The Last of Us

Alrighty. So, surprise! The Last of Us! Okay, so I’m jumping on the band wagon a little here, but oh well. On the off chance you’ve had your head under a rock and haven’t yet heard, The Last of Us is Naughty Dog’s new PS3 exclusive IP. We revisit the zombie apocalypse for about the nine trillionth time in the shoes of Joel, who’s a scruffy, cynical, worn out, not too good of a guy, and a fourteen year old girl by the name of Ellie.

It’s twenty years after the zombie (oh, my bad ‘infected’) apocalypse, and the world has gotten back into a sort of rhythm. (Albeit a predictably dark, tormented, dog eat dog rhythm). Joel and his partner Tess make a living as smugglers in the Boston quarantine zone, which is under martial law, until the fateful day they accept a job escorting a teenage girl from one pocket of the resistance to another. This girl is Ellie, and her relationship with Joel defines this game. Ellie is a beautifully realized character, and with the usual Naughty Dog flair is by turns hilarious or heartbreakingly real. As the player you can’t help but become attached to her, and I derived a very malicious sort of satisfaction from bashing in the heads of anyone who laid hands on her. The Last of Us serves as a kind of coming of age story for her, as you watch her transition from snarky teenager to strong young woman without ever crossing the line into annoying. Hats off to the artist behind this, because that is no easy trick.

Joel, however, stumbles awkwardly back and forth across the line from audience surrogate to actual character. Either would have been fine, but in playing I found that right around the time I got used to seeing Joel as a vehicle of my virtual self he would reveal some horrible dark dead he’d done in the past or spout an awkwardly heartwarming bit of dialogue, which would occasionally shatter the immersion for me as I had to scratch my head over Joel. Towards the end though, the story gets Joel’s ducks in a row and he becomes realized as the hero in a redemption tale in which his moral greyness makes for a truly beautiful ending. (In fact, I believe this goes on my list of best game conclusions of all time.)

The story doesn’t do anything ground-breaking but that’s not to the game’s detriment. Phenomenal characters and writing can often carry a story much farther than an original idea, and the well-worn path lent the tale an almost relatable bent. (Despite the flesh eating monsters) *SPOILERS FOLLOWING* However, not every post-apocalyptic zombie game needs cannibals, and this trend is becoming frustrating as it starts to pop up more and more in all forms of media. The near moral wrongness of killing one particular group of badies was rather refreshing and exciting… that is until the game played the ‘they’re bad because they eat people card’, which is a complete turn off. ***SPOILERS OVER***

While the characters are truly what shine here, gameplay and combat were surprisingly tight. The emphasis on stealth and survival horror tradition worked to the game’s benefit, helping shed a more believable light on Joel’s routing of dozens and dozens of enemies. You receive a dearth of weaponry, but it’s almost always smarter to save it for a pinch and rely more on sneaking and assassination to move through areas as ammunition can become scarce and switching weapons is no easy feat during combat. Crafting plays a heavy gameplay role, and the system is refreshingly intuitive and easy, with supplies just scarce enough to make things occasionally tenuous but not too punishing.

Battles are open to individual play styles, and any number of solutions can get you through a given area, especially later in the game. You could lay trap bombs, go out guns blazing, sneak around and knife enemies from behind or throw things to distract opponents and then slink past. However, it’s worth noting the game did have a tendency to throw unrealistic groups of enemies at you.

This was bad in a few ways, firstly because it undermined the very tittle “The Last of Us”. It’s hard to believe humanity is on the brink of extinction when wave after wave of gun wielding goons comes crashing after you, with no care for casualties. In fact, the human enemies you defeat in the game are equal in number to, if not greater than, the number of zombies you kill. The second reason is that in a game that came a hair’s breadth from seeming plausible, little things like such incredibly unrealistic odds of survival tip the scale away increment by increment from gaming perfection. This veritable glut of enemies is another trend in modern gaming that’s becoming tiresome. Putting the joy of gratuitous violence aside, games like this one could have benefited from fewer, more difficult enemies that took more ingenuity and less brute force to conquer.

On a more technical side, the game tended to have a bit of a climbable object detection problem which could leave you in the lurch with a trail of hungry undead behind you and nowhere to hide, because the game won’t realize there’s a ladder in front of you until you’ve mashed the button seven times.

One last little qualm is the levels. They often tended to outstay their welcome, stretching too long without changing environments and pulling the exact same gimmick reliably as clockwork. “Well, good thing we cleaned all these zombies out. Oh no! Another band of hunters has arrived and started shooting for little to no discernible reason.” The game’s most enjoyable levels were the ones only visited for short periods of time, like the small town mountain resort, or the handful of wilderness levels.

Speaking of levels, this game was beautiful, hands down. Every character model was beautifully rendered and detailed, the lighting and water effects were breathtaking. It very much bore the hallmark design aesthetic of the Uncharted series, and that is in no way a bad thing. I’ve never seen ruined cities look quite as appealing as they did in the Last of Us. The audio design was also a standout, voice acting was top notch, and the conversations between groups of hostile humans were surprisingly… human, and realistically made them morally easier or harder to murder in cold blood depending upon the person. (But one way or another, they uselessly end up murdered, because that’s kind of what Joel does.) Zombies and hunters had unique sets of sounds to signify their arrival, and different ‘infected’ types had their own range of noises to indicate which class they were. All of this tied itself into a nice bundle of immersion and gameplay that engaged all of the senses.

So, in the end the Last of Us lived up to its hype. While flawed in places, the game also managed to be beautiful and heartrending. Considering Naughty Dog tends towards trilogies, I’m sure there’ll be a sequel before too long. With the first game’s kinks ironed out, The Last of Us 2 could be something totally unforgettable. Meanwhile, this game is something that should not be missed.

Next Up, Resident Evil Revelations

Eternal Sonata (PS3)

Eternal Sonata is an anime themed RPG that came out on the XBOX 360 at or around launch, and was later ported to PS3 with some changes, including a pair of characters who are now playable as well as an altered, (debatably) clarified ending. I chose the PS3 edition simply to piss off a friend who was a huge fan of this game on xbox, but lacked a PS3 to play the enhanced edition. I’ve been led to believe the differences between editions are relatively minor, and as far as I can tell my review pertains equally to both versions.

The basic theme of the game is supposedly focused on the famous composer and pianist Chopin. He is in a coma, and all the game exists inside a dream he is having. Everything and everyone has music themed names, and some events seem to mirror events in Chopin’s own life.( His life is told to you in a series of cutscenes between chapters.) In all honesty, that idea isn’t realized. Chopin quickly becomes a backseat character and his dogged insistence this is all in his head seems really disjointed and out of place as you often forget he’s even there. The scenes about his life also quickly become more interruption than game enhancement as it becomes clear that while informative, they don’t add very much to the game except an excuse to play one of Chopin’s pieces. This fumbling of the Chopin portion of the story costs this game a lot of its potential. If the game had been played exclusively from Chopin’s point of view, rather than constantly jumping around to other characters, it would have tied things together a lot more smoothly by making Chopin into an audience surrogate and highlighting his separateness from the Eternal Sonata world which would’ve lent a more believable cast to the tale.

In this dream world of Chopin lives Polka, the leading eh… child? She is a young girl with magical powers, doomed by fate to sacrifice her life for those she loves and, to be frank, Yuna did it better in Final Fantasy X. Polka is annoying, frustratingly naïve, optimistic and none too bright. Before anyone says otherwise, examine the fact that she was told that if tensions between mankind ever threatened to boil over into war she should throw herself into the sea and things would be better. She accepts that without any questioning. She, of course, develops a love interest in the form of the street rat Allegretto, who steals bread for orphans and is raising his younger brother Beat. The world they live in is one of crushing taxes and unjust rule which they must set out to right. Along the way they meet a cast of companions who join them on their quest to right these wrongs. Only the addition of Chopin keeps this game from being completely formulaic, because otherwise it’s largely the plot of every RPG ever.

And, like many RPGs before it, the supporting cast is much more interesting than the leads. Of late this lamentable characteristic seems to be a trend that really needs to stop. These characters are often the only thing that save the plot, because by the end of the game the story had more holes in it than your favorite pair of underwear. The conclusion of the game was the grandest story cluster fuck I have ever seen. The cutscene was an hour long, and yet managed to give no explanation or closure to anything. It was as though the writers simply gave up.

This game needed editing more than anything else, because far too often things just didn’t add up. For example, on one level pirates rammed our ship, tied our boats together, then apparently went back below decks on their own ship to relax, allowing the main characters to board the pirate ship and chase the ‘scoundrels’ down at leisure.

The likewise editing needy gameplay mostly consists of traveling town to town, scene to scene, by way of dungeon. Encounters are thankfully not random, and the combat system did originate from a cool concept. Battles take place in a small area you are free to move your characters about. Entering a pocket of shadows will change your character’s special abilities from a light set to a dark set, and likewise an enemy may have different forms and abilities in light and darkness. Your actions are set to a four or five second timer which constitutes a turn, and within in that time you can attack or heal as quickly as you can mash a button. Which, basically, is all combat boils down to. For most of the game during an enemy’s turn you can fulfill a quicktime trigger to block an attack and significantly reduce the damage you take. Much later on you receive the ability to counter attack, which only occasionally pops up. But by then it’s too little too late. You’re already trained to the block button, and you don’t have enough time to think about switching buttons before getting hit, anyway.

A notable combat aspect is that in the case of Beat’s character you can also take pictures of enemies in place of a special attack, which may be sold for significant piles of gold. Another fun minigame takes the form of characters in the world who will challenge you to recite music with them. You can find score pieces in town and dungeons which you must match to the piece the character has. If you play well, you will be rewarded with very good items. But, if you’re like me and have no musical skill, once you start accumulating many pieces it becomes a huge pain in the ass to find the right one to play, assuming you even have it.

Most everything else is standard RPG fair. You use gold to purchase new equipment, then upgrade again in the next town. Saving is accomplished at save portals scattered about the world, which I am not opposed to when done correctly. It was not done correctly in Eternal Sonata. Target range for save portal spacing should be every twenty to forty minutes, preferably on the shorter end of that spectrum. It’s nice when you can sit down for several hours and grind away, but that’s not always an option. Sometimes you have to get off and take care of life. I clocked some gaps between save points at upwards of an hour. That’s not a good thing when the game is frustrating as this, the only thing worse than hating the game is not being able to get off of it and take a breather.

The visual style of the game is everything you’d expect from a childish anime RPG, full of bright colors and ridiculous flora and fauna. The visuals are well done, nothing too extraordinary (well, maybe the cringe worthy character design) but attractive all the same. The levels are pretty varied, but then again, the levels are also frequently too long and the game is prone to making you back track. The game’s audio was literally touted on the back cover but by and large I wasn’t too impressed. The Chopin pieces the game featured were, of course, signaturely complex, but barring those I didn’t find the music too outstanding. It was often pretty, and I do especially like the piece that played during the Lament Mirror Dungeon (which I believe is only in the PS3 version). Perhaps it was only because the music was made such a big deal of, but I was disappointed. Additionally, it’s worth noting voice acting was on the bad end of the anime spectrum. I especially found Polka’s sickly sweet schoolgirl voice hard to bear at times.

Eternal Sonata was unfortunately less than the sum of its parts. With some tweaking and editing, it could have been a truly original game, perhaps could have even achieved a larger following and classic status. As is, I won’t be revisiting this tale. The only thing I’m taking away is a broken narrative of Chopin’s life story and forty hours I consider wasted. This game doesn’t approach the complexity and charm of other available RPGs, and the unique concepts aren’t well enough realized to set Eternal Sonata apart. Unless you’re a diehard anime game or Chopin fan, I’d advise you to look elsewhere for your role playing fix.

Next Up, Eternal Sonata (PS3)

Silent Hill (1999)

This game is like the great white whale of used game hunting. Don’t get me wrong, I know how the internet works and I could’ve ordered it at any time, but where’s the fun in that? Incidentally, I’m still looking for it. I actually just gave up and borrowed a friends’ copy.

Anyway, way back in 1999 Konami gave us Silent Hill, the first in the legendary and ongoing series. Harry Mason wakes up in his crashed jeep, sans daughter Cheryl, on the edge of the resort town of Silent Hill. Thus begins his journey into the enigmatic and ‘scary’ town that gives this game its name, on a quest to rescue his daughter.


To be honest, the game surprised me. Of course I’d heard it was good, but then you hear a lot of things about old games and not all them end up true. Silent Hill has aged well, despite its graphical and voice acting imperfections, and especially despite its tooth grindingly awful combat. That’s because the game isn’t actually about its gameplay (thank god). I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily telling a story, either, at least not merely about some characters. People scoff at SH a lot, and often straight up piss on it for not being scary. And it’s not. As I played, the sense I got was rather of overwhelming sorrow. More than horror, I found sadness to be the game’s most pervasive theme. From the pre start menu cut-scene to the game’s ambiguous conclusion, Silent Hill laid a blanket of dark inevitability and wove a tale of people who were caught up in a heartless plot through no fault of their own.


The story in Silent Hill, like a lot of horror games, seems like it passed the improbable sign about a hundred miles ago. Since before the town became a vacation spot, an occult group has been firmly entrenched in Silent Hill society and it seems likely they’re not worshipping the friendly bunny god, either. I won’t go into spoilers, but it’s pointed out pretty early that this has a lot to do why the town is near empty of people and there are bizarre creatures running around. If you keep your eyes open and dig around the levels, you can piece a great deal of the story together, but it certainly isn’t spelled out for you. If you complete certain optional quests the game will hand you some more of the pieces, but these puzzles range in ease and obscurity, some are quite difficult without the aid of a walkthrough or FAQ. How many of these tasks you successfully complete determines your ending.


Full disclosure, since I only got a week with this game I saw only the Good ending, and not the Good+ due to a mistake I made early on. Still, I’m satisfied with saying that if you manage the Good, or Good + ending, you’ll have a fairly good idea of what happened to this town and Harry Mason’s daughter, but only if you think about things. It’s really a credit to the game that it forces you to fill in some the blanks yourself no matter how well you do.
The other characters beside Harry are few and far between, but they’re well characterized for their time and surprisingly endearing, despite their awkward dialogue and voice acting. They normally function to poke you along on your quest, telling you where to go and where Harry’s daughter might be before racing off on their own business again, yet somehow they keep reappearing because, of course, everything in Silent Hill is connected.Mostly, you are alone.


As you travel around the town your portable radio alerts you to enemy presences by ringing, and though these wandering enemies are not difficult to kill it’s almost always wiser to run. To accomplish this, you have to turn off your light and plunge headlong into the unknown at full pelt, or try to slowly navigate around the nurse shaped blur in the corner of your screen without alerting her to your presence.


and health packs are at first optimistically abundant, but they run dry pretty damn fast. Searching for supplies quickly becomes a gamble in and of itself. You need bullets for the bosses, with one exception, which can make things difficult to juggle. Especially as boss monsters don’t appear at regular or (at least to me) intuitive intervals. This necessitates the equally engaging and painful task of inventory management, which is one of the best parts of traditional survival horror, and a part I sorely miss.


Visually, Silent Hill is about as impressive as the inside of a card board box. Textures are frequently reused and new areas rarely look new at all. The Audio design is the real standout here. The music creeps up on you, and while the monsters and environments aren’t scary, you’ll often find yourself hunched over your controller with twitchy eyes anyway. When you first enter an area there might be a fuzzy little tune in the background, but by the time you’re at the end of a level your heart is racing in time to a beat and you’re swearing if that bass drum in the background doesn’t cut out soon a controller is going in the tv screen.


That’s a damn good thing, because the only tension that comes out of the combat system (baring obsessing about how much health you have left and whether you have enough shot gun bullets stored up) is pure frustration. Battle is slow and unresponsive, it can be borderline impossible to tell what you’re aiming at or IF you even are aiming at something. I did enjoy the satisfaction of kicking an enemy to make it stayed dead, but that was a pain in the ass as soon as you were dealing with two or three opponents at once. The dodge buttons were slow to kick in and couldn’t be relied upon, and the pause between shooting and being able to run away was often the difference between life or death, and that almost never ended in the positive option.


Yet, despite numerous flaws, Silent Hill sunk its hooks into me. I found myself relentlessly intrigued. The town took me by the hand and drew me into its parlor, and before I knew it I was all tangled up in its web. All told, my run took around a comfortable ten hours, not too short, not too long. The story came full circle, and despite a rather open ended conclusion I felt closure and an extreme desire to just hug Harry. Silent Hill deserves its spot on the classics shelf, and I strongly recommend it to any horror fans who haven’t visited yet. It takes a little patience, but it’s worth the ride to see where all this begun.

Mission Statement

Hello internet, I’m Val
I’m a gamer, but you won’t catch me playing CoD. About Everything else is fair game. I play and collect games from the PSone generation to present, and being as delightfully opinionated as I am, I thought it was time to start reviewing this shit. I play what I want, and there isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to my choices. If you’re looking for opinions on the newest Battlefront or Final Fantasy, I won’t have them. (Being poor, for the win.)
But if you wanna hear about games you never even knew existed, I’m your dude. So, I plan to write a relatively, but not very, brief write up on a game that I have played and upload it. I’ll shoot for one about every week and half, but I’m too busy to actually promise that. I’m starting with the original Silent Hill, and we’ll see how this goes, kay?