Round Five: Story

So with the scores all tied up it all comes down to story, which one was better? Well, let’s talk about it, The Last of Us is a pretty simple story, Joel is hired to escort Ellie across the country because she might be the key to a cure, of course the story gets a lot more complex than that though that’s mostly due to the characters and their complexity rather than the story becoming all too intricate. While in The Walking Dead the first season is all about Lee getting Clementine to Savannah to find her parents, again, seems like a pretty simple story, but the intrigue comes from the complications and characters they meet along the way. Neither of them are really detailed and original plots, but they don’t need to be, the focus is on the characters and they’re all very well written and very interesting, they’re the reason the stories work so well is because they’re written so well, it’s not about what experiences they go through, it’s about how they react to it.

But then again I feel as though-even though the story is very simple-The Last of Us just tells it better, after all with every event and every experience that the characters go through, you genuinely feel like they’re different people by the end of the story, in The Walking Dead, you don’t feel like they’ve come all that far, I mean Lee & Clementine’s relationship was pretty much established in the first episode and there were no major changes to it throughout the story, in The Last of Us the relationship is much better paced out and takes time for them to care about each other, and throughout the story their relationship is constantly being challenged. And even more so, the story in second season of The Walking Dead isn’t really all that focused, at first you think it’s going to be about Clementine & Christa heading to Wellington, then you think it’s gonna be about Clementine trying to fit in with this new group, then you think it’ll be about the gang surviving inside a prison with Carver, then you think it’ll be about Kenny’s mental health--I think you get the point. While both stories are definitely character pieces, the story in The Walking Dead just isn’t all that focused, The Last of Us never forgets what the end goal is, to get Ellie to the Fireflies, so considering that it’s more solid a story and better paced, I have to say it, The Last of Us is the winner.

Winner: The Last of Us

So with a score of 3-2 The Last of Us comes out on top as the superior game.