Banned in China: As well as several Middle Eastern and African countries due to LGBT themes. It's still available in Japan, albeit by removing the sex scenes in accordance with CERO.
Logic, credited as Bobby Hall, plays one of the Rattlers.
Content Leak: The Last of Us Part II had one of the largest game leaks of its entire console generation. On April 4, 2020, two days after the game's release date at the time (May 29th 2020, from its original February 2020 date) was changed yet again, this time to "Indefinite postponement", a 4chan user claiming to be an immediate family member of a Naughty Dog employee working on The Last of Us Part II made a post with a list that purportedly spells out many plot points for the then-unreleased title. On April 26, 2020, a second and much more damaging leak occurred when a YouTube channel posted several full cutscenes and gameplay sequences from the game one month before its intended release date prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in about two hours of footage and the debug menu showing the chapter menu being released in the wild. While these were quickly deleted by YouTube, these videos confirmed some of the 4chan spoilers, while debunking some of them as well. In particular, the leaks revealed that the character voiced by Laura Bailey that, prior to her appearance in the leaked content, only appeared in the 2017 Paris Games Week trailer, whom we now know as Abby, would be a playable character in the final game. Who is ultimately responsible for that second leak depends on who you ask. ND’s parent company, Sony Interactive Entertainment, claims the leak came from a third party breach on ND’s servers but other sources claim it was by a disgruntled then-employee over a pay dispute. In Grounded 2, the documentary that documents the development of Part II, Neil Druckmann claims that the person behind the leaks was a fan from the Netherlands who, in a misguided attempt to force Naughty Dog to release the game following the reveal of its indefinite delay due to COVID, leaked the videos.
Creator Backlash: While Laura Bailey is fine with the game, and in fact, loves that she played Abby, and believes the game has an incredible story, even she didn't like Abby after playing the game herself. She shared her thoughts in this article.
“I knew the story; I knew what I was getting into, and when it hit ‘Day One’ with Abby, I still didn’t like Abby. I didn’t like my performance. I didn’t like the character. I remember playing for like three hours into ‘Day One’ as Abby and talking to [my husband], Travis, and being like, ‘I don’t like what I did. I’m not good. This is terrible. I don’t know how I was cast. All of these years of work is for nothing.’ And Travis is like, ‘Just shut up, go back, and keep playing because you are obviously very biased right now.’ And as I continued to play, then I was like, ‘Oh, okay, I just had to acclimate to myself because I didn’t like me. I didn’t like Abby.’ You’re not supposed to, you know.”
Creator's Pest: Laura Bailey, as stated, enjoys the story and the role she was given, but she doesn't like Abby.
Demand Overload: The Ellie edition of the game sold out at every major American retailer within about 48 hours of announcement.
Development Gag: In the E3 trailer, there's once again a mook named Ethan that gets killed by the protagonist.note Joel was originally going to be named Ethan. As a joke, the Firefly soldier he kills at the hospital is named Ethan. The name thus returns again for the Part II trailer.
Dueling Works: With Final Fantasy VII Remake. Both were highly anticipated PlayStation 4 games coming out in early 2020 and were originally due to release two weeks apart, though delays to both games separated the eventual release dates to two months apart.
The first set of commentary is played alongside the game's cinematic cutscenes, and includes a variety of input from the lead actors and developers of the game discussing the game's story and how it came to be.
The second set is inside the Lost Levels, in which developers give context for what the levels were intended to be, as well as why they were cut.
Foiler Footage: In some of the trailers, Joel comes up behind Ellie and puts his hand over her mouth and says, “Do you think I’d just let you do this on your own?” In the game itself, it’s actually Jesse who does it. It also happens after Joel dies, meaning it was just made to mislead the audience. In the DVD Commentary mentioned above, Neil Druckmann admits that this was done due to fans correctly guessing that Joel was the one who dies, and made the trailer, as well as subsequent ones, lean into misleading the audience to believe that Dina, not Joel, was the one who died.
God Never Said That: There were rumors from a supposed insider that Laura Bailey had to do motion capture for the sex scene with Abby and Owen playing as the former, with Neil Druckmann playing the latter, leading some of the game’s detractors to accuse him of sexual abuse and living out a creepy sex fantasy with her through a self-insert character. Laura herself had to point out she never mo-capped any scenes with Druckmann, let alone a sex scene.
According to Neil Druckmann, some of the dialogue for Part II is inspired by dialogue from The End of the F***ing World.
Neil has also stated that a lot of inspiration for Part II came after watching The Revenant.
Neil had reportedly made a presentation of female role-models from an episode of Feminist Frequency, which might explain Abby's design.
The twist that Abby is a playable character in the game's second is directly inspired by Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty's own surprise player character.
International Coproduction: The Latin American Spanish dub was dubbed by a mix of Argentinian and Mexican voice actors, being the Argentinian cast the returning characters from the previous game, while all the new characters are voiced by Mexicans. Also, mostly to avoid the same controversial problems the Argentinian dub of the last game had, the voice directing of the game was handled in Mexico by Sony's request.
Enforced, much like a certain reveal in the first gamenote Naughty Dog lied about you never playing as Ellie because of how important a plot point it was. — Druckmann and the rest of the crew have known they were making a sequel for about two years before the 2016 reveal, but kept telling the public they were "not sure" it would be done, likely to keep the reveal for when they were well underway with making it.
Magnum Opus Dissonance: It is clear from pre- and post- release interviews with Neil Druckmann that he considers this game to be his best work, and actually reflective of what he would have wanted the first game to be like if he had full control at the time. Additionally, Abby is his favourite character, showing it by gushing on Twitter about her. Fans have been divided as to both. Then again, Druckmann has also stated many times, years before Part 2 was released even, that he knew the game would be divisive.
Missing Trailer Scene: Dina telling Ellie, "See, I told you. They should be terrified." after they kiss does not happen in the game.
One-Book Author: At the time of writing this, this is the case with Ellie's Latin American Spanish voice actress, Mariela Centurión, since, outside voicing Monica in the dub of Ask Lara, she hasn't worked on anything else besides voicing Ellie in both games.
The Other Darrin: The Latin American Spanish dub offers a curious case: While all the returning characters has their respective voice actors from the Argentinian dub of the previous game reprising their roles, the only two exceptions on this rule were Maria, who was voiced in the first game by an unknown voice actress, in this game she was replaced by a Mexican voice actress, Vianney Monroy; likewise, Jerry is voiced by Mexico-born Roberto Mendiola over the Argentina-born Diego Brizzi, as the later retired from voice acting.
An early plot outline for the original game had Tess in a villainous role, harboring a grudge against Joel for betraying her in the past and pursuing Joel throughout the game. This idea was revisited here with Ellie now being the one embarking on revenge across the country.
A minor subversion: During the One Night Live event in 2014, as a bit of an epilogue to the first game, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson performed a scene on stage playing Joel and Ellie (showing tension, but a bit of a reconciliation, as he plays a song for her and gifts her a guitar). This scene became Part 2's prologue.
Release Date Change: The game was originally scheduled to release on February 21, 2020, but in late October of 2019, it was pushed back to May 29, 2020, with director Neil Druckmann citing that that they chose to get more time to complete the game. Then, on April 2, 2020, it had the bad luck of being delayed indefinitely because of the rise of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Druckmann confirmed on the PlayStation podcast that while the game was pretty much done by the time it got delayed but having the team work from home made it harder to finish and they needed some time to weigh options about how they were going to distribute it once they do finish it. This all changed, however, with the massive leak just over 3 weeks later on April 26, 2020, and on the following day a new release date of June 19, 2020 was given.
Role Reprise: In the Latin American Spanish dub the returning characters were dubbed by the Argentinian voice actors who dubbed in the previous game, while any new characters were voiced by Mexican actors.
Sequel Gap: The Last of Us: Part II is being released seven years after its predecessor.
Shrug of God: When asked about Ellie's ultimate fate in the ending, including whether or not she returned to Jackson or reconciled with Dina, the developers have refused to give a definitive answer and encouraged players to come to their own conclusions.
Streisand Effect: After the aforementioned Content Leak, Sony and Naughty Dog fell afoul of this effect when they, via a third-party company (MUSO), started issuing DMCAs en-masse in what appears to be a futile attempt at damage control. This would've fallen under the radar had they simply went after people that reuploaded the leaked content, or showed screenshots of said content, but they also targeted anyone that even talked about the leaks (without having the actual leaked content in their video), the mere fact that the leaks existed (again, without actually showing the leaked material), memes made about the leaks using IPs that neither of them own (eg. Grand Theft Auto V), even the mere fact that the mass issuing of DMCAs were happening. The DMCA-ing of the preceding items, where no leaked content was shown, fall squarely under the "false copyright claim" / "DMCA Abuse" category, and put numerous Youtube channels in danger of termination due to accumulated strikes as a result of the claims. This also caused more of the unaware to look into the leaks. Things reached a peak when a DMCA was filed on Sony's own Tweet advertising the game.
Spoiled by the Merchandise: The Ellie statue that came with some of the versions of the game shows her missing fingers.
Throw It In!: Alejandro Edda actually improvised the part where Manny spits on Joel's corpse.
Trolling Creator: After Neil Druckmann confirmed that someone is pregnant at E3 2018, he was asked if the pregnant woman you can find on a poster in Cassie Drake’s room in Uncharted 4 is Ellie’s mom. He said she was a mom. The poster had long been speculation fodder with some people even believing that she’s Ellie. It was Dina that ended up being pregnant.
In March 2020, Jason Schreier did a report on the intense crunch conditions that had become commonplace at the studio, pointing out that the rate of turnover was high enough that of the twenty non-gameplay leads of Uncharted 4, 70% had left. Script changes were causing problems late into development; Playtesters were finding characters unlikable while Naughty Dog's tradition of not using managers meant that developers were working on art assets for weeks at a time, only to find a change in the script had made their work irrelevant. Both factors were resulting in the long development time and constant delays that had marked production. Shortly after the report went public, a former animator for the company claimed that Naughty Dog's reputation is so bad in Los Angeles that the studio found it "nigh-impossible" to hire game animators, forcing them to hire workers from the film industry. At least one employee was so overworked during the creation of the September 2019 demo that they had to be hospitalized - an occurrence that was not uncommon at the studio during crunch.
Former ND employee Jonathan Cooper has claimed that the development cycle was plagued by having an inexperienced team since all the old guard had left. While he says the younger employees are a very talented bunch and it’s not their fault they were put in a bad situation, the game took a year or so longer than it should have to make since they all had to learn on the job with no one to go to for help.
Neil Druckmann admitted after the game released that for over half of the game's production, Ellie did kill Abby at the end, with Ellie's revenge being compared to a drug addiction and killing Abby being the rock bottom moment.
He also admitted that for most of the production that at the end when Ellie is in the empty farmhouse alone, she originally found one of JJ's baby toys that was left behind and picks it up before leaving, implying that she was going to try and get Dina back, but Neil decided to cut it to make the ending more ambiguous.
The game was originally planned to be even longer with Ellie and Abby being given five days each instead of three, that among other things would have fleshed out the Seraphites more and involved Ellie journeying to their island as well. This was likely cut for pacing and dragging the game on for even longer.
When Joel is being beaten to death, Neil originally thought of Joel being so far gone he would look at Ellie and mutter "Sarah" as his last words. Troy Baker thought it was better if he didn't say anything however, and it ended up being the version they went with.
Earlier concept art of Abby had her looking very different with a much slimmer figure and curly black hair. She would have infiltrated Jackson off-screen and befriended Joel at the same dance that Ellie and Dina kiss before later revealing who she was and killing him. This version of the game also included a more free roam of Jackson where you apparently played as Abby while exploring the town.
The developers went through multiple ideas regarding Abby's motivation to kill Joel, with most of them having the commonality that Joel had unknowingly wronged her in some way. One such scenario took place in the distant past as part of the game's backstory, where Abby witnessed a massacre at Joel and Tommy's hands. They finally settled on the Blamed for Being Railroaded idea because every player who played the first game would be very familiar with what Joel had done.
One concept art also depicts Abby having sliced Joel's arm off with a machete instead of shooting his leg.
There is also concept art of Ellie hugging Joel's corpse and watching as the people from Jackson comes to get his body, which is likely what happens off-screen in the game.
During the farm sequence with Ellie and Dina, an entire playable sequence was cut where Ellie hunts a boar and kills it it an overly violent way due to her PTSD from Seattle, then suffers a panic attack from hearing the boar's screams and being reminded of Joel. The scene was removed at the last minute due to pacing, but you can still read about it in Ellie's journal. It would also have served as a Call-Back to the boar Ellie runs into in the museum flashback.
Originally, Maria was the one coming to Ellie and Dina's farm house to talk about Abby, before it was changed to Tommy. Presumably Tommy was meant to be too crippled to be able to come and Maria would be feeling vengeful on her husband's behalf, before they figured it made more sense for Tommy to be the one guilt-tripping Ellie rather than his wife.
Isaac would have been a more fleshed out character where a flashback would show the newly orphaned Abby arriving at the WLF and being taken under Isaac's wing, with the latter also being an ex-Firefly and becoming something of a father figure to Abby. This might also have been cut not to make the game even longer than it was, though it would have explained Abby and Isaac's relationship a little more.
Cat, Ellie's ex, was meant to show up as an NPC that Ellie could interact with during the dance, but it ended up being cut.
In the final version of the game, one of the flashbacks involve Joel and Ellie looking for guitar strings in an abandoned music store and finding a couple who left Jackson a few months ago, who were biten and turned into the infected. In an earlier version, Joel and Ellie were visiting Joel's new girlfriend who lived near Jackson. They'd find her bitten and zombiefied, with Joel having to put her down. Ellie would start the same conversation as she does in the final product, about this situation being avoidable if the cure was made and Joel getting angry at her.
Ellie and Dina's talk in the weed basement was going to be longer, with Ellie asking Dina what her actual feelings were and if she had just kissed her to mess with her or make Jesse jealous, but it ended up shortened.
In the Updated Re-release for PlayStation 5, three fully cut levels were included, albeit in an unfinished state due to them being cut before they were fully implemented. These levels included...
An extended version of the festival where Ellie and Dina kissed that had the idea of recontextualizing common gameplay mechanics that had been used for violence up until this point instead being used for more innocent purposes, like carnival games. Throwing mechanics would have been used to knock down bottles (with the prize for knocking them down being JJ's toy elephant Ollie), weapon upgrade mechanics would have been used to craft Ellie a drink, and Listen Mode would be used for Ellie to play a game of tag with some kids with her playing the role of a Clicker. Ellie would have also met up with Cat, her ex-girlfriend who made her tattoo. Interestingly, it seems that the two would have been Amicable Exes, considering that they're happy to see one another in the cut sequence.
A much more extended version of the Seattle sewer system, which would have had Ellie crawling through claustrophobic pipe systems. One moment in particular would have Ellie crawling mere inches away from a dead Clicker that was embedded into the wall. Her flashlight would have died as she got close, and fixing it would have her hallucinate Joel's corpse in place of the Clicker.
A sequence of Ellie hunting a boar after she and Dina return from Seattle. It would have been a Call-Back to the deer hunting scene from the original game, though it would have ended with Ellie confronting the wounded boar and having a PTSD-induced breakdown upon hearing its screams. In the end, all that made it into the final game was Ellie describing this moment in her journal.
The original idea was that Ellie would have come across Joel's mutilated body after he was already dead and the perpetrators were gone, and she'd have to rely on the wounded Tommy to learn what had happened. It got changed to her witnessing Joel's death firsthand to make it more personal for her.
Write What You Know: Some elements of the game's plot were inspired by a video of Palestinians lynching 2 Israeli soldiers. He admits to being extremely angry at the people who did it and wanting to make them suffer, but eventually regretted wanting to act out on his "Gross" thoughts. The game would have players live a power fantasy of hate for characters committing similar murders in game, wanting to see them suffer, but when said and done make the player question whether or not their blind, hate-fueled retribution was justified.
You Sound Familiar: Laura Bailey voiced and provided motion capture for Abby, having previously done the same for both Ramirez and Kari in the first game. Kari's voice is noticeably different in both the flashback to the Saint Mary's Hospital scene as well as the Part I remake on PS5, but whether it was another voice actress entirely or Laura doing a different voice (there's no official confirmation and the new voice is close enough to go either way) is unclear.
Misc
When Ashley Johnson first tried singing "Through the Valley" for the teaser, she got told that she sung it too well, and had to take lessons from a vocal coach to sing it "worse", as in "how Ellie would sing".
Ellie is the first female protagonist of a full-length Naughty Dog project. Ellie was the protagonist of the first game's Left Behind DLC and Chloe Frazer was for Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, which is about half the length of a full-length game.
for "killing" Joel.