Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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I really umm’d and arr’d over posting this, because I know what is about to follow is not going to offer any fresh perspectives, or break any new ground or offer some kind of hot take. And while trying to offer any one of those things in every review written would be a fool’s errand, it is a little different when a review comes so long after the release of a title.

That said, my understanding is Part 2 does some pretty extensive retconning and reframing of Part 1, so I am sorta half posting this here as an anchor point for a future me who comes out of the other side of Part 2. If as a by-product of that this becomes an enjoyable read for others, or promotes any sort of discussion, then I’ll take that as a win.

So, without further ado, here is my review of The Last of Us Part 1.

The work they put in to improving the visuals, lighting and facial animations cannot be understated. In fact, at times, it is so profound you almost can’t truly appreciate it properly. Like it looks incredible, and runs just as well, but then you put it side by side with the remaster and like… holy *****.

Remember when we played games on PS3 and reviews would remark about how graphics were probably not going to get much better than this?

Yeah, so about that.

I know some console gamers like to pretend power and performance do not matter, but regardless of what you think about that, this generation of consoles were sold on the power and performance they would offer. Now some three years into the lifespan of them, this promise has rarely been delivered upon and if anything, it almost feels like we have gone backwards in some regards from the expectations the PS4 Pro set.

Here, ironically, two PS3 remakes show the PS5 at its absolute best, coming side by side only to games like God of War Ragnarok, which somewhat shattered the idea that games being made for PS4 and 5 together would somehow hold them back. But that is a discussion for a different review.

All I am saying, is I played this on Performance Mode on my PS5 and this is the standard I expect from all PS5 titles. Anything less than that, and I dunno what you are doing. The PS5 apparently couldn’t run an empty open world like Gotham Knights in 60 fps, yet can run this at a rock steady 60 fps when the frame is packed full of rich detail, raytraced or some sort of equivalent lighting and reflections and more. This is the promise of the PS5, delivered. You add onto that a deep suite of accessibility options to really tweak and tailor the experience to your needs and man, if only Sony weren’t so damn greedy, I’d be telling everyone in the world to pick this up.

It is worth pointing out for balance, that for as good as this is on a technical and visual level, I wouldn’t say any of this really transformed my experience of this title in any meaningful way. At least not in the way I hoped with that price tag slapped on it.

You look at something like the Dead Space remake in how it stayed true to the original, but still took the time to take many years of feedback on board. Changing sequences people didn't like, overhauling old systems, streamlining and tweaking others. I think The Last of Us really could have used this kind of pass over it. This is pretty much exactly the same experience you would have on PS4, only it just looks and runs significantly better, which is great, but I am not sure it is enough when you are trying to charge me the same price as a brand new title.

Because of this, a person who has played this multiple times will probably care more about the work done here than a general audience person will. Was that always the intention? For this to be a niche collectors item rather than the ‘ultimate’ way to play this title? Well if that is the case, I still feel like this is overpriced. This isn’t like some beautifully packaged, extras packed, Criterion edition of your favourite movie or whatever, it is just a regular old release.

That isn’t to say they haven’t made some meaningful touches to gameplay. I dunno whether it is just years of exaggerating the idea in my brain that the worst part of The Last of Us was playing it or because of the inclusion of things like gyro, a massive suite of accessibility options to tweak your experience to your liking, and improved companion AI and animations - or maybe just some combination of the both - but this is probably the most I've ever enjoyed playing through this, for whatever that is worth.

For real, the game at times feels extremely dated. And they really frontload the experience with a lot of incredibly frustrating, forced stealth, encounters against the Infected which honestly kinda suck. This is at a point in the game where you basically have no weapons or resources making the opening hours of this game kind of a slog, and a big barrier of entry to some of the game's best moments. Best moments which come more in the second half with a shift to a focus on Human enemies, with a Joel who is far more kitted out. Now, again, being real, I dunno whether the human enemies are “more fun” to face in the traditional sense, so much as they are simply less frustrating to face, but I’ll take it.

For whatever reason, the accessibility tweaks don’t seem to apply to Humans and Infected equally. Even with the difficulty at the lowest, and the accessibility at the max, stealthing my way through Infected sections was always extremely frustrating. And one mistake was usually an instant failure. Without touching any of my settings, I would go into an encounter with Humans who were so blind and deaf it was laughable, meaning I would have to go back into my settings to turn everything back up again so it wasn’t so cartoonishly easy. I got so fed up with this, that I got to the point where if there was an optional path in an area and my survivor hearing thing told me Clickers were down there, I’d just skip it. I was groaning enough whenever they switched from a Human encounter to an Infected one during the main story, there was no way in hell I would take on optional Infected encounters.

I think what makes the Infected so annoying is they have seemingly way more health than Human enemies, the two Special types can insta kill you if they get into melee range and the regular ones will run into your face and will stunlock you with stagger animations. All of this is not fun, and you have very little answers for when things go sideways, as Joel has no real mobility and most of the Infected soak up bullets like massive sponges.

That isn’t to say Human enemies won’t attempt to flank you and grab onto you themselves, but they couldn’t insta kill you even if they did grab you, they also can’t trap you in animations as they run into your face and flail at you until you die and for whatever reason no matter how much I turned the settings up, they seemed way harder to balls up stealth against.

Now in fairness to the game, this isn’t really an action game in the traditional sense, it is probably closer to an immersive sim or a survival horror game. Sure you aren’t like dealing with your oxygen or hunger levels or whatever, but resources are generally fairly limited and Joel is pretty damn fragile, even with the difficulty at the lowest and the accessibility options at their maximum. Well up until the end. You will eventually have enough gear, upgrades and resources where you can turn the game into an action game if you want, but I think you will spoil some of the best hours the game has to offer if you do that.

It is clear that you are expected to feel vulnerable as that feeds into the wider narrative and the characters, likewise, they want killing to matter to the player, and this would have less impact if Joel was taking on waves and waves of enemies in every encounter, rather than small collections of Infected/Bandits.

However, while I get they don’t want you having the dissonance of Joel kicking down the door and blasting his way through everything with an unlimited ammo shotgun, I just don’t feel like they executed this idea very well at all. If every section against the Infected makes me groan in annoyance, and the best case scenario for me is to basically just skip the encounter by sneaking past everything, then I don’t see that as a positive for the game design, whether intentional or narrative supporting or not.

However, while I don’t love that aspect of the design, I do feel in a general sense The Last of Us is really well constructed and paced, in a way that we sorta don’t see a lot of anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I love an open world game where I need to clear out bandit camps for new loot and make narrative decisions, but I don’t want every game to be that. Again, a discussion for another review.

The best part of The Last of Us is Joel and Ellie’s story, and the game tells that story, nothing more or less. It is 12 to 15 hours of linear spaces, rich with detail and environmental storytelling - which admittedly aren’t immune to repeated assets - but I feel like the developers here are really set free, when they are able to create environments of intention rather than just of scale.

Each location serves the narrative that is playing within it, reflecting back where Joel and Ellie are in their journey, in a literal and more thematic sense. Nothing is here just to increase the square mileage on the map.

The game does now have a New Game+ mode with optional stuff unlocked at the end (groan), but the game isn't built around the idea that you are going to play this over and over again in loops. When the journey is over, it is over. I dunno, it just feels like you just don’t get a lot of games like this anymore and it is one example where this feeling “dated” is actually a good thing.

I mused to myself as I played this, that had this been made today - and even if those 12 hours or so hours of story and performances were identical - but they took the narrative and spread it out over a massive open world with a bolted on 40 hours of busy work bandit camps and radio towers, where Joel had to hit X level to do the next story mission (with XP boosters available in the cash shop, of course) whether we would hold the game in the same high regard, that we do today.

I will say, talking of the story, they changed the ending right? I swear the ending was different. I remember the hospital being really spooky and grubby. I don't remember Joel seeming so damn sad, remorseful and regretful about everything. Did they change this to make it line up better with Part 2? No spoilers please.

It is a shame, as ending aside, this is a masterclass in nuance. The Last of Us exists in a world of grey we don’t see in a lot of video games and I really admired the restraint to not spell out the themes of the title too overtly. The game very much holds up a mirror to the player, and it is really up to the player to realise the mirror they are looking into and it is really up to the player in what they perceive of the thing looking back at them in that mirror.

Early 20s me would have just admired how cool the brutal melee animations were and probably not really thought about much else. 30 something me is like that Kombucha meme, where I am thinking about how ***** cool that animation was - which were apparently improved for this remake, I dunno if that is true - while also remarking about how that person I just brutally slaughtered with a machete was exactly that, a person. A person who might not be any worse than I am, and is just another person trying to survive in this ***** up world through the same means I am using.

That isn’t to say there aren’t characters who are presented as far more obviously evil, like David. But I think it is fascinating that Joel is not trying to be a better person, he doesn’t come across some sort of comeuppance and must go on a path of redemption, he isn’t really trying to help anyone. Joel is a mostly self serving mirrored force to whatever forces he himself faces along the way. This is why the ending worked so much better, at least in my memory, maybe he always sounded so damn sad?

It is an idea as old as time, granted, but I just think it is executed here to near perfection. There is no need to preach to the player, no need to do the mask reveal like the end of a Scooby Doo episode, it is simply a mirror held up and what you perceive in that mirror is personal to you, hell, if you want to you can just look away from the mirror entirely if you want.

And in a way, this could have only worked in a game, because while the game doesn’t truly give you a choice in a lot of things, it was still you who pulled the trigger every single time. Granted no one expects you just to turn off the game and walk away, but as much of an illusion as it may be, the choice was always there.

This is important for the final moments of the game, because regardless of whether you sneak by everyone or whatever, Joel is always going to take Ellie, kill Marlene and tell the lie. Maybe he'll doom the whole damn world. But maybe if he didn't do what he did, Ellie would die for nothing based on the Firefly's track record throughout the game. Either way, this is Joel's choice, not the players.

Other than that tunnel with all the Bloaters and Clickers which kinda spoils the momentum of the last couple of hours of this game, I still love them anyway. They might be my favourite last couple of hours out of any game I've ever played.

That torture scene? Oh baby. Maybe we have always been seeing Joel through Ellie's eyes. Maybe Joel has always been, consciously or unconsciously, restraining himself in front of Ellie. But in this moment, there are no masks, we finally see who Joel has always been. And we have pulled the trigger every time. An explosive culmination of a man who has experienced so much pain and loss, finally given something to fight for one last time.

Before that, we also suddenly become so acutely aware of the weight on our shoulders that has been there the whole time, as we take control of Ellie for the first time. We pull the trigger and watch as we make her do unspeakable things. That conversation between Joel and Tommy suddenly echoing loudly in your mind with each trigger pull. Did Joel create a monster? Will Ellie be forever haunted by these events? Do either of these things even matter in the context of this world? Would she have survived these events without Joel? Would Tommy have?

Then there is the power of the quiet moment with the giraffes and how it truly means something because of everything you’ve been through as a player with these characters over these ten or so hours. Like I would have rather not been as frustrated as I regularly was playing this, being honest, but all my frustration really enhanced this moment for me in a way I don’t really experience as I don’t like difficult games. And again, they didn't put some cheesy flashback in here with still shots of stuff that happened during the game to some plinky plonky moments. Like with the mirror this game holds up, here, it offers a quiet moment of reflection for the player, where your mind goes in that moment is personal to you and how you have processed this experience.

Talking about it more generally though as a product, while the improved visuals and facial animations do enhance the story to a degree, the writing and performances are as far as I know untouched, so you are still going to get the same masterpiece of a story and those incredible, medium defining performances, even if you play the Original or Remaster. And I swear they changed the ending. I am saying it again.

Also, maybe a controversial opinion, but I actually kinda like the original character designs better. I am sorry. I know they were heavily stylised and kinda clashed with the realism the game was meant to go for, but I’m sorry, a lot of the new character designs to me just look like they took the old ones and ran them through those Mobile Apps which turn you into old people in your selfies. I know some people online get really mad at those kinds of takes, so I apologise in advance, but it is just how I feel.

Anyway, my TL;DR is this, The Last of Us is one of the best games ever made. And Part 1 is both the best way to experience this game, and also the most unnecessary way to experience this game, all at the same time.

At half the price this is an absolute no brainer of recommendation. At its existing price I do not feel it does enough that is truly transformative to justify a purchase over the other versions that exist. In fact, I am pretty sure The Last of Us Remastered is free for PS Plus subscribers.

About the only person I’d recommend Part 1 to is the most diehard The Last of Us fan, as I think you are about the only person who is going to really appreciate what this has achieved.

...Well at least until the PC version comes along, as I am pretty sure you’ll be able to get this from a legal key reseller for the price this game should have always been. Then I’d recommend Part 1 to everyone who has a PC that can run it

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Kandagawa Jet Girls (Steam) - It's like Wave Race, but by the Senran Kagura guys.

• An arcadey jet ski racer with a touch of Mario Kart, as you can pick up special weapons along the way like rocket launchers, gatling guns, shotguns, etc (which can be fired in forward or behind you). You also have a basic gun equipped at all times that's mostly useful for clearing out obstacles in your path (it doesn't seem to do enough damage to other racers' shields to break them).
  
  Cause other racers to spin out by blasting them with special weapons.
• That doesn't mean it doesn't (theoretically) require a more skilled touch as well. You can get a race start boost by reving up your engine at the right point during the starting countdown, you gain a bit more speed (at the cost of control) if you tilt the left stick back & you get a bit more control (at the cost of speed) if you tilt it forward, which is useful during tight turns. There is a guage which builds up (located on the lower right corner of the screen) as you complete actions during the race (such as passing through rings that charge it), and you can expend 20% of it for a temporary boost, or if it's fully charged you can unleash a special (if you're holding a weapon item you'll unleash an extra powerful variant of it. If not, you get temporary unlimited boosts).
  
  the guage is fully charged, so I can unleash a super variant of the gatling gun weapon I'm holding.
• There are various elements on the track to keep an eye out for, such as the aforementioned rings you can pass through to charge your guage, but also balloons & holograms (of cute cartoony mascots) you must shoot to clear the path forward (they don't cause you to crash, but can temporarily slow you down), as well as boost pads which temporarily speed you up. Of course there are ramps as well which you can use to catch some air & pull off some tricks. There are four different trick commands, & while 3 of them are shared between all teams, the 4th is unique to each team. Tricks grant buffs such as increased speed, tighter control, or a charge to your special guage. The team unique trick always grants two buffs instead of one, which sometimes includes special buffs like temporary invincibility.
  
  Performing a team exclusive trick.
• There are 8 or so teams to play as (you unlock them as you play through the story mode), which run the gamut in terms of cliches (you have the garyu delinquents, the foreign exchange American weebs, the rich girls, the idols, etc.). Is there a particular gameplay mechanic between having two girls per craft? Not really it seems, just an in game explanation as to why they can race & attack at the same time.
  
  These girls don't seem to be as multitask talented as your average MK racer, so have a dedicated driver & attacker.
• There are about 5-6 different courses to race on, though each has two or three different variants, so there is ultimately quite a bit of choice. These are likewise unlocked as you play through the story mode, and run the gamut from Japanese castles, futuristic city scapes, sewer systems, & more.
  
  
  
  
• I spent most of my time in the story mode, which consists of 64 races spread out over 8 chapters. Each chapter usually centers around the story of a specific team, with the first chapter being the longest, following the titular "Kandagawa Jet Girls" team (I assume this is the canon story, and is what the anime adaptation also follows). It's mostly bubbly fluff (though the California Coast High story mode, the "American weeb" team, is absolutely hilarious) though the last team introduced tries to add a "serious" tone/threat that they ultimately gloss over.
  
  
  
  The "Unkai Surfers", team of California Coast High, are absolutely hilarious (I've posted more of their gems in the screenshot thread).
• It's actually pretty technically sound of a racer all things considered. Certainly no Mario Kart (or probably Wave Race), however it's noticeably of a very much higher quality than the absolute drek of the genre like Garfield Kart. The biggest issue is that Story Mode is almost never a challenge. You can easily blitz the first chapter without having to upgrade your team's jet ski, and although the challenge does slowly ratchet up in subsequent chapters, by then you should have enough points at any given point to buy enough upgrades to stomp whatever comes your way. I assume you could probably get more of a challenge by taking on human players (it has an online mode of course) & maybe you can set the CPU difficulty to a higher standard in exhibition races, but I haven't really tested those things out.
  
  You can barely see the next closest racer at the edge of the mini-map.
• That said, Story Mode does attempt to mix things up with optional objectives attached to each race (tasks such as "don't touch a wall", "perform tricks more than 3 times", "pop 10 balloons", "use more than 4 types of weapon items", "don't use any weapon items", "reach X maximum speed", etc.). Now, sometimes you'll have to hold yourself back in order to complete some of these (can't exactly fire off a bunch of weapon items if you're too far ahead of the pack, as they won't fire unless you're close enough to target someone), but they do give you something extra to think about. For your trouble you'll be rewarded with new accessories & costumes for the girls to wear (remember this is from the Senran Kagura guys, so you'll get stuff like bunny suits, nurse bikinis, wedding bikinis, & the like).
  
  Lots of different costumes to unlock, such as sailor fuku bikinis, or bikinis that are barely there.
• Outside of the racing action (& kitting out the cast & jet skis), there are also a handful of minigames to take part in which you can use to earn extra points. These range in scope from a jet ski cleaning rhythm game, mopping auto runner, treadmill running, & a ring race mode, all of which have multiple difficulty modes.
  
  
  Earning extra credit.
• Given that this is from the Senran Kagura peeps it shouldn't come as much surprise that there's some crossover material. While they don't have a story mode, Ryobi & Ryona (from the SK series newer batch of "Hebijo" students) serve as an extra pair of racers. Of course you can obtain further SK characters (such as Asuka, Yumi, Homura, Ikaruga, etc.) as paid DLC, though I haven't partook.
• I know I've brought up it's Senran Kagura connections a few times now, so I think it's relevant to point out that it never goes as far as those games go in terms of the "fan service". Yes, there's lots of jiggle & bikinis, but that's about it (similar to the recently released Samurai Maiden in this regard). There seems to be little to no sexual innuendo in the dialogue/narrative (other than maybe some slight Yuri undertones depending on the team), no mode where it's possible to virtually "grope" the girls (before anyone jumps down my throat, I'm not saying that it's a bad thing such a mode is absent, just that it's a feature that was relatively common in such games once upon a time like the older Senran Kagura games & Gun Gun Pixies), and no clothing breakage mechanics (for what it's worth, clothes breakage very much IS a mechanic in the aforementioned anime adaptation, whenever a team has their shield shattered, but whether it was added to the anime or removed from the game is unknown AFAIK).

Conclusion:

• Actually a pretty fun & bubbly racing game when is all said & done. Granted, it's a very fan servicy game so know what you're getting into, but it's definitely a much more solid game than 90-95% of the games that make gratuitous sexualization part of their core appeal.
  
  Celebrate that victory.