Over the past seven years, The Last of Us was the symbol and face of Sony and PlayStation. You could say the opposite or put the value of that claim on the scales, but one way or another, in the last life cycle of the PlayStation 3 the release of The Last of Us marked an important warning for the industry how much for the public: the first one saw arriving on the market, now at the end of the generation, a title that pushed to the maximum performance, combining a solid gameplay and perfectly blended with the story told, the public instead had received an important warning, the need for own a PlayStation 3 if you wanted to experience the adventures of Joel and Ellie.
A planetary phenomenon
The Last of Us is one of those titles that get in your veins, they stick to your hands like dirt under your fingernails that we struggle to pay attention to and wipe it off. The Naughty Dog guys showed great charisma in Nathan Drake's adventures with the Uncharted trilogy, and The Last of Us proved to be the classic graduation exam.
It was no longer an Uncharted with zombies, it was a story that focused all its heart on real characters, anti-heroes and no longer models of heroism, in a way now consumed by an infection that has turned most humans into ravenous monsters.
A man who was a father and saw the death of his daughter coincide with the onset of the pandemic. The game therefore takes place in media res, with an effective prologue and perfectly diluted in what will be the emotional strings of the title. We know immediately what we will encounter, it will never be a story of winners or losers, but only of poor lost souls, now forced to survive in a world without rules and full of violence.
Joel therefore joins Ellie, a girl immune to the virus. Perhaps she could be the salvation of humanity; the Lights, a riotous group, needs her to synthesize a vaccine, but the long journey that the two will face will be an opportunity to get to know each other, throw up on their pain and cling to each other avoiding the classic clichés typical of the genre. Joel watches Ellie. She is not his daughter, but she feels the duty to defend her. THEhe ending of The Last of Us is the coronation of human selfishness, an emotional defeat that will never heal.
Out of the console
Few are the stories that manage to have such a predominant emotional impact on the player. Or rather, there are few games that are able to convey so many emotions as to stir the desire to play a sequel not for the game mechanics, but to immerse yourself once again in a world as macabre and dead, as fascinating for the narrative frame that has received. What distinguished The Last of Us is precisely the overwhelming force to go beyond that final "I swear" and bring the characters to life in our hearts and minds.
How many other people will have turned up their noses at the announcement of The Last of Us Part 2? Many, including the writer, but having already completed the second chapter, I take back any kind of doubt without any problem. Naughty Dog in addition to packing an emotionally crazy title on the side of the story, seems to have idyllically preserved that feeling of suspension in the time of the finale. Joel and Ellie at the end of the first chapter, continued to live outside the game console. We all wanted a sequel as much as we didn't want it. The Last of Us Part 2 perfectly preserves the spirit, the skeleton and the nuances of the characters who, if they are recalled after years and years, will have had their reason to remain engraved in each of us.
The Last of Us: a cross-media product
News not long ago is that HBO has struck a deal with Naughty Dog to bring Joel and Ellie's adventures to television. For now we know very little, except that in this pre-production phase many names that have signed the success of the TV series Chernobyl have entered this project at full capacity.
Forecasts are difficult to make: as always, the passage of a videogame brand into other frames, such as cinema or television, does not always have good results. Netflix's recent The Witcher convinced enough, but the fandom behind The Last of Us will be far more demanding.
This is because what has distinguished the success of the game is also the evolution of the characters, which grows progressively without too many celebrations, but managing to kidnap the player's attention. As already mentioned, The Last of Us is perhaps one of the few games that manages to combine narrative needs with other gameplay needs, but at the end of this great story, we feel totally emptied of any dream or hope, so much so that we now embrace that world, inhabited by these people.
DLCs such as Left Behind, where we will play Ellie a couple of weeks before meeting Joel, show how much the background of the main characters is the real fulcrum of the success of the title. Everyone has lost something and leaving it behind is the most necessary to live in the new world.
Violence, anger and revenge are more fearsome than the infected outside the walls of the house. The Earth has never been such a dangerous place, between marauders and people seeking revenge.
