Most of the hilarity emanating from Like a Dragon and its spin-off series, Judgment, comes from the franchise’s snappy dialogue and the absurdist character and item descriptions of its English translations. For example, Like a Dragon’s stalwart protagonist, Kiryu Kazuma, can go from calling a new fighting technique he saw on the street “rad” to vehemently explaining that his propensity to brawl with thugs in public doesn’t make him a “fisting artist.”
Sega (EN) / Ryu Ga Gotoku
Don’t let the fact that developer Ryu Ga Gotoku’s samurai spin-off, Like a Dragon: Ishin!, is a historical period piece that takes place in 1867,make you think that it won’t contain the same levels of ludicrous sidequests and wacky dialogue as its predecessors. If anything, the fact that Kiryu’s feudal stand-in, Sakomoto Ryoma, partakes in similar madcap misadventures in the year of the Meiji restoration and the downfall of the Shogunate only adds to the game’s zaniness.
In that spirit, I spoke with Marilyn Lee, the senior localization producer for Like a Dragon: Ishin!, to get some insight into the work that was put into crafting Like a Dragon: Ishin’s English translation.
Localization in a nutshell
Much like how Like a Dragon’s bombastic heat system fighting moves ought to make you feel like an extreme beast of a man, a localizer must ensure that every bit of text in Like a Dragon emanates an authentic Yakuza experience.
“The translating team takes the raw Japanese and churns out a direct translation as true to the meaning of the Japanese as possible but ultimately clunky, dry, and not especially what we’d call natural,” Lee said. “The team of editors then takes that line and brings in the characterization, makes it sound like natural dialog, which becomes the final script.”
Sega (EN) / Ryu Ga Gotoku
‘Translation is not mathematics’
One way of providing context for players that’s often used in translated works of Japanese games is to swing south with dialogue translations of characters with Kansai accents and give them a southern Texan drawl. But while folks who consume Japanese media have become accustomed to Osakan characters having the vernacular of a person hailing from Alabama or the Bronx, Lee said the LaD localization team strives to “avoid making a direct analog between specific English and Japanese dialects.”
Lee credits the LaD localization team’s decision to examine vernacular characteristics and accents “on a deeper level” to Scott Strichart, a senior localization producer at Sega and “the former architect of Like a Dragon’s Western renaissance.” “While our philosophy on Kansai-ben involves many colloquialisms that might independently register as Southern, we’ve failed if players are categorically hearing all Kansai speakers with a twang,” Lee said.
“In the case of Ishin!, we would invite players to compare characters like Majima and Saejima (or Soji and Nagakura) to the game’s Gunman trainer, William Bradley, who was deliberately written to evoke the manner of a late 19th-century Southern cowboy. Likewise, this game also introduces the archaic Tosa-ben dialect, which we hope is difficult to attach to a given style of English and more so simply reads as rustic and insular,” Lee said.
When it comes to how much free reign the LaD localization team has in terms of cursing, Lee says games with the localization caliber of the Like a Dragon series “can’t simply mechanically swap out ‘kuso’ for ‘damn’ because “translation is not mathematics.”
“Cursing is a vital linguistic component in English, and therefore our editors generally have leave to employ it as freely as they would in any other M-rated title (within reason),” Lee said.
“Localization, as we view it, favors recreating the experience of the source language user rather than risking a sacrifice in writing quality to stay devoutly faithful to the source language itself. If a skillfully deployed curse is going to make a joke hit as well in an English line as it did in a curse-free Japanese line, then we’ll almost always use that curse.”
Localization funsies
You better sing, Ryoma.Screenshot: Sega / Ryu Ga Gotoku
My most hot-button question for Lee was which character in Ishin! was her favorite to localize. It should be noted that when I sent Lee this inquiry via email, I made sure to include the tagline “and why is it Majima?” To my delight, Lee replied saying Majima is “fun to watch, he’s fun to fight, and he’s absolutely fun to localize.”
“Majima is the cross-section of so many compelling character types: he can be hilarious, he can be frightening, he can oscillate between being oblivious and being the smartest man in the room and somehow it always feels authentic. Yakuza 0 players also know that deep down, there’s a real human there, projecting all these personality traits for reasons he may not even remember (in the main series’ continuity, anyway).”
Majima’s cult of personality notwithstanding, Lee said Ishin’s minor characters deserve their due just as much as the Mad Dog of Shimano (period piece edition).
“Working for days at a time on minor characters such as Tom the would-be samurai, or the cryptic, slang-weaving Mysterious Merchant gives our team the chance to craft a wide variety of voices. Truthfully, it demonstrates how tenacious the settings of RGG games are, that they support so many [people] of so many dispositions and still feel cohesive.”
Lost in translation
True.Screenshot: Sega / Ryu Ga Gotoku
Recently, Viz Media translator Kumar Sivasubramanian famously threw in the towel after having the unenviable task of translating Cipher Academy, a mystery series by the creator of the Monogatari series. Sivasubramanian called it quits with Cipher Academy because a bulk of the series’ dialogue was filled with cultural or phonetic puns that don’t make sense in English. Like Sivasubramanian, LaD’s localization team is also confronted with the herculean task of translating Japanese puns or jargon for English-speaking players.
Whenever there are nuances and phrases that don’t have a true 1:1 equivalent in either English or Japanese, Lee said the LaD localization team uses their “best judgment” to find “suitable methods to convey things as closely as possible to the essence of the source language.”
Although some LaD fans can be “diehard purists,” Lee says most have a generally subjective line on what sounds “‘true” to the source material.
Ryoma is a god among men. Screenshot: Sega / Ryu Ga Gotoku
With Like a Dragon, we believe that players can tell that the writing is meant to harmonize with every other aspect of the presentation. If a moment has an over-the-top zoom-in and we replace a simple ‘Nani!?’ with an English line that matches the absurdity of the cinematography, we haven’t betrayed the authorial intent there—we’ve done our best to execute on that intent across countless linguistic and cultural chasms.”
Much like colloquialisms in Cipher Academy, Lee said Japanese puns “never translate.” Whenever a pun is uttered in the LaD series, Lee said her team must “roll with them as they come and commiserate together for the real tricky ones.”
“Thankfully, that also means there are afternoons spent with the whole team shouting out funny chicken names, which is basically the entire reason we all got our college degrees,” Lee said.
Measure twice, cut once (Yakuza style)
He just like me fr.Screenshot: Sega / Ryu Ga Gotoku
In total, Lee said it took the localization team a little over a year to finish localizing Ishin! to have the game ready to launch on February 21 for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC. Meanwhile, the games that took the longest to finish localizing are Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 because they were a part of the Yakuza Remastered Collection, Lee said.
“Some projects took a long time from start to finish just due to the localization process was intertwined with the development of the game. Some took long because of the number of languages involved. Others took a long time because of the sheer volume of the project,” Lee said.
While localizing the drama and humor in Ishin! was par for the course with other games in the series, the trickiest part of localizing the spin-off was ensuring players weren’t lost with the historical context and geography in Ishin!
“Our updated glossary and new memoir feature can do some of that work, but ultimately it falls to astute translation and sharp editing to be successful. Creating context for the audience is critical,” Lee said.
Historical context for the Meiji Restoration period
Sega (EN) Ryu Ga Gotoku
For historical reasons, Ishin! has an unapologetically negative stance toward Americans and European pressure at the end of the Edo Period, which staff writer Sisi Jiang expanded upon in their review for Ishin! When it came to handling the localization of a game that criticizes the countries some players come from, Lee reiterated that it’s a localizer’s job to ensure the experiences designed in a game are brought to players from different countries, even if aspects of translated text offend people.
“Our job as localization professionals is to convey the meaning and sentiment of a piece of media as accurately as possible in another language. Sometimes this means tackling a challenging subject, especially in Ishin’s case where many characters are driven by different political ideologies that are linked to a historical time period,” Lee said. “We did our best to convey the text, and players have the freedom to come to their own conclusions.”
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, successor to 2017’s Breath of the Wild, is out soon. And while there’s a big fancy collector’s edition of the sequel available, which includes a book, Nintendo is this week taking the time to revisit the original, releasing for free a book called The Explorer’s Guide.
It used to be the whole point of the special Explorer’s Edition of the game, but with Breath of the Wild now six years old Nintendo figures we’ve all explored quite enough, thank you, and so instead of the book helping us find our way around a post-apocalyptic Hyrule for the first time, it can now help us remember the good times instead.
As Polygon report, Nintendo have released the book as a pdf on their company site, and you can read/download it here. It’s…OK? I mean it’s typical limited edition filler, in that it’s not useful enough to be a true guide, there’s not enough art for it to be an art book and it’s not specific enough to be the game’s manual.
It’s still a nice little thing to thumb through though, even after all these years, though weirdly not the whole book has been uploaded. For reasons known only to Nintendo, pages 73-84 are missing, an omission that’s not for plot reasons because there are spoiler warnings present on pages that did make the cut (If you’ve got this book at home from 2017 and can tell us what’s on the pages, that’d be great!).
If you want to check it out, note that most of the book is dedicated to explaining the broad concepts of Breath of the Wild’s open world design to newcomers, and so may not be the most interesting thing you’ll read today, but the intro section is still fun, if only because Nintendo had to try and wrangle the series’ convoluted timelines and history into a couple of concise pages!
The following contains spoilers for The Last of Us show and both games.
Inevitably, someone will read everything I write here and chalk it up to “being mad about the show doing something different from the games,” but reader, I implore you to consider that just because something is different, that doesn’t mean it is inherently good or above critique. I’ve got beef with the version of Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us show. The show has constantly been oscillating between big swings and faithful recreations, and some of its departures from the game have certainly been for the better. But certain scenes, dialogue, and even behind-the-scenes discussions surrounding the character of Ellie are leaning into a narrative that I think already does her journey through violent grief a huge disservice and we haven’t even seen it through, yet.
To get it out of the way, none of this is on Bella Ramsey, who portrays the young girl in the adaptation. She’s doing an excellent job with the material she’s been given, and it’s been a truly refreshing experience in even the most faithfully recreated scenes to see Ellie played by a teenager. Ashley Johnson’s performance in the game still captured the character’s youth, but it had the polish of an adult playing a child character. No, my beef is with showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, who are leaning harder toward a narrative suggested by The Last of Us’ marketing, rather than the one that plays out in the games themselves. I’m specifically referring to how the show frames Ellie’s relationship with violence, and how it portrays her not as a child who had to learn how to fight to protect herself and the ones she cares about, but as the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a kid who kills animals in their backyard for fun.
The showrunners say Ellie is “activated” by and likes violence in the show
Initially, I didn’t pick up what Mazin and Druckmann were putting down when I first watched the series’ premiere episode. In the final scene of the episode, Ellie witnesses a brutal murder of a FEDRA soldier at the hands of Joel, played by Pedro Pascal. She watches in what I initially read as shock, but as Mazin describes it in the Inside the Episode video for the pilot (skip to about the 4:30 mark), this isn’t a stunned silence. It’s her being “activated.” She “likes” watching the violence unfold. She likes the idea of being defended to brutal ends, and the idea of this dude getting “punished” for the indiscretion of holding them at gunpoint.
Screenshot: HBO / Kotaku
Perhaps, at the time, I read her silence as shock because of my familiarity with the game, where she repeatedly expresses shock and discomfort early on at the lengths Joel must go to to keep them alive. But the framing of Ellie as a person who actively likes violence rather than one who turns to it out of necessity has become much more apparent throughout the season’s run. Episode three, which is otherwise a beautiful story about how violence is sometimes the end result of loving and protecting someone in the post-apocalypse, has a scene where Ellie finds an infected pinned down by a bunch of rubble. Rather than dealing with it efficiently and getting back to business, Ellie takes her time to hover over the poor bastard and look him over like he’s a dying animal. She slices open his head with her switchblade and sees what’s under the skin of an infected. When she finally stabs him in the head and kills him, she pulls back with a satisfied expression that’s unnerving. Again, Ramsey is putting in the work here.
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Joel never sees this scene unfold, because it’s important that he views her as an innocent kid and not a weird, violence-loving pervert, but, horrifyingly enough, the character who does see this side of her is David, the predatory, cannibalistic cult leader she meets in the series’ eighth episode. When he’s got her caged up in his cannibal kitchen, he says he can’t let her out because she would take her switchblade and gut him. Which, like, you’re a cannibal who kidnapped her, so spare us the judgment when she naturally wants to kill someone who abducted her. But he goes on to say she has a “violent heart.” Which, unfortunately, I guess is true in this version of the character.
The reason this doesn’t sit well with me is because it’s not only fundamentally at odds with Ellie’s story in the game, but because it feels like it’s rooted in a simplistic and reductive view of her story in the source material, a view that was largely perpetuated by Naughty Dog in its own marketing campaign for The Last of Us Part II.
What is Ellie’s relationship with violence in the games?
Let’s rewind to the beginning of Ellie’s story in the game. When she and Joel first meet, she’s not had a ton of exposure to violence. At least, not the kind of human brutality Joel would expose her to throughout the first game. When Joel kills the FEDRA forces there, Ellie is taken aback, having thought they would just hold them up as they made their escape. Eventually, Ellie comes to accept the necessity of this violence as they make their cross-country journey, leading to her first kill in order to save Joel from a raider. She’s sick about it, and it results in tension between her and Joel because she picked up a gun despite his deliberately never giving her one. The two then bond over him teaching her how to use a rifle and then giving her a pistol. It’s a point of newfound trust, and it illustrates that Ellie takes on violence for necessity’s sake.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
The equivalent scene in the show is a painfully drawn-out sequence where Ellie shoots a raider in the leg and while he pleads for his life, Joel tells her to get to safety while he handles it. Then the two jump right into talking about the effects killing can have on your soul. In an abstract way, this feels like it’s setting up Part II’s themes in a more overt way, which has been a running theme throughout the season. We can see the show pretty deliberately leading into the events of the sequel for season two with a number of things, including references to characters like Dina and framing Joel’s actions in a sympathetic way. Part II sees Ellie going down a dark, violent path, so perhaps the thinking here is that by asserting Ellie is a violent person, the things she does later will seem more consistent with our understanding of her character. But the foundation of Ellie’s relationship with violence is fundamentally different, and I don’t think it’s for the better when, in the games, the contrast between who Ellie was and who she became is so fundamental to her story.
Part of what makes The Last of Us Part II effective is that it feels like a transformative story for Ellie. She’s gone from a child who was horrified by Joel’s violence to a young adult who travels to Seattle in the grip of righteous fury. She goes on this crusade to find a group who killed Joel and at least kill Abby, the one who dealt the killing blow. She goes under the pretense that this is what she wants to do, but as she goes on her revenge tour, each subsequent kill wears on her.
The death of Nora, which is a loaded scene for a lot of reasons, is where this starts to become clear. Ellie commits one of her most heinous acts of violence in the game during an interrogation, and in the next scene, she’s overwhelmed with guilt at the lengths she had to go to. She has to be comforted by Dina, afraid her partner will see a monster where she once saw a future. Next, in an attempt to extort information about Abby’s whereabouts from her friends Mel and Owen, she tries to use Joel’s signature interrogation technique of asking one party for information and confirming with the second. If the information matches up, she knows it’s accurate. If not, well, that’s up to her discretion. But despite her attempts, the confrontation goes off the rails and ends with Ellie killing both of them in a messy scrap. She then realizes Mel was pregnant, and is immediately overcome with anxiety at having killed an innocent party. Throuhgout her spiral into violence, Ellie is repeatedly confronted with the possibility that she’s not cut out for what she signed on for.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog / Kotaku
Eventually, she leaves Seattle without killing Abby. The fact that she killed everyone other than the person she views as most responsible for Joel’s death wears on her, but Dina is growing sick from her own pregnancy, and everyone around her is telling her this is the best course of action. They argue that Abby losing those close to her is an equivalent punishment for taking the life of Joel. She reluctantly goes along with the plan, up until Abby shows up at their hideout and forces her to go along with the plan by way of a beatdown and a threat.
After this, Ellie tries to live a normal life in the post-apocalypse by living on a farm with Dina and their son JJ. But she’s still dealing with PTSD surrounding the death of Joel, and ultimately leaves her family behind to pursue Abby once more. Once she tracks her down to Santa Barbara, California, the two come to blows one more time. Ellie gets the upper hand and nearly drowns her on the California beach. But in a moment of clarity, she lets Abby go, realizing this was never going to bring her the peace she wanted.
What does violence actually mean in The Last of Us?
Whether driven by survival or grief, The Last of Us has never framed violence as something characters take an overt pleasure in. Sure, when Ellie kills Jordan—who was a snarky piece of shit—in Part II, it’s satisfying to fuck him up. But it has an underlying meaning beyond Ellie liking acts of carnage. The fact that she has gone through a fair bit of the series uncomfortable or traumatized by violence makes her giving into it a moment of noticeable change, and her repeated struggle to persevere in her quest illustrates that despite her compulsion, this isn’t who she is.
HBO Max
Meanwhile, the showrunners are over here telling us that this is absolutely who Ellie is. It’s alluding to a version of this story that feels more in line with Naughty Dog’s marketing of The Last of Us Part II than it does the story it actually told. As a person who found Ellie (and Joel and Abby, for that matter) profoundly sympathetic by the end of the sequel, it’s worrisome to me that HBO’s version of her is leaning into a perverse vision of what violence means in The Last of Us.
Unfortunately, Part II’s marketing campaign lost the thread of grief and love-driven violence that’s at the core of the game and swaths of the internet think The Last of Us is about how violence is bad, and players should feel bad for doing it. How did this interpretation become so prominent? Naughty Dog itself said this is what the game is about. In an interview with Launcher, series director Neil Druckmann described the dueling protagonist structure as having been at least partially inspired by his witnessing of an Israeli soldier’s lynching (there’s an argument to be made that centrist Israeli politics run through the game’s veins), and a desire he felt to hurt those responsible. This was followed by immense guilt and a desire to explore that idea in Part II’s structure. The idea is that you would play through Ellie’s segments killing Abby’s friends, then find out at the end that Abby killed Joel in her own grief.
I don’t think it’s wrong to be judgemental of Joel, Ellie, or Abby’s actions. The game itself is pretty overtly critical of them throughout. Ellie’s killing of Abby’s friends is always treated as something that comes with a cost, as nearly every kill she commits is framed as mentally taxing on her. Abby, meanwhile, spends her entire half of the game trying to make up for the way she tortured and killed Joel because she’s trying to “lighten the load.” But nevertheless, we have to act out the play until it reaches its natural conclusion, which leads to the same dissonance we can feel in the first game’s final segment where Joel kills several innocent people to save Ellie.
For characters like Joel and Ellie, violence is a language spoken in a world where they’ve learned and been taught that it’s the only way they can communicate. It’s all the things that the characters feel, that they navigate, that they express through violence (or, in key moments, the choice not to use violence) that really matters. The desire to protect. The desire to avenge. The decision to forgive. But despite Part II delving into themes of grief and forgiveness through violence, the narrative that this series is about violence permeates through how we talk about it. That’s on Naughty Dog because that was the message the studio put out. But I find everything the company said about the game in marketing materials and interviews, such as the assertion that the game was “about hate” when it was first revealed, suspect after it became clear the studio had been deliberately obfuscating what Part II actually was. I understand this was done in an effort to keep the shocking event that sets the game in motion hidden ahead of launch, but the second Joel died instead of showing up in scenes the trailers showed, I approached the game with no further preconceptions.
Image: Naughty Dog
The sanding down of The Last of Us’ thematic makeup is Naughty Dog’s own doing, but that framing was what people had to work with. Much of the criticism surrounding Part IIfocuses on its relationship to violence, concluding that it’s meant to be a heavy-handed lesson in the cost of giving in to some base urge to harm one another. In post-release interviews, Druckmann has gone on record saying that the company’s messaging around Part II wasn’t reflective of what the game was actually about. But that’s the video game industry. Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put these games in front of people, and 20+ hour experiences must be reduced to bullet points you can put on marketing copy. It ultimately didn’t affect the prestige of the franchise, as Part II went on to sell 10 million copies and earn countless Game of the Year awards. However, HBO’s television adaptation feels cognizant of the series’ decade of discourse in a lot of ways, and in this case, not for the better.
In some ways, this has worked out in the show’s favor, because stories like Bill and Frank’s get to take on new life as a sign that love is worth living for instead of being a cautionary tale about how caring about people is bad for your self-preservation. But this particular change feels like it’s an odd turn toward a marketing campaign that has ultimately soured a lot of the discussion around The Last of Us and the character at its center. That marketing and the ideas it helped to cement hang over the series to this day. It can be hard to see past those notions when you’re actually playing through a game that, if it is viewed as being about how violence is bad and you should feel bad for doing it, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, however, when viewed primarily as a story of grief and, ultimately, acceptance. After watching Ellie go through so much inner turmoil as she fought her way through her demons while playing Part II, I don’t understand why the show seems to want us to view violence as something that excites her rather than as something she’ll one day reluctantly resort to as her own pain manifests. Yeah, some people will read this and minimize it to some kind of adaptation purity nonsense. I just hope the core of what The Last of Us is isn’t squandered under what a marketing team said it was to fit all its nuances on the back of a box.
Go look through your Steam Library, flick across the spines of your PlayStation collection or gaze up at the shelf with all your Xbox games on it and tally for yourself: how many games are there set in the world you live in?
I’m not talking about Call of Duty, which puts dates and names on contemporary places but could be set anywhere. I’m not talking about a racing or sports game, which intricately model exactly one aspect of the entire human experience, at the expense of infinitely countless others.
I’m talking about a video game that lets you do a lot of the stuff you already do, or at least can do, on a daily basis. After you’re done adding those games up, you probably won’t find many. You might not find any at all.
Let me explain where I’m going with this. I was playing Yakuza Kiwami 2 the other day, part of a long-running series that is believed to be inherently Japanese, when I realised one of the things that resonated most with me wasn’t very Japanese at all.
Yakuza is inherently urban. Most of your time spent interacting with a Yakuza game isn’t spent smashing bikes into a man’s face, it’s spent approximating the same stuff anyone who lives and/or works in a modern urban environment does every day. You’re just…walking around. Popping into a convenience store to buy a drink. Trying out the new fast food place on the corner (every new Yakuza game, set 1-2 years after the last, always has a new place to try). Catching a cab because it’s raining and you can’t be bothered walking four blocks. Running into people you know on the street (or not running into them, see previous cab comment).
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These are global, human experiences because they’re built around one of the few things billions of people around the world have in common: consumer capitalism. Yakuza is set in Japan but the bulk of its action—ritual and ancient combat on the grounds of a hallowed clan headquarters aside, maybe—could be taking place anywhere and it would be much the same game. Anywhere people live, eat and shop within close proximity, from Manila to Melbourne, Brussels to Bangkok would work just as well.
A big part of Yakuza’s appeal is the intimacy of its place, the availability of so much stuff in such a relatively small area, the way you start to recognise certain buildings, know your way around back alleys. The fact almost everywhere you visit is a store—a bar, a takeout, a restaurant, a clothing retailer—is, on the one hand, kinda depressing! That so much of our love for Kamurocho is built on commerce, and that I dismissed other genres above for only doing one thing when Yakuza is, when you strip it down to the studs, spending most of its time also doing just one thing (buying stuff).
On the other hand that’s a gross simplification, because it’s not our fault the world is like this, we’re just living in it. And buying a refreshing soda from a vending machine, going to the arcade, buying a new bandana or sitting down to enjoy a nice meal might all be “commerce” in the broadest sense of the world, but they’re also very different types of nice things, satisfying very different needs and urges.
Importantly, what sets these Yakuza activities apart from other “real world” games like Madden or Gran Turismo or Life is Strange is that fact that they’re everyday things. We do them, all the time, just like the guy on screen. Which sounds boring as hell, but is in fact I think one of the biggest reasons people love Yakuza, and its main playable characters, so damn much.
Kazuma Kiryu is an exceptional man, of course, who can hurl signs into crowds of armed men, leap over barricades like Superman and even cheat death. But he’s also the most relatable protagonist in video games, because when he’s not doing that stuff we’re in control of him as he sits down to slurp a bowl of ramen, buy a packet of smokes or get weirdly frustrated at a UFO catcher machine.
I do that! We do that! And having the player control Kiryu’s most mundane activities—playing out in a world that’s a recreation of our own, not a fantasy or alternate timeline or fictional take—is the best, because they’re doing a wonderful job of fleshing the character out. Making him fallible, human, a guy who has to kill time and run errands and eat normal food, just like us.
This revelation got me thinking about two things. Firstly, about how if you could move the Yakuza formula to another city, I’d love to see a London edition/take, complete with Greggs, pints, nice suits and the city’s iconic cabs. The characters and cutscenes would write themselves:
Yes, I know this is set a very long time ago, I just really like this scene and think it’s basically a Tom Hardy-driven Yakuza cutscene
Secondly, it was weird that I was having to fantasise about a different game doing this, since almost no other video game series is letting us do everyday things in a digital version of our own world. There are open world games (Yakuza is definitely not an open world game) with some stores and pastimes, sure, but they’re not as integral to the experience, or as densely-packed. They’re also often caricatures of cities (see: GTA V), with little resemblance to Yakuza’s faithful recreations of a modern urban environments, down to the magazine racks on convenience store shelves. And games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley may encourage players to engage in the mundane, but they’re set in idyllic locations, and digging up turnips is not something people living in modern cities are doing every day.
Persona, maybe? Though it provides the illusion of freedom and choice, in reality its hamstrung by a limited set of locations and a strict schedule it keeps the player on. So no. Sleeping Dogs? It has some denser areas, designed to be played as a pedestrian, but still nothing on the scale of Yakuza’s daily distractions. The Sims? It’s either the best or worst example possible, and would need a whole other article to unpack, so in the interests of keeping this brief I’m going to say “no” here as well (though I will entertain arguments to the counter!)
I guess all I want to say here is that video games don’t always have to be about escapism. Or at least don’t always have to be about escapism. Sometimes the most boring, everyday actions can be the most meaningful in a game, because if you want us to truly relate to a playable character, one of the best ways to do that isn’t to pull off some superhuman shit every five minutes, but to just…let us take them out for a nice little snack and a walk down the street.
The release of The Last of Us in 2013 already marked a remarkable shift in narrative tone for big-budget, so-called “AAA” games. However, for some of us, 2014’s DLC chapter, The Last of Us: Left Behind, proved to be even more remarkable. It took mechanics that, in the game proper, had been used in nail-biting sequences of life-or-death desperation and repurposed them as the stuff of bonding and relationship-building, leading us to feel Ellie’s connection with Riley not just through cutscenes and pre-written dialogue but through play, in the purest sense of the word.
Now, the episode of HBO’s adaptation based on Left Behind is here, and it’s very good on its own terms. The storytelling fundamentals still work, even with the interactivity that made the game so striking removed. (A number of sequences built around that interactivity, including one in which Ellie and Riley have a contest in which they throw bricks to break car windows, and one in which they hunt each other with water rifles, are understandably totally absent in the episode.) However, because Left Behind was a particularly remarkable example of what’s possible when AAA mechanics are used in new and exciting ways, I don’t feel that there was really any hope of this episode reaching the same highs. The game was one of the very best, most innovative and moving AAA experiences of the decade in which it was released. This is—and I don’t mean this as an insult at all—a very good episode of a mostly very good TV series, and it does benefit from a few music cues that the game lacks. On top of that, Bella Ramsey and Storm Reid are both exceptional, and defixfnitely make this story and its deeply felt emotions their own. Let’s get into it.
A tale of two malls
First, let me touch on the biggest change between this episode and the game on which it’s based. In both, Joel’s been seriously injured, and Ellie must find some supplies with which to treat his wound. Here in the show, we experience Ellie’s mall flashback while she rummages for supplies in a house where she and Joel are hiding out, and the only real thematic throughline between the action of the “present” and the “past” of the episode is that what Ellie goes through in the past informs our understanding of why she’s so desperate not to lose Joel in the present.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, she’s actually got Joel locked up in an old storefront at a Colorado mall, and the flashbacks to her night at the mall with Riley are interspersed with action set in the “present” in which she searches this other mall high and low for medical supplies. Playing the DLC, you probably spend about as much time in the Colorado mall as you do in the Boston one, and as Ellie, you must fight infected stalkers, solve some environmental puzzles, and survive some very challenging combat encounters with men who are hunting Joel and Ellie. The Colorado mall also has a number of details that trigger associations for us as players with the Boston mall. For instance, both have a restaurant chain called Fast Burger, and in the pocket of a body she’s searching, Ellie finds a strip of photos created by the same type of photo booth she and Riley use at the mall in Boston.
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Meanwhile, all TV show Ellie has to do is look in the kitchen for a needle and thread. She doesn’t know how easy she’s got it.
This hopeless situation
In the episode’s opening scene, the injured Joel tells her to leave and she says “Joel shut the fuck up!” reminding us, as the last episode emphasized and this one will drive home, that she has known too much loss already, and she’s not about to give up on him.
He tells her to go to Tommy. She covers him with a jacket, gives him a fuck you look, and walks out of the room, and into the flashback that dominates the episode.
She’s running listlessly in circles in a high school gymnasium. On her Walkman (yes, an actual Sony Walkman, which she also has in the game) she’s listening to “All or None” by Pearl Jam. It’s from the 2002 album Riot Act, so it would exist in the show’s timeline where the outbreak occurred in 2003. Without spoiling anything for those who haven’t played The Last of Us Part II, Pearl Jam does figure into the game in a way that likely won’t, for timeline reasons, play out the same in the show, so this at least lets the band’s work be heard in the TV series.
Screenshot: HBO
(Incidentally, none of this stuff with Ellie in school is from the game. Some of it may be based on material in the comic book series The Last of Us: American Dreams, but as I haven’t read that series, I can’t say for sure.)
Soon, a bigger girl starts giving Ellie shit, telling her to pick up the pace so that the whole group doesn’t get punished. When Ellie says she doesn’t want to fight about it, the girl says tauntingly, “You don’t fight. Your friend fights. She’s not here anymore, is she?” With that, Ellie decides she does want to fight after all.
Cut to some time later, and Ellie’s sporting a nasty shiner. A FEDRA official, Cpt. Kwong, notes that her behavior has been particularly bad for the past few weeks and that his bad-cop approach in response—tossing her in the hole multiple times—hasn’t worked, so he tries the good-cop approach, giving her a heartfelt talk in which he suggests that she’s too smart to throw her life away, but that seems like exactly what she’s determined to do. She can either keep misbehaving and end up a grunt, doing grunt work until she dies in one unfortunate circumstance or another, he says, or she can swallow her pride and someday become an officer. His impulse is rooted in a bleak view of humanity—”if we go down, the people in this zone will starve or murder each other, that much I know”—but Ellie nonetheless seems persuaded, for the moment.
Ellie’s room, featuring a poster for Mortal Kombat II
Later, Ellie’s in her room as the rain falls outside. She’s reading an issue of Savage Starlight, the significance of which I first talked about in my recap of episode five.
Setting the comic down, she stares at the vacant bed across the room before a lights out call prompts her to try going to sleep. For a bit, the camera lingers on details in the room, like a small stack of cassettes that includes A-ha’s greatest hits compilation and an Etta James tape, both of which feature songs we’ll be hearing before the night is out. Also on Ellie’s wall are dinosaur drawings, space shuttle diagrams, and, amusingly, a poster for the 1987 sci-fi comedy Innerspacestarring Martin Short, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Quaid.
We also see a poster for Mortal Kombat II. Yes, this reflects one of the biggest changes to the source material that we’ll get to later in the episode. However, what you may not know is that, when Left Behind was remade for The Last of Us Part I, the developers also snuck a Mortal Kombat II poster into Ellie’s room there, confirming (via retcon) that the game does at least exist in the game’s universe as well, likely because they knew by that point that MKII was going to be taking the place of The Turning in the TV adaptation.
Riley and Ellie’s reunion gets off to a rough start when Riley (Storm Reid, Euphoria) sneaks into the room and puts her hand over the mouth of the sleeping Ellie. Ellie panics, knocks Riley to the floor, and grabs her switchblade before she realizes who her attacker is. When she sees that it’s actually her best friend, the exposition starts flying fast. Riley’s been gone for three weeks because, after a long time spent “talking about liberating the QZ,” she’s actually decided to do something.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
This triggers complicated feelings in Ellie, who refuses Riley’s request to come with her and have “the best night of your life” because she has to get up in a few hours for drills “where we learn to kill Fireflies.” Yeah, these friends are in a tough spot, seemingly on opposite sides of an ideological (and real) conflict. As Riley predicted, though, Ellie quickly relents, the chance to spend a few hours with the friend she’s been missing so much apparently too tough to pass up.
What’s FEDRA vs. Fireflies between friends?
After they make their escape, Ellie is surprised that Riley seems less inclined toward conflict than usual, telling her, “You can’t fight everything and everyone. You can pick and choose what’s important.” “Are they teaching you this at Firefly University?” Ellie asks, and it turns out they are. A minute later, as they’re sneaking through an old apartment building, Ellie’s flashlight starts giving out. “Firefly lights are better,” Riley teases. When Ellie declares that “one point for the anarchists,” Riley says, “We prefer freedom fighters.”
In a moment that’s new for the show, Ellie and Riley find a man’s body in a hallway, with some pills and a bottle of hard liquor nearby, which they snag and take swigs from on the rooftop. In the game, they instead raid the camp of a man they were on friendly terms with named Winston, who, remarkably for someone in their world, died of natural causes. He has some booze in a cooler that you can drink. The show’s Ellie handles the liquor much better than her game counterpart, who spits it out.
After begging Riley to let her hold her gun, Ellie asks, “So, what happened, you started dating some Firefly dude and was like, ‘Uhhh, this is cool, I think I’ll be a terrorist’?” It’s a striking line because it’s both an obvious joke and it also seems to be Ellie perhaps trying to feel out Riley’s attitude toward boys, as if she’s trying to determine if there’s any chance Riley reciprocates her feelings. (Nothing like this is said in the game.) Soon, Riley tells the truth: she encountered a woman—Marlene—who asked her what she thought of FEDRA. Riley replied with her honest opinion, “they’re fascist dickbags,” and with that, she was in. Ellie starts to push back, regurgitating some of the same bullshit Cpt. Kwong told her earlier about FEDRA holding everything together, but rather than let it devolve into an argument, Riley says they’re on a mission, and leads them onward, hopping across many a rooftop on the way to their destination: the mall.
Screenshot: HBO
When they arrive, Riley arranges a pretty cool reveal for Ellie, having her friend stand in the darkened shrine to capitalism before flipping on the power. Ellie gazes in awe as everything becomes illuminated. Riley promises to show her “the four wonders of the mall,” and their adventure truly begins.
Take on me
The Last of Us becomes the latest prestige TV series to use the A-ha hit “Take on Me,” a song that also figures into the game’s sequel, as Ellie experiences the wonder of escalators, or as she calls them at first, “electric stairs,” for the first time. Amazed by the contraption, she races down them, races back up them, walks in place, and, perhaps trying to impress her crush and probably feeling the effects of that swig of alcohol she took earlier, just generally acts like a total goofball.
As they make their way toward Riley’s first wonder (which is now the second wonder because Ellie was so wowed by the escalator), they pass a movie theater with a poster out front for a film in the Dawn of the Wolf series, the Last of Us universe’s stand-in for Twilight. Briefly stopping to regard the display at a Victoria’s Secret, Riley comments on how strange it is to her that people once wanted that stuff, then starts laughing while trying to imagine Ellie wearing the lacy lingerie. Riley moves on, but Ellie takes a moment to check her look in the window, clearly concerned about the impression she might make on Riley tonight.
Just like heaven
Riley tells Ellie to close her eyes, and as she leads her by the hand to the mall’s next wonder, we’ve gotten enough insight into Ellie’s feelings that we can imagine how exciting it must be for her, that high school electricity you might feel at the slightest physical contact with the person you’ve been dreaming about.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
The wonder is indeed worthy of the build-up: a stunning carousel, lit up in golden lights. This is, of course, straight out of the DLC, the source of some of its most iconic images, but new here is the fact that the carousel plays a music-box version of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and I think the lyrics of that song sum up how Ellie feels in this moment pretty well. Like the game on which it’s based, this episode is full of unspoken emotion, which makes it all the more effective. Ellie’s smile, beaming at Riley as the carousel spins, says more than words ever could. Find someone who looks at you the way Ellie looks at Riley here. The two have another drink, and Ellie continues to bask in Riley’s presence.
But such moments never last, and as the carousel grinds to a halt, Ellie’s mind is interfering with what her heart feels, turning over questions again about Riley’s allegiance to the Fireflies. “Did you really leave because you actually think you can liberate this place?” she asks, making the question sound every bit as dismissive as it reads. When Riley protests that it’s not a fantasy, that the Fireflies have set things right in other QZs, Ellie tells her that they could do that too, “if you come back. We’re, like, the future.”
Screenshot: HBO
Riley doesn’t seem hopeful about her prospects with FEDRA, telling Ellie that Kwong has her lined up for sewage detail. To Kwong, Riley is doomed to the kind of grunt work she told Ellie she could avoid if she plays her cards right. This is new for the show, and makes it that much more clear why Riley wants a life outside of what FEDRA has in store for her.
Pictures of you
Next up on Riley’s tour of wonders is the photo booth, another classic moment from the game. When the DLC first launched in 2014, this moment felt impactful because it featured some then-novel Facebook integration, allowing you to upload images of the specific poses you had Ellie and Riley strike to your feed. It was a way for people to share the experience and connect over their feelings about it. It’s a bit strange to see a moment that was initially designed not just for interactivity but for social media integration be recreated without these elements that once made it so special. It’s still a sweet scene, of course, but this is one case where the game will always be the definitive experience for me. At least the show’s Ellie and Riley actually get a printout of their photos, albeit faded and colorless. The game’s duo got only their memories of the experience.
As they head to the next wonder, Riley talks it up, saying “it’s pretty dang awesome and it might break you.” Ellie tells her not to oversell it, but she hasn’t. She tells Ellie to stop and listen, and in the distance is the unmistakable cacophony of a video arcade. Yeah, Ellie is stoked. Standing before Raja’s Arcade in all its noisy glory, she says, “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Mortal Kombat II vs. The Turning
The arcade’s got Centipede and Tetris, Frogger and Daytona USA, all alive and ready to be played. But there’s one game they want to play most: Mortal Kombat II.
This is one of the episode’s biggest departures from the game. There, the machines in the arcade remain off, and the most Ellie can do is imagine playing with them. (As I discovered when re-playing Left Behind for this recap, there’s a hidden trophy you can get here, a little self-deprecating joke from Naughty Dog. If you approach and interact with a Jak X Combat Racing arcade machine in the back corner, Ellie will imagine playing it for a bit. When she’s done, she comments to herself, “That game is stupid,” and you get the trophy, called Nobody’s Perfect. Oof, was Jak X really that bad?)
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
In the game, it’s not Mortal Kombat II that they play, but a fictional fighting game called The Turning, and Ellie can only play it with her imagination. As Riley narrates the action, and as Ellie imagines it so vividly that she can hear the game’s announcer as well as the sound effects of battle, you enter a series of onscreen inputs to pull off attacks, blocks, dodges, and, finally, an ultra kill. Yes, The Turning was clearly inspired by Mortal Kombat, so the genuine article makes for a pretty fitting replacement.
In his own commentary piece, my colleague Kenneth makes a strong argument that something is lost by having the characters actually play a game, rather than merely imagining one. I definitely agree that the way it plays out in the game is much more poignant. It’s just one more thing that Ellie will never get to really experience. At the same time, I think the interactivity of the sequence was central to its impact, that just seeing Ellie imagine the game and input sequences would have little of the same effect that the scene conjures through the device of having you do it, and in lieu of that, I think swapping in Mortal Kombat II, a game so many of us have our own memories of playing, allows us to feel some deeper connection to the scene. For me, it’s another instance, like the photo booth, where the TV show was never going to fully recapture the power of the game on which it’s based.
Screenshot: HBO
Kiss me, kill me
Bella Ramsey does a great job of capturing the intense excitement and supreme cluelessness of a gamer girl who’s literally never played an arcade game before, and it’s fun to watch both her and Reid react to the game’s legendary sound effects, and to Mileena’s famous fatality. Eventually, playing as Baraka, Ellie gets a win on Riley, who tells her how to do his fatality. Baraka impales Mileena on his blades and the girls lose it, and in the excitement, we can tell, even if Riley can’t, that Ellie really wants to kiss her. The moment passes, though, and Ellie protests that she has to be back home in bed soon. However, Riley tells her that she got her a gift, and that’s enough to get Ellie to tag along for a bit longer.
In the food court, Riley’s got a little camp, where she gives Ellie volume two (actually “volume too” lol) of Will Livingston’s series of pun books, the same one she’s been torturing Joel with throughout the series. In the game, Riley gives it to Ellie just after you ride the carousel, and you can spend a while reading jokes to Riley if you like. (My favorite of the bunch: What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? ‘Tis the C.)
In the show, however, Ellie’s delight in the new treasure trove of punny goodness is short-lived, as she finds a bunch of explosives Riley has made. Riley says that she would never let them be used on or anywhere near Ellie, but Ellie doubts that her supervisors would care what Riley has to say about that, and she storms off.
Riley gives chase and tells Ellie that she’s leaving, that this is her last day in Boston, which is enough to get Ellie to stop. “I asked if you could join so we could go together,” Riley says, “but Marlene said no.” In the game, Riley phrases this sentiment a bit differently, telling Ellie that Marlene “wants you safe at that stupid school. I’m not even supposed to come see you.” The reasons why Marlene might be looking out for Ellie from afar—even before knowing Ellie was immune to cordyceps—will become clear in time, if you don’t know them already. Despite Riley’s heartfelt plea, expressing her desire to spend some of her little time left in Boston with Ellie and to say goodbye on good terms, Ellie remains furious, and storms off again.
Love and truth in the Halloween shop
She thinks better of it, though, and turns around before she gets too far. Trudging back through the mall, she hears screams and fears the worst. Charging into the store the screams are coming from, she’s confronted with a spooky sight indeed: some sort of mechanical Halloween jumpscare device letting out the pre-recorded shrieks. Here it is, the Halloween store, the final wonder Riley had in store for her. (In the game, you actually enter the Halloween store first upon arriving at the mall. This scene effectively combines that one and one near the end of the DLC.)
Riley’s hiding out in the Halloween store, and tells Ellie she was saving it for last because she thought she’d like it the best. “I guess it was stupid,” she says. “I’m fucking stupid.” Ellie sits down. It’s time to talk about some real shit.
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
“So you leave me. I think you’re dead. All of a sudden, you’re alive. And you give me this night. This amazing fucking night. And now you’re leaving again, forever, to join some cause I don’t even think you understand. Tell me I’m wrong.” Yeah, I can see how Ellie’s got some emotional turmoil going on at the moment.
Riley tells Ellie that she doesn’t know everything. Unlike Ellie, Riley remembers what it was to have a family, for a little while at least, and the real sense of belonging that came with that. Now the Fireflies have chosen her, and she senses a chance for that kind of belonging and purpose again. “I matter to them.”
Screenshot: HBO
Ellie softens a bit, and tells Riley that she’s her best friend and that she’ll miss her. Riley proposes “one last thing,” and Ellie agrees, before Riley tosses her a werewolf mask and grabs a spooky clown mask for herself, masks they both also wear in the game. She puts on Etta James’ “I Got You Babe,” the same song that features so prominently in the game at this pivotal moment, and begins dancing atop the display case.
For a while they just enjoy the moment, but what Ellie is feeling is too strong to be contained, so she takes off her mask and pleads with Riley, “Don’t go.” Just as in the game, Riley agrees, almost as if she’s been waiting, hoping that Ellie would ask her this. Ellie kisses her, then apologizes, to which Riley responds, “For what?” It’s a beautiful and cathartic moment, and a painful one, too, since we know their happiness ends even before it has a chance to start. It makes for a fascinating contrast with the third episode, which charted the love story of Bill and Frank across decades. Here, we get the love story of Ellie and Riley, not quite in real time but not too far off. This night lasts only a matter of hours, and yet the memory of it will be with Ellie forever.
I feel like “don’t go” is a bigger ask on Ellie’s part here in the show than it is in the game, since she knows that FEDRA has Riley pegged for grunt work, and it’s a lot to ask someone you love to resign themselves to a life of such limited possibility just to be with you. But I’m sure that in that moment, she thinks that together, they can create something better. And who knows, maybe they could have.
They barely even get a chance to imagine what that future might look like, however, before the infected we saw earlier roars and runs in, putting up one hell of a fight before Ellie finally finishes it with her switchblade. Not before both of them are bitten, however, and just like that, their dream future evaporates.
“I’m not letting you go”
Screenshot: Naughty Dog
And while future Ellie rummages desperately in the house for something to help Joel with, past Ellie, thinking her fate is sealed, smashes shit in a rage before collapsing next to Riley. Riley says they could just off themselves with her gun, but she’s not a fan of that idea. Taking Ellie’s hand, she says, “Whether it’s two minutes or two days, we don’t give that up. I don’t want to give that up.”
Screenshot: HBO
Rummaging in the kitchen, Ellie finds some needle and thread and returns to Joel. For a moment, she takes his hand, interlocking her fingers with hers. She’s not letting him go. Then, she begins to sew.
We here at Kotaku get plenty of tips via email. Some are spam, others are error-filled hate messages, and a few are serious allegations that require serious investigation. So it’s refreshing when something comes in that just points us toward something breezy and cool, as was the case with a recent tip regarding the slay-the-house-down-boots fashion of the Like A Dragon: Ishin! developers, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio.
A development subdivision of Sega whose roots trace back to 1998, Ryu Ga Gotoku (“RGG”) is a Japanese studio responsible for the 2012 third-person shooter Binary Domain. However, you’re probably more familiar with RGG’s most prominent work, the Yakuza series. Since 2012, RGG has been in charge of the action-adventure franchise, developing new mainline entries and remastering old ones while putting together spin-offs such as the Judgment series and the latest remake, Like A Dragon: Ishin!
It’s that latter game, which was originally a 2014 Japan-only release before making its worldwide debut earlier this week, that was the topic of the tips email we got this week. Enamored with senior editor Alyssa Mercante’s “fashion callout” of The Game Awards’ bland drip, the reader (whose name we’ve decided to keep hidden) said we should check out this making-of Like A Dragon video to see some “cool suits.”
“I loved The Game Awards fashion callout and follow-up article and 40 seconds into this video about Ryu Ga Gotoku making the next Like A Dragon game there is an amazing staff promo photo,” the reader said in an email to Kotaku. “I guess if you’re in charge of the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, you’re basically obligated to wear a cool suit.” And they ain’t lying! RGG is literally stunting over the entire industry in one shot.
SEGA Asia(EN)
In the first episode of a multi-part series on Sega Asia’s English YouTube channel, we get a quick glance at RGG’s fashion sense. Japanese fashion is pretty captivating if you follow it. Filled with flowy silhouettes, wild colors and patterns, and an interesting blend of casual and smart aesthetics, folks in the Land of the Rising Sun know how to dress. RGG is no exception. Sure, the suits the developers wear about 40 seconds into the above video are all black, but the nuance is in the details. Two staffers have jackets with interesting markings: one with a variety of white dots and another with copious small crosses. A different staffer has a coat with tastefully accenting white lines. Three other staffers have all-over patterns, with two of the staffers’ suits having a nice sheen. If you told me this was an alternative J-Rock band and not a bunch of video game developers, I’d believe you.
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Even the developers’ boots, while nondescript on the surface, really add to the developers’ collective drip. Most in the photo have round pointed-toe, glossy-looking boots with no laces like they all just stepped off the set of The Matrix or something. Two others mix things up a little bit, with one staffer having what appears to be round lace-up boots a la Dr. Martens (though maybe not that exact brand) and another seemingly wearing some very dark, perhaps suede-looking boots. Either way, RGG’s fits are on point! I may not be the fashionista that Kotaku’s Alyssa Mercante is, but I, too, am gagging over the confident simplicity RGG exudes in their almost-matching looks. It’s dope to see, especially in an industry known for some of the most predictable (graphic-tee-and-blazer) outfit combos ever.
Anyway, shout out to RGG for slaying the entire industry in a matter of seconds with both their killer fashion and their even more-killer samurai game, Like A Dragon: Ishin! In fact, staff writer Sisi Jiang called it “the best samurai game that you can play right now.” You should check it out.
I know this isn’t the most pressing issue facing the video game community, but I just think it’s funny: someone at Ubisoft has finally got around to fixing a bug that has impacted one particular version of Assassin’s Creed on one specific platform that has been bugging people (or maybe just one person?) for years.
You might experience unexpected game behavior while playing this PS4 game on your PS5 console.
Still, like I said, not a huge issue. But still an issue, one that would have been logged somewhere at Ubisoft, far enough down the list of priorities that it didn’t get fixed at the time, but on the list nonetheless, waiting to be tackled by somebody, anybody, whenever they had the time.
That time is this week. The series’ Twitter account posted this earlier today, saying that an update be released tomorrow specifically targeting this very bug:
We’re happy to announce that Assassin’s Creed Syndicate will receive an update tomorrow, February 23, on PlayStation 4. This update will provide a fix for flickering issues when playing on PlayStation 5.
Sweet, sweet Delta-8 Baked Bags’ Coned are the ice cream inspired edibles that are packed with rich chocolate infused with smooth, chill, Delta-8 THC.
Thank you for reminding me to dig this out and replay it. Not because I want to enjoy it flicker-free—I never had it on PS4, I have it on PC!—but because this is a deeply underappreciated entry in the series, and one I’d love to revisit in the wake of the more recent games being just a bit too much.
Best: New Toys: It’s hard to choose one thing that I’d call the best part of Vice City, the GTA game that brought the series to Florida and the 80s, but if I have to (Editor’s note: You do.) then I’d pick the introduction of more vehicles to the sandbox. In Vice City, you could fly in planes and helicopters, drive scooters, golf carts, dirt bikes, various boats, and even pilot remote-controlled helicopters, too. All of this made Vice City a more fun playground to tinker with between missions.
Worst: Crappy Combat: The annoying, crappy combat. While it’s mostly unchanged from GTA III, it stands out in Vice City more because everything else—like the improved visuals, larger map and better cutscenes—is so much better this time around. And Vice City has a ton of combat in it, making it even harder to ignore just how clunky and bad it is.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom isn’t due out until May 12, which means fans heavily invested in the lore and secrets of the game have three months of avoiding (what they will probably think are) spoilers ahead of them.
The collector’s edition of the game comes with a 204-page artbook, and over the weekend that book leaked online, with every damn page of it winding up posted on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit. It’s the Japanese version, meaning it’s difficult to make out exactly what some of this stuff is, though that’s not a huge problem since it’s a fairly basic artbook, mostly just images with some captions underneath.
First up, because this is a preorder bonus and not a full-blown, standalone artbook, it’s missing context. There are hundreds of images here but they’re not laid out in any kind of order or sequence, and without paragraphs from the developers and artists explaining in depth what everything means and why it’s there, there’s little here that you wouldn’t have expected to see in a trailer.
There are lots of images of Link wearing costumes, some familiar returning faces, some outfit designs for allies and friends, sketches of (again, familiar) bad guys and lots of illustrations of environments that, without the context I just mentioned, are basically just “here’s a cave, now here’s a room with a stone floor”.
“This book was designed to come home with you the day you bought the game”
I’m being vague not to protect anyone, but just because…this is all very standard stuff. Without the context of this art being properly explained—or from any of us actually playing the game—it’s just a book full of cool Zelda pics.
Which, of course, is all it’s meant to be. While it’s tempting to pore over this book three months out from release, hoping for cryptic spoilers and keys to Tears of the Kingdom’s lore, this book was designed to come home with you the day you bought the game. People would be free to flick through it on the bus on the way home, or in the back seat of a car, or on the couch when they’re only 23 minutes into the game. There was never going to be anything huge here, because that would be extremely stupid!
For example there’s not a single image of Ganon. There’s an illustration of Zelda, but no mention on whether she’s playable or not. We have glimpses of the monstrous transformation Link appears to be going through, but nothing more than what we’ve already seen in trailers. There’s no plot summary.
The only things that could even remotely be considered spoilers are a couple of costumes that reference older games in the series, and the return of a particularly shitty type of enemy, but those are just…facts about the game, not narrative beats.
So if you’re sensitive to spoilers and you somehow end up somewhere on the internet where this book’s leaks cannot be avoided, relax. This is a preorder bonus, not a Spoiler Tome.
It seems I was too quick to judge HBO’s The Last of Us. While the first four episodes certainly kept my attention as well-written and delightfully-shot prestige television, I had been a little let down as the adaptive process of turning the game into a show has, so far, left out the recreation of specific, memorable action sequences from the game. Well, with “Endure and Survive,” the fifth episode of the first (but not the last) season of The Last of Us, the show has revealed that it’s more than capable of adapting the action of the video game, and in some cases, just might be doing a better job with it.
Adapted from the hit PlayStation 3 title of the same name, The Last of Us’ gripping, character-driven plot exists alongside tense, deadly, moment-by-moment combat encounters. The player, as Joel, must overcome both hostile humans and infected with a combination of stealth, firearms, and crudely improvised weapons. For its first four episodes, HBO’s adaptation has, mostly, prioritized the story elements, choosing in some cases not to recreate memorable action sequences or feature unique, crafted props of the kind we’ve seen in the game. It makes sense for television to focus on the actors and the story, but until now I’ve found the show to be missing that key action ingredient I’ve loved so well, not just from seeing the game, but from playing it.
There’s a reason The Last of Us appears on our list of the best action games you can play this year. With a slower cadence than what you find in something like Naughty Dog’s other recent series, Uncharted, and an emphasis on survival, The Last of Us as a game injects tight, intense, action sequences throughout the narrative, reminding you that, however much things might feel under your control during the narrative downtime, you’re never actually safe in its deadly world.. The action sequences are when the rug has been pulled out from under you and you must deal with a situation in the here and the now. Mess up, and someone’s dying.
Our action game list highlighted the sequel, Part II, as being a bit more flexible, with more options for how you approach and respond to various situations. But the sequel follows what the first game already did so well: Moments where, forgive the cliche, all hell breaks loose and you must respond. Immediately. It’s stress-inducing action for sure, but damn, is it a thrill.
While I would’ve certainly traded the first game’s “upside-down” shootout sequence in the “Bill’s Town” level for the beautiful story of Bill and Frank we got in episode three of the show, I was beginning to worry that HBO’s TV adaptation would continue to leave out other, more explosive sequences rather than attempt to translate the immediacy of the game’s action to the screen. But here we are with episode five’s suburban sniper sequence. This gripping scene not only translates the game’s action particularly well, but does so with a narrative revision that makes the carnage even more intense.
Just like in the game, Joel and Ellie have teamed up with Henry and Sam. But this time, Henry and Sam’s situation is a bit more urgent. Kathleen, the leader of a revolutionary force, obsessively wants to see Henry die for his role in her brother’s death. Like the game, Joel, Ellie, Henry, and Sam must travel down an abandoned suburban street, moving from car to car to avoid getting shot by a sniper overlooking the area.
The TV show does depart a touch from this scenario as it exists in the game. To start, Joel isn’t faced with additional hostile forces on his approach to the sniper’s nest. And it becomes clear once Joel deals with the sniper that this individual belongs to the revolutionaries in Kansas City (the game’s parallel version of these events takes place in Pittsburgh and doesn’t feature Kathleen or any of the revolutionaries introduced in episode four). This is one of the improvements the show makes over the original game, something its sequel also worked harder to achieve: lending faces, complicated motivations, and identities to the antagonists.
But we need to talk about the sound design in the sniper sequence first. Though the show has caught my ear before (a particularly unnerving-yet-satisfying ambient music swell as Joel, Ellie, and Tess ascend the stairs in episode two’s museum is one such example), I am unhealthily obsessed with the gunshots in this scene. The exacting and penetrating strike of the sniper rifle’s shot is chased by a split second of silence that could swallow the universe, followed up with a timeless whisper of air and sensually percussive hits on the bodies and windows of cars. Satisfying bangs funneled into powerful clangs, sharp shatters of glass…heavy metal bands will spend their entire careers trying to deliver something so sonically beautiful and destructive at the same time. This is bliss.
The sounds are loveable as special effects and creations on their own, but the effect really drew me in with an intimacy of the kind I’ve felt in video games—and in particular, the one this show is based on. The scene that mirrors this one in the video game is one example, but the latter half of The Last of Us Part II also has a similar sniper scenario. Cover-to-cover movement with the threat of violence pressing you back is successfully brought to life on screen. But we’re not done yet.
Screenshot: HBO
Like in the game, Joel eventually gets to the top of the sniper’s nest, eliminates the shooter and must then get behind the scope as hostile human forces march forward. In the show, the personality-less mob of foes is replaced by new-character Kathleen on her quest for revenge, with her forces in tow. Joel must make several needle-threading shots, one of which is recreated from the game: Hitting the driver of a hostile vehicle, with the camera going behind the scope of the rifle itself. And yes, like the game, that car crashes into a house…a house which has a surprise in store.
The TV show’s vehicle veers off and crashes to the right side. It crashes on the left in the game; this mirror image of recreated scenes seems to be a common element of the show. Joel and Sarah are flipped in their position on the couch in the opening episode; Joel’s “I am sure you will figure that out” line of dialogue to Ellie asking what the hell she’s supposed to do while he naps in the first episode sees the couch he lays on flipped to the other side of the room.
And while a cluster of infected does ultimately flood the street in the game as well, it’s quite different in the show. Here, the emergence of a horde of infected from underground serves as the payoff to some wonderful foreshadowing in the previous episode and earlier scenes in this one, where we learn that FEDRA had previously chased all the infected underground as a way to “fix” the problem. It’s clear that this is something that will resurface to cause a problem. And in this scene, once you see that truck fall into the house…you know what’s coming, and that the hubris that led Kathleen to go to such extremes will soon claim its price.
Screenshot: HBO
Shattering the calm insanity of Kathleen’s myopic quest for vengeance, the fallen truck and the chorus of screams and roars from the mob of infected it unleashes is a powerful release, snapping us out of the daze of trying to follow Kathleen’s justification for cruelty. We’re barely given time to digest the contours of her bloodlust as the infected’s long-buried rage drowns out all, the great equalizer that considers no one safe and needs no justification for its wrath and violence. At the end of this scene, I felt the instinctual urge to put down the controller and take a breath. Except there was no controller.
Episode five’s sniper scenario doesn’t just adapt a key action sequence of the game, it makes it better. The pacing is tighter, more intense. The narrative wrapping pulls you into what’s at stake in a far more satisfying way, and it earns its zombie mob scene. This is the kind of game sequence adaptation I’ve been waiting for in HBO’s show, and it did not disappoint. Until next time, I’m gonna go see if Whole Foods has crow on sale.
While The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is one of the most hotly-anticipated video game sequels of all time, that’s not the only reason it’s notable this week. It is also, sadly, the first Nintendo game to hit the $70 threshold.
While physical copies of the game have previously been available for preorder at places like GameStop for $60, Nintendo’s press release for the game following tonight’s Direct confirms that the cheapest version will be selling for $70. Preorders for the game at that $60 pricepoint suddenly stopped being accepted by retailers on Tuesday night.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: An epic adventure across the land and skies of Hyrule awaits. In this sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you’ll decide your own path through the sprawling landscapes of Hyrule and the mysterious islands floating in the vast skies above. Can you harness the power of Link’s new abilities to fight back against the malevolent forces that threaten the kingdom? In addition to the standard version, which will be available at a suggested retail price of $69.99, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Collector’s Edition will release on launch day at a suggested retail price of $129.99, and includes a physical version of the game, an artbook with concept art, a Steelbook case, an Iconart steel poster and a set of four pin badges.
That would make it the first ever Nintendo game to hit that $70 threshold, at least as a recommended retail price, which is a bummer for us as consumers (since wages aren’t increasing in line with the inflated cost of…everything) but also expected from a business (because all their costs have gone up). This is why it’s called an inflation crisis, baby!
Back in November, Nintendo responded to Sony’s decision to increase the price of the PS5 by saying “it won’t take such actions at this moment, but will continue monitoring situation and carefully consider (whether we need to take the option).”
While that Switch hardware increase hasn’t materialised—yet—maybe recouping an extra $10 per copy of a game expected to sell millions will help Nintendo’s bottom line, especially since the company just saw its share prices tumble after analysts predicted the aging Switch is “rushing to end of its lifecycle at a faster-than-expected pace,” and that without news of replacement hardware on the horizon things might just get worse.
For the first time ever, tonight’s Grammy awards featured a category just for video game soundtracks. And the first ever winner in this new category was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed. Congratulations! A momentous occasion for everyone involved, but for the rest of us, also a very funny moment of live television.
The nominees were veteran games composer Austin Wintory (hilariously given his previous body of work, for Aliens: Fireteam Elite), Bear McCreary (Call of Duty: Vanguard), Richard Jacques (Guardians of the Galaxy), Christopher Tin again (for the Civ-like Old World) and Stephanie Economou for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s expansion Dawn of Ragnarok.
Composer and violinist Economou—who at time of publishing had a Twitter bio simply saying “Non-award-winning composer”—is now an award-winning composer. Congratulations Stephanie! Making the occasion even more memorable for everyone watching at home, though, was presenter and comedian Randy Rainbow (also nominated tonight, for best comedy album) being given an envelope that had “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla” written inside it then reading it like this:
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It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
It must be nerve-wracking at the best of times being up there and announcing awards knowing that so many people (even if this was the earlier “premiere” ceremony) are watching you. Then imagine being asked to read, not “Beyonce”, but “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok” when you’re not someone who has been exposed to those words non-stop for three years, and has somehow internalised them and made them seem even remotely normal. It is not a normal collection of words. It would be hard!
You can watch Economou’s full acceptance speech, in which she thanks everyone who “fought tirelessly” for this category to be included in the awards, here.
STEPHANIE ECONOMOU Wins Best Score Soundtrack For Video Games & Other Interactive Media
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – The ConvertsImage: Ubisoft / Kotaku
This year the Assassin’s Creed franchise turns 15 years old. In that time, the franchise has expanded into multiple games, mobile spin-offs, books, movies, shorts, and more. It’s a big, complicated universe that involves historical conspiracies, shadowy cults, and ancient aliens. And those ancient aliens, the Isu, have a complex language, and it’s that language that seems to have frustrated an artist working on a newly released Assassin’s Creed comic.
Since 2007’s original Assassin’s Creed adventure, each installment in the franchise has added more and more lore. At this point, it’s a batshit-wild universe and one key part of the madness are ancient beings, later named the Isu, who were technologically advanced, lived on Earth like gods long ago, and were wiped out 77,000 years ago following a war with ancient humans who they’d enslaved. Anyway, the Isu created all sorts of gizmos and trinkets that, thousands of years later, are still being sought after by humans obsessed with power. And many of these items are covered in the Isu language, which was largely untranslated until 2021, when fans finally cracked it.
But apparently working with this language is a pain in the ass, as seemingly revealed by a bit of text in the recently released comic book, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – The Converts. At one point, we see a close-up of an ancient Isu tablet of some kind which is covered in the ancient aliens’ language. And translated, part of the text reads says:
“If somese as esplasi how to write this shit it would be muc appreiated”
It’s pretty easy to see what this person was likely trying to say using the Isu language, even if it has a few mistakes. The message was likely meant to say:
“If someone can explain how to write this shit it would be much appreciated.”
This funny little message was first spotted by the Assassin’s Creed super fans over at Access The Animus—the same people who first cracked the Isu language a few years back. They also spotted “multiple bits of incorrect Isu language” in the comic, suggesting the artists or writers involved weren’t given enough information or direction about the Isu language, hence the mistakes and frustration.
Kotaku has reached out to Ubisoft, the comic book writer, and the artists.
While some fans had a good laugh at this angry Easter egg, others were upset that the creators behind the comic book didn’t consult fan guides and translation tools before working on the book. However, it should be noted that it would be very weird for an official Ubisoft-approved Assassin’s Creed comic to rely on fan translations, assuming the people behind the comic even knew of that work. (Which would explain why they included this Isu Easter egg at all: Maybe they didn’t expect anyone else to read it!)
Vivid colors and deep blacks It’s Oscar season which means it’s time to binge all the nominations before the big day. Why not enjoy these pieces of art on a new TV from our friends at Samsung?
Personally, as a big fan of Assassin’s Creed and its wild lore, I totally get how frustrating it must be to try and tell stories within that universe. It’s fun to experience the mess from the outside looking in, but working on it is likely a pain in the ass at times and I don’t begrudge an artist for sneaking in a little jab at how annoying and absurd it must be.
According to a report from The Hollywood Reporter, Waller-Bridge is attached to the live-action show as a writer, though there’s no word on whether or not the Fleabag star will be in front of the camera at this time. Alongside writing, she’s set to act as executive producer alongside Ryan Andolina and Amanda Grenblatt, who both recently left Amazon to found their own production company, and have worked out further deals with Bezos and co. to work on projects like the Tomb Raider series.
If you’re unfamiliar with Waller-Bridge’s work, she is known throughout the internet for her role as the titular character in Fleabag, a two-season series (also produced by and streaming on Amazon) which is also one of the few examples we have of what perfect television looks like.
Fleabag is two seasons of perfect television.Image: Amazon
You want to watch two short self aware seasons about a woman trying to claw her way out of emotional detachment and grief? It’s streaming on Prime. Don’t thank me, because it will ruin you for days. Come for Waller-Bridge’s sharp writing and performance, stay for Andrew Scott as the Hot Priest.
Vivid colors and deep blacks It’s Oscar season which means it’s time to binge all the nominations before the big day. Why not enjoy these pieces of art on a new TV from our friends at Samsung?
This series will be the third time Tomb Raider has seen a live-action adaptation, with Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander portraying Lara Croft in two separate film series. At the moment, it remains unclear if this show will be based on the classic Tomb Raider games or the survival-oriented settings of the reboot series.
While the Amazon adaptation is in the works, developer Crystal Dynamics is also in the midst of developing a new Tomb Raider game. The studio was recently acquired by The Embracer Group after Square Enix sold it and other studios off in an effort to downsize and shift its focus onto other things like blockchain.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – 2002 Screenshot: Rockstar Games
Last year, footage of the next Grand Theft Auto—assumed to be GTA 6—leaked online. While Rockstar quickly tried to erase the videos from the internet and plug the holes in the ship, it was impossible to completely contain such a massive, unprecedented leak. So fans around the world got a very good look at the future of Grand Theft Auto. And now myself and others find it hard to go back to the aging GTA Online.
Late on September 19, 2022, 90 short videos of early gameplay of what would later be confirmed by Rockstar as the next GTA entry leaked online via a hacker. The footage revealed a lot about the next game in the massively popular open-world franchise, including that the series would be returning to Vice City, Florida, a fan-favorite location last seen in GTA: Vice City Stories, the prequel to the beloved PS2 classic, GTA: Vice City. It also gave us a good look at the new protagonists of this next criminal adventure and some of the missions we might experience when GTA 6 is eventually released. Fans even began mapping out the game’s virtual world using the leaks.
Rockstar undoubtedly hates the leak and likely wishes it could rewind time and prevent it from ever happening at all, but it did end up revitalizing the playerbase. For the first time in a long time, there was excitement and energy in the GTA community, which after years of GTA Online updates and poorly received remasters was in a pretty bad place prior to the leak. Even an early, unfinished or unpolished leak of GTA 6 was better than radio silence and glitchy remasters. People were pumped and hyped about the future of Grand Theft Auto in a way I hadn’t seen in years.
But then, once the leaks were scrubbed from the web and it became clear Rockstar wasn’t going to release any official teaser or trailer to capitalize on the moment, all I and other GTA fans could do was go back to GTA Online. And that’s harder to do now that I’ve seen the future.
Rockstar Games
The latest big and free expansion to GTA Online,Los SantosDrug Wars, was released late last year at a really bad time for me to play and cover it for the site. So I just…didn’t play it. For the first time ever in the history of GTA Online, I skipped a new update completely. I’ve still not played it. At first, I blamed my skipping of the latest update on bad timing and a busy schedule due to holidays and end-of-the-year content. But now, weeks removed from all that, with more free time to play stuff, I’ve still not fired up the new update. And I think it’s time to admit to myself that my growing burnout around GTA Online was increased greatly by that small taste of what’s to come. That look at the future of GTA in Florida ruined me.
I could go back and drive around the same highways and streets of Los Santos I’ve been cruising around since 2013. I could fire up the game and check out the newest business and missions connected to it. I could, sure. The thing is, I don’t know if I want to. I mean, eventually, I will play more GTA Online. I sort of have to as it’s part of my job here at Kotaku. Yet, if it wasn’t part of my career there’s a real chance that I might just never play GTA Online again.
To be clear: It’s not because GTA Online is worse today than it was a decade ago—it’s actually much better to play in 2023 than in 2013—but because getting a glimpse of a fresh new world has killed my desire to boot up the same old Los Santos after a decade of GTA Online and GTA V. I mean, just having new songs on the radio will be amazing. I love Queen’s “Radio Ga-Ga” but you can only hear it so many times in 10 years before you’re ready for new tunes, too.
At this point, I’m hoping the wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 and its sunny beaches, palm trees, and new characters isn’t too much longer, because I’m ready to leave Los Santos behind for a tropical vacation to Vice City.
Image: Nintendo / Retro Studios / DidYouKnowGaming / Kotaku
Early in December 2022, Nintendo had a journalistic documentary about a failed 2004 pitch for a Zelda Tactics game nuked from YouTube. Last week, however, Google’s video sharing platform restored the project after seemingly failing to find any copyright infringement. It’s the rare example of a content creator standing firm and getting a copyright takedown notice reversed.
“We won,” YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming tweeted on December 28. “The Heroes of Hyrule video is back up.” It added that YouTube confirmed the original copyright takedown notice was indeed from Nintendo and not an imposter, and that the video has received over 20,000 views in its first day back.
The video was originally posted back in October and featured material from a failed Retro Studios pitch to make a Legend of Zelda tactics spin-off for the Nintendo DS called The Heroes of Hyrule. The video poured over the design goals and delved into why the studio best known for Metroid Prime was interested in making it in the first place, all based on an interview with the former developer behind the pitch.
When Nintendo issued a copyright takedown notice against the video months later in December, DidYouKnowGaming accused the beloved gaming company of censoring journalism and hurting efforts at preserving historical records. It told Kotaku it planned to defend the video on fair use grounds, and that campaign now appears to have prevailed.
“When you counter a DMCA on YouTube, the company who DMCA’d you has 10 working days to show that they’ve taken legal action against you, or the video is restored,” tweeted Shane Gill, the owner of DidYouKnowGaming. “So I spent the past two weeks checking my email to see if Nintendo was suing [sic] me.”
Nintendo was not suing, at least not yet. While that option still remains, the Mario maker would now have to take the channel to court to get the video removed again, rather than simply relying on flexing YouTube’s automatic copyright protection policies. “Their intent was to scrub this piece of journalistic work from the internet because they didn’t like what it uncovered,” Gill tweeted.
Nintendo, YouTube, and DidYouKnowGaming didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Those well-versed in their Metal Gear Solid trivia will know that the original ending for Metal Gear Solid 2 was changed before release. Scenes involving a massive ship crashing into Manhattan island were a bit too much in a very young post-9/11 world, with images and videos of planes striking the World Trade Center a constant in the media. In a recent interview, director Hideo Kojima talked about the complicated nature of releasing such a game after a world changing event and how it nearly drove him to quit Konami.
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty released in November of 2001 to much anticipation. As a series focused on “Tactical Espionage Action,” the games have never shied away from political themes, be they a part of the fictional story or commentaries on world events and history. While it’s been known for some time now that elements of the game were changed at the last minute due to the September 11 attacks, recent comments reveal that the stress and challenge of handling such a release were enough to push Hideo Kojima to quit Konami at the time. A conversation with Konami’s chairman, Kagemasa Kozuki was what convinced Kojima to stay back then.
Speaking with Shuka Yamada for IGN, Hideo Kojima described an awkward and tough situation after Metal Gear Solid 2, due to release in the Fall of 2001, contained images of the World Trade Center and other sites that were attacked on 9/11.
9/11 took place in 2001 right before the release of Metal Gear Solid 2. We’d just sent off the master, but the game featured both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It seemed impossible to release the game. I was called to the board of directors and they all turned pale when I explained the situation. Nobody would tell me what to do, with the exception of Mr. Kozuki, who tackled the issue.
As I thought about what to do, I went to speak with Mr. Kozuki about possibly quitting the company. That’s when he told me: ‘When this game comes out and society has their say about it, they’ll be talking about you, its creator, and me, the person who sold it. I doubt they’ll say anything about anyone else. What will you do? I’m ready for whatever happens.’
When I heard how far he was willing to go, I made the firm decision that we’d release it together. The rest is history.
MGS2 would go on to receive critical acclaim. The game’s tactical stealth gameplay was a dramatic evolution of what came before it and its meta-narrative filled with postmodern themes about digital information, virtual realities, among many others, is still relevant and widely discussed.
After MGS2 shipped, Kojima found himself in dire need of recovery. “I became completely exhausted, and I always end up in an awful state when I finish making a game,” he said. “After the first Metal Gear Solid, even after it was done I wasn’t recovering at all and ended up being passed from one hospital to the next.”
9/11 and the themes of Metal Gear Solid 2 weren’t the only time Kojima would face the need to alter his work. As we found out during The Game Awards this year, Kojima rewrote the original story for the sequel to the narrative-driven, post-apocalyptic delivery-service simulator, Death Stranding; the game’s themes of loneliness, isolation, and world-altering events were too close to what we all went through (and are still struggling with). The Covid-19 pandemic followed Death Stranding’s 2019 release by only a few months.
“Fiction changes when something that big happens,” Kojima told IGN. He continued:
That’s why I completely rewrote [Death Stranding 2]. You can’t pretend that something this big never happened. While the games themselves are based on characters who are not bound by our reality, the players themselves have gone through the pandemic, and a story written before that experience just wouldn’t resonate with them in the same way, whether it was a fantasy story or a sci-fi one.
Kojima Productions is currently working on Death Stranding 2. The company is also working on an unnamed game with Microsoft, a project Kojima says other publishers turned down; though he pitched the idea to a few places, he describes the game as requiring “infrastructure that was never needed before.” Other companies seemed to not be as into the idea, “they really seemed to think I was mad.”
Whatever that new game is, let’s hope he’s not predicting an awful future for us yet again.
The last few years have been fairly bursting with TV shows and movies adapted from popular games. And even more are coming down the pipeline. If you ask some fans, many of these shows have strayed too far away from their original source material, so it might be nice to hear that the producers of Amazon’s God of War TV show aim to stay “incredibly true” to its original source material: the games.
While it had been reported early this year, it wasn’t until last week that Amazon officially confirmed it was developing a TV show based on the popular and long-running God of War franchise. The PlayStation series features Kratos, a god-like Spartan warrior, running around the world killing everything. Recent games have aged him up and given him a son, changing the tone of the series and helping make it more popular than ever. And now, in an interview with Collider, Amazon Studios Head of TV Vernon Sanders explained that the upcoming streaming show will be “incredibly true to the source material” which he says has a “real emotional core.”
“We know that there’s such a passionate fanbase for God of War,” Sanders told Collider. “But the thing that we’re always looking for is whether there is a real emotional core, if there’s a real narrative story, and I think [that’s] part of what makes God of War so special.”
The Amazon TV boss continued, explaining that the newer games, while being “giant epic” adventures are still focused on telling a story about “fathers and sons, and families.” He thinks this will appeal to everyone, even people who haven’t played the games.
“So what [showrunners] Rafe Judkins and Mark Fergus and [writer] Hawk Ostby have come up with for the first season, and for the series, I think, is both incredibly true to the source material, and also compelling on its own,” explained Sanders. “So we think it’s going to be huge.”
Paramount / Xbox
Recent video game adaptations, like Resident Evil on Netflix and Halo on Paramount+, have been heavily criticized online by fans for veering too far from the original source material the shows are supposedly inspired by. And while I do hesitate to agree with angry fans online and I think adaptations should be allowed to make changes, it’s hard not to get a bit annoyed by how often the Master Chief takes off his helmet in the new Halo show. And as Sanders points out, Amazon has a good track record with adaptations that fans like, listing The Boys and Invincible as examples of how to do adaptations correctly.
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Of course, talk is cheap, and making TV shows is hard. It’s always nice to say you’ll stay true to a video game’s storyline and narrative, but it’s much harder to do when so many of the games being adapted into TV shows are mainly 20 hours of combat with about four hours of cutscenes and script. But hey, maybe God of War on Amazon Prime and The Last of Us on HBO Max will be fantastic and true to their source material. Apparently, The Last of Us is actually the greatest story ever told in a video game. Seems like that should make for a few good episodes of prestige TV?
For the past week or so, some folks playing Spider-Man: Miles Morales on the PC have been encountering a bug that, at the end of the game’s dialogue sequences, would just go ahead and play a honking loud air horn.
It wasn’t for everyone, and asPC GamesN report some players—presumably those who have spent any time in New York City—didn’t even realise it was a bug in the first place. But for others it was there, it was recognisable as a bug and it was wonderful.
An emotional revelation from a family member? HONK. A heartfelt thanks for risking your life? HONK. A sombre reflection on the nature of heroism, and the sacrifices inherent? HOOOOOOOOONK.
Here’s one example, set to autoplay at the relevant moment:
Spider-Man: Miles Morales Airhorn Bug (Mild spoilers?)
And here’s a second that is much funnier if you sit through the whole thing first:
Spider-Man: Miles Morales Airhorn 2 (Mild spoilers)
Sadly, the bug has now been removed. The game’s latest patch notes, released late last week, lead with:
Hey everyone,
A new patch for Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is now live. This update holds dozens of fixes and improvements. We addressed a bug that resulted in unintended air horn sounds being audible for some players and fixed a bug that caused some audio effects to be absent from specific cutscenes.
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Audio missing from cutscenes would indeed suck. I’m glad they fixed that one. But extra audio, like, say, an air horn sounding at inopportune times, does not suck. It is very good, and funny. Since one of the other things addressed in the update was the creation of an option to “skip Fast Travel animations”, could we please also get “leave the very funny air horn” as a box to tick as well? Thank you!
