Perhaps it's cos I'm ill (the reason I treated myself to the PS5 upgrade and bashed it out in a day) but this was nowhere near as amazing my inital playthrough a little over a year ago.
Maybe I just needed to give it more air before revisiting because the action setpieces in this game are easily the best in the series and therefore very memorable so they're gonna lose that intensity.
The slower character moments still held up, though. I love the Nate & Elena bits so much. I also warmed up to Sam more on this playthrough too.
In addition, I'm not too sure how well The Last of Us-isms fit into this game. Some of them translate excellently but some of them should stay in Last of Us.
Overall, I still love this game. When I first played it I struggled to determine if I preferred 3 or 4 but this one clealy takes the cake for me. The action is better even though this is the most grounded. And the emotional moments hit the hardest.
I think it would've been interesting to see Hennig's original vision but I think Druckmann naturally kept some of it while adding to it gracefully. Uncharted was known for it's small characters but big plots, Last of Us for its big characters but small plot. I think he found an excellent balance for this perfect conclusion for Nathan Drake.
Sidenote: was this buggy for anyone else? The original on PS4 was flawless. Played on Fidelity Mode and experienced some pop-in, character animations not activating at the correct times, wouldn't let me climb at points, etc. which were all pretty harmless but still take you out of it. The most damning one was when I somehow got stuck inside of a wall and had to restart from the last checkpoint.
Maybe I just needed to give it more air before revisiting because the action setpieces in this game are easily the best in the series and therefore very memorable so they're gonna lose that intensity.
The slower character moments still held up, though. I love the Nate & Elena bits so much. I also warmed up to Sam more on this playthrough too.
In addition, I'm not too sure how well The Last of Us-isms fit into this game. Some of them translate excellently but some of them should stay in Last of Us.
Overall, I still love this game. When I first played it I struggled to determine if I preferred 3 or 4 but this one clealy takes the cake for me. The action is better even though this is the most grounded. And the emotional moments hit the hardest.
I think it would've been interesting to see Hennig's original vision but I think Druckmann naturally kept some of it while adding to it gracefully. Uncharted was known for it's small characters but big plots, Last of Us for its big characters but small plot. I think he found an excellent balance for this perfect conclusion for Nathan Drake.
Sidenote: was this buggy for anyone else? The original on PS4 was flawless. Played on Fidelity Mode and experienced some pop-in, character animations not activating at the correct times, wouldn't let me climb at points, etc. which were all pretty harmless but still take you out of it. The most damning one was when I somehow got stuck inside of a wall and had to restart from the last checkpoint.