is pregnant. I’m not conflicted, Naughty Dog, I simply do not want Abby to succeed. Despite my criticism of Abby, she decides (with the intervention of Lev) in that moment that she is going to end the cycle of violence by letting Dina and Ellie go, which is nice and all, but Abby should have maybe checked whether Ellie was still going to come good on her promise to kill her before walking away. Look, I... I’m pretty confident that I get what Naughty Dog are presenting with the dichotomy between Ellie and Abby despite their many similarities... … but I just think it fails with an adult audience who already believe in the dark and grounded nature of the world of The Last of Us. And it didn’t just fail to land with me. Unfortunately, it’s not like my opinion is an outlier in the sea of people that played this game. This is the scale to which I care for the following characters: And this is the scale to which Naughty Dog wants me to care for those characters: The disconnect between those two lists is telling. A few last minute notes that I feel are worth mentioning about other characters: The scene about 80% into the game where Tommy comes to visit Ellie and Dina and tries to guilt Ellie into continuing the quest for vengeance is incredibly written and acted. It is a great example of the game’s ability to suck me in and keep me glued to the story. Tommy’s behaviour is sickening but it’s understandable and I buy it as a logical outcome of even just the pure emotion that he would be feeling; it is believable even if you assume he doesn't have brain damage. It’s a very emotional scene and this is a tribute to the acting and dialogue. Even though it knocks the amount to which I like Tommy as a character down a few pegs, the talent of all involved in materialising that scene is commendable. Lev’s personal arc is a bit strange. He comes out as trans to his family. His mother and community disown him. His mother and sister (the two people he cares about the most) die as a direct result. What was the point that the game is trying to make? ‘Be yourself regardless of how it affects others?’ The main role of Lev in the grander narrative is to assist Abby recover her humanity due to the influence of his innocence (just like Ellie’s impact on Joel in TLOU1), but Lev’s personal arc is miserable and unfulfilling. Is it just me or do Owen and Abby’s father look ridiculously similar? When I first played this scene I got creepy Lannister vibes. Am I alone? Why is Mel going into combat as third-term pregnant woman? What is this madness? Edited April 29, 2022 by Platinum_Vice 10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Platinum_Vice Posted January 14, 2022 Author Popular Post Share Posted January 14, 2022 (edited) 05C Enjoying the day on the green: How about the things that TLOU2 does right? (It took me a while to get to this point, but I’m here, finally). Most prominently, there’s the terrifying and gorgeous world in which our characters find themselves. Nature's growth and the inevitable destruction of buildings and man-made structures isn’t quite timeline-accurate (rivers flowing through roads and trees growing in streets is more in the realm of 200-400 years without human intervention, not 20 years) but I love it anyway. The world is OVERFLOWING in gorgeous details. You can just see it jump off the page from concept art through to the executed end result. Nothing looks the same between different areas and encounters, assets don’t seem to be recycled, and I always knew where to go navigationally. If every linear experience had such impressive environmental details and level design, I’d never leave my house. Joel’s house is a touching place to visit. Naughty Dog have mastered the art of designing the interior decor for the homes of our favourite characters as seen now in all of their four most recent games. Seeing that Joel had begun reading books about space (presumably to help him relate to Ellie’s own interests) and that he was a talented wood carver in his spare time was heartwarming. Ellie’s own granny-flat was again worth every minute that I spent over-analysing every detail. Ellie's desk contains astronomy books, an astronaut figure, a poster for Savage Starlight and one for a band, a globe, paints, and at the far right of this image, the Voltron toy that she looted for Sam. Treating your character like a real person is critical. Likewise, the flashback sequence at the museum where Joel and Ellie celebrated her birthday was surreal. I wanted to stay there forever to not just escape the horrors of what Ellie and I were experiencing in Seattle, but because I wanted to soak in the details of the flashback (it was cute to discover that not only had Joel begun teaching Ellie how to play the guitar, he had also taught her how to swim). The flashback as a whole was too 'perfect' but I’m trying to focus on the positives here! Using real locations in Seattle was exactly what I wanted in the Uncharted games. I recall reading at the time that TLOU2 was released that many Seattle locals discovered consistencies in not just the landmarks like the aquarium and theatre, but also locations like The Cheesecake Factory were replaced with in-game equivalents. Bravo. Also in Seattle, I enjoyed the time capsule of a bank robbery on Outbreak Day during an early sequence when Ellie and Dina first arrive in town. The bridges between the skyscrapers are very cool but... did the WLF never look up? I doubt Seattle is foggy every day. Shout-out to Abby and Ellie both struggling with the power outage in the bowels of the hospital. Listen closely when Ellie is killing Nora... I think you can hear the Rat King smashing and crashing in the lower levels at the same time. Another quick tangent while I think about the Seattle’s Ground Zero... I wish these games threw me a few more bones regarding the lore of the infected. For example, we know that it transfers to new hosts when they breathe in spores, but what about bites? Is that a blood transference thing? I’d like to know. TLOU2 provides new information about the infected that flies in the face of how I expected them to work. I did not expect the infected to need to have to feed or migrate. I thought their lifecycle was already explained: they bloat and explode which pushes out more spores into the atmosphere. I thought they just bit people to spread the infection, not to eat their flesh... I just figured they drew off the fat stores from the host and sat down and grew into the walls when they’d run out of energy, therefore continuing their lifecycle. But apparently now they... migrate? And eat large game? I don’t mind if Naughty Dog’s vision of the infected strays from my own theory but just give me more lore to chew on please! Another success story in TLOU2 is the gameplay loop. In addition to the story, you also take part in combat and exploration loops, and I personally like the balance even though TLOU2 received a lot of criticism for being too self-indulgent by having too much story versus a small amount of gameplay. Keep in mind that there is only 4 or so hours of combat in this 25 hour game. You can test that yourself... all combat encounters can be played again from the main menu back to back. Skirmish arenas are all wider and taller than in TLOU1, and they have thin spaces to squeeze between and things to crawl under (such as cars) and through (such as grass and low water). There’s more glass windows and panels for enemies to see you through/be distracted by you when you throw something through them. The lines of sight and cover locations are masterfully constructed in every arena. Unless I’m mistaken, TLOU1 didn’t feature any instances where infected and human enemies inhabit the same encounter until the Left Behind DLC. TLOU2 does this multiple times, and when I found myself dying repeatedly at a few skirmishes on Grounded difficulty, I noticed myself thinking, “I wonder whether humans or infected will win this time,” because the outcomes were always subject to change as minor differences quickly extrapolated outwards in a strange butterfly effect. Clickers can now hear you reloading, switching weapons and accessing your backpack to craft items so you have to be prepared for anything (or, depending on your confidence, you might use this to your advantage). Art by Patrick Brown [Instagram] Crafting now includes silencers which are essential on Survivor and Grounded difficulties, and it is a prime example of how tense the gameplay becomes when you’re counting how many silenced rounds you have at your disposal versus how many enemies you have to kill, and then you try to figure out how you’re going to get through the encounter with as much stealth as possible. On those higher difficulties I found myself planning which order I’d take out enemies with consideration to my ammo count and knew I couldn’t drop any shots. Ellie's Day 2 was pretty difficult on Grounded difficulty. The best thing about the Scars as a faction is their use of a dozen or so whistles as communication during combat. The different whistles each have specific meanings or code that they use to talk to each other (ie: whistles for ‘something’s not right,’ ‘I heard something,’ ‘over there!’ and ‘dead body here' are all different but consistent between skirmishes which is fantastic attention to detail by the mole people in the SFX department - I see you, Rob! TLOU2 provides extremely accurate depictions of violence. Enemies cripple when you shoot off their limbs. They beg for their lives. They choke on their own blood. They let out blood-curdling screams of pain, fear, desperation, and in agonising emotional pain upon seeing their friends and loved ones dying before your unstoppable onslaught. It is VERY confronting. Several moments remained with me over the course of the game, and many more times than that Mrs Gonzo piped up that she’d never seen me play something so violent before, and that it was a key reason why she didn’t want to play it herself. Abby gets a couple of gameplay-specific shoutouts: the legs that Abby considers to be her arms are so big that they actually function as a damage indicator/health bar. If they’re covered in blood, she’s in trouble (similar to how Joel bends over in pain if heavily damaged in TLOU1). Another cool moment in Abby’s gameplay comes when Lev and Yara assist her escaping from her hanging, they all come across the large woman who had captured Abby (and who had stolen her backpack). You have to fight that woman to get your backpack and weapons back. This is so much better than the industry standard of coming across your expensive and admirable arsenal in a locker or laying around next to where you are being held prisoner. It is still convenient that the woman was so easily found but it is a step in the right direction. Ellie gets her own shout-out from me during an exploration/looting breather in between combat encounters. You had recently located a note describing a group of WLF deserters and soon afterwards enter an apartment. You see a workbench at the end of a corridor passed multiple closed doors and you get tunnel vision; finally, a chance to upgrade your weapons. As you enter the animation that commences the workbench system, it is suddenly interrupted as someone grabs you from behind and you realise that you’ve entered the home of the WLF-deserters - and they all want to kill you. Once you take them out it dawns on you that you should have seen the signs... this apartment is clearly lived in. For example, you activated a sound trap on your way in and tomato plants are growing in the corner and are being tended to... they must have heard you coming and hidden away in a locked room before getting the jump on you. On a second playthrough you realise why you made the mistake – the game will not let you engage these deserters/open the locked door before accessing the workbench. The encounter is programmed to interrupt your workbench activities. It is a fantastic example of how to correctly subvert the player’s expectations the right way, and you’ll never approach workbenches with the same naïveté again. The workbench animations are so good, by the way. Only Red Dead Redemption II has a weapon upgrade system that eclipses this (to my memory of recent AAA titles). Ellie’s ability to play the guitar is wonderful. I was reaching out to connect to Ellie and Joel through this process and the game drip-fed me those teeny-tiny moments to keep me on the hook. There’s also at least one missable opportunity (and cutscene) to play the guitar in Dina’s presence in a record store which was really charming. I’ll never hear Take On Me the same way again. Ellie’s rope mechanic is pretty great, too. It is clearly an evolution of Uncharted 4’s winch mechanics and it’s used to great effect in TLOU2. I hope it continues to be built upon in the future. The safe puzzles are conversely pretty weak, requiring only the level of puzzle-solving ability relied upon in Uncharted games. Hidden away in the pause menu is a setting to automatically pick up loot. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t be on by default because there’s no reason to not pick something up. You can’t carry more tape by leaving behind water bottles. Players are left wandering around mashing the triangle button repeatedly... I dunno, I guess I found that awkward. Tapping it in... the ending and the final shot of the game: As I wrap up this review I’m going to return to the end of the game before giving my closing thoughts. There is a subtle moment that I liked at the end of the game. Ellie frees the slaves at the Rattlers’ camp and she asks them where she can find Abby. The group is grateful and points Ellie in the right direction. I picked up on some subtext here that the group assumes that Ellie is an ally to Abby, and that Abby was a well-liked member of that group of slaves (maybe even a leader-figure or someone who rallied them with hope) and that Abby’s actions to that group are what likely led to her punishment at the beach. Abby is literally being crucified here. She is barely recognisable. One of the first victims on the pillars has a ponytail to fake you out, so when you have to weave in and out of the pillars looking for a muscular, long-haired woman, and then can’t find one, you retread your steps and eventually find Abby on one of the first pillars that you passed. Her change in appearance is substantial. The game wants you to believe that she has paid for her sins. Lev is also there being subjected to the same treatment even though he had a lesser role in Ellie’s grief. Taking control of Ellie in the last chapter did connect me to her as a character: she was exhausted, and so was I. Ellie and I were ready for the game to be over. Not in a “this game sucks, I want the last trophy so I can move on" way, but a “this has been a journey, and I am ready to go home” way (and I’m confident that this harmony between Ellie and the player was intended by Naughty Dog). I think one final role reversal/perspective switch would have been great here. Being Abby on the crucifix waiting to die and watching as the ghost from her past emerges from the fog to come and send her into the beyond, and then cutting back to Ellie to see Abby’s shrunken appearance as an external observer would have had greater effect. _________________ This is the final shot of the game. I love it. It evokes the game’s opening shot of Joel holding the guitar at the same angle and cleaning the fretboard: Joel teaching Ellie how to play the guitar has a direct correlation to their father/daughter relationship. Joel gifted this guitar to Ellie and they’ve ventured out to find new strings for it. Throughout the game, Ellie struggles to play the song Joel had taught her... a Pearl Jam song about a fear of loss. The moth on the fretboard symbolises her grief. Ellie draws it in her journal next to poems that indicate how much she is struggling to deal with Joel's death. A moth is just like a butterfly except moths are way cooler because they’re stronger, live longer, and spin silk. They go through the same life cycle (larvae -> pupa (cocoon) -> adult form) which is a common metaphor. It is a metamorphosis, just like Ellie’s adolescence and just like her grief. Upon reaching the end of her journey of grief in this game, where her fingers are bitten off in a confrontation with Abby, and where Ellie has a flashback of Joel and decides to relinquish her desire to avenge him, Ellie returns home to find herself alone with minimal possessions such as her guitar. Alone, she sits down and begins to play that same beautiful Pearl Jam lick but discovers that she can’t complete Joel’s song because two of the fingers that she needs to use on the fretboard were casualties of her quest for vengeance, just like two of the members of her family. Humbled by this discovery, she sets the guitar by an open window where the moth on the fretboard is perfectly positioned so that it could fly out of that window and into the sunset. The metamorphosis of Ellie’s grief is complete and she is finally ready to let go. Truly, this is beautiful. Closing thoughts (the 19th hole): This game was like heroin. I was fucking addicted (and it was a very dark addiction) that gave me enjoyment on many levels but it was accompanied by a distaste that is hard to describe with few words. I could not put it down. I could not stop thinking about it. No game has had such a profound and prolonged emotional effect on me in a long time, if ever, which goes beyond just 'wanting to get back to playing it because it's really fun or really immersive.' I had to get back to this game and push myself through the oppressively dark journey. Everything other than the story was a clear 10/10 homerun, but the story broke Rule #1 with such unapologetic, obnoxious confidence that there is absolutely no possible way that I could give this game a 10/10 rating. Foundational misreads by Naughty Dog resulted in a game that is, incredulously, less than the sum of its parts. Even if you disagree with me by positing that Rule #1 is not “connect the player to their character” (a slightly altered version of the same Rule #1 for novels and films), but instead believe that video game Rule #1 is actually “just make the game fun”... well, shit, you're outta luck, because this game is miserable. It is quite suffocating. I don’t even think the story qualifies as being mature enough for its players. This game is rated for 18 year olds at a minimum. All reasonable 18 year olds are mature enough to be aware that revenge tours and the cycle of violence are needlessly destructive. When I was 18 I was very aware that Gandhi said “an eye for eye will leave the whole world blind.” I knew that Confucius had said that “when embarking upon a journey of revenge, you should dig two graves.” That is the overarching message of this game and it’s just so... basic. It doesn’t even follow through with that message: Ellie herself abandons the cycle of violence but ends up broken and alone. Abby abandons the cycle of violence but is still hunted down by a ghost from her past and is ultimately crucified in her newly-realised quest for hope. The game should not be so active in its attempts to try to make me feel like a piece of shit for murdering Abby’s father or for killing Abby’s dog when I’m not given any other choice to advance through the game’s systems, and make no mistake, the game is trying to make the player feel bad about those decisions. That’s the equivalent of a movie criticising and lecturing me for not walking out of the cinema after a horrific scene that it showed me when I just wanted to get a decent two hours of entertainment for the price of admission. Don’t sell me a game rated only for adults and use a central message fit for high schoolers. Neil: most adults are plenty mature enough be able to do this already. [I know, its Buzzfeed, but it is what it is.] You can have grounded stakes and tension without killing the main character that we already relate to. You can literally just look back at the prior game in the series; TLOU1 managed to balance the grounded nature of an unjust and violent world with tension, relatability and player-introspection and was lauded for it. Breaking Rule #1 with such gusto by killing that character, eroding everything we like about the other main character that we relate to, and forcing us to play as someone who is responsible for Joel’s murder was, plain and simply, a mistake. And it was such a bad mistake that it has backfired with respect to this particular fan, because no sane writer or developer would make these decisions, so now I’m left questioning whether all of the success in TLOU1’s character development was by design or by a series of happy accidents... and that is a terrible, terrible line of thought that you do not want a fan to be considering. It is easier to criticise someone else’s work than it is to create... so here are some alternative ideas for what could have taken place in TLOU2 instead: What if Abby had left the Firefly Lab in Utah in despair and then come across Jackson as a traveller? She then could have become ensconced into their community and maybe have had a relationship with Ellie. Abby could then have discovered Joel’s identity causing her own internal conflict. Then Abby would be faced with an impossible choice like Joel was at the end of TLOU1. Or potentially, even Ellie could have been brought in to face that choice as well, because as we know from her flashback sequences, she was struggling with Joel’s decision-making regarding his actions in TLOU1. An alternative could be a similar situation to what we played in TLOU2 where Abby set off to find Joel, but what if she found Tommy instead, and Tommy pretended to be Joel to protect him? Potentially, Abby could kill Tommy so that Joel feels the pain of losing someone he loves. Joel could then go to Seattle on a revenge tour and Ellie could leave soon afterwards to try to save him. Then the story would be about saving Joel from revenge, not about Ellie seeking revenge herself (it’s a bit more thematically powerful and a more mature lens through which we could experience a revenge story). Actually, during the pre-production of TLOU2, Joel was written to have had a girlfriend that gets infected. What if Abby instead came to Jackson, found Joel’s girlfriend and killed her by torturing her, and was discovered and had to run away (or retreated to Seattle due to Mel’s pregnancy). That is a substitute for the prior idea. Or Tommy's wife could have been killed? This could go on forever, but my point is that having some more objectivity or restraint on the writing team could have resulted in drastic changes to criticisms made not just by myself, but by many others, by altering very little during pre-production. It is a positive however, to see a developer create a story that is character-driven. The characters are the story while the zombies are the setting (just like TLOU1), and it gives me some small comfort seeing industry leaders navigating towards that general direction – the direction where games will be increasingly considered to be ‘art’ - even if I don’t agree with the exact bearing. Talk birdie to me: let me know your own thoughts about The Last of Us! Edited April 29, 2022 by Platinum_Vice 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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