I know I talked about The Last of Us in a previous post, because the music in it is so good. But I want to talk about it a little bit more now that I've played through the game again in anticipation of the upcoming The Last of Us 2. I also finished the Retro Replay series The Last of Us: the Definitive Playthrough, where Troy Baker and Nolan North play through the game, every episode with a guest voice actor from the game, including Ashley Johnson who plays Ellie.
A tangent: if you like video games and voice actors and you haven't watched Retro Replay, I highly recommend it. These guys are a joy to watch, especially as Nolan descends into complete focus on certain games. Their stories are fun to listen to and watching them slip in and out of voices for little scenes is pretty great. They've also done an Uncharted play through, with Nolan trying to figure out how to play his own character.
Replaying The Last of Us has not felt at all like returning to a game that's seven years old. It feels just as new and interesting as it did when it first came out. I think it's a little less scary, a little less jarring just by virtue of having played it before, but it definitely still packs a punch.
The story in The Last of Us came at a time when there was a glut of these very specific "dad" kind of stories in movies and video games. Another game I love: The Walking Dead by Telltale Games has a very similar not-the-dad/not-the-daughter character vibe, it does it very differently. And specifically in TLOU we get so much more time with these two characters when they're just alone together, trying to make it to the next location. It allows for a lot more subtle interactions, not too mention the imagery it undertakes which tells us so much more about them than just the dialogue.
It's been such a long wait for the second game, I knew I had to play TLOU again in advance of it coming out, just so I could have all those feelings back and close to the surface before the next game. There are just these visceral moments toward the end of the game that I don't really know what to do with and questions I don't know that the next game will really answer for us (but I hope it does).
In two of the last episodes of the Retro Replay series for this game, they have Merle Dandridge on as a guest. She plays Marlene in the game, the leader of the Fireflies. She gets to see them play through the end of the game, from Joel and Ellie's last descent as they close in on the hospital (and Troy's very very very awful attempts at getting through the tunnel), their capture by the Fireflies as Joel tries to revive Ellie, and what happens between Joel and Marlene as he finally learns what the Fireflies plans with Ellie really are. And we get to listen to these three voice actors talk about how these characters make them feel in those really tense and emotional moments in the game. Merle also brings up one of those really lasting questions about the creatures in the game, about how much of them is left, and whether or not they could ever be saved.
And they end that second to last episode with one of these pivotal questions about the final moments of the game, where we're left to wonder as players and observers in this story, what happens next? What does it mean for these characters to keep going knowing now what they know (or don't). Whether or not Ellie actually knows the truth and what that means for what happens next.
This older Ellie we see in the trailers for the next game gives us a small glimpse of what's transpired. That Joel kept his promise to teach her to play guitar, that they went back to Tommy's place, that they haven't lost their knack for survival, and that there might be some chances for happiness. I'm so excited to see where it goes.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
