I never keep up with the zeitgeist when it comes to anything in media. TV shows, movies, video games, you name it. I’ve come to accept that I will always be behind, looking at stuff years past the point of their popularity. Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for so long have probably noticed me covering things long past their prime.
And that’s okay! There’s no need to keep up with what’s current and popular unless you’re on the entertainment beat, or your friends won’t stop talking about it. Hell, the last time I tried keeping up with current gaming was with the recent Call of Duty games, and even I gave up by the time Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) came out.
But this time around, I am part of the zeitgeist, albeit indirectly. A currently popular TV show that in itself is an adaptation of a popular video game franchise. But rather than watching the TV show on a service I don’t have, I’ll just play the game it’s based on. After all, if people say “the book was better” whenever a novel gets a film adaptation, I assume the same rule applies for video games that eventually became TV shows, right?

The Last of Us is the game I’m referring to. Released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3 to critical acclaim, it spawned a new franchise for Sony to capitalize on, with books, comics, and of course, that TV show that’s airing on HBO Max and recently finished its second season as this writing, which covers part of the game’s sequel, The Last of Us Part II.
I had briefly played The Last of Us before back around 2016, futzing around with it through PlayStation Now, a cloud streaming service where you could play PlayStation 3 games on a PC through cloud streaming. I didn’t get very far in it due to the visible lag I was having with inputs, so I stopped playing it on there.
Several years later, I grabbed a copy and mentioned it on a Some Stuff I Bought post back at the end of 2022 because I had heard many positive things about this game, being a critical darling, and a favorite for many. One of many games given the coveted “Game of the Year” award by numerous publications. Obviously, if something is given that much praise, it has to be just that good, right?
Folks, what you’re about to read is the journey of a woman wanting to enjoy a popular video game from 12 years ago and being absolutely frustrated with it. With gameplay being so aggravating to the point of controller-throwing anger. A miserable story that left me feeling cold and disappointed at the end. A game that left me wondering if Roger Ebert was right about games not being art.
Light spoilers for The Last of Us within.
Mild-mannered dad Joel (Troy Baker) returns home to his daughter Sarah after a long day. Cut to a few hours later where Sarah suddenly gets a call from Joel’s brother Tommy (Jeffrey Pierce) about the news that there’s a massive pandemic, the two make their hasty escape to safety. After the absolute chaos of escaping the city with Tommy, Joel and Sarah are confronted by military soldiers who shoot at the pair, wounding Joel and killing Sarah.

Cut to several years later. Joel, now an older man suffering from PTSD, eventually meets Ellie (Ashley Johnson), a young girl who is meant to be dropped off by Joel’s friend Tess (Annie Wersching), before complications occur and Joel has to take care of Ellie through the continental United States full of psychopaths, enemy factions, and the mutated cordyceps virus to take her to the Fireflies, a military faction with specialized equipment to help her.
I will say off the bat that Joel seemed like a very nice guy at the start, and I could relate to losing a family member, which can be a traumatizing experience and change any person. Troy Baker gives a wonderful performance in that regard. But as I went through the campaign, Joel always seemed to be cynical and distant to everybody at all times. Many other characters, including Ellie, and later, Tommy, try to ground him a bit more to reality, or at least to get him to lighten up, which he does a bit towards the end of the game. There’s a lot of moments where the story boils down to “Joel does not want to deal with caring for Ellie, so he wants to dump her off to somebody else so he can go back to handling things by himself, but Something Happens that forces the pair to stick together for a little longer.”
For a good chunk of the game, I genuinely did not like Joel as a character. Until the latter third of the game where he starts putting himself in extreme danger, just to save Ellie from unfortunate circumstances the pair got into, Joel just felt like a boring white dude protagonist in a sea of games that already had that market covered. Joel’s overall pessimism just sucks the air out of the room, in contrast with others like Tess, who I really took a liking to. Made me wish I was playing as her, because she was at least caring and optimistic in spite of the hellscape they were forced into.

Nothing against Troy Baker’s performance, this is the game that got him noticed by the mainstream gaming audience, but much like Ellie, I really wish Joel did lighten up more.
“But it’s a video game,” you may ask. “How does it play?” Well, The Last of Us has probably the most clunkiest gameplay I’ve played in a 7th generation game. And I’ve played some janky games in my time, believe me.
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