HBO just premiered the first episode of the first season of The Last of Usa series that adapts the acclaimed video game developed by Naughty Dog (Uncharted).
For a significant sector of the gamer community, this title is considered the greatest in all of history, competing head-to-head against games like Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil 2 and a wide etcetera for the first place.
So the news that HBO would produce a series was taken with relative skepticism and even some fear, given the turbulent history of video games adapted to the film or TV format.
In the vast majority of cases, these productions have been disastrous, but since the premiere of sonic the hedgehog We have seen the beginning of a long-awaited new era where the original material is respected and a story that everyone can enjoy is adapted.
We have watched the first episode of the first season of The Last of Us and we can confirm with relief that this is the same case. The chapter is brutal and remains completely faithful to the essence of its original plot.
Although there are some big changes worth noting here.
The main differences between the video game and The Last of Us series
SPOILER ALERT: From here we will address details of both the game and the first episode of the series. We recommend reading it at your own discretion if you have already seen any of both elements.
Timeline
The first big difference we notice is that the story runs under different timelines. In the original video game, the zombie apocalypse begins in the year 2013. While in the series, technically, the first introductory sequence starts in the year 2003, then jumping 20 years for the main story in both cases.
So the plot of the game takes place in the year 2033, while that of the series takes place in the year 2023, although in appearance they are the same destroyed world.
This element of starting everything in 2003 is cleverly harnessed to portray the dynamics of the world at a point where smartphones were not present and ignorance made it possible for this deadly pandemic to take everyone by surprise.
character introduction
In the original game we took initial control of Joel’s daughter and then managed him for most of the rest of the game (barring a short section later). So that whenever a character is introduced to us, we are in command of the protagonist in turn.
Here the possibility posed by the cinematographic narrative of audiovisual language is fully exploited and each character is presented to us separately, thus opening space to cement the foundations of their personality and motivations.
Relationships and motivations
Here the video game narrative is left aside a bit to give deeper motivations to the characters. Now Joel wants to get out of town to rescue his brother Tommy from latent danger.
In the original game, our protagonist ends up taking Ellie in because of a situation of relative greed and ambition, which gives him more depth here in the HBO production.
Bill and Frank
They are mentioned just a couple of seconds at the end of the first episode. But everything indicates that they will have a greater weight and power than they had in the game because of what they managed to mention about them.