‘Uncharted: The Lost Legacy’ is the Best Game in the Series: Here’s Why
The Uncharted series is well known for quippy writing, carefully directed cutscenes, breathtaking environments, and bombastic interactive setpieces that send these games over the top from your standard action flick. I have been a fan of the series since its early PS3 days, but for a number of reasons, I neglected to pick up Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy until this past year. Having now studied the development history of The Lost Legacy and how its initial role as spinoff DLC evolved into its own fully fledged Uncharted installment, not only is this one of Naughty Dog’s strongest titles to date, it is arguably the best iteration that the Uncharted series has received. While doing little in the way of gameplay innovation, its choice to pivot focus to new protagonists and its completely economical use of the player’s time make The Lost Legacy a lesson that I hope Naughty Dog follow going forward with the series.
By virtue of The Lost Legacy’s brief runtime and chosen protagonists, it suffers from virtually none of the criticisms aimed at earlier Uncharted games. Whereas some of even the most beloved entries in the series like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves fall back on cover shooting and area repopulation as a main driver of combat and tension-building for the player’s advancement within contained areas, The Lost Legacy carefully refines and reduces these formulaic elements. The Lost Legacy smartly opens its environments to allow the player to spend ample time sneaking about, marking enemies, laying traps, stealthily taking out errant guards on patrol, all before an inevitable firefight erupts in time to clear an area. Unlike the rest of the Uncharted series – and even Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End is sometimes guilty of this – I didn’t feel like a second of my time with The Lost Legacy was wasted or repeated.
Respecting the Player’s Time
This respect of the player’s time is also reflected in the pacing of the story, with an immediate introduction into an Indian city market at geographical and political odds with itself and a militaristic force. The politics of this situation are left rather vague, and instead, you are guided through the perspective of a young girl into the troubled world that the game’s playable protagonist, Chloe Frazer, finds herself in. Fans of the Drake-centric Uncharted games will be familiar with Chloe’s morally duplicitous nature that tends to selfishly exploit opportunity over pre-established agreements. But from the moment the game begins, we are presented with aspects of Chloe’s personality that were seldom able to emerge in the context of the stories that introduced her character. Instead of manifesting the kind of impulsive spontaneity of earlier games, Chloe is presented as more thoughtful and considerate. Her character never escapes the shadow cast by earlier Uncharted games, but her role as the game’s protagonist feels earned throughout the entire experience.
One of the issues many Uncharted fans lamented when The Lost Legacy was announced surrounded the notion that Nathan Drake’s story had been so well wrapped up, and that this spin-off might detract from the closure that Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End had offered. Not only does the focus on Chloe completely circumvent that concern, the addition and integration of Nadine Ross as Chloe’s partner throughout – instead of Sam Drake, who shows up at the end, perhaps – enables this game to confidently swing into new narrative territory without needing to cling to the baggage of the earlier games. Nadine’s role in Uncharted 4 established her as one of the most formidable characters in the entire series, and pairing this mysteriously fierce badass with Chloe, a rather chatty and charismatic character we’ve known through the earlier Uncharted games, works marvelously. The contrast between Nadine’s stoicism and Chloe’s sarcasm is perhaps the highlight of the game.
Can the Uncharted Series Survive Without Nathan Drake?
Pairing up two characters that are less morally concerned than Nathan Drake also allows for a degree of genuine character growth that carries more of an arc than most of the earlier Uncharted games. Chloe’s greed and self interest coupled with Nadine’s private military corporation background challenges two asymmetrical personalities to eventually adapt to each other’s dispositions. Early in the story, Nadine and Chloe get heated about how to proceed on their mission to pursue the tusk of Ganesh, and Nadine insists that “we’d be foolish to take unnecessary risks.” Chloe interrupts and undermines Nadine’s experience by posing an ultimatum that Nadine would only get her share of the profit from their quest if they played by Chloe’s rules. This power dynamic of continually one-upping each other is present in all of the Uncharted games, but this dynamic between Nadine, a character that many will still view as a villain from Uncharted 4, and Chloe, an already morally dubious character, creates a constant relationship tension that drives the story forward as much as the plot itself.
One of the areas that caused this relationship between Chloe and Nadine to shine for me transpires early on in the story when they encounter the Western Ghats – an open and expansive mountainous jungle. This area serves as the closest thing to non-linear level design in the entire Uncharted series, as the two characters are released into a giant open area linked together by muddy paths that they can drive through. As they meander their way through the Western Ghats, this idle time allows Nadine to pry into Chloe’s motivations for finding this legendary tusk of Ganesh. Chloe’s father was someone deeply involved with the history of this tusk, and learning about the origins of Chloe’s expertise causes Nadine to lower her guard and display less resentment at being bossed around. We learn of her guilt, anger, and insecurity of no longer being in charge of Shoreline, and thus both characters have emotional stakes in this quest for the tusk – not just financial ones.
Because the Western Ghats is such an open-ended section of the game, almost all of this relationship dynamic evolved through gameplay rather than cutscenes. Naughty Dog has always been above par with this style of conversational storytelling, but this moment in The Lost Legacy was extremely effective for investing me in these protagonists.
The Lost Legacy is Stunningly Beautiful
One moment in this section of the game that effectively breaks this rule, however, is when Nadine tells Chloe that she should take a photograph of a beautiful statue embedded in the landscape and send it to her father. When Chloe shrugs off this suggestion, Nadine doubles down on her joviality, questioning whether Chloe’s father is one of those old people that can’t figure out how to use computers and phones. Nadine suggests that Chloe should just show him the photo when she returns home, to which Chloe’s composure finally breaks for a moment. “No, it’s just a few decades too late for that,” Chloe reluctantly admits, implying all the more forcefully to Nadine the insensitivity she had just inflicted, learning in that moment about Chloe’s father’s death. Both Chloe and Nadine were masking these internal feelings of vulnerability for the first third of this game, and I felt that this moment is where everything clicked between them as characters.
One of the potential criticisms I have of The Lost Legacy is the inclusion of Sam Drake as a third wheel to this dynamic between Nadine and Chloe. Early game banter establishes that Nadine hates Sam due to their interactions in the events of Uncharted 4, while Chloe claims to really only know Nathan. But when Nadine discovers Sam midway through the game, it’s revealed that Chloe and Sam had previously been working together on this quest for the tusk until Asav – the game’s primary antagonist – captured him. With Sam in Asav’s clutches, Chloe found the need to seek out Nadine in the first place. Nadine learns of this history between Chloe and Sam, views it as a personal affront to their working relationship, and abandons Chloe for a time. Eventually the three characters are able to reluctantly work together, and by the end of the game, they are all practically friends. Sam’s character serves two roles: to create conflict and provide comic relief. To those ends, his character further enables the development of Chloe and Nadine’s relationship (e.g. a cute moment where Nadine ousts Sam from the passenger seat because she calls shotgun). But given the rarity of Nadine and Chloe as game protagonists, I have to wonder if this game might be stronger if it hadn’t felt the need to include one of the Drakes as a central male character.
Do We Need More Uncharted?
When I first heard about The Lost Legacy, I wondered if I really wanted more games in the Uncharted formula. The series has some of my favorite and most memorable gaming moments, like the train sequence in Uncharted 2, but I didn’t think there would be room to keep iterating on the core gameplay elements. The shooting in Uncharted has never felt spectacular, but somehow Naughty Dog made combat in The Lost Legacy feel the stealthiest and weightiest it ever has. There are only so many vines to swing on, hills to slide down, and rocks to grip onto, but somehow the environments in The Lost Legacy feel organic and fresh in a way that previous entries in the series never quite achieved. But not only does the game refine these elements and more, it consciously trims away other elements like the aforementioned repopulating cover-shooting rooms, leaving something truly lean and pristine – qualities that are very rare to find in harmony within the AAA gaming space.
The Lost Legacy is also completely happy to acknowledge the player directly when it is making fun of previous Uncharted game tropes or stealing them directly. One of my favorite moments in The Lost Legacy involves the use of the notorious crate puzzles that populate all of Naughty Dog’s recent releases. Chloe finds a crate that can be pushed down to the platform below, allowing Nadine to progress through the environment by climbing higher up. This crate crashes through the floor below, taking Nadine with it – a direct acknowledgement to the player that these “puzzles” are filler at best in terms of game design.
On the other hand, the game completely plagiarizes Uncharted 2’s famous train sequence that leaves Nathan Drake hanging off a cliff at the beginning of the game. The Lost Legacy’s climactic battle involves the need to stop a train from carrying a bomb into a densely populated Indian city. But this self-plagiarism is completely forgivable and justified when presented with modern graphics and animations that squeeze every last ounce out of the Playstation 4’s hardware. This excellent finale is in some ways uncanny because it’s impossible not to compare the two train sequences, but The Lost Legacy learns all the right lessons from its past work in the way that any writer would hope to when revising their earlier drafts on a topic.
Future Possibilities for the Franchise
I think that The Lost Legacy completely greenlights the possibility for more spinoff games in the Uncharted universe that don’t depend on Nathan Drake to succeed. I would gladly spend another dozen or so hours with Chloe and Nadine, but not everything – however exceptional – needs a sequel. I would be completely happy if The Lost Legacy existed as a standalone game, but it’d be a mistake to suggest that there isn’t plenty of potential left to explore these characters and these environments in future games. If I had to choose between another mainline installment or a spinoff like this, I think Naughty Dog should double down on tighter, more focused experiences like The Lost Legacy.
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