Does The Last of Us have the best Narrative ever?

It caught me off guard..

What is good lore ?

Usually fantasy settings have decent lore because the very idea of fantasy requires world building and history. But I can't seem to grasp the idea of a game like HL2 having good lore ?

I see what you mean, but honestly, good lore is not really the exclusive domain of the fantasy genre. You can have good lore in science fiction (Mass Effect), horror (Resident Evil), cyberpunk (Deus Ex) etc. For example, take Breaking Bad- it has lore. The lore here is Walt's involvement with Grey Matter, Gus' past. Lore just means the backdrop that a story is set against, the backdrop that sets up the main narrative.

Similarly, HL2 has incredibly rich lore- as evidenced by the fact that so many spinoffs like Portal are all based on Half-Life's lore.

Stanley Parable.

I can subscribe to this.

Meh, the themes Spec Ops delves into are very cool, but it gets too much entangled in being a bro shooter even after it's played its hand.

Cut down the manshoot by like two thirds and it would be a more grounded and better story.

Same is true for TLOU, btw.

At least the manshoot in TLOU is satisfying, where as Spec Ops is just going through the motions until the next dramatic story scene.

I know there're people who will tell you that that's MUH MESSAGE.

Yeah no. MUH MESSAGE only stands to gain from killing dudes being actually fun right from the start.

I see. I didn't mean it like that. Just used fantasy as an example. Didn't know Portal was even based of off HL

Aperture Science (where Portal takes place) and Black Mesa (where Half Life takes place) are two competing factories in Half Life universe. The Borrealis, a ship with portal technology that Combine (baddies in HL2) want to use to lead an invasion to earth (end of HL 2 EP2) is the technology pioneered by Aperture Science (hence the Portal Gun in Portal games).

While I agree the gameplay was lacking... The atmosphere and setting was great. And what I meant by pacing was that it didn't get get entangled. Whether the mechanics were good or not..it doesn't matter, both can cause the game to lose it's focus but in this case it didn't. The story and plot points weren't always introduced separately from a gameplay sequence in the form a cutscene...It was consistently presented and always dangled in front of the player as bait.. I overlooked the bad mechanics because of this... I really liked it.. It was refreshing.. and so different from the other shooters.

Silent Hill 2 imo

I just like the Hollywood Blockbuster Archetype Naughty Dog has down.

I don't like the constant praise this game gets year after year. I thought the game itself was kind of subpar and the gameplay was bland and hard to get into. Kinda like the First Mass Effect.

Absolutely not. I will argue Mafia 2 had a deeper engaging story. Even gta 4.

Does The Last of Us have the best Narrative ever?

No.

Please tell me this is a joke? RDR had ONE good moment the entire game, the final scene in the barn. That was it. The rest was a case of "what generic moments can we steal from Wild West movies". It's overall narrative was average at best.

LOU has a great story, no doubt, but not sure it's the absolute best...

Collectively the Metal Gear franchise has the best narrative in gaming... MGS4 and MGS2 being the best two of the franchise (story-wise)

TLOU gets a close second/third IMO. with Bishock Infinite and Bioshock taking 4th and 5th place. I think if you don't have TLOU in your all time top 5 you're either lying or you haven't played the game.

SW does it again.. praising the game in the series with the WORST storyline. Well after Phantom Pain that is.

MGS4 > MGS2 > MGS1 > MGS3 > MGSV. I'd place

Haha. Some of us do go to sleep, you know.

I am not compelled to answer your little "challenge" tho. Just gonna have to deal with the fact that I think MGS4's story is silly.

The Last of Us is a story about a zombie apocalypse and a gruff manly man who has to escort the only person immune to the virus to be experimented on. It has been done a million times. It's not original.

Its execution is pretty good. The voice acting and animation are all very good. The dialogue is pretty decent. It doesn't go anywhere really interesting or unique. It isn't insightful or thought provoking in the way that games can be. It's a compelling, entertaining narrative that keeps you playing even when you already know how it's going to end.

A game like Planescape Torment is much better as a narrative. The fulcrum of its story is a question, "what can change the nature of a man?" and the game leaves it up to you to answer that question with your actions. The game asks you what you believe and allows you to prove it. It is deeply philosophical and says a lot about the nature of self and identity. It's also incredibly well written in its every nuance.

Or something like Metal Gear Solid 2, a story so clever it took almost 10 years for everyone to realize that Kojima was predicting the direction the media would take and warning us that constructing someone's environment out of pop-culture creates an easily manipulated artificially constructed reality that can give anyone with control of the media control over people. It was so clever that it came true.

Then there are games like Okami, which are beautiful and deeply emotional mythological epics filled with memorable characters, clever parables and heart wrenching climaxes to very fleshed out character arcs.

I just can't take people who think of TLOU as some masterpiece of storytelling very seriously. It does a good job creating an exciting and compelling context for gameplay, but if analysed purely as a narrative there are so many games that do a much better job.

It's somewhat convoluted, but being convoluted doesn't mean that the actual themes or ideas are complex. At best it means that the plot structure is complicated, but I wouldn't even say that. Underneath all that extra shit that Kojima puts into the story, the core plot is pretty simple and easy to understand.

But really, what I think is hilarious is carshamy's claim that MGS2 is some kind of thinking man's story. And him equating a supposedly "complex" plot with making one think is pretentious at best. If a complicated plot was all it took to be complex, the later Harry Potter novels would be more complex than many literary novels. But the reality is that they are not because a complex plot does not always equated to complex ideas and themes.

No I thought it was very cliched and generic.

I can see why someone would put MGS4 above 3 (1 I do not agree with mostly because of how much more complex 3 is, but I will agree that 1 is at least much more tightly written), but placing 2 above 3 is inexplicable, I think. 2 is just a very poorly written story.

Not only is Shattered Memories at least just as good narrative-wise, it only really works (is made better) as a game

I think MGS4 is easily the poorest story-wise (tho I haven't played V yet). For all MGS2's ridiculousness, it at least is memorable. MGS4 doesn't even have that going for it. I'm convinced that Kojima was totally winging it for MGS4, just `making that shit up as he went along. It had some of the worst pacing and really amateurish storytelling techniques as well. Remember those parts after the boss fights when Drebin would explain their whole life story in length expository chunks? Awful.

Several old school PC based rpgs have much better narrative.

@RoboCopISJesus: have you even played TLOU?

Oh, I agree, which is why personally I rank MGS3 higher than MGS4, and also because 3's pacing was spot on. That said, 4 does have a great story to tell, it's just that it doesn't tell it very well, thanks to a lot of its exposition heavy cutscenes. When you look back on it though, you can see that the game still tries to tell a good story, which is why I can see why someone would like it (I personally loved the entire ending sequence, those final two hours or so were done very well imo).

I think as far as Metal Gear is concerned, the execution of the story is just as important as the story itself, and while both MGS3 and 4 excel in at least one of those areas, MGS2 was just a poorly written mess, which is why I think it's the most ridiculous out of all five (maybe level with TPP).

I would say yes. It all felt like a high quality movie through out. Everything was just so well done, all the little details in the gameplay, to the cutscenes and acting. It felt like a movie even while playing, much thanks to the great dialog and animation while playing. Not just some gameplay bits to get you to the next cutscene like the norm was before. Naughty Dog has really set the benchmark.

@lostrib: Yes.

Better question is, have any of the cows in this thread even heard of Planescape or BGII?

Literally finished TLOU: Remastered a few hours ago as I had a PS4 for xmas...... Loved the game but it's not as engrossing as I was expecting it to be considering all the hype and praise the game gets from pretty much everyone.

Maybe it didn't help that I had seen a few of the Digital Foundry videos of it so did actually see some of the sections before I played them.

It is a fine game but I was disappointed that I didn't buy into the who immersion as much as I was expecting.

Not sure about best RPG (gameplay isn't so hot), but PST arguably has the best RPG storytelling to date.

As for the overall best video game storytelling, that would be Clannad and Steins Gate (both visual novels I've mentioned quite a few times around here).

TLOU narrative is very cliche. Most of the plot was so predictable except for a few deaths, that it feels like Druckmann has no originality in his writing. It's cliche as hell but it's so well written for a game that it will engross you into its world and you end up loving it so much.

I'm much more impressed by detective stories such as Sherlock Holmes and Phoenix Wright as apposed to apocalyptic tales like TWD and TLOU. But I can appreciate it for what it is and even have it in my top games list.

what is up with these walls of text?

"yes" only has 3 letters you dumb dumbs

Hit the nail on the head. Over a decade ago, people kept complaining about how complex/complicated/convoluted its story/ideas/themes were. But nowadays, over a decade later, it's the opposite, with people complaining that it's simple/straightforward and not complex/complicated/convoluted enough. What's changed is that 2015 is now a very different world from 2001. What was complex/complicated/convoluted to comprehend back then is now pretty simple/straightforward to grasp today. Back then, internet culture was in its infancy, there was no such thing as social media, or Facebook or Twitter, or 4chan or Reddit, or smartphones, or the War of Terror, or ideas like the connection between war and video games, or extreme online trolling, or internet censorship, or internet memes, or New World Order conspiracies, or alternative online media, or many of the ideas we'd be familiar with today. And yet MGS2 was commenting on things like these long before they had happened and/or become popular, and fairly accurately predicted what the future would be like over a decade on from its release.

Phoenix Wright has excellent storytelling. It's funny, it's eventful, it's suspenseful, it's clever, the characters display so much warmth.

I cant think of many games that top. That ending, wow, I would've felt the same was a Joe. Very riveting story and not very often I care about the characters in a video game.

@GreySeal9: exactly my thoughts. There's so much character in everything.

Good story, but there is better out there in my opinion

Sure, if you've never seen a zombie flick before. Eh, let's just say that it's not for me.

Yeah, i love the trilogy. Especially the first one, which i think is the best in the entire series.

Dark Souls has a better story than both of them.

The last of us was good, but in the end it's just another spin of overused zombie apocalypses tale.

I kinda agree with what you said about HL2's story. However an excellent game.

sure.

My reaction to the premise of the OP is just guttural laughter, but in respect to the idea of finding a game with the best narrative (or a stellar one), I rarely ever see anyone talk about Odin Sphere. While I could name several others already mentioned in this thread (and I didn't go through them all), I want to bring light on Odin Sphere.

It's not the best game ever made, in fact, it's pretty dull and monotonous in the later stages, and on the PS2, it was nigh-unplayable with those sub-10 fps framerates on some bosses... but the way in which the stories of five separate characters are connected and intertwined, all culminating in the impending doom of the world was just flat out brilliant and a win for gaming story-telling.

I honestly cannot recommend playing the GAME potion of the game, but the story alone is worth seeing all the way through.

I never played MGS, but no wonder why I never got attracted to its story then. The trailers felt over-dramatic. But the stealth itself is appealing to me (at least in MGSV).

It's a very personal story with really well developed characters that feel very real. I don't think it's the best narrative ever, as you've pointed out there are other games that do certain things better. Max Payne, for example, is really well written.

Witcher 3 hell Hearts of stone the expansion has a mature story on par with films man

I haven't played TLOU but I'm sure if I have, I would have probably liked its story and yes, Max Payne 2 had an awesome dark story not like that POS story of Max Payne 3. I myself love Bioware and CDPR's narratives/stories (or you could say those of RPGs).

Purely from a gameplay perspective, there's no denying the quality of all the Metal Gear games (I personally think 3 and 4 are two of the greatest stealth games ever). Hell, even MGS5 has incredible gameplay design, it's just those repetition issues in the second half that bring it down. But I hate it when people pretend like MGS tells a very good, very well written story. It doesn't. It's over the top and ridiculous, and more often than not, it's poorly written.

stupid people*

Max Payne and SH2 had better narrative and better gameplay than this overrated turd. At least it's not as bad as MGS /hurl

Still MGS4's storyline beats any other game of last generation, and on par with the best (Bishock, Bioshock Infinite and The Last of US)