The Last of Us: Left Behind

Too much of the weight of The Last of Us concerns its storytelling and "acting" (voice-acting, but I like the character animations in cutscenes as well). It's only natural the DLC expansion would be heavily story-/character-focused. Unfortunately, the tight gameplay isn't frequently praised as highly as the story of the main game, so it's even sadder to see this DLC downplays combat quite significantly.

I've owned the base game since 2015, but took so long to get to the DLC, quite simply because I could not decide whether I wanted to start it on Normal or Hard, or if I wanted to play Hard or higher on the base game first, and I eventually benched my PS3 for some years to focus on PS4 (on which I do not have the remaster). I intended to replay the game because the TV show just started on HBO (at the time of writing, we're half a day away from the second episode airing), and wanted to play the DLC first, mistakenly believing it to be 100% prequel. Things kept happening to piss me off, which carried the consequence of skewing my judgment, poising me to dislike this a bit more; 1) apparently, I hadn't bought the DLC yet, and I needed to jump through hoops to add funds to my PSN wallet, as the website kept shitting itself, and ultimately I bought a digital gift card on Amazon to transfer those funds; 2) the ~6gb download took for-fucking-ever, when I was hoping to knock the whole DLC out in a couple hours before bed on a worknight, but I had to just give up 57% of the way through and do something else; 3) "something else" turned out to be "start the main game again, on New Game Plus, and I played continually without feeling like I wanted to "stop" and switch to the DLC, until I finally took a break to go to bed; 4) the game seemed to make me download the DLC again(?) from the main menu, which took another hour or two. God damn....

But it may have been worth the frustration, as the expansion was good enough. Well, good enough for the wait, especially as I was dicking around on my phone to kill time. Maybe not quite worth the $9.99, especially as the PS4 remaster occasionally gets as cheap as $8.99 for the whole thing. But oh well....

I feel bad giving this a middling score, as I did very much appreciate the story, but I just wish there was a bit more "game" than "movie." Riley's cool. This new vulnerable side we see of Ellie is cool. I guess I don't care too much for how the story switches between the "present" and past - I mean, I "get" it, I think, thematically (Ellie struggles to keep Joel alive because she wasn't able to save Riley, as one layer), but I don't know. The climaxes of both timeframes are cool.

I had to restart the final battle tons of times because I'm dumb -_-"

And I'm also slightly mad at myself for not doing anything with the Rifle after picking it up.

I also feel like the joke about Jak X: Combat Racing is a little disrespectful to Naughty Dog's own roots, but I also think that's true for everything from the PS3 era onward, so....

EDIT: I went back to play this game after completing the main game again (in the middle of which I first played this DLC). I was after miscellaneous Trophies, namely the one or two "Optional Conversations" I missed. Feeling like it shouldn't be "too hard" because of the small amount of combat sequences here, I decided to go Survivor, which I hadn't yet attempted on the main game. It was... well, kind of really fucking fun! I feel like the mode encourages stealth a lot more than combat, but I learned pretty soon that I will not be successful in sneaking around the Stalkers any time soon, so I did this thing where I'd open myself to die while making sure I could find all/most Bricks scattered around the arena, to plan for my final attempt, in which I just ran around to juke the enemies while grabbing Bricks as necessary. I felt I'd accomplished something there. Later encounters were more touch-and-go, teaching me I could just avoid combat where possible, which also allows me to save all four bullets I had.

As I'd very recently played the DLC for the first time, I skipped any cutscenes I could. Because I'm unused to Survivor Mode, and, frankly, not good at shooting games, I died a lot in the final battle, necessarily having to restart from checkpoints, and I imagine spending more time in that fight than in the entire rest of the DLC beforehand, at least in this run. With a "better" (to me) ratio of story:play, I grew to appreciate this DLC quite a bit more. Unfortunately, it also kept bugging out in the final battle, including despawning all enemies sometimes when I died, making it impossible to progress , so I'll hold back on bumping it to a 4.0.

The first time I did Ellie's joke book Optional Conversation in the main game, it was the funniest shit I'd ever heard. The rest kind of wore on me. In the DLC, I guess I "fat-fingered" my controller and accidentally hit Circle after only two puns, so I made sure to play them all in this second run. While I was otherwise skipping cutscenes and streamlining the experience by avoiding other optional content (i.e., the extra masks in the Halloween store), I feel I've "improved" my experience with the story by seeing all the puns play out. A mild irony to my otherwise gameplay-focused run!