The challenges of translating The Last of Us to the television audience | The DeanBeat

There are many times that I have fantasized to be the game director for the last of us, the big video game of Naughty Dog and the executive producer of The last American television series on HBOwhich has just completed its second season.

I would have used Joel better in the second match and the second season of the show. I would have thrown different actors in the main roles – by focusing more on those who look more like the characters in the games. But the first season of the show was so good that I made my peace with the decisions of Neil Druckmann, play director, and Craig Mazin, the co-creator and showrunner. I was a fan frustrated at the beginning, and now I am a defender of the series, because my attitudes have changed.

After all, by converting the game into a show, they gave respect due to Series of games that is my favorite of all time. The first season was fascinated and it shot more than the game with the third episode, in the love story of Bill and Frank, which was just a little bit of the game. Hollywood did not always have such respect for the properties of the game, and this respect was a nod to the growth of the game in mass culture. We now have a generation of accomplished Hollywood creators who love games.

As a game, the original title of 2014 drew my attention because it was a survivist zombie story where each fight was difficult to death – with combat with melee so intense that it was not to silence hordes of zombies like so many other games. It was a question of sneaking on the zombies in an almost loose way and cutting your throat with a knife – closely and personal. And even if I was addicted to the grainy action, I stayed for the characters and the beginner and fine budget, where the start of the game resonates so perfectly with the end of the game.

I watched these creators take my favorite game and make them one of my favorite television shows. I am, alas, not director. I’m just a fan, where I can only receive the result of their entertainment work. The second game seriously tested my loyalty as a fan, because he killed characters that I loved without mercy or ceremony just to assert that it was a dangerous world where life was suspended by the sons.

And so I expected the tragedy of the second episode where we were all stolen from a character too early, apparently without any chance of saying goodbye. I was pleasantly surprised by the big budget of this episode where the city of Jackson, Wyoming, defended it against a giant attack on the infected. There have been heads to the hard bosses of the game, like when Tommy faces the Bloater in this fight (but of course, this fight was out of words in the story). It was a panoramic battle of the genre that we did not expect at a time of shows with reduced budgets.

There have been differences from the game, with the addition of a therapist, deletions of major combat sequences, the shortening of furtive infiltration scenes that have taken hours in the game, and other things that told me that the manufacturers of shows thought that the repetitive action of the game should not be translated to the television screen.

In some ways, I feared the reaction of other fans in season 2.. Ellie is released under the spotlight as a lesbian, although if people had played the last of us: left behind DLC, that would not have been a surprise. The show and the game have dealt with this subject with sensitivity, like any love story. And that made me proud to see the attempt by creators and actors to retain criticism that such things were too “awake”.

It took the bravery to make these characters and this story of the love story, which should be considered normal, in our current climate. And while I hated some parts of the last of us: part 2 so much, I understood them and how they were part of the simple idea that all our actions have consequences – and Part 2 of the series of games concerns these consequences. As I finished the game, I understood this and my own hatred of the games of the game decreased. It is interesting to see this kind of reaction take place with the probably larger television audience.

I also wondered how it was strategically important for creators to decide exactly where to finish the second season, because we can expect several seasons to continue for the show. In fact, as it happened with Game of Thrones, we can expect HBO to take place before the game series and go to a new narrative territory that does not come from any game.

I can now see that the structure seems to have a logic break at the start of the fight at the Seattle theater. This season had only seven episodes, but it has gone through the content of the second match at an alarming rate. He shortened long fire and focused on the drama between characters like Joel and Ellie and Ellie and Dina and Ellie and Jesse. It reminded of some people that it was too boring, with not enough action. But this game never concerned zombies. It was interaction between people.

There have been unforgettable moments such as the confrontation between Ellie and Nora, where we see that Ellie has changed in a way that there is no turning back. I was surprised at the beginning that they jumped the huge Boss fight and kept Nora as a dramatic moment. But the showrunner shows his bias: showing more humans, no more zombies. I thought that the actor who played Jesse, a rare Asian American character who was like a man from Marlboro in the West, was up to the game character.

The disappearance of beloved characters was supposed to tell us that life is short in the dangerous world. And yet, by finishing it in episode seven in the theatrical scene, the creators reversed this message by making the climax all the season. Indeed, in the second match, there was not really a natural stop point halfway through events.

I look forward to the story of Abby in the third season to come, and I could expect the last character confrontation providing fodder for a fourth season. But if there is something that I fear the most, it is that this show will be finished before I know. So, my request to the showrunner is to slow it down, to further capture game events and give us more. Do not rush through it and find that you have to invent a whole new story as the showrunners have done in Game of Thrones. I guess this series of games and shows taught me to fear the ends.

Should you play games? If you look at the two seasons. Of course. They had me at the beginning. And they always have me.