008Zulu said:
Casual Shinji said:
That's why the very first gameplay is you being Sarah scared and home alone, and watching the situation unfold from the backseat of a car. This gives you that emotional connection. Without it it would've probably been the kid from ME3 all over again, though with much better characterisation.
My point was she wasn't alive long enough to make that connection. If they had killed her off and the end of Act 1, then I could see the emotional aspect of her death since it gave you time to actually bond with the character. As it stands, we are supposed to be sad simply because she is a kid.
I don't know, she was to me. Obviously this is just a backstory, but thanks to the terrific performance from both actors you get a very effective father/daughter relationship in a short ammount of time.
And here's the thing, the very second Sarah appears on screen (she's actually the first image the game starts out with) you
know she's going to die. And Naughty Dog knew this, which is why they threw a few curveballs. The first character you play is her. This instantly gives her a player connection; Just a few minutes ago you were playing as her wandering around the house not yet aware of the chaos that was about to errupt, and now she's dead. We've all at some point in our youth been in a family situation where we're powerless to do anything about it because we were just kids. So all we could do was just quietly observe the crisis unfold and hope for the best. The intro perfectly recreates that sensation, but with the added punch of the observer dying. Again, we knew she was going to, but with everything that preceeded it, it adds a lot more weight.
Another one is
how she died. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought she was gonna get bit or outright killed by a zombie. But instead it's the person they thought would protect them who ends up killing her. Thinking they were out of the woods only to immediate walk into the lion's den.
And all of this is not written in simply for the sake of Joel wanting to protect Ellie. Because when they first meet Joel doesn't give a shit about Ellie at all. In the 20 years he spent in the apocalypse there've probably been countless teenage girls he's seen get killed. To him this is just the next one in line. Initially it's actually Tess who bonds with Ellie and strikes up conversations with her. The scene where they find out Ellie's secret and the military comes sniffing around, Joel just runs and leaves Ellie and it's Tess who helps her on her feet. The guilt laden obligation for Joel to protect Ellie actually comes from Tess, and it isn't untill halfway through the game that Joel protects Ellie because he genuinely cares about her. The purpose of the backstory doesn't really come in effect untill the second half of the game.