The Last of Us Part I Shows There’s Isn’t A Completely Faithful Remake

Also contains spoilers for The Last of Us Part I.

Even though it’s a remake of a game released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3, The Last of Us Part I is, in most respects, the same game as the original The Last of Us. It will take players a little longer to understand the story if they have not played the original. The story is the same, and they will meet the same characters. They also experience many of the same emotions. The two of them see the same post-apocalyptic United States in which Joel is traumatized and must confront his inability not to leave Ellie, his surrogate child.

Although it retains the same script and design principles as Part I, it still stands as a completely new game. By making a game look “better” than it did before, it’s changed into something else. It can be altered in many ways.

The character designs are what make The Last of Us Part I so distinctive. Developer Naughty Dog updated the game’s visuals, improving the graphical fidelity of everything the player sees, from the stomach-churning fungus boils covering a massive “Bloater” monster to the bits of bright green grass poking out from the cracked asphalt of a ghost town’s potholed roads. It’s the cast’s faces, though, that really stick out.

Protagonists Joel and Ellie are more naturally expressive – the elastic cartoonishness of their original faces has been replaced by realistically furrowed brows and, of course, wide-eyed expressions of horror when something tragic plays out before them. The characters also appear quite different from people. Joel is a great example of a dramatic change in character design. He appears much older and wearier than before. His tired eyes are etched with wrinkles. His eyes are highlighted by bruised shadows. His age can be seen in the whiteness of his hair and his beard.

His expressions are less sincere than ever before. They have lost their cowboy charm and been replaced by a sort of outward cruelty. This makes it difficult to see him taking the heroic turn that the two versions of the game call for, of which he ultimately is incapable. The sense that Joel is a man running out of time – that the world has ground him down and that he has little left to cling to beyond his care for Ellie – makes it less shocking that he makes the selfish decision to stop his companion from giving her life to create a cure for a world-destroying virus. Joel is redesigned so that he doesn’t appear to be too beaten up by his violence to see a brighter future.

This kind of change alters the game’s impression by subtly underscoring the original’s narrative. The remake may also introduce dramatic changes in other instances. A few characters are now more distinct, including the Boston quarantine Zone residents who were hardened by the disease, as well as Joel and Ellie’s human enemies on the way west. The faces reflect an increased sense of individuality in a group that was previously homogenous. Instead of seeming like they’re less important than the main characters in the story, the nameless enemies give a better impression of being real, living people.

Their faces are the only thing that makes it difficult to distinguish between important and non-essential characters. Because of this, the deaths of these characters feel more like the destruction and extinguishing digital life than the game’s original goal. Part I also feels more like its sequel, The Last of Us Part II. It tries to convey its brutality through touch points such as making enemies cry out for each other during combat, or having them beg for their life after being wounded.

These visual reminders widen the scope of Part I’s world. The original Last of Us was difficult to separate the many (or even hundreds) of bandits, soldiers, and civilians killed by Joel and Ellie into anything other than human beings. Their more personable faces help clarify the story further, showing that an entire nation lives beyond the spotlight shone on the main cast, their fates changed by bloody encounters with the protagonist – or narrowed into a seemingly eternally barbaric future when Joel chooses to save Ellie’s life rather than allow her death to provide them with a hopeful future.

While these design decisions emphasize aspects of the story already present in the original, other significant visual changes alter The Last of Us’ characters in ways that fundamentally rethink their role in the narrative.

Tess, Joel’s criminal and romantic partner from the early part of the game, has received perhaps the most dramatic redesign. The original Tess was a younger, livelier counterpart to Joel – a companion whose relative youth and similar disregard for the lives of her enemies highlighted that it wasn’t just the game’s protagonist, but also those around him who had learned to repeatedly kill others and risk their own deaths in order to eke out a living in post-apocalyptic America. Because Tess now looks as worn down and wrung out as Joel, her final moments in the story – sacrificing her life to ensure he and Ellie can escape a group of enemies in Boston – take on a different inflection.

Tess in the original game

Tessa from TLOU Part I remake

The younger Tess was a representative of the post-apocalyptic generation, who were looking for companionship and the brutal work of smuggling survival. When she gave her life for Ellie’s survival, it meant she ultimately saw the world differently from Joel when it mattered most. This decision, echoed in Ellie’s willingness to die for a cure and Joel’s final decision to condemn the world to further murder and horror because of his selfishness, meant that the original game positioned Joel as something outside of the youthful possibilities that Ellie and Tess initially represented. With Tess’ redesign, this subtle thematic touch slips away. Tess still sacrifices herself, keeping to the original script, but her doing so doesn’t carry the same thematic weight it once did.

This is a good example of how a remake can never be considered neutral, regardless of how close it adheres to the original. In the case of Final Fantasy VII Remake, this dynamic holds true. And it remains so in manically devotional artistic tributes like Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, 1960 thriller PsychoThis remake recreated every aspect of the original, from script to shot composition. As evidence of what’s lost in even the most faithful remakes: It’s tough to find Vince Vaughn’s Norman Bates as frighteningly compelling as the original’s Anthony Perkins. No matter how difficult a remake attempts make something new without significantly altering the source material, recreation is characterized by new decisions and changes that are always introduced.

That’s because a remake – even one made by a large team like Naughty Dog – reveals the fingerprints of those who made it. The games are the product of time, place and the priorities at their creation. They also reflect the limitations and technological capabilities of that time. When Naughty Dog returned to The Last of Us for Part I, the studio did so with knowledge of the original’s successes And failures, commercially and critically. With a sequel already made and published, it succeeded. It did it with nine years’ worth of experience guiding its decisions.

Part I of Last of Us is, despite having many similarities to the game, quite different. Its characters are not the exact same characters as before, its world is not the exact same world as before, and the experience of playing it is different enough that it becomes a new work – one that might best be viewed as a different draft of the same novel, or a new cut of the same film. Recognizing these differences makes the 2013 Last of Us Part I and the Last of Us Part I more than just a newer and older version of the story.

Original publication: Issue 351 Game Informer.