Twenty years after a fungal infection obliterated most of the U.S. population and turned the victims into infected monstrosities, Joel is tasked with escorting Ellie to the Fireflies to help reverse engineer a cure. This isn't easy for either of them, since Joel has been left almost permanently bitter after the death of his daughter, and Ellie is distrusting of him.
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Troy Baker has admitted he nearly left his own audition for Joel because he didn't feel like he was right for the part. Neil Druckmann clearly disagreed, and once Baker and Ashley Johnson started reading together, the chemistry that ended up defining the whole game was already there.
Ashley Johnson didn't just voice Ellie once and move on - she picked up BAFTA Award wins for her performance in both the original game and the Left Behind expansion. Part of why fans were so invested in seeing her get a meaningful role when the HBO show came around.
Anyone who played the original game remembers the running gag that Ellie couldn't swim, which led to some clunky pallet-pushing puzzles. Naughty Dog leaned right into it here: swim over to a pallet by the museum and Ellie cracks a joke about Joel once having to shove her across the water like that.
Fans of the first game still think fondly of Sam and Henry, the brothers Joel and Ellie travel with for a stretch. In a quiet moment in Part 2, Ellie comes across Sam's old toy robot and picks it up, a small gesture that carries a surprising amount of weight if you remember how their story ended.
Joel gifting Ellie an astronomy book isn't just a sentimental prop. Neil Druckmann has said the whole detail exists because Ashley Johnson, who plays Ellie, wanted to be an astronaut as a kid. In the same breath, he's explained that Joel's love of music and singing comes from the fact that Troy Baker started out as an actual musician before he ever voiced a video game character.
Bruce Straley, who co-directed the original game alongside Neil Druckmann, left Naughty Dog in 2017 and had no involvement in the sequel. His shoes were filled by Anthony Newman and Kurt Margenau, with Newman having previously worked as the melee combat designer on the first game.
The multiplayer mode Factions was a genuine fan favourite from the first game, but Naughty Dog made a deliberate call to leave it out of Part 2 entirely so the whole team could pour every ounce of effort into the single-player campaign. They were clear that Factions wasn't gone for good, just parked for a while.
Naughty Dog couldn't resist sneaking their own games into each other. In The Last of Us, players can find plush toys of Nathan Drake, Jak, and Daxter sitting alongside an actual Uncharted board game, tucked away on dorm room shelves for anyone bothering to search the rooms properly.
While the bulk of Naughty Dog was heads-down on Drake's Deception, a second smaller team inside the studio was quietly working on something completely different in the background. That project turned out to be The Last of Us. It's the first time in the company's history they'd split like this, and it's kind of wild to think both games were cooking at the same building at once.
Hidden throughout the campaign are three collectible 'Strange Relics,' and each one is a sly nod to a different chapter of Naughty Dog's history. Find all of them and you get a trophy just for appreciating the studio's back catalogue.
