Talk:The Last of Us

Humour:	5	"You can't deny that view" was the bookend refrain of The Last of Us and I have to agree in relation to this article. There are quite a lot of problems here, but the article has some excellent ideas and some amusing comic turns despite them. I already had a brief discussion about this article with you, so I hope you will forgive me for briefly going over old ground and expanding upon some of those points. I have played The Last of Us through twice, once to actually play the game and the second time to collect all the collectibles, so I would like to think I speak from a position of some knowledge when I go over this article. The article generally flows well and I enjoyed reading through your take on the story, a particular highlight being the description of the meeting with Bill and the jokes about everybody hating each other near the start of the game. The main problem is your tendency to fabricate facts unnecessarily. There is little need to resort to making things up especially when an abbreviated description of what happens or a slight exaggeration would work just as well. As an example consider the start of the "Prologue" section, you discuss the start of the game and talk about Joel ordering a takeaway and the delivery person being infected. Now, I'll admit to it being some time since I played through the prologue, but that doesn't happen. The problem with this is that it distances your article from the subject matter, much of the humour in an article of this type is derived from a parody of the subject matter. People who read the article will likely want to read a humorous take on the game as well as the characters within it, this comes from using the factual events of the game and making jokes about that. It may seem that I am making a mountain out of a molehill here, but this is a trend that repeats a number of times throughout the article. Consider the part of the text I mention above and compare it to something like "Twenty years before the start of the main game, the protagonist Joel returns from work and receives an suspiciously expensive watch as a gift from his daughter Sarah. Sarah explains that she paid for the watch using money she received from selling hardcore drugs, Joel laughs. Later that night Sarah awakens to find the house in darkness and Joel downstairs shooting their neighbour to death." While that may not be the apex of written humour it works better because it is firmly rooted in the actual events that take place in the game. I would suggest that you have a read through and consider the areas of the article where you are making up events that do not happen in the game, if you find that you are doing this ask yourself why and whether there is something you from the game you can actually use instead. This leads me onto another issue, the lack of a unifying theme for the article. I understand that you are essentially telling story of what happens in the game but you don't seem certain how you want to do this. At times in the article you discuss Joel and Ellie's near sociopathic lack of concern for the world around them or you make fun of their character traits and at other times you try to draw humour from the situations they encounter e.g. shooting the Deer 15 times or the massive queue of cars in Pittsburgh. Neither of these ideas manages to establish itself as the dominant one throughout the article and there doesn't seem to be much of a running joke. It would be better to have one of these ideas run throughout the article; this would allow the reader to imagine what the reaction of the characters will be to any given situation and then to have the pay-off of having the character act as expected. You seem to be at least partially down this road and I enjoyed the passing references to Ellie's inability to swim and Joel's inability to have any emotions besides sadness, anger and, occasionally angry sadness. I'd suggest increasing the scope of this joke, this doesn't mean you need to point it out repeatedly but a passing reference to it does just as well. You could say something like "On learning that Joel plans to leave her with Tommy, Ellie runs away. Joel goes after her, ostensibly to keep her safe, but in reality to check whether he should blame himself for the needless death of another small child. Joel finds Ellie and the two speak about their feelings. Ellie's fear of abandonment and Joel's disgust at needless knee-jerk violence. A group of people then arrive at the house; Joel throttles three of them to death before plunging a pair of scissors into the fourth's eye and leaving." In that example I am trying to draw in as much real game content as I can, as well reinforcing Joel's character traits i.e. hypocrisy, sadness and ultra-violence. You come close to this throughout the article and I'd like to single out your image captions as they achieve this sort of humour in a much better way than the actual prose. You use the image captions to make jokes or observations about the game, it's characters and it's setting this is exactly the sort of thing you need to draw out into the main body of the article. The above points are the main problem areas at the moment, I don't think there is too much in the way of rewriting to be done, but I think some of your sections would benefit from a second look and some attempts at approaching the humour differently. You can plainly write well but at the moment it's too patchy to be anything more than just okay. Have a go at making some changes and have a look at articles like All Quiet on the Western Front and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater for some more ideas. Both of those articles use very different styles and it would be to your advantage to experiment with the type of jokes they make.
Concept:	7	There's nothing particularly wrong with the concept here, the approach you are using is perfectly fine but it seems rather half-hearted. The article doesn't read much like an article about a game should, it focusses mostly on the story and there is very little mention of the developer and the critical reception the game received. While it is perfectly possible for the article to exist without these I feel that there could be a bit more of this in yours. In your preamble you seem very eager to get straight into the article and you neglect some simple explanation of what the game is and when it was released. It may be that this was a deliberate choice but it doesn't seem to be consistent enough to be deliberate to me. Have a look at the wikipedia article and consider what information they provide in the pre-amble; they give a good summary of what the game is, who developed it and how it was received by the general public. There's no reason, as far as I can see, why you shouldn't include this in your article, it encourages the idea that this is a parody and gives those who have not played the game some idea of what it is, or at least what you would like them to think it is. There's not too much to be done here, your tone is generally good, but just keep an eye on your use of profanity or colloquialisms. Try to keep your language encyclopaedic and professional, only using alternative language when there is no other option.
Prose and formatting:	7	As with the above, there's not too much wrong here, the main thing you need to keep an eye on is your grammar. I corrected a couple of errors as I read through but there are quite a few others. Where you speak about Tess dying you say "She dies an heroic death". I wasn't sure if this was a reference to this meme or whether it was an accident, just before this you use the word "Admonishes" in a way that doesn't make much sense either. Make sure you proofread carefully. I always recommend this to people, despite being hopeless at actually doing it when it comes to my own articles. There are plenty of people who will help you out with this if it's something you aren't particularly enamoured with. At best minor errors like this don't really bother a reader, at worst they annoy people and make them stop reading. It's crucial that you make sure your spelling and grammar is as good as it can be so that if people are going to hate the article it's because of what you wrote rather than how you wrote it. The rest of the article doesn't have much in the way of problems, there are plenty of images and the formatting is good, I would suggest having a second look at the information in the infobox, there doesn't seem to be much point in it being there unless it's going to provide something that the text doesn't.
Images:	9	My favourite part of the article, the captions are relevant, funny and are really well written. You need to work at translating this success to the rest of your article. The reason they are so well done is that they make good observations about the game, its frustrations and its characters seamlessly. Consider this and try and incorporate into your normal jokes, I appreciate the style you use in the captions is different and you have the image as something of a crutch to help you, but regardless this is a real indicator of your ability and the potential for the rest of the article. Good work.
Miscellaneous:	7	My overall grade of the article.
Final Score:	35	Overall my original comment rings true, this is a decent article but it feels like it could be so much more than that. You are letting yourself down in places with some poorly executed jokes and some forays into more juvenile humour. Despite this, the good parts of the article were still enough to keep me reading. If you can increase the impact of the jokes in the main section of the article and give it more of an underlying theme throughout you will be on exactly the right lines to make this excellent. Game articles are always challenging and you have taken this one on well, don't be afraid of trying some different ideas if they appeal to you having read through some featured articles, it's your work and nobody will mind you taking extra time to improve it. I always worry that I have sounded overly critical in these reviews, I hope you don't feel that is the case, I could sit here and discuss what you are doing well all day, but that's not why we're here. If you take major umbrage with what I have said please bear in mind that this is just my opinion, easily replaced by asking anybody else. If you do have any questions for me then feel free to ask on my talk page. Good luck making your changes.
Reviewer:	"I used to be addicted to soap, but I'm clean now". --ChiefjusticeWii 18:44, 29 November 2014 (UTC)