In a shocking twist from Naughty Dog, the voice acting for their newest game, The Last of Us, will not be led by Nolan North.  As much as I enjoy his Drake, Naughty Dog has wisely gone to other actors so the games are not seen as too similar right off the bat.  Naughty Dog Creative Director, Neil Druckmann revealed the leads for their new game, which was announced at last night's Video Game Awards.

The male lead will be played by Troy Baker, best known for his role as Snow Villiers in Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2, as well as the protagonist, Booker DeWitt, in the upcoming BioShock Infinite.  The female lead will be played by Ashley Johnson, who was on Growing Pains as a child, but has also done voicework for shows like Teen Titans and more recently Ben 10: Ultimate Alien.

Good to see Naughty Dog stepping into what appears to be a gritter genre, namely survival-horror.  Ammo already appears sparse, and in spite of the sunlit setting, the noises the creatures made as they attacked the male lead were incredibly unsettling.

Nolan North, while an enjoyable voice actor, seems to have become something of an industry standard for better or worse, and also does not seem like his sort of happy-go-lucky characters would not fit into The Last of Us' world.  Regardless, judging from the trailer that we saw last night at the VGAs, Baker and Johnson are set to be excellent mediums through which to tell us what is shaping up to be an interesting tale of survival.