The Last of Us Part I Shows There’s No Such Thing As A 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. The plot will be much the same for those who first play the remake. The story is the same, and they will meet the same characters. They also experience many of the same emotions. Joel and Ellie both experience the same vision in a post-apocalyptic United States. Joel struggles to accept his loss of Ellie as his surrogate.

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. You can alter it in any way you like.

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Protagonists Joel and Ellie are more naturally expressive – the elastic cartoonishness of their original faces has been replaced by realistically furrowed brows and, of course, wide-eyed expressions of horror when something tragic plays out before them.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.

The expressions of his face are more apathetic than they were before. His cowboy smile has been lost and replaced by an outwardly apathetic look. 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’s appearance has been altered to make him appear more beaten than he is by the violence of his life.

This kind of change alters the game’s impression by subtly underscoring the original’s narrative. Other cases introduce more drastic differences. The unique characters in the remake, such as the Boston quarantine area residents and the human enemies Joel, Ellie, and their many victims on the journey west, have more detail faces. This allows them to better represent an individuality within a homogenous group. 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 digital destruction than the violent extinguishing and destruction of human life as the original game intended. 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 soldiers and bandits that Joel and Ellie killed 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.

Tessa from the original video game

Tess from TLOU Part I remake

In the past, Tess, younger, was seen as representative of future post-apocalyptic individuals who only wanted companionship and to survive by smuggling. 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.

These examples show that even though a remake may be a neutral effort, it is not a true recalibration of the original. The same dynamic applies to a top-down reimagining such as Final Fantasy VII Remake. And it remains so in manically devotional artistic tributes like Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, 1960 thriller PsychoThe remake was faithful to the original in every way, including script and 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. Video games reflect the times and places they were created, the priorities and limitations of their creators, as well as the technological and financial resources of our 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. The sequel was made and it had been released. 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, is very 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.