The Last Guardian vs The Last of Us

[vivster]

LethalP said:

vivster said:

The gameplay is generic, boring and constantly breaks immersion and pacing in an awesome world with awesome characters and an awesome story. If you remove 100% of the gameplay and replace it with cutscenes it will be a better movie than it could ever be a game. And if gameplay is the single worst thing that is happening in your game and it makes people hope that it is over soon, so they can get more of the story then, yes, it's very shitty gameplay.

That's just bullshit, the bolded. First off if you have ever watched a good movie you'd know that if anything TLOU's subtext is what's generic. There's some good voice acting and delivery, but the writing of dialogue itself is hardly interesting and sometimes even overly dramatic, In a way most films of the same critical acclaim aren't. There's nuances to film that not even TLOU or Rockstar games have, like for example the use of interesting cinematography, which can literally make or break a scene in a good movie. In TLOU you're getting soap opera pans, as apose to say a Sam Mendez film like Road To Perdition which has impeccable cinematography. Scenes where not even that much is happening and nothing is being said, but you understand the mood it's trying to convey because of it's good execution. TLOU is playschool in comparison.

Now to my point, the story is far from what makes TLOU a good game. It's good in it's overall pacing despite it's flaws. From the design of the environments to the scattering of guns/bullets/recources making it well balanced, especially in higher difficulties. The idea that the same materials are required for a molotov, which can be relatively OP, and a med pack presents to the player a dilemma. A simple one, yet extremely effective because a molotov could prepare you for a group of clickers later, but good luck getting there with that low health bar. 

The combat itself with the weighty guns and great sound design. Gunshots look and sound lethal, melee is simple but also conveys the concept of knocking someone senseless really well. It's stealth elements are fairly shallow, but again for what's there it's execution is good and you can come up with some really cool fights in the game.

What it does not so well has been covered to death on the internet, you know, because it's critically acclaimed so naturally the internet has to be all like ''muh overrated'', because of a quasi-trending video they saw on youtube shitting on it. It's AI can do stupid things, like Ellie running right in front of an enemy and them not reacting. The environmental puzzles that can get boring and repetative. The moments of walking and talking where you can only listen while pushing up. I get it. But those problems are outnumbered by a really well designed third person shooter campaign in a compelling world, with combat encounters that require you to think on your feet and not just run and gun. It's not a case of this being my opinion, it literally does have well designed traits, quite a lot of them. And the gaming community at large has acknowledged them. Saying it has bad gameplay is lazy.

Listing all the good and bad things of a game and then applying math is not how reviews work, at least not how they should work. All the great things about the game mean nothing when I sit in front of my TV moaning that I have to do boring gameplay again.

In the end it's all about how you weight it. And in my case I gave the game a solid 9 and it was the best game of that year for me. But god beware when I criticize the most terrible thing of the game. Apparently finding the gameplay boring means that I hated the game.

That ND cannot do gameplay they showed plenty with Uncharted, which is another boring linear exercise just to waste time between cutscenes. Except that in Uncharted the story is also quite boring and predictable, contrary to TLOU.

BTW, Ellie not being detected is not an AI flaw, it was willingly programmed that way to make it easier. Which just shows that ND couldn't give a rat's ass how well their gameplay fits with the rest. In the end they just want to make big epic set pieces connected by a thin thread they call story and with the shiniest pixels available. And they do that very well. But they're doing it in the wrong category and still try to claim their products are games.

ND should just do their own epic tv show like GOT. That way they don't have to deal with filler gameplay and can script as much as they want.