Troy Baker and Nolan North’s YouTube channel Retro Replay has started a new series centered around yet another game that both actors played a role in. This time around, The Last of Us is getting the “Definitive Playthrough” treatment from the duo prior to the launch of The Last of Us Part II in 2020.
The first episode of The Last of Us: The Definitive Playthrough kicks off, where else, but at the start of the game. Baker and North are joined by Hana Hayes, who portrays Sarah, Joel’s daughter, in The Last of Us. If you’ve played The Last of Us before, you know what happens early on in the game and the reaction from all three hosts is quite remarkable, especially so many years later.
During Sarah’s death scene early on, both Baker and Hayes end up crying and hold one another for comfort. North himself, who has apparently never played The Last of Us before and isn’t familiar with the opening, just ends up essentially freezing and staring at the screen blankly. It’s pretty similar to the reaction that I think I had when I first played The Last of Us back in 2013.
As an aside, I have no idea how North seemingly wasn’t aware of the larger story beats in The Last of Us until this moment considering he plays a major character (David) in the game, but I guess that’s a whole different topic.
After the opening scene concludes, Baker and Hayes talk about their experience as actors and the places they each needed to go to emotionally in order to elicit those performances. Baker also talks about the feedback he received from director Neil Druckmann when shooting the scene and talked about how it needed to be re-shot at one point before they eventually finalized it.
While The Last of Us is beloved for a variety of reasons, this blunt opening is perhaps one of the most memorable parts of the game for many. It’s cool to see the actors who played such a major role in creating the game still reacting this emotionally to it over six years after originally launching and also goes to show how impactful the opening of The Last of Us is.
Episode one continues on throughout the first hour or so of the game before eventually leaving off when Joel and Tess run across Marlene. Baker then says that he’ll be taking over the controls and playing the game the next time around.
You can find the first episode of Retro Replay’s The Last of Us series down below. New episodes are set to be released every Tuesday if you’d like to check out the full series in the coming weeks and months.
The post Nolan North and Troy Baker Reacting to the Opening of The Last of Us is the Video You Need to See Today by Logan Moore appeared first on DualShockers.