stossmo said:
You can start a new game with all of your perks and I plan to just rip through to keep the pace and story as tight as possible. I spent so much time sniffing around for stuff that I lost the sense of urgency that most of the sequences should have.
I decided long ago that for games I am interested in primarily for the story, that I am not going to bother with collectables. So I didn't spend much time sniffing around for comics and dog tags. I'd raid houses for useful supplies, and occasionally stumble across a collectable or two, but I kept the sense of urgency to the game.
I plan on replaying it and finding everything, eventually.
It would kind of take you out of the game when your health was extremely low, you were sneaking around trying to avoid several guys who were searching the area for you, and you'd pick up a comic and hear Joel yell out, "Hey, Ellie! I found another one of those comics you like!"
MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW!!!!
SPOILERS
I thought I knew how it would end when I reached the last sequence but was pleasantly surprised they didnt go that route. That said, I also regretted Ellie wasnt given the choice because you know she would have gone through with it, I think any of us would have. Joel was pretty damn wrong....he just wasn't capable of letting her go. The game was just too dark to go that route.
I loved the ending. I became really fond of Ellie, and I didn't want her to die. For me, that whole ending sequence was agonizing, because I knew that if they could get the cure from her, then they were doing the right thing. One life for all of humanity is a very inexpensive trade off.
But still, I wanted to pull out a gun, kill everyone of those guys, and take her away. And felt a grim satisfaction when that was exactly what the game let me do. When I got to that point, it was exactly how I wanted the game to end, but not at all how I expected that it would. I kept thinking Joel is going to get there and it will be too late, or he is going to have a change of heart once he gets into the OR, or after the encounter in the garage. The car scene was brilliant. Seeing Joel driving in silence. I held my breath thinking, What did he do? He better not have left her behind! And when he lies to her, it kind of stings. Because you know her character would have gladly given her life for humanity, and is likely something she had already considered carefully during that year long journey.
Joel didn't save her for her, he saved her for himself. He chose to let all of humanity eventually parish, rather than lose someone close to him again. I love that. It is really dark, but somehow feels just in a way. Take a look at humanity in that game. How much was it really worth saving?
Also I felt some strange sense of entitlement. Ellie and Joel could have died any number of times on that journey. They faced insane odds, and by this time the Fireflies must have given them up for dead long ago. Humanity was the primary antagonist preventing them from getting to their goal again and again throughout that year. If they had died, which they were on the brink of many times, the end result would have been the same. Only now they get to enjoy a quiet life with Joel's brother and their group. Even when the Fireflies found them at the end, a man trying to preform CPR on a dying girl, they treated them with hostility, despite Joel's pleas, and gave him a rifle butt to the head.
He fought with everything he had to get her there, and then they take her from him and prepare to dissect her. That wasn't what he had in mind when he killed countless people and sacrificed so much blood and effort to get her to them.
The gay porn thing didnt bother me, It rang pretty true to her character after the way Bill treated her, and to the way teenagers act in general. I like to think that if Bill had been halfway decent to her she wouldnt have stolen the mag from him. I realize it was implied that Bill was gay but I didnt really know until after the magazine reveal and I think that was the point of the sequence.
You didn't really know, even after he said that the dead man was his partner, and read the dead man's letter written to Bill? It was pretty explicit.
It's an interesting discussion, I like that Bill was gay, it wasn't necessary for the plot but it made his character much more 3 dimensional to me. Sadly, gay people are the butt of easy jokes all the time in the real world, why not for characters in the last of us as well?
I guess I just feel we should be beyond a day and age when gay people are the butt of jokes.