Despite HBO’s The Last of Us getting a lot of praise for the most recent episode, some fans still couldn’t help but notice some significant differences from the original game.
The series not only significantly changed Sam, but it also removed significant portions of the original’s progression, changing Henry in a way that fans definitely didn’t expect.
The showrunners, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, discussed some of the big deviations from the game’s storyline in episode 5 while having a chat on The Last of Us Podcast.
For example, they changed Henry who kills foes with Joel in the game, into a character that has never taken any human life.
Druckmann shared that “There is a change here, quite significant from the game. We just needed Henry to be able to fight and kill with you. And we also try to give a certain morality to Henry that even Joel would not have, which is like – There is a part where Sam tries to steal a toy from a toy store, and Henry says, ‘No, we only take what we need and nothing more.’ And it was a way to sort of separate them. Here, again, because we do not need Henry to kill, there is this beautiful choice of, like, I have never killed anybody.’… I think it immediately separates him from Joel. And you understand why Henry’s so reliant on this man that he just spotted kill a bunch of people.”
The moment the protagonists enter the tunnels under Kansas City marks the biggest departure from the Naughty Dog game.
As gamers are aware, the letters and notebooks they uncover serve as the basis for a whole plot that describes the life of a survivor by the name of “Ish” and the community he lived with underneath the city.
Ish appears in passing in a simple drawing in the series, but the character’s backstory is completely omitted.
About this specific change, Druckmann said they frequently discussed how the show should “enrich” the game.
That being said, he explained that “We just could not tell the story in the show. There was no way to do it. But we wanted to honor the fact that this place existed, and it felt like there’s a way to reflect back on these characters and the journey they are going through now, especially with kids lived here. And you saw Sam sketching and drawing stuff before, and now you could’ve imagined there would have been, like, a dozen kids here, and now they’re all gone. So, I just love, again, it’s this moment that honors it. And it’s like these two are almost like a parallel dimension of the same story side by side and kind of help talk to one another and enrich the other.”
Mazin acknowledged that the adaptation could have technically devoted a whole episode on Ish’s backstory, but he argued that the final product was still better as far as he was concerned.
“It is better to tip our hats to Ish and then have people play the game,” he stated.