singedsun

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.

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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.

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I've long been a sucker for villains, specifically female presenting villains with all their over the top baddassery. Maleficent, Ursula, the Evil Queen were my more favorite characters growing up than any of the princesses in those movies. I think there was a combination there between black, kind of goth style and the sheer willpower these women exuded that set this like standard in me for the kind of villains/antagonists I prefer.

Of course my favorite games to play these days are long RPGs like Dragon Age and Mass Effect so unless we're talking The Invisible Man (and we're not) pretty much all the "evil" characters in those games are very dangerous shades of grey.

In fact in the first Dragon Age novel, The Stolen Throne, we meet a version of the Witch of the Wilds that seemed like your pretty typical chill hag in the forest doing up spells for the lost lonely village people who wandered too deep into the forest. I liked her. Then when we meet Morrigan and her mother in the first game, I was super on board with this like badass witch woman who wanted to live forever by training up her replacements and then inhabiting them. Such a creative twist on like old witch/hag folklore to have her turn out to be this old school dragon that you can in no way actually kill. She's great.

But she's not my favorite. By far, my favorite comes in the second game when we meet the Templar Knight Commander of Kirkwall, Meredith Stannard. To explain, I have a deep and abiding interest in magic/templar dynamic in these games and I'm always willing to debate it at the drop of the hat. But suffice to say I side with the Templars pretty much 100% of the time (which I know is not the norm for most fans).



Meredith meets all my qualifications for angry, badass women in fancy outfits (armor in this case) with fuck off weapons (definitely). So many people playing through the game manage to avoid the entirety of Meredith's backstory. But before the game, her family becomes infamous for the disaster her sister brought to Kirkwall. Her younger sister, a mage, hidden by their parents so as not to have her taken away by the circle, never properly learns how to control her magic.

In her teens (I think), her sister gets quite overwhelmed by her magic, the neighbors grow suspicious and call the Templar. In an effort to escape them, Amelia gives into the demons and turns into an abomination. The abomination tears through their parents before setting into the city upon their neighbors and friends and if I remember my lore correctly, she kills and/or injures like seventy people before the Templars finally take her down. When the Knight Captain explains to young Meredith what happen, she asks to join the Order. The Knight Captain becomes a kind of surrogate father to her as she rises through the ranks of the Order and he leaves his sword to her when he dies.

When we meet her in the game it's like sixteen years later, Meredith is a stoic woman who believes so fervently in the Templar Order and the Circle it guards because she's seen first hand what can happen to people, families, children, when they're left without proper training. She's harsh because she feels she must be, to not allow for the weakness that created the abomination her sister became.

Of course later, with the addition of the red lyrium to her sword, it amplifies her faith and devotion and fear to her goddess and the Order. But the affect of the red lyrium has turned her from rationality to radicalism. Logic and reason have departed had left behind a zealot in her place.

I love her because she's trying so dang hard to do the right thing. She's a faithful servant to the Order, the Circle, the teachings of Andraste and the city of Kirkwall. It's her home and she's only serving it in the best way she understand how. She's a tough nut to crack, Meredith, but if you side with her you get bits of her personality. You see how she might once have been more relaxed, maybe funny, maybe more open with her templar and the mages of the Order. You see how she could've been a mother-like figure to many of them. You see the change in Cullen from Templar to Knight Captain and how she gave him a second chance after his failure at Kinloch. You see his respect in her and for her training.

And then the red lyrium, does what it does, weakening her mind. And we see the Meredith she's holding back. We see the bitterness and angry about what happened with her sister. Her ever-present worry that it can and will happen again. She's hyper-vigilant. And then she's full-blown zealot as the very worst things she's imagined happening within Kirkwall are happening again. There is no control and so she must try to enforce some.

Now there's a lot of speculation about the Circle in Kirkwall and it's corruption levels, in addition to the city itself and the massive amounts of absolute batshit it was sitting on with all the ACTUAL honest to the Maker evil sitting right underneath it. So who knows how different things might have been.

The fight against her in Act III is LONG but you see her so well then. What the zealot version of her is willing to sacrifice to keep her city safe, becoming essentially the opposite kind of abomination that her sister had once been. This mirrored evil to save what is already lost.

"What I have done is protected the people of this city, time and again. What I have done is protect you mages from your curse and your own stupidity! And I will not stop doing it! I will not lower our guard, I dare not!"

It's the best. I love her.


[graphic by geraltciri]