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jaggedwolfFinal Uncharted game! Half the length of the other ones, focused on Chloe and Nadine. They're a good pair, I'd definitely take a full length game with them, though it seems like Naughty Dog's done with the Uncharted series.
Enjoyed staying in a single location for the bulk of the game, for the first time since UC1, and I got to learn about an Indian empire I'd never heard of. It was cool recognizing the Hindu gods that are part of this adventure's background mythos. Gameplay is as fluid as ever, though as with previous installments I don't care for driving segments.
Chloe has always been more morally slippery than Nate, needing both him and Elena to argue with her in UC2 to help save the world. Similar to Nate, though, is how she approaches jobs with a joking distance. Lost Legacy lets us see a different angle on her by seeing her more vulnerable, on the hunt for an artifact because of a personal connection, not only the money.
And if you're going to bring in Nadine as the partner on the job, Chloe is someone I buy willing to work with Nadine. At the beginning of the game I was quite amused by Nadine asking Chloe if she had any feelings about all these Indian artifacts being passed around or destroyed for money - Nadine, you ran a mercenary army, I do not think you avoided much destruction of anything, human or objects. But it is, I think, Nadine scoping Chloe out, trying to get a sense of this woman she's working with for the first time. Her weaknesses, her strengths.
I spent so much of the game waiting for Nadine to betray us, that I was taken aback by the betrayal going the other way. Of course Nadine is irate at the mission being to rescue Sam Drake, who almost killed her, and of course Chloe didn't tell her. I still don't care about Sam but it's a deft move in the story, and he later serves the useful purpose of illustrating how fast Chloe and Nadine have become so close.
The title applies to both of them. Chloe's following in the footsteps of her archaeologist father and the tusk of Ganesha he never found. Nadine is wrestling with the lost of Shoreline and a clear listlessness about what to even do - you can't imagine the Nadine of UC4's beginning picking up this job. And yet, despite these underlying arcs and my own familiarity with Hindu mythology, I did not foresee the ever-present daddy issues of Ganesha coming into play.
Ganesha's the remover of obstacles, yes, but the two stories I remember best of him are essentially filial piety unleashed. In the first, the story of how he got his elephant head, he is a human boy created by his mother, Parvati, to guard her chambers while she's bathing. Parvati's husband, Shiva, arrives and demands entry. Ganesha refuses to stand aside. An enraged Shiva beheads him. Parvati is distraught to find her boy dead and demands Shiva fix this, and Shiva replaces the head with an elephant head. Tada, new son!
The second story is one where Ganesha and his brother Kartikeya decide to race around the whole world to win a prize from their parents. Kartikeya rushes off, confident off his win. Ganesha instead circles his parents, declaring that they are his whole world, and like a good suck-up, wins.
So, filial pity to the max. I hadn't heard the Parasurama story before, and so I got to be as surprised as Chloe and the rest of them when the answer to the final puzzle is that reason Ganesha was defeated by Parasurama was because Parasurama was wielding Shiva's axe. Ganesha yielded deliberately, to preserve his father's honor, and the interplay of that with each of Chloe and Nadine's storis is up there with Nate in UC4 realizing how the pirates died. Top-tier Uncharted story moment for me.
And Asav not getting it, after him and his men have been thinking of Chloe as nothing more than an annoying intruder, a "half-breed", I love Chloe's cockiness about how obtuse he is even as she's getting handcuffed. Asav is super lowkey a Hindu supremacist, right? He was obsessed with the tusk, rants about the blood of the old kings running through him, is causing a civil war in India. They never describe him as one explicitly, but they probably did not want to go there, same with the actual Hoysala empire historically being invaded by the Delhi Sultanate instead of the game's description of a Persian invasion. (I don't think the Persians ever invaded that far south in India? But my grasp of this history is shaky.)
After all my complaining in previous games about Elena being conveniently offscreen during the boss battle, I was very happy that Chloe and Nadine took down Asav together, even if the boss battle could've felt cooler than a punching fight.
Oh, and I definitely ship Chloe/Nadine, though I think Elena reacts to that with "Chloe...I have a list of terrible things Shoreline did right here..." and Chloe's like, what's the big deal, she's not doing that stuff anymore, yeah?
Enjoyed staying in a single location for the bulk of the game, for the first time since UC1, and I got to learn about an Indian empire I'd never heard of. It was cool recognizing the Hindu gods that are part of this adventure's background mythos. Gameplay is as fluid as ever, though as with previous installments I don't care for driving segments.
Chloe has always been more morally slippery than Nate, needing both him and Elena to argue with her in UC2 to help save the world. Similar to Nate, though, is how she approaches jobs with a joking distance. Lost Legacy lets us see a different angle on her by seeing her more vulnerable, on the hunt for an artifact because of a personal connection, not only the money.
And if you're going to bring in Nadine as the partner on the job, Chloe is someone I buy willing to work with Nadine. At the beginning of the game I was quite amused by Nadine asking Chloe if she had any feelings about all these Indian artifacts being passed around or destroyed for money - Nadine, you ran a mercenary army, I do not think you avoided much destruction of anything, human or objects. But it is, I think, Nadine scoping Chloe out, trying to get a sense of this woman she's working with for the first time. Her weaknesses, her strengths.
I spent so much of the game waiting for Nadine to betray us, that I was taken aback by the betrayal going the other way. Of course Nadine is irate at the mission being to rescue Sam Drake, who almost killed her, and of course Chloe didn't tell her. I still don't care about Sam but it's a deft move in the story, and he later serves the useful purpose of illustrating how fast Chloe and Nadine have become so close.
The title applies to both of them. Chloe's following in the footsteps of her archaeologist father and the tusk of Ganesha he never found. Nadine is wrestling with the lost of Shoreline and a clear listlessness about what to even do - you can't imagine the Nadine of UC4's beginning picking up this job. And yet, despite these underlying arcs and my own familiarity with Hindu mythology, I did not foresee the ever-present daddy issues of Ganesha coming into play.
Ganesha's the remover of obstacles, yes, but the two stories I remember best of him are essentially filial piety unleashed. In the first, the story of how he got his elephant head, he is a human boy created by his mother, Parvati, to guard her chambers while she's bathing. Parvati's husband, Shiva, arrives and demands entry. Ganesha refuses to stand aside. An enraged Shiva beheads him. Parvati is distraught to find her boy dead and demands Shiva fix this, and Shiva replaces the head with an elephant head. Tada, new son!
The second story is one where Ganesha and his brother Kartikeya decide to race around the whole world to win a prize from their parents. Kartikeya rushes off, confident off his win. Ganesha instead circles his parents, declaring that they are his whole world, and like a good suck-up, wins.
So, filial pity to the max. I hadn't heard the Parasurama story before, and so I got to be as surprised as Chloe and the rest of them when the answer to the final puzzle is that reason Ganesha was defeated by Parasurama was because Parasurama was wielding Shiva's axe. Ganesha yielded deliberately, to preserve his father's honor, and the interplay of that with each of Chloe and Nadine's storis is up there with Nate in UC4 realizing how the pirates died. Top-tier Uncharted story moment for me.
And Asav not getting it, after him and his men have been thinking of Chloe as nothing more than an annoying intruder, a "half-breed", I love Chloe's cockiness about how obtuse he is even as she's getting handcuffed. Asav is super lowkey a Hindu supremacist, right? He was obsessed with the tusk, rants about the blood of the old kings running through him, is causing a civil war in India. They never describe him as one explicitly, but they probably did not want to go there, same with the actual Hoysala empire historically being invaded by the Delhi Sultanate instead of the game's description of a Persian invasion. (I don't think the Persians ever invaded that far south in India? But my grasp of this history is shaky.)
After all my complaining in previous games about Elena being conveniently offscreen during the boss battle, I was very happy that Chloe and Nadine took down Asav together, even if the boss battle could've felt cooler than a punching fight.
Oh, and I definitely ship Chloe/Nadine, though I think Elena reacts to that with "Chloe...I have a list of terrible things Shoreline did right here..." and Chloe's like, what's the big deal, she's not doing that stuff anymore, yeah?