When I saw the sixth episode of The Last of Us, I was terrified. I had played the game years ago (despite a very rational and healthy fear of zombies) and I knew where this episode was going and what kind of fights Joel and Ellie would be forced into. But then the show didn’t spend hours in one place as Joel and Ellie snuck around to avoid getting murdered and doing a little murder themselves. Instead, the episode moved forward with a flourish and got straight to the good stuff – which in video games usually means the cutscenes.
This article contains spoilers for the first six episodes of The Last of Us.
The way The Last of Us skids through hours of battle to get straight to the point was one of my favorite parts of the show. It’s not an action show, but a horror show punctuated by moments of action. We don’t spend our time marveling at the characters engaging in cool exploits or downright gun-fu a la A Better Tomorrow and John Wick. More like real life, the plot is a means to an end and is meant to be horrifying and maybe a little annoying, rather than awe-inspiring.
That was on purpose. Game creator and show producer Neil Druckmann has spoken at length about his desire to ensure the violence in The Last of Us has an impact. “[O]One of the easiest decisions we made was like saying, ‘Let’s remove all of these. Let’s only have as much violence in this story as we need to and no more,” Druckmann told Variety earlier this year. “This allows the violence on screen to be even more impactful than it is in the game.”
When you have to play the same sequence multiple times, it stops being harrowing and can only become irritating.
The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin has also spoken out about the very different approach to violence the show has compared to the game. “Watching a human being die, I think, should be very different from watching pixels die,” he told the New Yorker in January.
People quickly hopped on the quote as an example of how Mazin denigrates one art form (video games) to support another (live-action TV). But Mazin was referring to the way the carnage in video games can sometimes decrease rather than increase emotional response. If you’re in a tricky part of a game – say it’s about a college hospital full of murderous assailants – and you have to repeat the sequence over and over because you keep getting killed, then the emotional impact of the sequence will level up change.
As a person who sucked at playing The Last of Us, I tend to agree with Mazin. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is more pathetic than getting killed in a big fight meant to carry a lot of emotional weight and having to repeat it. The characters I fought stopped being characters and became obstacles, their cries of pain just becoming a soundtrack of anger. When you have to play the same sequence multiple times, it stops being harrowing and can only become irritating.
And every time The Last of Us TV series skipped one of those big fights, it hit my brain with dopamine like finding out the final boss is just a fast-paced event. It feels like I, a mediocre player, get away with something every time it happens. When I realized that the third episode would simply be a touching exploration of love in an apocalypse, and that I wouldn’t have to watch characters infiltrate a school full of infected and battle a bloat, I’m pretty sure I quietly of my place on the cheered couch. I may have cried because these lovers had just decided to end their lives together, but I was incredibly fortunate that I didn’t have to go through an adaptation of a fight scene that I found miserable.
The same thing happened at the end of the sixth episode when Ellie and Joel quickly realize that the university hospital they traveled to has been abandoned and they should leave. It was like an unseen force (Craig Mazin and company) pressing the X button to skip the action. I felt like I used codes to avoid an entire level I had never been a fan of.
I’m not the only one who enjoys skipping to the cutscenes in a multi-story video game. Youtubers have been stripping games down to their essential stories for years, including The Last of Us. Here’s a 5+ hour snippet of the remastered The Last of Us with nearly a million views.
And here’s a nearly 11-hour video that does the same for The Last of Us II. Whose length is…which makes me realize why the next game could be split into a second and third season instead of being consolidated into a single season. This video has more than three million views.
There are many reasons why people enjoy watching the cutscenes. They might want to know the full story before spending hours of their lives playing through it. They might want to revisit part of the game without having to play it. Maybe, like me, they have an almost crippling fear of zombies and would prefer to avoid the scariest parts of a game they’ve heard a lot about.
In the earlier days of cutscenes, they weren’t just there to advance the story, they were treated like a reward. Defeating a boss in Final Fantasy VIII meant watching a fully rendered Quistis take out a robot with a giant gun, or watching Rinoa and Squall fall in love on the ballroom floor as the music swelled . These tiny super pixel characters were literally fleshed out when they were rendered in a cutscene. This is why skipping the gameplay bits in The Last of Us feels so good. It’s like I’m cheating. I hope future hyper-faithful video game adaptations take note of this. If the story is strong enough, the good parts aren’t necessarily the fights, but the moments in between.