“The Last Of Us: Part II” is set for release at some point in 2018-2019. The sequel takes place five years after the end of the original, and moves Ellie, the deuteragonist of the first game, into the protagonist role. Contrasting the theme of love in “The Last of Us,” the sequel will focus on hate as the central theme in the story.
Development began the year after the first game’s release and motion capture filming started in 2017. Along with this, Neil Druckmann and Halley Gross will be returning to write this story while Gustavo Santaolalla will be coming back to compose and perform the score.
Only two trailers have been released thus far. The first came out at the PlayStation Experience event in Dec. 2016 to show the main characters once more. The second was released on Oct. 30, 2017 at Paris Games Week and showed four new characters that are going to be integral to Joel and Ellie’s new adventure. Their names are Yara, Lev, Emily, and the fourth person has no name at this current moment.
Furthermore, “The Last of Us: Part II” has already received awards simply regarding the hype surrounding its release. It won Most Anticipated Game at The Game Awards and on the PlayStation Blog as well as winning the award for Most Wanted Game later in 2017.
Developed by Naughty Dog, “The Last of Us” is an action-adventure survival horror game released on June 14, 2013 for the PlayStation 3. Later on it would be re-released for the PlayStation 4 under the title “The Last of Us: Remastered.”
“The Last of Us” plays from a third-person perspective where players must use firearms, improvised weapons, and stealth in order to survive in this post-apocalyptic version of the United States.
The basic plot of the game revolves around the character Joel, a smuggler who is assigned the task of escorting a teenage girl who may be part of the key to ending the apocalypse named Ellie across the ravaged United States. Along the way, they must defend against hostile humans as well as former humans that have been transformed into cannibalistic monsters due to a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus.
“The Last of Us” was originally announced in Dec. 2011 and was widely anticipated by people. Upon release, it received universal acclaim for several different categories including: depiction of female characters, sound design, visual design, gameplay, narrative and characterization.
Along with all of this, the game became one of the best selling games for the PlayStation 3 by selling 3.4 million copies within three weeks of its release. By July 2014, that total reached all the way to seven million copies.
Naughty Dog is a studio that primarily makes games for the Sony PlayStation consoles, dating all the way back to 1996 with the first “Crash Bandicoot” game.
They made several more installments of that series for the PlayStation 1. They also made the “Jak and Daxter” series on PlayStation 2, and arguably their most notable and successful franchise “Uncharted” on PlayStation 3 and 4.
Overall, “The Last of Us” earned 122 awards and 195 nominations, dominating several awards by winning most of the categories it was nominated for. Several sources called it their Game of the Year and the amount of awards it received has led it to landing a spot as one of the most awarded games in history. Many even consider “The Last of Us” to be one of the greatest video games ever created.
Erika Brandenburg
Staff Writer