This post contains major spoilers for The Last of Us.
I'm not sure I really wanted a sequel to The Last of Us.
What makes the original such a great game isn't its mechanics. Cover shooter, stealth elements, a crafting system: all very well done, but hardly innovative. What elevates the game is its storytelling, and, I would say, very specific elements of its storytelling at that. The setting has been much praised, but to my mind it's mostly a standard zombie apocalypse. The stages of the fungal infection make a nice excuse to have four different types of zombie, but that's about it for originality. Which is why I've never seen the appeal of a "different characters, same world" sequel. The only benefit over a different post-apocalyptic setting that would give greater narrative freedom is being able to use runners, stalkers, clickers, and bloaters again, and I feel like the original pretty much exhausted the gameplay potential of those enemies.
Even praising the plot of The Last of Us is a little misleading. Its turns are largely predictable if you have any experience with this kind of narrative. It's obvious from the second Ellie and Joel meet that the emotional core of the story will be the development of a bond between them and the consequences of that bond. You know that appealing characters like Tess, Sam, and Henry will be killed off in service to the grimness of the setting. The reason these developments are effective anyway is that they're executed with a skill and a subtlety that remains extremely rare in video game writing, direction, and performance.
Not to be a downer here, but I'm also not especially excited by the prospect of a Last of Us film. It'd be nice for new audiences to experience the story, but the version the game tells is good enough for me. And even a perfect translation of the story wouldn't feel as special, because high-quality execution isn't as rare in movies as it is in video games. That is, when I say that The Last of Us is perhaps the best-executed video game story I've ever experienced, you have to understand that this involves grading on a curve. Most video game dialogue is stilted and achingly on-the-nose, performed by actors who are competent but not capable of spinning straw into gold. Neil Druckmann understands the value of silence, indirection, and inarticulacy in creating a credible and immersive story, and Troy Baker, Ashley Johnson, and the other actors know what to do with the material. The result is a small triumph, the elevation of a standard narrative into something profoundly effective.
So why am not excited that those same people are making a sequel? Well, aside from the obvious fear that lightning won't strike twice, I feel like it's going to be very, very difficult to follow up on the ending of the original without spoiling it. I get the sense that a lot of people want Ellie to find out what Joel did, but I don't think any of the possible outcomes of that development are worth showing. Everything that could happen between them is implicit in the final cutscene of the first game, and it's the ambiguities of that moment-- does she believe him? does she care?-- that make it powerful. If she's shown to find out, all that happens is that she forgives him eventually or she doesn't. The former makes for artificial, time-marking drama rather than an evolution in the characters' relationship, and the latter slides toward excessive grimdark bleakness.
What I would hope for is that it's either dealt with quickly-- someone tells her, and she says, "Yeah, I pretty much knew that"-- or that it doesn't come up at all. The latter would be better, I think. In stories these kinds of terrible deceptions always come out, but that's not how life works. Sometimes liars get away with it. And consider how much quiet drama there would be in having that cloud over Joel and Ellie's every interaction, one more thing never quite stated.
That's what I'd like, but I don't think it's going to happen. They're going to have to bring it out into the open. The expectation is going to be too strong. What Druckmann said about this game being "about hate" is pretty suggestive. And I'm sure that, as with the first one, the obviousness of it will be offset by skillful execution. I'm certainly looking forward to the game, anyway. Cool trailer, great visuals. I just hope Naughty Dog's confidence that they've found a story worth telling is untainted by the inevitable pressure to follow up on a tremendously popular property. The unnecessary sequel is one feature of film storytelling that video games can do without.
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