The Last of Us

NO SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS, PLEASE!!! I HAVEN'T FINISHED THE GAME YET!!!!!

I doubted that this game would live up to the hype. But...wow.
I don't want to dub it a masterpiece before I get to the ending (sadly, I've seen lots of games start great only to crap out in their final hours). But so far this one is blowing me away (and I normally HATE the survival/horror/shooter genres)

The way Ellie was handled REALLY surprised me (in a good way). Modern games have a lot of.....issues when it comes to handling female characters (**cue obligatory rant about the-game-that-shall-not-be-named**). And games don't do much justice to kid characters, either. But Ellie's behavior and dialogue actually feels REAL! Her dialogue feels like it's being delivered by a teenage girl and not some 30-year-old male writer's idea of what a teenage girl would sound like.

It's so jarring to see a female lead character in a game actually behave like a human being instead of spank material and/or a lame plot device. And I'm torn between enjoying it and cynically waiting for a fridge to drop on her.


This next drawing has a slight spoiler for the middle of the game, so it's going under a cut:
( Possible spoiler under the cut... )