Round Three: Supporting Characters

Not to sound like a broken record but, yet again, it’s a tough choice, both games have a great supporting cast, for instance, The Last of Us has Tommy, Sarah, Tess, Henry, Sam, David, Marlene, Riley & Bill. While The Walking Dead has Kenny, Duck, Katjaa, Carly, Doug, Lilly, Larry, Ben, Christa, Omid, Charles, Molly, Bonnie, Luke, Sarah, Carlos, Nick, Alvin, Rebecca, Sarita, Mike, Jane & Arvo…so this is probably gonna take a while to go through. First of all with The Last of Us, a lot of the characters have a strong purpose in the game and are very well done characters. Sarah & Riley for example act as anchors for our main characters and really are the two that really show them as people at their most vulnerable. While the others act more as a reflection of who they are, Tommy for example is a reminder of who Joel used to be, Tess reflects who Joel is now, Henry & Sam are there to mirror Joel & Ellie’s relationship and how what loyalty can do to a person.  David & Marlene show what a person is capable of when pushed to the extremes and Bill shows why companionship is important now more than ever. Every character has their purpose and place in the game and are all very well done and memorable characters.

While The Walking Dead is a little more complicated, considering how many characters there are spread across two seasons, not everyone gets a decent amount of development, they’re not bad characters per-say, they just don’t really have a defined personality, so I’m probably just gonna skip over a the lot of them. And even with those left over they’re not always the best, Ben, Sarah & Nick for example are really annoying and when they eventually die, you don’t honestly feel that much sympathy for them, in fact when given the option to kill off Ben I didn’t even hesitate, the guy was more trouble than he’s worth. While others while having definitive personalities, just weren’t given that much to do.

So that leaves only several other characters and really the only ones who matter, the first one being Jane, Jane is awesome, not only does she has some great chemistry with Clementine but the parallels that she shares with her really help build their relationship and the two definitely grow from each other, Jane becoming more sympathetic and Clementine becoming a little bit more hard core. Another character is Luke who ends up playing about several roles at once, he’s the leader, he’s the optimist, he’s the rebel, for any other character this would be too much to handle, but Luke actually manages it pretty well, mostly because he’s not perfect at any of them. He may be the leader but he’s still open to other people’s opinions, he’s optimistic but has his limits and he may rebel against others but he’s willing to compromise, he’s really the only character that you have full confidence in throughout the entire season.

And of course there is Kenny, oh Kenny…Kenny is the only supporting character to properly carry over from season one to season two, and boy is there a lot to talk about. When we first meet Kenny he’s an honest, loyal and respectable guy whose main concern is protecting his family, over time he builds a friendship with both Lee & Clementine and after he loses both his wife & son, they’re the only two that really pull him through and he almost dies protecting them, so we’re lead to believe he’s dead. But in season two when we finally see him again and learn that he’s alive, it’s without a doubt one of the most emotional moments in the game, when you’re given the option to hug him you bet that I hugged him. Which then also leads to the most heart-breaking storyline of the season and that would be the slow mental decline of Kenny. After everything that this guy has been through, losing his family, seeing his friends killed in front of him and being brutally beaten up by a psycho, you can imagine that it’ll leave an effect on him, and it does exactly that, he becomes more brutal and narrow-minded, unwilling to compromise and it becomes easier for him to make tough choices, this all comes to a climax where you’re given an ultimatum to kill Kenny or let him kill Jane, and either way you go you’re gonna get emotional. If you kill him then he finally says that he’s at peace and can be with his family again, but if you save him then he begins to even out some more and you see him become more human as time goes on and you finally get to see more of Kenny from the first game and yet again, the emotions begin piling on.

So this is a real tough one, do you go for the small and memorable group or do you go for the large but varied group? Well again it’s really tough but I’ve gotta go with The Walking Dead on this. I mean yeah I don't remember every character nor do I care that much for others, but for the members that do stick out to me, I really love them. The Last of Us may have better written characters and may have used them better, but I never cared for them nearly as much as I did for people like Kenny or Luke. Again the characters in The Last of Us are still really good, but they sometimes feel more like plot points rather than legitimate people, in The Walking Dead, they feel like legitimate people, and that’s what matters most to me, the winner: The Walking Dead.

Winner: The Walking Dead