I’ve always been fascinated by how stories change when they shift mediums. Usually, I watch books I’ve read come to screen. But with The Last of Us, there’s a chance to see how a great video game story can become a great show. I’ve worked through both the game and the show recently, and I wanted to write down some thoughts I had. Simply put, The Last of Us is a good example of how a studio can take a game and turn it into a show.
If you don’t know anything about The Last of Us, a quick synopsis. Humanity has fallen prey to a fungal infection inspired that leaves people in a state similar to zombies. Society fell apart, leaving the survivors to fend to themselves or gather in small towns and enclaves in the ruins of cities. Two characters — a middle-ages man name Joel and a teenage girl named Ellie — have to make their way west from Boston. They fight against infected, and other people, to reach their goals.
There are three topics I’m going to cover. First, the story of the game and why it needed to change for the show. Second, the world building opportunities that changing mediums provides and what the show does with it. And third, I’m going to look at the attitudes towards violence in both game and show.
Now I’m going to do those three topics without spoilers. Then I’m going to do a fourth, spoiler section where I discuss a few things without worrying about spoilers. Feel free to skip that section.
One: Changing the Story
The common story of The Last of Us is the story of Joel and Ellie and their journey west from Boston across a land of fallen cities, fungus-fueled zombies, and factions of survivors. The game and the show tell the same story, but do so differently.
There are many reasons to change the story. For starters, there’s the obvious issue of time. The video game takes 15 hours to beat the story only, and 22 hours to play everything. Of that, roughly 90 minutes are cut-scenes instead of playing time. Add an additional few hours for the DLC. The show runs about eight and a half hours.
Doing a direct cut-scene to show translation would be too short. Doing the entire game to show would be too long. The writers had to consolidate and modify the story-line to make it fit.
Slightly less obvious is the idea that doing a replay of the game exactly is boring. Yes, the creators should hit the high points of the game. They should include the scenes that the fans enjoyed and remember with fondness. But this is a chance to add to the story, not just re-tell it on camera.
I like most of the differences in the story the show does (beyond the World Building and Violence that I’ll discuss later). One big change is they streamline the story, consolidating several events into one scene to save on time and exposition. A second change is to modify the context around an event, so its impact on the story is the same but the specifics of how and why are different. The game and the show tell the same story, but each in a unique way.
Did you notice I said I liked “most” of the differences? Yeah, there were some things they did that I wasn’t happy with. One or two key scenes that they changed in such a way that they didn’t have the same impact as their game counterparts. Not enough to seriously hamper my enjoyment, but enough that I took note. But hey, nothing’s perfect.
Two: World Building
World Building means expanding the setting beyond what we know from the game. If the Story has Joel and Ellie leaving Boston, World Building is telling us more about Boston. This is an area where the show’s creators can take as much or as little from the game as they want, or need to, in order to tell their story.
The video game has two different extremes with world building. One on end is the world built by playing the bare minimum of the game, with everything every player will experience. The other end includes every found artifact, hard to reach vantage point, and unique conversation the player can possibly uncover, usually through great time and effort. The player must experience the one, but has to work to uncover the other.
Shows have the one world every viewer will see. This has its tradeoffs. The world is built more tightly to the narrative, but the excess details are lost. Like the story section, the show has the chance to build a slightly different world, if not outright contradictory. They need to support the story they’re telling, and if that means clashing with the game world, so be it.
The World Building can be further divided into three section: history, locations and specific characters.
History
The history part we can get through pretty quick. The show spends more time exploring the world before the game. There several scenes that take place before the pandemic that are completely new. They provide a context for the pandemic that the game doesn’t, something a viewing audience would expect.
Locations
It’s hard to describe how the show builds the locations different from the game without describing the people, so I want to point out here that this section will make references to the populations and factions of cities. This is meant to be separate from the individual, named characters I’ll get to in a moment.
The Last of Us uses the same sequence of eight locations as the game. The one big change is that the fourth location changes from Pittsburgh to Kansas City, but fulfills the same narrative role in the story.
For The Last of Us, the show makes an effort to humanize and give depth to the locations. The black-helmeted soldiers of Boston are no longer generic neo-fascist villains; now we see several of their faces, and see them reacting to the trials and fears of the world. We feel some sympathy for them and their role in their society. This change makes more sense when you consider that they are no longer some of the first opponents you fight and kill (see Violence, below). But it doesn’t contradict the game.
The Kansas City/Pittsburgh exchange is the biggest opportunity to expand on the world: the writers need to fill several story points, but otherwise have free reign to build a new location. They do so really well. The Kansas City location fills the same story development niches Pittsburgh does, but the opposing faction Joel and Ellie contend with is not a one-dimensional villain. We get why they’re doing what they’re doing, even as we hope they fail.
The other locations don’t differ too much from their game counter parts. We learn more about them, and appreciate them, but their impact on the story doesn’t change.
Named Characters
The last aspect of world building I wanted to discuss are changes to named characters. This is where the show greatly changes from the game. They need to do this to fit their story and the differing expectations of a viewing audience.
Every named character is different than their game counterpart. Some changes are small and don’t contradict the game, adding depth to even simple characters. Take the character of Maria. in the game, we know nothing about her other than her relationship to other characters and her position of leadership. in the show, we learn more about who she was before everything fell apart. We don’t know if game Maria is the same or not, and it doesn’t really matter.
Some of the characters are drastically different. Their biographies, and how they influence the show’s story, are big departures. Now, I’m not a purist. I don’t expect everything to be exactly the same. So when this happens, I ask myself, what were they trying to do? Do the changes they make work within the context of the new story?
I say yes. I say that the two biggest character departures absolutely make sense. Neither character would have worked if they’d been brought over exactly as they were from the game. Both stories would have been heavily influenced by the different expectations of violence, and one’s context was completely changed by differences in the story. This is what I’m going to talk a lot about in the spoiler section below.
Three: Differences in Violence
The last topic I want to go over is the way the two mediums use violence to tell their story.
The video game uses violence as a way to engage the player. It’s a challenge that must be overcome, either through stealth, guile or straight up combat. It is so common that the game only managed to make it intense by limiting your resources, forcing you to count bullets and manufacture traps, otherwise you’ll run out of ammunition and be forced to fight hand to hand.
The show uses violence much more sparingly. One online count I found put Joel’s kill count at over 200 in the game, but less than 40 in the show. It makes sense that the show would have a more realistic portrayal of violence than the game would. If they’d tried to mimic Joe’s kill count, it would feel like an 80’s action film, or at least a parody of one.
As a result, death in the show is much more impactful. Take the first time we see Joel kill someone in the show. The scene has a companion scene in the game. But in the game, he’s killed a few dozen infected and Boston guards by that point, and the death is just one more. In the show, it’s his first kill, and the context of the kill makes it all the more impactful.
The change in violence increases the lethality of the world. The infected are all the more dangerous for how few of them Joel and Ellie kill. The ease with which some factions kill is more jarring. It feels more real than the game does, and the characters react accordingly.
Spoilers
This section I want to discuss two things that require the spoilers tag.
Welcome to the spoiler section. The two topics I want to discuss here are the Bill and Frank story, and the Sam and Henry arc.
First, Bill and Frank. I loved this story-line. The characters were so much better than their game counterparts. But the big question I had was: why do things differently at all? The obvious answer is that Bill’s chapter in the game was one long combat sequence, something the show was not doing. so they had to do something different.
Slightly less obvious is that they needed a catalyst for Joel to decide to take Ellie further. Marlene had tasked him and Tess to take Ellie to the capital building; Tess’s last wish was for him to take Ellie to Bill and Frank’s. Bill’s letter, and the comment about finding someone to protect, gave Joel the impetus to take her all the way to Wyoming. The game didn’t really have a counter part; it just railroaded Joel into doing it.
FYI: Probably my only big complaint of this show comes from the Bill and Frank episode. Bill is a survivalist by nature. When raiders finally come, he stands in the middle of the road with a rifle while Frank is running around wildly. That makes no sense. Bill would have a plan that involves a safe place for Frank, and a nice firing position to defend the perimeter.
Now, Sam and Henry. Tying Sam and Henry’s background to the Kansas City rebellion was great. It gave the Kansas City faction a reason to keep coming after them, one that made sense. But the point I wanted to bring up had to do with violence.
in the game, Henry kills a number of infected and Pittsburgh hunters to protect Sam, and eventually Ellie. It’s just part of living in that world. But the show makes a point of him not being violent. He’s never killed anyone, and he doesn’t until Sam turns at the end of the episode.
The game is heartbreaking enough, fighting through Pittsburgh with him for several hours and then losing them. in the show, it’s worse. The only person Henry ever kills is his brother. It’s heartbreaking.
So ends the spoiler section.
Conclusion
Obviously, a lot of thoughts about this show and game. I think it is a fantastic example of translating a video game story to screen. The writers consolidate and rework the story to fit the new medium. They expand the world to meet the expectations of their audience. And they consider the influence of violence on the story and treat it well.
I recommend the show to anyone who can handle the violence and intensity of it. I also recommend the game, to anyone who enjoys games and has the time to sit down and play.
Thank you for reading through this post with me. Let me know what you think below, especially if you’ve experienced one or both of these examples of The Last of Us.
