Discussing The Last of Us Part 1 Remake

[Winter]

Okay, let's get this out of the way real quick, this game is not worth $70 NOT because it's bad but because it was a game with minimum effort which was a the point. Naughty Dog needed a game that would be easy to make that was certain to turn a profit so I don't begrudge them that but given that this game is almost unchanged from the original in terms of story and gameplay.

This remake was made with the promise that it was rebuilt from the ground up and would include Part 2's gameplay. It was said in a number of interviews that the gameplay had been altered to be more like P2's which just about everyone was onboard for as the gameplay was the one thing that was universally praised. That is NOT what we got as most of the changes to gameplay were minor alterations such as the more aggressive AI and new features such as Customizable Difficulty but in the end it was pretty much bit for it identical to the Original Game.

Now the most notable alterations to P2's gameplay was things like Going Prone, dodging attacks, squeezing through tight spaces, more vertical level designs and being able to air assassinate enemies. This is what players like the most in P2 in terms of gameplay and NONE of them are included in the Remake. ND did say that they didn't include going prone because it broke the game which is fair enough but why not include the other features. Dodging attacks wouldn't have broken the game, in fact it would have balanced things out a bit more because, again, the enemy AI are just as aggressive as P2 and most of their attacks are intact.

Same goes for squeezing through tight spaces as enemies gang up on you more often yet there is no real way to escape them in a pinch like there is in P2. And the altered level design to make things more vertical, the defense that they wanted to be loyal to the original design but why stick with the original design at all or not include any of these features when, again, the main selling point of this game was that it was rebuilt from the ground up so why wasn't it REBUILT FROM THE GROUND UP!

It doesn't help that, IMO, the game isn't as beautiful as the original. In the original game it had such a wide range of colors showing and that was mostly kept intact in the sequel but in the remake a lot of the color seems to have been sucked out of the game making it look a little ugly. Yes, the graphics are fantastic but it's less original and it really bugs me.

I also Tess looks... wrong. What I mean by that is that is all the other characters more or less look like their Original Counterparts which makes sense because the sequel did what it could to keep the characters on model from the original. But Tess, looks like a completely different character with a completely different facial structure and it doesn't help that she emotes to much now. In the first game Tess was the least expressive of the cast ONLY showing a great deal of emotion at the END of her part of the story but here she's, as weird as it sounds, TOO Expressive which, for me, weakens her final moments.

Tess being more expressive throughout the game lessens her final moments as you realize just how much her approaching death is hitting her so the person who has been just as hardened as Joel is now breaking but because she emotes more it's means less. It doesn't help that Bill, Henry and Sam actually seem LESS expressive then the rest of the cast. Like there was a LOT of effort put into recapturing the performance of the actors with just about everyone EXCEPT these 3 and giving more expression to one of the more stoic characters.

Same thing kinda goes for Riley as she doesn't seem to emote more then her original version and it takes me out of her scenes. And I have to say that I think Left Behind SHOULD have been integrated into the main game. I've talked before about my mixed feelings about the idea of doing so but after playing the game YES it should have been included in the main game with maybe one or two scenes added in (like showing how Ellie and Riley got from the orphanage to the abandoned building (which would have only been like maybe 3 extra minutes)) and have the two parts of the game split apart and placed where they are chronologically in the main game.

WITH ALL THAT SAID is The Last of Us latest remake/remaster bad? No.

I had a lot of fun replaying this game and while it didn't live up to the hype ND was putting behind it the fact of the matter is I was at the end of Bill's Town aka 4 hours into the game before I had to stop myself so I could get a few other things done and then I went right back to playing the game and only stopped at the sewers because it was 6 AM and I needed to go to bed to get anything done.

These issues I had were more annoyance than anything as while I still enjoy this game it felt like it wasn't what was promised even though what we got was still great. Hell one thing I enjoy about a lot of modern games is the Customizable Difficulty settings as I love playing around with this by making enemies as tough as possible while also making my health top and removing aiming sway altogether as I find it more annoying then anything.

The little things really do add up like how Joel or Ellie will stumble a bit while picking up a bottle or brick while running in combat. The changes to the arrow that allows you to remove that annoying arc line and have the better aiming system from P2. Or how for all the issues with enemies being more aggressive it does make combat and stealth more tense even on the lower difficulty setting. Or how they included a feature that makes gathering resources easier which is a GOD SEND for getting collectables. I also like how, because everything is in engine, that we hardly get any of those cut to black screens that is there to go from cutscene to gameplay BUT keeps the ones where it actually makes SENSE to keep them.

I love the tiny add-ons in animation like the work bench animation or that we see Joel picking up arrows or just seeing ammo removed from guns instead of guns just vanishing when you take their ammo. Or how we can skip looking for safe combinations and just unlock them if we already know the combination to the lock. Or the combat/stealth encounter system from the last few ND games so we don't have to replay an entire chapter just for one encounter we enjoy.

Hell there WERE a few bits in the original game that I never new where a thing UNTIL I played the remake like how at one point Bill will ask if anyone is beaten after a fight with Infected to which Ellie replays "Nope, not me" rather quickly or some lines that I only heard half of because the game never finished loading them or their was a bug that meant they never loaded at all.

This may not be the remake that I was promised but it was still really damn good and in regards to the whole $70 thing ND did say that they had nothing to do with that and given their own annoyance with it I'm incline to believe them so while I don't like it I won't put them blame on them.

So, those are my thoughts on the remake, not great, I like many things from the original better but I like just as many things in this version... Except that bit in the sewers where I have to deal with stalkers, that level can go straight to hell.