As we continue to storm the monastery, we get ever close to finding Schafer and the secrets of Shambala. But more than that, we may finally get the chance to avenge our closest friend: Cameraman Jeff!

Something I didn’t notice until I replayed both Uncharted 1 and 2 on stream is how well both games foreshadow their big supernatural elements while keeping the details close to their chests until the late game reveals.

They call just enough attention to details like the black teeth that most players will pass right over them, but on replay, it’s clear that they’re hints as to what might really be going on. It’s executed well and the team should be commended for the deft hand with which the reveal was seeded.

We’ve made it to the monastery, and Shambala is in sight. We just have… so many evil Russian soldiers in our way.

The body count is going to be high.

We’re at 80% of the way through the game now, so next week should be the final batch of episodes. Looking forward to seeing you all then!

They really bought out the big guns against this little village on the fringes of Tibet, but they aren’t invincible. We might be able to work with the locals to turn them back.

Alright. We’ve had our slower moment. Now it’s time to start ramping up again, this time with a killer set piece on moving vehicles.

Just like with the train segment, this one isn’t done through parallax scrolling. Those vehicles are really moving on a mountain in real-time, and it’s just as impressive here as it was on the train.

It’s also great to see how Elena always manages to show that she’s able to keep up with Drake without taking away from his heroism. They make a strong pair, but each of them is fully capable of taking care of themselves. She may have been the kidnapped damsel at the end of the first game, but thankfully they never do that again.

It’s probably why she’s still one of my favorite female characters in video games to this day.

It seems possible that Lazarevic wants the Cintamani Stone for reasons that are less material and more mystical, but what could those reasons be? Hopefully, the clues we find by tracking down this expedition will help us figure that out.

Whatever those things are, they’re strong enough to hurl giant boulders at us. And as attractive as that is, it’s not very friendly. Thankfully, as tough as they are, we didn’t have to defeat them. We only had to keep them away long enough to secure our escape.

Now that we have thought, we’ve been found by the evil war criminal. They’re attacking the people who took us in, so it’s only natural that we fight back against them.

We may be battered, beaten, and bleeding more than a little, but still, we press on. We have to, otherwise, the sacrifice of one Cameraman Jeff will be in vain. He was dedicated to his craft, and it cost him dearly. For him, we’ll stop that madman.

He truly was a cameraman of our time.

Since we just went through the train section, followed by a fairly long combat segment in the snow, it’s smart of the game to give us this slower moment, where we get the chance to decompress with a bit of plot development followed by light platforming.

It’s important for games to have moments like this to break up more bombastic set pieces because otherwise there’s a risk that the whole experience ends up fairly homogenous. By giving us a moment to breathe, the game can start building up the tension again before we’re thrown back into the fighting.

Moments like these also allow the team to stretch their more creative muscles a bit, like how trying to punch a villager instead makes Drake wave hello because he doesn’t have any reason to hurt them. I also noticed upon rewatching the footage that Elena appears to have come with her own winter gear, not needing the kind of jacket that Tenzin gives Nate when he wakes up.

Which should come as no surprise, since she’s the smart one.

Though Cameraman Jeff has been lost, he will not be forgotten. We’ll find the people who took his life and punish them! No, wait. Actually, we should go after Chloe. There’s no way Flynn will keep with mouth shut.

Guess that means we’re all aboard the most famous level in Uncharted 2.

Though technology marches ever onward, even today the feat of programming and engineering that went into the train level is impressive. Rather than use the old-fashioned parallax scrolling methods commonly found in 3D platformers of the PS1 and PS2 era, Naughty Dog opted to make the entire level itself a moving object that would dynamically shift onto multiple different tracks in real life as the player advanced through it.

Thankfully, Boundary Break did a video on Uncharted 2 in which he covered the train segment, and the visual does more justice to the technical feat on display than I could ever hope to in words alone. The channel is absolutely worth the watch if you’re interested in learning more about the technical wizardry that goes into your favorite games.

As for us, the journey continues next time!

This isn’t good. Looks like Lazarevic’s men caught up with us while we were exploring the temple. If they’re fighting us now, then that means that they got passed Elena and Cameraman Jeff!

What if something happened to them!? We can’t lose Cameraman Jeff! We’ve grown so close over his less than five minutes of total screen time!

I can’t believe they would introduce a character as loveable as Cameraman Jeff and then so cruelly take him away from us like this. It’s almost as if the entire point of Jeff’s character was to sell how cruel Lazarevic is by giving him a non-essential deadweight member of the cast to shoo…

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh! That makes sense! I’ve played so many games, read so many books, and watched so many movies, and yet this is the very first time I’ve seen something like this happen!

Joking aside, it’s easy to poke fun at this exact trope because it’s used often and once you see it, it’s hard not to feel the writer’s attempt to pull at invisible heartstrings, but the reason the trope is so heavily relied on is that it works. When we give the bad guy a target like that, and let him shoot the man in cold blood, it communicates to us immediately that he does not value human life the way someone like you or I might. They don’t have to tell us because we just saw it.

And because characters like Flynn and Chloe work with him, even if in Chloe’s cast she’s doing it just to stay alive, his deeds reflect on them and their morality. With Flynn, his eagerness to work alongside such a man shows us he is also not willing to sacrifice other people in the name of profit (if you somehow got the opposite impression despite everything he’s done). And as for Chloe, while it’s clear she’s not happy with it, her willingness to put that aside because she’s afraid of standing against him as a genuine, credible threat.

It’s another case of the team at Naughty Dog using limited screen time to communicate as much as they can quickly and efficiently.

With Cameraman Jeff on our side, I can’t imagine anything should be able to stop us. With his camera in hand, he bravely films us off on the sideline, giving us the moral boost we need to push through the pain and take down the bad guys in front of us.

We’d be lost without him.

Look at him, the way he so casually pitches in to remind Drake that “It sounds pretty stupid when you put it like that”. Truly, nobody could point out the truth as quickly and efficiently as our beloved Cameraman Jeff.

If anything were to happen to him… I don’t know what I would do.

For a couple of ordinary thieves with no special training, we’re doing a swell job mowing down hundreds of Russian(?) soldiers working for a murderous psychopath.

Hopefully, this means absolutely nothing bad will happen on our way to Shambala.

At last, we have reunited with the most important person to ever walk into Nathan Drake’s life: Cameraman Jeff. While Elena Fisher is a capable and resilient journalist, truly it is Cameraman Jeff that saves the day where no one else can. I’m sure given that we only just met Cameraman Jeff, he’ll have a long and healthy future in the Uncharted series. He may even become a franchise staple.

On a more serious note, it’s clear playing this immediately after Jak II that Naughty Dog learned their lesson from that miserable love triangle they tried to establish between Keira, Ashlin, and Jak. Here, it comes off as more natural, given what we know about all three characters. In that introduction, we learned that Drake dumped Chloe and that she still has feelings for him. And given where Nate and Elena were relationship-wise at the end of Drake’s Fortune compared to where they are now, it’s clear that the two of them went their separate ways, and it’s not too hard to guess who dumped who, given that Elena seems to have a far more stable life than Nate does.

It organically sets up this narrative, which we’ll slowly start to build on, that Chloe starts feeling jealousy toward Elena. And while she won’t act on it, it starts to eat away at her.

Now that Sully has exited stage right, Drake and Chloe are off to steal the Cintamani Stone from under the nose of Russian warlord Zoran Lazarevic.

Surely nothing bad will happen, right?

We’ll discuss it more when we get to Uncharted 3 because that’s what the faults of Naughty Dog’s design pipeline make themselves know, but I imagine part of the reason Sully had to leave the game’s story so early is either they couldn’t fit him into any other area or the actor had previous obligations they couldn’t get out of.

The former is a distinct possibility because we know how that back when this trilogy was being developed, Naughty Dog’s team would often be working on levels and design concepts before the writers could account for them in the script. And therefore, they would often need to write plot explanations for why certain sequences were taking place after the fact, once they had been largely completed. These first two games do a phenomenal job of hiding the seams in that process. It’s part of why both of them, but especially Uncharted 2, are so popular.

Once we move on to U3, that stops being as true as it is for these games.