The Last of Us (HBO, from Creator of Chernobyl) - No game spoilers please

kakarott said:
Yea it was singled out just for you.
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Not at all. There has been things I might have done differently but it wasn't made just for me either. It is made to appeal to as wide an audience as possible while attempting to stick to the story. From listening to the official podcast they seem to have done a good job. Viewing figures sound like they are fantastic, IMDB episode scores are all 8-9+ other than ep 7. I think its been great, certainly compared to some of the dross that we've had served up in the last few years.
 
Colonel_Klinck said:
Doesn't matter to you. The series isn't just aimed at you and certainly isn't aimed just at people who played the game.
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Doesn't matter to anyone.
Wasting 2 hours of a limited run time to tell a story about characters who 'almost' have no bearing on the main plot is idiotic and those precious minutes could have been spent in MUCH better places.

The only difference is that people who HAVE played the game know how much better the series could have been had they not repeatedly stamped on the 'plot brakes'

Someone (I believe in this thread) put it really well.
After an amazing start, this series started to feel like it was being written to pander to critics and win awards, not to tell a compelling and well paced story.
 
Yet I've played the first game through twice, and the sequel. Love them both, easily in my top 5 and I thought it was some of the best telly I've seen in ages.

Loved hearing backstory for some of the characters you come across in the game, loved the continued character development for Bill and David. Thought they did it justice without rehashing the game, expanded the world and were faithful to the story line.
 
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VincentHanna said:
I'd take issue with that as I completed it twice on PS3 and again on PS4 and have enjoyed the whole series immensely.
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I also have played and completed it multiple times and cannot believe they wasted an entire episode on that awful and boring DLC, while sweeping David and the cannibals under the rug as an afterthought to be rushed past.
Anyway, I AM glad that a video game adaptation is being loved by the masses and for what it's worth, as a whole, I recon I am still enjoying it, but it could be SO much better :(
 
There has been very limited infected and they were in the snow during the game. But disappointed on that front.

Not sure about the comment about Ellie having no bearing on the main plot - she is the whole driving force behind this? If it wasn't for her Joel would not have left the QZ. The last episode was purely Ellie while Joel took a nap.
 
Non game player here and have no complaints about any time telling the back story to supplementary characters, whether they happen to drive the narrative at all. Not every episode of a TV show has to drive the story forward. Plenty of the better episodes of other shows do nothing to move things forward (breaking bad fly episode immediately comes to mind).

What these 'boring/slow/pointless' episodes do bring to the show is a feeling of a real world, not just laser focused on the leads all the time, that would soon become dull. They pace the show out well, give you time to breath and reflect a little.

I imagine most folk moaning about dull episodes would have no issue if it was released all at once, binge straight to the next episode, watch it all but take nothing in.
 
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Uncle Petey said:
Given that the infection was originally widespread due to the food supply being contaminated, I still don't see why they would be limited to cities.
More heavily concentrated in those areas, sure.
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Honest question; how do the infected stay alive? If they need to eat or whatever to sustain the body then it totally makes sense they stay around cities. America's a big place, once you're out of a city you could drive for 1hr and not see a town in places. Let alone if you're a shuffling infected.

I watched ep8, loved it. Didn't see the "twist" coming at all, nicely done on that front.

C Kent said:
I'd also argue the sniveling, whiny bitch Joel is indicative of the 2nd game
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Just quoting for the lols.
 
SixTwoSix said:
Non game player here and have no complaints about any time telling the back story to supplementary characters, whether they happen to drive the narrative at all. Not every episode of a TV show has to drive the story forward. Plenty of the better episodes of other shows do nothing to move things forward (breaking bad fly episode immediately comes to mind).

What these 'boring/slow/pointless' episodes do bring to the show is a feeling of a real world, not just laser focused on the leads all the time, that would soon become dull. They pace the show out well, give you time to breath and reflect a little.
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Yes you are right under usual circumstances, however just taking your example of BB and the fly episode - series 3 of BB is 13 episodes, approx 11 hours long, that's a good 3 to 3 and a half hours worth of additional story building compared to this. If TLOU clocked in with that additional run time then no one would have any issue with the 'filler' episodes, the ones that have diverged away from the main story. The issue for most of us that have played the game and can compare it to the show in this thread is that there's a limited amount of time to get from A to B.
By going around the houses and focusing on other elements it's taken the focus away from building the core aspect of the story, Joel and Ellie's relationship and its suffered for it. In the grand scheme of things having nigh on an entire episode of Ellie's little teen romance added nothing that a 10 minute tightly written flashback would have achieved, episode 3 despite being well written and superbly acted added nothing in the grand scheme of things. They were both negatives in driving the story forward for a show that was already going to struggle to tell what it needed to in the allotted run time it has.
SixTwoSix said:
I imagine most folk moaning about dull episodes would have no issue if it was released all at once, binge straight to the next episode, watch it all but take nothing in.
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Not for me, I prefer weekly episodes of a tv show as, in my opinion, it gives those 'water cooler' moments for folks to talk about and discuss what happened. Shows that drop all at once don't allow any suspense to build.
 
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Scam said:
Honest question; how do the infected stay alive? If they need to eat or whatever to sustain the body then it totally makes sense they stay around cities. America's a big place, once you're out of a city you could drive for 1hr and not see a town in places. Let alone if you're a shuffling infected.
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I don't know how any of the infected stay alive for so long or remain functional in any zombie show tbh :D

Anyway, my point is that it was a worldwide infection that wasn't limited to cities. People were infected everywhere and bit/ate everyone available.
Unless you're suggesting that most/all of the non-city based zombies should or would have migrated to cities because the fungus hive mind told them that's where the grub is or something - which would be pure speculation afaik, I'm still not seeing a compelling argument.
 
C Kent said:
Yes you are right under usual circumstances, however just taking your example of BB and the fly episode - series 3 of BB is 13 episodes, approx 11 hours long, that's a good 3 to 3 and a half hours worth of additional story building compared to this. If TLOU clocked in with that additional run time then no one would have any issue with the 'filler' episodes, the ones that have diverged away from the main story. The issue for most of us that have played the game and can compare it to the show in this thread is that there's a limited amount of time to get from A to B
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Fair point on BB, does have an overall longer season runtime, although TLOU is just shy of 9 hours. I just don't feel like i've been robbed of anything with the supplementary character episodes - we're clearly in an agree to disagree moment here, it's all down to personal preference. By no means do I think it's a perfect show, it has its issues, the background character episodes aren't one of them for me.

C Kent said:
I prefer weekly episodes of a tv show as, in my opinion, it gives those 'water cooler' moments for folks to talk about and discuss what happened. Shows that drop all at once don't allow any suspense to build.
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On this we can agree, I like the shift back to weekly viewing we're slowly seeing - as it weeds out the poor shows that get renewed purely as folk can sit and binge it in a day and keeps viewing minutes high. When it's a weekly show and you have some bad episodes, the numbers can plummet fast.
 
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The first and main thing about this show is about a father and daughter relationship, the 2nd thing is about it's people, the last thing is about the zombies.

A show about zombies is uninteresting, let's remove all the humans in it, and have all zombies, what do you get? Them sitting around eating their own foot? It's only interesting because of the people, we watch it for the people, the script is written about its people. There are a lot of shows and movies where the entire thing is about running away and escaping from zombies and we complain about those being mindless and shallow. (What's that recent movie set in Vegas? Army of the Dead?)

The Zombies are a backdrop to a setting which causes the human drama, the game is that, this show is that.
 
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