Is The Last of Us a timeless classic?

[MTZehvor]

Justagamer said:

MTZehvor said:
I don't think so, but I guess we'll see. History seems to remember the games that were the first to try something; Ocarina of Time is remembered for bringing the adventure genre into 3D, Halo is remembered for revolutionizing the shooter genre, Metroid Prime is remembered for being the first to combine exploration with a first person perspective, Metal Gear Solid is remembered for being the first to mesh movies with games, etc. The Last of Us's gameplay is pretty standard by this point, and the story is probably most notable for depicting characters making morally ambiguous decisions, which games have done before (Deus Ex for instance). Since games seem to be remembered by being the first to do something important, I don't think TLoU will ever really reach that same level of, for lack of a better word, fame. Honestly, there may very well be no seventh generation games that ever reach the level of the most famous older games, just because fewer major boundaries were broken.

Tl;dr: I don't think there's anything that TLoU does which is particularly "groundbreaking," so to speak, which isn't necessarily bad, but means that it probably won't get remembered as well in the long run.

I actually agree with most of what you daid, except one thing. I think it did do one thing grounbreaking. It told a story like no other game before it. No cheesy lines, no lame voice acting. It was the best story in a game, ever to this point. That's pretty groundbreaking to me. There have been many stories told, but none were ever done as well as well as this one. When a game has me choking up, watery eyes early in the game, that's an impressive thing. 

 The last of us, it's a classic. 

I'm not sure that telling the best story ever would qualify, though, as almost silly as that sounds. Lots of games have told stories where much of the focus is on the main characters acting in morally questionable ways to protect those they care about (the earliest such example I can recall being 2002's PW:Justice For All), and even if everyone on Earth could decide that TLoU did it better than anything else before it, I don't think that would be enough to get it remembered alongside the "timeless classics." The best remembered games aren't necessarily the ones who did it best; they're the ones that did it well first. There have been some really great stories in games before The Last of Us, without cheesy lines or lame voice acting. Even if TLoU improved on them dramatically, there aren't any new horizons being reached, so to speak.

To illustrate the point, take Okami, the PS2 game from 2006. I would argue that its story is one of the most engaging I've run across in a video game. Witty dialogue, well developed characters, well rounded character arcs, and an extremely satisfying ending. And yet, when Okami is remembered by the public, it's usually remembered for one of two things; the art style or the celestial brush mechanic; which were the two big "new" things it did. Personally, I think remembering Okami just for that is a bit of an insult to everything else it does so well, but that's unfortunately the way long term popularity in video games seems to go. Perfecting things that have been done before, even if you're vastly improving on them, comes a very distant second to the new things you're trying out.