'The Last Of Us Part 2' Release Date Confirmed, Plus First Look At Joel

Dread it, run from it, destiny finally arrives. The Last of Us Part 2 has a release date at long last guys, and my excitement is untethered and knows no bounds. After years of waiting, wondering, and hoping, we now know for sure that Naughty Dog's long-awaited sequel will be arriving on February 21, 2020. I don't know about you, but I think I'll be booking that entire week off in an effort to avoid spoilers from any other overzealous gamers out there. If nothing else, I'm also just thrilled that we can finally stop losing our minds every time an online retailer "leaks" a release date for the game.

The exciting news was announced alongside a brand new trailer for The Last Of Us Part 2 during PlayStation's State of Play livestream last night. You can check out the trailer for yourself below if you haven't already seen it, and if you have already seen it? Well damn, just watch it again. As the trailer kicks off, we see that Ellie is older, in the beginnings of a new relationship, and living as part of a community that's attempting to rebuild and pick up the pieces following the outbreak of cordyceps fungus that transformed an alarming chunk of the population into mindless mushroom monsters, leading to the complete collapse of civilisation.

Ellie, it transpires, has some kind of job in which she patrols the area surrounding her new community, no doubt in an effort to make sure there aren't any clickers or scavengers around that could attack. It all seems pretty nice. Obviously, this is The Last Of Us, so nice doesn't last for very long. It's left purposefully vague, but it's clear that something happens to someone that Ellie cares about, which inspires her to go on some kind of vengeance-fueled road trip.

We also get a quick look at Joel's brother Tommy, who visits Ellie in the trailer, seemingly early on in the game in an effort to talk her out of her mission. Naturally, whatever he has to say won't be good enough, as we soon get a violent montage of Ellie shooting, stabbing, slashing, and smashing her way through Clickers and humans alike. It's all very intense, and it's clear that she means business. As she said in the original reveal trailer back in 2016; "I'm gonna find, and I'm gonna kill, every last one of them." It's still not clear who "them" is, but they definitely did something pretty awful to Ellie.

The Last Of Us Part 2

But oh boy, the trailer doesn't end there. In the closing moments we (finally) get our first look at an older, sadder-looking (but still incredibly handsome) Joel. Judging by Ellie's reaction of "what the hell are you doing here?", it seems that Joel has decided to follow Ellie on this mission of revenge. He replies, in a moment that genuinely made me well up if I'm being honest, "you think I'd let you do this on your own?"

My theory is that Joel and Ellie have absolutely not been on speaking terms, perhaps since she discovered what Joel chose to do at the end of the first game. Regardless, he'd still follow Ellie on a mission that he perhaps knows is stupid and massively dangerous. My heart can barely take it.

The Last of Us Part 2

Obviously, this is Naughty Dog, and the developer is a master of not giving too much away in its trailers. I mean, I might be reading into it but it looks to me that the scene at the end between Joel and Ellie might not even be the same scene at all, but two completely different moments edited together to throw us off. As such, I think there's a very good chance that we can't really trust too much of what we see in this newest trailer. There's definitely way more going on in The Last Of Us Part 2, and I can't wait to uncover the truth for myself early next year.