Watching episode six of The last of us I was filled with dread. He had played the game years ago (despite a very rational and healthy fear of all things zombie) and knew where this episode was heading and what kind of fights Joel and Ellie would be forced into. But then the show didn’t spend hours in one place, as Joel and Ellie sneaked around trying to avoid getting killed and doing some murder on their own. Instead, the episode fast-forwarded and got right to the good stuff, which in video games usually means the cut scenes.
This article contains spoilers for the first six episodes of The last of us.
The way The last of us motoring through hours of combat to get straight to the point has been one of my favorite parts of the show. It is not an action program, but a horror one peppered with moments of action. We don’t spend our time marveling at characters engaging in genial feats of heroism or clever “gun fu” a la a better tomorrow and john wick. More like real life, the action is a means to an end and is meant to be horrifying, and maybe a little disturbing, rather than inspiring.
That was intentional. Game creator and show producer Neil Druckmann has spoken at length about his desire to ensure that violence in The last of us it has impact”[O]ne of the easiest decisions we made was to say, ‘We’re going to take all that away. Let’s only have as much violence in this story as is required and no more.” Druckmann told Variety earlier this year. “That allows the violence to have even more impact when you see it on screen than in the game.”
When you have to replay the same sequence multiple times, it stops being nerve-wracking and can become irritating.
Craig Mazin, executive producer of The last of us, has also spoken about the very different approach to violence that the show has versus the game. “I think watching a person die should be very different than watching pixels die.” told the New Yorker in January.
People quickly jumped to the citation as an example of Mazin denigrating one art form (video games) to prop up another (live action TV). But Mazin was referring to the way that carnage in video games can sometimes decrease emotional response rather than increase it. If you’re in a tricky part of a game, say dealing with a university hospital full of mugger-ass muggers, and you have to repeat the sequence over and over again because they keep killing you, then the emotional impact of the sequence is going to change.
Like a person who sucks at gaming The last of us I tend to agree with Mazin. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more miserable than dying in a big fight that is meant to carry a lot of emotional weight and having to repeat it. The characters she was fighting with ceased to be characters and became obstacles, their cries of pain simply becoming an annoyed soundtrack. When you have to replay the same sequence multiple times, it stops being nerve-wracking and can become irritating.
And every time the TV series The last of us it’s skipped one of those big fights that hit my brain with dopamine like when i find out the last boss is just a quick time event. He feels like I, a mediocre player, get away with it every time it happens. When I realized that the third episode would simply be a poignant exploration of love in an apocalypse and that I wouldn’t have to watch the characters infiltrate a school full of infected and fight a bloated, I’m pretty sure I cheered softly from my seat on the sofa. I could have been crying that this loving couple had just chosen to end their lives together, but I was awfully happy not to have to sit through an adaptation of a fight scene that I found miserable.
The same thing happened at the end of episode six, when Ellie and Joel quickly realize that the university hospital they’ve traveled to has been abandoned and they need to leave. It was as if an invisible force (Craig Mazin and company) was pressing the X button to skip the action. I felt like I used codes to bypass an entire level that I had never been a fan of.
I’m not the only one who likes to jump into cutscenes in a story-rich video game. Youtubers have been paring games down to their essential stories for years, including The last of us. Here’s a 5+ hour cut of the remaster. The last of us with almost a million views.
And here is a video of almost 11 hours doing the same for the last of us II. Whose length is… makes me realize why the next game could be split into a second and third season instead of being condensed into a single season. That video has over three million views.
There are many reasons why people like to watch the scenes. They may want to know the whole story before spending hours of their lives playing with it. Maybe they want to revisit part of the game without the hassle of playing it. Maybe they, like me, have an almost paralyzing fear of zombies and prefer to avoid the scarier parts of a game they’ve heard so much about.
In the early days of cinematics, they weren’t just there to move the story forward, they were treated as a reward. beat a boss in final fantasy VIII it meant you got to see a fully rendered Quistis pull off a robot with a giant gun, or watch Rinoa and Squall fall in love in the ballroom while the music blared. These tiny, super-pixelated characters were literally fleshed out when rendered in a cinematic scene. This is why skipping the parts of the game in The last of us it feels so good. It’s like she’s cheating. I hope future hyperfidel video game adaptations take note. When the story is strong enough, the good parts aren’t necessarily the fights, they’re the moments in between.
