The Final of Us Half II Remastered is just about a “Director’s Minimize” of the 2020 PlayStation 4 sport, and whereas a few of its additions and particular options are questionable (just like the Roguelike mode), one of many extra fascinating inclusions is three playable misplaced ranges that have been reduce from the ultimate sport.
It’s not fairly often we get a peek backstage of improvement like this, so the extra builders are prepared to let gamers take a look at out scrapped materials, the higher. However after enjoying all three segments, I can see why every of them didn’t make the ultimate reduce. Having learn by The Final of Us Half II’s artwork e book and listened to interviews with the artistic crew, I used to be conscious of a minimum of two of those sections forward of enjoying them, and was to see what may have been. Provided that Half II has been already criticized for its size prior to now, Naughty Canine in all probability made the fitting name with these edits.
The primary misplaced degree is from earlier than the inciting incident of the sport’s revenge tour, and seems to have been a tutorial degree. Ellie hangs out with the individuals of Jackson, enjoying video games with the locals that educate you the aiming and Pay attention Mode mechanics, and he or she even chats together with her ex-girlfriend Cat.
We by no means meet Cat within the sport itself, and the model of her we see within the misplaced degree seems like a placeholder mannequin, so that’s in all probability the factor I want made it into the ultimate sport. However many of those tutorials have been retooled with the perspective-shifting opening, with The Final of Us Half II educating you totally different mechanics as you swap between Ellie and Abby whereas maintaining some momentum.
The second part is extra of an enlargement of a section that also exists within the sport. It options Ellie traversing the Seattle sewers as she strikes throughout town. That is in all probability the least notable section Naughty Canine included in Half II Remastered, but it surely does have one actually affecting second that foreshadows Ellie’s battle with PTSD following Joel’s dying.
The third and remaining section is one referenced in The Final of Us Half II, however by no means proven. In the course of the sport’s remaining hours, Ellie has a journal entry that talks a couple of boar she went looking however left dying after its pained squeals reminded her of Joel’s brutal dying. Initially, this hunt was imagined to be playable much like the looking sequence within the first sport’s Winter section. However having performed it now, the entire thing felt a bit unwieldy and irritating. In the end, between this and the equal PTSD reveal within the remaining sport, I want the one the crew went with as a result of it’s much less tedious to get there.
The misplaced ranges aren’t the one behind-the-scenes options included in The Final of Us Half II Remastered, because it additionally has a commentary observe you can play alongside the sport itself that includes Director Neil Druckmann, Narrative Lead Halley Gross, and actors Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey, Troy Baker, and Shannon Woodward.