You wake up as a young child who wakes up in a dense labyrinth and stumbles a towering, intimidating beast who’s back is littered with spears. What may be treated as a powerful beast to conquer in most other games, even Ueda’s own, is turned on his head as the player is encouraged to lean into the child’s first instinct: to care for it.
This is the natural extreme of one of the themes that define every game in the ICO trilogy: relationships that define barriers of language, clan or species. Trico is originally on edge around the boy: perhaps rightfully so with it’s injuries clearly at the hands of man-made weapons, but they learn to trust each-other as they work through the maze together.
It’s premise and focus on puzzle solving brings to to mind Ico over Shadow of the Colossus. Unlike Ico the power balance has largely shifted. The boy can run, jump, climb, manipulate smaller mechanisms like switches and fit through smaller passages in caverns. Even in his wounded state Trico more than pulls his weight, jumping over large caverns and manipulating bigger machines and structures. His large body acts as an excellent tool for platforming, too. The player can put Trico in the proper position with a little direction and scale him like they would a Colossi from the last game.
Directing Trico was where The Last Guardian had the most potential to fall short with so much of it resting on the game’s AI. The characters are unable to communicate, so the player is tasked with miming what they want him to do. The boy’s frantic exaggerated animations made this really charming on it’s own, but I’m surprised by how responsive Trico is while keeping a realistic amount of delay as he comprehend what you want him to do, considers it, and executes. If you actually understand what you want Trico to do and convey it to him properly then you’ll never be kept waiting too long. It might have just been my imagination, but it felt like he grew sharper and more responsive as the game went on and his bond with the boy grew. On the whole they did a good job of making him reasonably responsive without making him feel like a vehicle the way so many animal companions do in games.
Breaking things up are sections where the player is tasked with nursing Trico by finding food for him or sections where the two are separated for plot reasons. These sections try their best to avoid tedium through interesting level layouts ans scenarios. Navigating your way through more simplistic puzzles with the boy’s limited move-set shakes things up and paints a picture of how much more difficult things can be without your companion.
Ueda has always approached games with a trademark “design by subtraction” approach. The valley has a lot of spacious environments that keep the world from feeling like it was built just for the player’s convenience. There’s not much extra to find or alternate pathways to take, but it keeps the world from feeling artificial and accommodates the enormous Trico very well.
I feel like this can come with some drawbacks though. You play with what is largely the same set of mechanics for the entire game with the tools the player gets to play with evolving only marginally. There are some unique puzzles and mechanics but you’ll be ferrying barrels around and running away from guards a lot more than anything else. It’s possible to keep the variety going with a simple set of mechanics as Ueda proved himself on the last game, but TLG can’t help but start to feel repetitive, especially around the middle portion, without something like Shadow of the Colossus’s unique encounters to carry it through.
The combat encounters with the guards feel like the game’s weakest portion. Trico disposes of them easily when he’s actually around, but the game frequently pits you up against them by yourself and challenges you to solve a puzzle or move an object while you’re surrounded by them. There’s not much challenge to these sections, just tedium as you circle around a room trying to stay clear of them and mashing out of situations when they grab you.
A game with this ambitious of a concept can’t escape some clunk here and there. The camera struggles in-doors and the way Trico, the boy and the environment collide with each-other can be pretty clunky. This is more forgivable in the context of a fairly laid back puzzle solver where these things are unlikely to be punishing, but I can think of a few occasions where the boy was killed by poor collision detection during the platforming with some checkpoints that made things a little obnoxious.
But these are problems that I’m ultimately willing to forgive. I consider Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to be fairly flawed experiences that end up paying off in big ways in the end and The Last Guardian is no exception. The way Trico goes from a skittish, traumatized creature to one that isn’t afraid to fly again isn’t exactly a groundbreaking narrative, but it’s reflected so well in the game’s animations and mechanics that it’s hard to to get sucked into it. It doesn’t always stick the landing, but it’s really hard for me to rag on a game with such a bold concept and such a tendency to nail it when it really does need to nail it.
The ending especially tied every loose end and plot thread up in a neat way. It’s easy to read Ueda’s games as vague to inspire further thought about the world and lore, but I read them more as a closed, complete experience that only uses what’s absolutely necessary to convey their point. If Ico was a game about bonding through dangerous situations and Shadow of the Colossus was about conflict, violence and how it saps away at the soul, The Last Guardian’s ending reinforces a game about compassion and its power to heal us from conflict and trauma. The boy and the beast manage to break the boundary between species and divert from their predestined path to be enemies, and all it took was for one to reach out a helping hand to the other. It’s a powerful tale that’s told mechanically as well as it is visually. This rare combination makes it a very special game.
This is the natural extreme of one of the themes that define every game in the ICO trilogy: relationships that define barriers of language, clan or species. Trico is originally on edge around the boy: perhaps rightfully so with it’s injuries clearly at the hands of man-made weapons, but they learn to trust each-other as they work through the maze together.
It’s premise and focus on puzzle solving brings to to mind Ico over Shadow of the Colossus. Unlike Ico the power balance has largely shifted. The boy can run, jump, climb, manipulate smaller mechanisms like switches and fit through smaller passages in caverns. Even in his wounded state Trico more than pulls his weight, jumping over large caverns and manipulating bigger machines and structures. His large body acts as an excellent tool for platforming, too. The player can put Trico in the proper position with a little direction and scale him like they would a Colossi from the last game.
Directing Trico was where The Last Guardian had the most potential to fall short with so much of it resting on the game’s AI. The characters are unable to communicate, so the player is tasked with miming what they want him to do. The boy’s frantic exaggerated animations made this really charming on it’s own, but I’m surprised by how responsive Trico is while keeping a realistic amount of delay as he comprehend what you want him to do, considers it, and executes. If you actually understand what you want Trico to do and convey it to him properly then you’ll never be kept waiting too long. It might have just been my imagination, but it felt like he grew sharper and more responsive as the game went on and his bond with the boy grew. On the whole they did a good job of making him reasonably responsive without making him feel like a vehicle the way so many animal companions do in games.
Breaking things up are sections where the player is tasked with nursing Trico by finding food for him or sections where the two are separated for plot reasons. These sections try their best to avoid tedium through interesting level layouts ans scenarios. Navigating your way through more simplistic puzzles with the boy’s limited move-set shakes things up and paints a picture of how much more difficult things can be without your companion.
Ueda has always approached games with a trademark “design by subtraction” approach. The valley has a lot of spacious environments that keep the world from feeling like it was built just for the player’s convenience. There’s not much extra to find or alternate pathways to take, but it keeps the world from feeling artificial and accommodates the enormous Trico very well.
I feel like this can come with some drawbacks though. You play with what is largely the same set of mechanics for the entire game with the tools the player gets to play with evolving only marginally. There are some unique puzzles and mechanics but you’ll be ferrying barrels around and running away from guards a lot more than anything else. It’s possible to keep the variety going with a simple set of mechanics as Ueda proved himself on the last game, but TLG can’t help but start to feel repetitive, especially around the middle portion, without something like Shadow of the Colossus’s unique encounters to carry it through.
The combat encounters with the guards feel like the game’s weakest portion. Trico disposes of them easily when he’s actually around, but the game frequently pits you up against them by yourself and challenges you to solve a puzzle or move an object while you’re surrounded by them. There’s not much challenge to these sections, just tedium as you circle around a room trying to stay clear of them and mashing out of situations when they grab you.
A game with this ambitious of a concept can’t escape some clunk here and there. The camera struggles in-doors and the way Trico, the boy and the environment collide with each-other can be pretty clunky. This is more forgivable in the context of a fairly laid back puzzle solver where these things are unlikely to be punishing, but I can think of a few occasions where the boy was killed by poor collision detection during the platforming with some checkpoints that made things a little obnoxious.
But these are problems that I’m ultimately willing to forgive. I consider Ico and Shadow of the Colossus to be fairly flawed experiences that end up paying off in big ways in the end and The Last Guardian is no exception. The way Trico goes from a skittish, traumatized creature to one that isn’t afraid to fly again isn’t exactly a groundbreaking narrative, but it’s reflected so well in the game’s animations and mechanics that it’s hard to to get sucked into it. It doesn’t always stick the landing, but it’s really hard for me to rag on a game with such a bold concept and such a tendency to nail it when it really does need to nail it.
The ending especially tied every loose end and plot thread up in a neat way. It’s easy to read Ueda’s games as vague to inspire further thought about the world and lore, but I read them more as a closed, complete experience that only uses what’s absolutely necessary to convey their point. If Ico was a game about bonding through dangerous situations and Shadow of the Colossus was about conflict, violence and how it saps away at the soul, The Last Guardian’s ending reinforces a game about compassion and its power to heal us from conflict and trauma. The boy and the beast manage to break the boundary between species and divert from their predestined path to be enemies, and all it took was for one to reach out a helping hand to the other. It’s a powerful tale that’s told mechanically as well as it is visually. This rare combination makes it a very special game.