The Last Of Us Shows That Good Games Can Inspire Great Shows

Time and time again, we have seen games deliver remarkable stories that can compete against the greatest of cinema. From the detailed and heartfelt story of God of War to the down to Earth feeling from the Last of Us, good video games truly can inspire great shows, directly or indirectly. The story of The Last of Us is yet another zombie game where you don’t wanna get bit and keep your ammo stocked up.

Although the actual goal of the story is extremely significant as Joel and Ellie venture through a ruptured world in hope of delivering a cure. Although the cure in this game is not a vial or an antidote, or another virus, it is Ellie, she is the cure, and when the time comes, she will save humanity. This premise is beautiful and not too over the top that it could be considered bad in any way.

Like other movies of this genre, this goal and system are very repetitive. As seen in World War Z or I Am Legend, the main protagonists just want to find a cure. Although it is intriguing, it just sucks the life out of the film. The thing that sets apart The Last of Us, is that it is humane.

The characters in both the game and the show, exhibit a flurry of emotions with little acts and bits of dialogue here and there to really show the players how real these digital characters actually are. But of course, there are differences between the games’ version and the one we see in the show, but overall the gist of the story is basically the same.

This is because you don’t want to change something that already works, and The Last of Us works extremely well.

Now The Last of Us is not the only game to inspire great movies, games like Dark Souls created an entire genre for games and ideas alike. With this staple, it inspired movies in its image and new franchises at the same time. Although the Soulsborne name does not have a direct reimagination in a TV format, it still exists as a reminder and as a token of inspiration, truly driving home the idea of a great story inspiring a great movie.

The Soulsborne genre did inspire other games, which in turn innovated the entire movie industry. Even games like Sonic were able to garner enough support and love from the community that it inspired their own franchise in the format of a movie. Garnering great reviews and massive love from the fans, even after the original character model issues.

Another popular example is the critically acclaimed title Halo, and everything that has been associated with it. With the coherent success of Halo and its many years of content, it too received its own TV series which was a pretty good adaption, if not an amazing one.

The Halo TV show was produced by 343 Industries, who are also the current developer of the Halo video game series, showing just how adept a studio became to push out something on another media platform. It may not have been perfect, but it was still fun. We can pretty easily deduce that every game to have a media representation was inspired by its own game and most possibly others of the same type.

The same applies to games being inspired by movies or other formats of media. Of course, many movies or TV shows may be inspired by the feats achieved by some of these games, but inspiration doesn’t really amid to success, especially not in the creative department.

Movies like Monster Hunter or the old Doom and Resident Evil movies are prime examples of everything a movie of this genre shouldn’t do, and that is to take a new different path. The Resident Evil adaptations had one extremely noticeable problem, even the newest one, that it took a very weird approach to the movies rather than what we would see in the games.

Yes, it incorporates old characters and enemies, but it really isn’t enough to set the tone and ultimately fails. And it is not only Resident Evil suffering from this. Many shows derived from games follow the same repetitive mistakes.

This could be due to creative differences in the directors, conflicts between the game’s story and the story the show is trying to push towards, or maybe the expulsion of the original game’s studio from having a part in the development of the show.

This ends up damaging the base of whatever the show was actually going for and inevitably gets entangled in a mess of bad story decisions and characters. This happens in good adaptations too, just not too abundantly. Another thing to note is the actors that have started to shift towards gaming forums.

Especially in games like Death Stranding, which has many real-world actors in the game, really starts to influence the entire movie and game genre as a whole. Nonetheless, The Last of Us proved something many franchises really couldn’t. Although the game was carried by its amazing graphics and extremely realistic combat, the thing that went on to create the TV adaptation, was nothing other than its story.