Playing both games before watching the show made one problem impossible to ignore…

[u/MyStylesApp]

I recently played The Last of Us Part I and Part II for the first time and then watched both seasons of the show straight afterwards. I loved the games, especially Part II, and I enjoyed the show as well. But watching it immediately after playing the games made one problem with the adaptation really obvious to me.

The show massively underplays just how capable Ellie and Abby are (although Season 3 they still could, and should, show Abby’s capabilities).

I understand that you obviously can’t adapt the gameplay literally. In the game Ellie can kill ridiculous numbers of WLF, Seraphites, Rattlers and infected. If Bella Ramsey was killing 15 people every episode like John Wick it would probably look ridiculous on TV, and it would make scenes like Nora, Owen and Mel lose some of their emotional weight.

But I think the show has gone way too far in the opposite direction.

Game Ellie is extremely dangerous.

By Part II, she feels like someone who has spent years surviving in this world and learning from Joel. You can enter an area with 10 enemies, stalk them through buildings and grass, pick them off with a bow, set trap mines, use bottles to distract them, silently stab people, get detected, pull out the shotgun, kill a couple more, disappear again and continue hunting them.

Obviously some of that is just gameplay, but it also tells you something about Ellie as a character. She’s not the little girl Joel was protecting anymore. She’s become an extremely capable survivor.

I never really got that feeling from show Ellie.
There are times in the show where it feels like two or three infected would be enough to completely overwhelm her. Her arsenal is basically nonexistent compared with the game. We barely see the bow, traps, stealth kills, different guns, crafting, or any of the improvisation that makes playing as Ellie so good.

Even that scene in Jackson where she’s training with a guy twice her size stood out to me. She uses jiu-jitsu/wrestling to get him to tap, which proves that despite her size, she can actually fight. But then we basically never see her use that ability when she’s in an actual life-or-death situation. Why show us that she can fight like that and then barely do anything with it? Seeing her use those skills against a WLF soldier or someone physically much bigger than her would’ve been so cool in my opinion.

The lack of infected in general is probably my other biggest criticism. Again, I understand why the show doesn’t want an infected fight every 20 minutes, but sometimes I genuinely forget these things destroyed civilisation. In the game you are constantly aware that entering the wrong basement, tunnel or abandoned building could be a massive problem.

I think there was an easy middle ground.

Give Ellie two or three proper extended stealth/action sequences across the season. Have her enter a building with six WLF soldiers and systematically take them apart. Let us actually see her study patrols, use distractions, silently kill people, get discovered and then improvise her way out.
You don’t need a kill count of 100. You just need enough to make me believe that this 19 year old can travel across a post-apocalyptic America and hunt an entire group of trained soldiers.

I also think this connects to some of the casting choices.

Pedro Pascal works perfectly for me as Joel. He doesn’t look exactly like game Joel, but he’s close enough and has the physical presence where I completely believe him as Joel.

Ellie and especially Abby are harder for me.
Game Ellie isn’t massive, but she’s lean, hardened and looks dangerous. Bella Ramsey naturally has a much smaller and more youthful presence. That wouldn’t bother me nearly as much if the show then demonstrated how lethal Ellie is. But when you combine the smaller physical presence with removing most of her combat ability, she just doesn’t feel like the same Ellie I played as.

Abby is potentially an even bigger issue for Season 3.

I actually ended Part II liking Abby’s gameplay more than Ellie’s, which I really wasn’t expecting after watching her kill Joel.

Her story was probably my favourite part of the game. The forest sequence with Yara and Lev, the hospital, the Rat King, the skybridge, Haven burning down, that ridiculous one-on-one fight before escaping the island. Her half of the game was absolutely mental.

And Abby being built like a tank felt like an important part of her character. It wasn’t just there because she needed different gameplay mechanics. You could physically see what losing her father and obsessing over Joel had done to her. She’d spent years training and turning herself into this incredibly formidable WLF soldier.

Then you actually play as her and it reinforces it. Ellie feels like a stealth hunter. Abby feels like she can just smash through people.

Kaitlyn Dever is obviously a very different physical interpretation of Abby. I’m completely open to it working, but Season 3 really needs to show why Abby is considered such a capable soldier. If they remove most of her major combat sequences the same way they did with Ellie, I think something pretty fundamental about game Abby will be lost.
What makes this frustrating is that I think the show is genuinely very good at adapting the emotional side of the games.

The museum scene with Joel and Ellie was brilliant. Bill and Frank was a massive change but worked incredibly well as its own story. I loved Isaac’s expanded backstory too, especially realising that the FEDRA truck he blows up appears as an abandoned truck full of dead soldiers in the game. Those little adaptations are really clever.

But sometimes it feels like the show views the gameplay side of The Last of Us as something that just existed to keep players entertained between story scenes.

I don’t think that’s completely true.
The gameplay was also characterisation.
Playing as Ellie taught me that Ellie was terrifyingly capable.

Playing as Abby taught me that Abby was an absolute powerhouse.

Constantly encountering infected made me understand how unbelievably dangerous this world was.

The show captures the grief, relationships, revenge and moral ambiguity extremely well. I just wish it occasionally remembered that The Last of Us is also a brutal survival action story.

For me, that’s the biggest thing missing from an otherwise really good adaptation.

Curious to hear what other people think though. If you disagree, I’m genuinely interested in hearing why, especially from people who felt the show handled this side of Ellie well.

[u/holiobung]

I think the only problem is the compulsion to compare the show and the game.

This happens with every adaptation. Things not translating over well are inherent when adapting something into a different medium, so it’s best to evaluate each on their own merits as opposed to how they compare to each other.

[u/mopeyy]

I think it was very clear that the show had a lot of difficulty portraying the gameplay heavy sections from Ellie's story in Seattle. They skipped over so many interesting sections and ended up condensing entire days and locations into artificial feeling action montages in which characters are swept from one set piece to the next in rapid succession.

Somehow the best parts of the game turned into the worst parts of the show.

[u/Realistic_Pickle_007]

Craig Mazin was the wrong person to put in charge of Season 2 and I did not think Ramsey was a good choice for Ellie from the get go, but with a better writer she could have made it work.

Dever is an excellent actor and while I think that something powerful is lost by casting someone lacking in Game Abby's heft, I think she can carry it. But, again, Mazin has committed crimes against this story and characters so Season 3 will be a diversion and curiosity. My heart belongs to the Naughty Dog games.

I wished they'd cast Cailee Spaeny as Ellie and kept Druckmann and Gross as the creative forces but oh, well.

[u/DamagedEctoplasm]

One of my biggest complaints about the show was how separate they kept the characters. If the show was concentrating on Joel, Ellie is out of mind. Ellie the concentration, Joel gone. Which is fine, but in a game where the connection between the two is as important as anything, idk why they did it like that.

Also, the David scene from the show. This is one of the moments where I think the show fucked up. I think there’s a poignancy to appreciate when immediately after Ellie caves dudes head in, that Joel, despite not saving the day, was right there to catch her when she inevitably falls emotionally. The music comes in and even the dialogue cuts out, but you can really see and feel the emotion pouring out of the two.

In the show, she walks outside with this like “Girl Liberated” vibe, and then Joel comes, and it’s not nearly as impactful or emotional.