I know many love this game as much or more than ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. I thought it sucked sooooo bad :D No, that would be too extreme. I liked the world, graphics and how the relationship between the player and the doggo develops. But the controls and camera were so uuuuuunbelievably shitty, I couldn't believe the game was released in this state. Every second of gameplay was torture for me. As a result, I found it difficult to enjoy the beautiful story and creative world. That's a shame, because this is where the game is really strong. Unfortunately, it plays like ass :/

Bom jogo, bem bonito...historia interessante onde vc se apega ao Trico que é seu companheiro durante toda a jornada do game criando um lanço de amizade muito forte... mais nem tudo são flores no jogo e algo que chateia muito e que acaba ofuscando a jogatina são as movimentações do personagem que parece um bêbado e a câmera do jogo onde vc se perde toda hora em meio aos cenários apertados com o trico gigante cobrindo toda sua tela ... só não dropei o game pela historia e pelo trico kk ...mais infelizmente a irritante movimentações do jogo me fez passar raiva em muitos momentos me forçando a da uma nota de 6,5/10

The Last Guardian is a concept game where you solve puzzles by interacting with an alien and apathetic environment.

I think a game should be fun to interact with. Any time a game is not fun to interact with, the payoff needs to be exceptionally exquisite. For me, the cinematic, emergent moments of this game were not worth the unresponsive camera, terrible controls, badly signaled interactibles, and constant button prompts. I'm glad that experiments like this exist so that they can later be turned into games, but I can't enjoy the prototype.

my feelings for this game are so complicated but to keep it short, if you have liked uedas previous games please play this

the games ending made me tear up, and thats why its so hard for me to not give it a 10. i have not played a game that after i finished i only wish it couldve been a tad bit better, but tricos movement i find to be to unresponsive sadly. if this game got a remaster and they fixed tricos clumsy movement, instantly a 10. trico really excelled in areas where he couldnt move, the bit where you are jumping tower to tower trico was great, but thats cause trico literally couldnt move

tldr
if you like uedas previous games (ico and shadow of the colussus) then please play this game, when this game is at its best (which it normally is), its a amazing

heaven, hell, heaven again

If Andrei Rublev becomes praying through film, teaching us how to bear the cruelty of its passages, The Last Guardian feels like a harsh meditation in which kindness is a piecemeal revelation as the only way to get through. Not as explicitly as an introspection you can hear from the person whose faith is challenged over and over, but even more confidently lies in the power of experience.

The game almost doesn't speak about any monument you're in contact with to the point that dialogues, most of them, feel very redundant because we are not supposed to get too much in the realm of representation. In one way or another, the game named and thought its narrative elements to steal imagination from our control, and that's why dream-like seems to be the proper way to describe it.

Honestly, I believe the unarticulated emotional vibrancy of this game is almost too much, and sometimes it needs the cliche appeal to distract us from the weight of nest's atmosphere. In the last segments (what we usually call a "Final Boss") the space almost drowns, but the peaks of motion, power and narrative intensity that follows are all as close to perfection as any visual media can get.

SOTC definitely handles better the darker themes, making it feel more grounded by giving a greater level of control to the player, but nothing conveys as much life and as much death attached to its gestures so well.

There seems to be a prevalent expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.

I loved the aesthetic of this game but it wasn't memorable.
In terms of controllability and game mechanics, this game is still far from being very good. In my opinion, it is a shame since the story had so much to give. We know that this was postponed for seven years which is a long time...

Some other times the command just failed, I often tried to make the boy do things and sometimes he couldn't, for whatever reason.
The other really disappointing feature in this game is the fighting the boy needs to do in order to get rid of the armored knights. It's the same thing that appears on loading screens. And it's a terrible idea for the controller's lifespan (but perhaps that was intentional. Thank you Sony).

I hated it when it released back in 2016. Now, I've been replaying all the games from Makoto Fumito Ueda and I loved it. Beautifully inmersive, if you have pets or had in the past, this game will hit your feels. It's worth the chance.

As a tip, try to pet Trico everytime he obeys you, and give every order 3 times in a row. He may not respond the first or second time, but he will at the third. It made my gameplay much smoother, and the AI didn't feel half as frustrating as everyone states it is.

I’ve been trying to work out how to write about this for a while. It’s easy to have a list of complaints when you don’t like something, or set out the pros and cons when something is just decent. When I find something truly exceptional and beautiful like this I don’t know what to say.

From the start when I first met Trico, I was utterly enamoured. It’s such an amazing feeling interacting with this enormous mythical animal hybrid thing. It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s adorable, but also dangerous, alien. Like a pet but not. Something that could never be in a zoo. I’ve spent a lot of time just watching him, seeing him play, scratch, roll around, like my own dog. Taking hundreds of pictures. Forgetting that this is just a ‘program’ or a series of numbers, triggers and scripted gestures. It’s easy to suspend disbelief when something is so immersive like this.

I love the tactility as well, climbing through its limbs and down, riding and petting it. Pulling out spears from its flesh and feeding it so it can heal. Of course there’s some issues with controls, camera angles, deliberate animal stubbornness and wild inobedience, but these frustrations were easy to move past.

The game has a great variety of puzzles and problem solving, even when Trico’s not around.

Some might find the narrative overly sentimental but I think it’s earnest, it was completely affecting for me, the same kind of open-ended, involving experience as the team’s other titles where you can find your own meaning to attach to it. SOTC had some standout moments to me and TLG has so many more. I’ll never forget this.

I desperately wanted this to be one of those 'change your life' kind of games. The same way people talk about Shadow of the Colossus. Alas...

Firstly, and most importantly, this thing handles like playing snooker with a rope. Moving the main character around on the ground is fine, but try and get them hanging off ledges or climbing (especially on Trico) and you might as well point in a direction and hope for the best.

Speaking of Trico, they are by far the most frustrating thing in this game. So much of the The Last Guardian revolves around having Trico carry you places. This should be achieved by issuing commands but whether Trico listens to these is an entirely separate thing. I'm assuming the artistic choice here is that it's meant to be akin to training a real life animal. As the owner of two cats I can confidently say I have enough of that in real life and don't need that level of needless frustration from my games thanks very much.

The environments look amazing and Trico does most of the time too. I think the artistic choices on the character models was a misstep as they can look flat and out of place when the world is so detailed.

Finally, the story is very non-existent for the most part. It's not until later into the game that we get a cutscene that fills in most of the blanks you've spent a good chunk of your time pondering over. The details we do get are interesting and I wish they could have been expanded upon further and sprinkled throughout the game more widely. It all just feels sort of empty.

That said, when the game shines, it really does shine. There are some great set-pieces to hit the story beats and the game has a lot of interesting mechanics that are a lot of fun when they work. The ending ties everything together nicely and almost makes you forget every time you sighed "oh ffs" over the previous 11ish hours. Almost, but not quite.

Juego mediocre, Pero un Trico Inolvidable...

Es de estos juegos que sin duda no se pueden expresar con una nota, y a pesar de la nota (objetiva) que creo que se merece, lo que llegas a sentir por Trico es Inolvidable, una experiencia que todos deben de pasar, enamorarse de Trico, lo sabrás si tienes una mascota a la que quieres, lo sentirás como si fuese ella.
Trico es, para mí, uno de los mejores personajes plasmados en un videojuego. Un compañero fiel que te enfadará, te protegerá, querrás protegerle y cada rasguño que sufra es como si te lo hicieran en tu propia carne.

Ahora bien, todo lo que diga de Fumito Ueda y su sensibilidad es poco, pero estoy muy unido a este mundo jueguil y hay cosas que son inaceptables y creo que un análisis como este ha de basarse objetivamente y al mismo tiempo dejar claro que eso no significa que no sea el juego de tu vida.

Jugabilidad.
Uno de sus peores puntos, la jugabilidad no es nefasta como apuntan, Trico no es horrible, no reacciona a su antojo, hay que saber cómo tratarla, eso es todo, es un animal y como tal no entendera a la primera el "truco" que le pides.
Eso sí... Es simple, simple como ella sola, los puzzles son una absoluta genialidad, pero se limitan a escalar, llamar a Trico que haga su papel y seguir escalando, la variante es que a veces es por su lomo y otras por el entorno.
Las situaciones son variadas pero se basan en ello, a veces se incluyen vidrieras que a Trico le aterrorizan y hay que buscar la forma de tirarlas, te hacen pensar pero al final es cuestión de escalar bien.
Los combates ni nombrarlos... Son tediosos, solo hay un enemigo que son las armaduras (jefes aparte que son dos) no resulta agradable topartelas son un estorbo , quitando el tramo final a mi me sobraban, aunque en la historia tienen sentido.
Esto al principio es llamativo además de darle de comer a Trico o no anda, pero al rato... Cansa y es repetitivo. Lo dicho monótono, es de juego indie, pero Trico te hará seguir, querrás más.

Gráficos.
Su otro punto flojo. Son bellos, un marcado cell shading con efecto fotorrealista, al menos en Trico. Pero no deja de ser cell shading y no precisamente el mejor que se ha visto. Perfectamente cabe en una PS3, creo que estando en PS4 casi todos los juegos de este año y el anterior los supera, Véase Horizon y su competidor directo final Fantasy XV (presupuestos aparte, last guardián se vendió como triple A y no tiene ese presupuesto de triple A metido ni por asomo)
Eso sí, de haber salido en PS3 su puntuación sería otra cosa. Lo dicho bellos pero muy desfasados, aunque Trico te hará seguir.

Sonido.
Escueto y a la vez directo, en una obra así no se necesita una banda sonora mayor, acierta y cumple en todo momento. El idioma inventado, los sonidos de Trico, los del niño, la música el silencio tan necesario a veces, sin ninguna pega. Ueda lo ha vuelto a hacer ambientando la obra con el sonido justo y necesario. Todo un acierto.

Innovación.
El hecho de cogerle cariño de verdad a un compañero y su relación... Si es que es innovación. Por lo demás no hay absolutamente nada nuevo en la obra. No innova. Todo está visto.

Historia.
Sensibilidad, arte puro, da igual lo que haya dicho técnicamente. No hay historia, la historia eres tú y es Trico. La historia se cuenta en 4 cinemáticas y te aseguro que es suficiente, es lo de menos, solo ver como actúa Trico en todas las situaciones es suficiente. Sufres con él le quieres, y sí este juego te hará llorar y emocionarte. De eso trata last Guardián, es emocion pura y el arte trata de "Transmisión" es su motor, y en este aspecto superar a last Guardián no es posible, por ninguno de los juegos actuales, No sentirás tantas cosas y tan rápido con otro videojuego te lo aseguro.

Trico... Te hará seguir y lo terminarás queriendo como si fuera un ser real.

Conclusión.
Merece la pena si buscas arte y sensibilidad, si no te dedicas a buscar esto... Este no es tu juego ni de cerca.