The Last Guardian

released on Dec 06, 2016

In a strange and mystical land, a young boy discovers a mysterious creature with which he forms a deep, unbreakable bond. The unlikely pair must rely on each other to journey through towering, treacherous ruins filled with unknown dangers. Experience the journey of a lifetime in this touching, emotional story of friendship and trust.


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Trico reminds me of my cat.

Trico the god, un juego que hace que te preocupes por tu acompañante mucho más que cualquier otro, un juego raro pero que renta totalmente jugarlo no te arrepentirás.

Un juego muy bonito y una muy buena historia, me saco hasta una lagrima la verdad.

TLG is a weird game which I’m not sure how I feel about. This is the last Fumito Ueda game I played, after completing Ico and SOTC which I both enjoyed greatly. Ico was the last one I played and hearing that TLG was similar, I decided to jump right into it.

My first experience with the game was that while it has immediately apparent flaws, it felt like a magical experience. Trico is really an endearing creature with detailed animations and a behaviour that, for the first hours of the game, is incredible. You’ll spot the wild creature playing with a chain, being attracted by the smell of a pot or sniffing random stuff and it is nice to just look at it (spoiler, this pretty much doesn't happen in the later half). You also have the two characters obviously getting closer over the first few hours, until they eventually trust each other. Magical is really the word that comes to my mind to describe this part of the game, I was especially impressed by the part where you have to rely on Trico to grab you in midair while you jump as that completely renewed the logic of the game, where the protagonist was the one taking the initiative for everything and Trico was, until that point, just a wild animal indirectly supporting you.

My first problem with the game appeared around halfway through, when you almost reach the top of the main tower. At that point, something happens to make both your characters fall. I cannot emphasise enough how much I hated this moment. Ico and SOTC are both short games with a very clear progression, in Ico after around an hour you’ll know you need to go to two places to unlock the final area and SOTC will right away tell you that you need to fight 16 colossi, you know pretty much exactly how far you are from finishing at any point. This led me to believe TLG would also be a pretty short game and indeed the game does lead you in that direction. Everything else seems to indicate that. Is there really enough in this game for a 10+ hours game? No, clearly not, I’ll detail this in the next section. And here is the problem, the game suddenly throws you back down and you have to climb yet another way, for about two more hours and guess what? The game does it again! You are thrown down twice and have to climb up again.

At this point, the magic just broke. I thought I was almost done and suddenly I’m hit with “not this shit again” about everything the game had to offer. You’re telling me I still have multiple hours of this “looking for a lever” thing? Trico is not listening to me again? Oh please, just let me end this game. Everything pretty much turned into a distasteful frustration. I am not sure if it is because of my negative feelings, but I feel like the game just became worse outside of a few moments. It doesn’t help that everything feels like an unneeded filler at this point, since the game just repeats the same pattern all the time, but I feel like Trico’s AI just started bugging all the time.

It’s obvious that Trico is on rails for most of the game and this doesn’t actually bother me, in fact I think this should have been the entire game. It’s obviously very difficult to create an AI of a giant beast that will be exploring corridors and solving puzzles and it shows. Whenever Trico has any freedom, he’s likely to just blank out at your orders, go back and forth, bark at you like you’re asking for the impossible and then after five minutes of waiting, he suddenly does the thing you’ve been trying to order him to do. Yes, Trico feels like a real animal WHEN he is on rails. When the AI takes over, he’s just blanking out and acting buggy. Trico staring at a wall is not lifelike. Trico doing two jumps then decides to go backward or blanking out before the third jump is not lifelike. It is just frustrating, especially when the game announces you’re not even close to the end and the game starts being repetitive, you just want to finish it and it hits you very hard how clumsy Trico is. It is obvious this is very badly managed or I would have said the game definitively needs to make Trico speaks more. Trico already barks and complains a lot, the problem is that it happens for something he'll suddenly do 5 minutes later so it doesn't clue you into anything at all. Another very frustrating aspect of Trico blanking out is that you need to restart some segments if you die, which can happen a lot because of other reasons I mention, and especially in the lategame they distance the checkpoints more than before, with segments where you need Trico to do something and it takes forever every single time you restart.

For the first part of the game, I think these problems are much less apparent because Trico is pretty much on rails all the time. The game only teaches you that you can command him after a few hours, so I am guessing you didn’t need to press R1 at all until then (I played Ico first, so I just assumed I can use it and never realised the tutorial didn’t tell me about it). There’s a logic I quickly learned: if Trico doesn’t do something, you probably need to look for another path and it proved to work (not that it’s a positive aspect of the game, the progression is often very artificial: you see a path but no you need to go another place first for an interaction with Trico THEN you can finally go there). I was almost never stuck and would always quickly find the way to go. This turned out much less obvious in the second half of the game as Trico’s AI would just bug out and there are things that just don’t make sense. There are a few parts of the game where you need to just walk to the right spot to trigger something or the game won’t progress. The voiceover gives you some clues, but even for these you sometimes need to trigger something or you can wait forever and it just won’t tell you anything. Sometimes, it also spoils the game right away without giving you any time to think. In fact, I think it was meant to spoil you all the time, it’s just that I didn’t always trigger it fast enough (or didn’t trigger it at all, most likely). There are also these dumb moments where you need to feed Trico or he won’t lead you to the next spot and the only way to learn is either the voiceover (which can make you wait forever, as I said) or looking everywhere and not finding anything (and if you’re lucky you’ll find the food before being stuck). Since the food is usually hidden somewhere, you just have to guess that it's time to actually look for food, not very intuitive.

By the way, most of the commands are literally useless. I don’t think I ever needed anything other than plain R1 and R1 + circle / square which orders him to smash something (which I did like twice, including the tutorial). I have no idea why they didn’t just remove this and simplify the game.

I mentioned earlier the game has apparent flaws but I could ignore them: the longer the game goes the more frustrating they are. The character’s controls are terrible and surprisingly worse than Ico. Not only is it very annoying how frail they made the boy this time, with a more “realistic” approach (not being able to run/jump while carrying something, no jump spam, struggling animations when climbing…) but they made things very annoying and confusing. The auto-grab is really a pain especially when you press the button to let go but he decides to grab something midfall, then you have the controls which can be confusing. In Ico, you approach a ladder and he climbs it, here you need to press the grab button. The thing I hated the most is how they’ve removed the auto-tracking for jump grabbing things. In Ico, you’ll never miss a chain because of the tracking but here, you really need to aim for that chain. The camera is also pretty terrible and really unfit for the combo of large beast + tight environments. It fades out to black a lot whenever it can’t manage to show something and it’ll often not show you what you want. I’m glad we can at least control it like a normal 3D game this time around though, as I really dislike the Ico camera. I don’t understand though why in every Fumito Ueda game, you just fucking can’t move the camera around without it centering back on the main character especially if you’re moving. What if I just want to observe some landscape?!

I like the overall design of the environment in this game and it looks very pretty with the cell shaded style and all. Not very immersive though because it quickly becomes apparent how much the place is designed for the player. Ico slightly had this problem but here it’s really emphasised. Literally everything you need has a magical lever to solve your problem. What’s the most immersion breaking is that they could have at least made a logic to those levers, but no. A gate you need to open will have a lever close to it, but not all gates will. Trico has a lever for the armour and chain at the very beginning, but not later beasts. Whenever you go off tracks you’ll notice how much the game has designed a path specifically for the player. Aside from these levers, the rest of the game is just as nonsensical. What’s the purpose of this entire place? It’s just full of empty rooms, big corridors and gates like the entrance of a castle. There isn’t a single room with anything useful and whenever it’s not empty, it’s some weird design like the traps that make Trico mad. Even the placement of the guards is weird.

And the guards… this is by far the worst part of the game. The guards are really annoying and the mechanic of mashing keys to free yourself is utterly terrible. Being pursued by them while you have to solve a riddle is just terrible. There’s even a section where I just restarted because if you get spotted by them, it’s impossible to have the time to pull a specific lever before they grab you. Then there’s the fights, where you just watch Trico beating the guards and can’t do anything. This is also where Trico’s animations are the worst as he’s jumping around in a really clunky manner and this is even more so terrible because it means you can’t even stand still on his back, remove spears or anything because it’ll constantly shake you. Oh yeah, you can’t even AFK because of this so don’t try it. Then after the fights Trico is angry and you need to appease him, which really gets tiring especially toward the end of the game where you need to do it multiple times in a row because they kept piling up fights. The end of the game is really a terrible section honestly with some of the worst segments of the game.

There were many cool moments but it feels like the game should have really just been that without the extra fillers: the first time you cross a bridge in midair and need to get rid of the eyes, the fight against another beast, when you’re left alone with the other beast, etc. Then the game would have been about 5-6 hours just like the previous games and I think people would appreciate it a lot more. The flaws are pretty easy to ignore when you make the game a much shorter experience. It really doesn’t offer anything to climb towers for an additional 6 hours with the same riddles all the time and frustrating mechanics. Some of the cool moments are even ruined because of how often they are used. I was really impressed the first time you have Trico jump and rescue you by grabbing you when you’re falling but then they kept doing it all the time. You also have the “oh no he missed you but surprise he’s using his tail to grab you” which just doesn’t work after the first time.

Remember how I mentioned that Trico and the boy become closer over the first few hours? It all stops after that and there’s pretty much no evolution until the last 30 minutes. There’s a part where Trico will actually fight the eye dudes because you’re in danger, but then he goes back to being scared by them again. That’s about it.

Finally, I’ll mention the lack of variety if I didn’t explicitly say it already. It’s always about finding a magical lever or having Trico jump somewhere, there’s pretty much nothing else. They really could have thought of better interactions, both for the boy and the protagonist. Maybe using a crate to push a button? Hell, Ico already had more ideas. They even added an item, the mirror, which you will use for about one hour in the entire game because it’s unavailable the rest of the time.

So despite all this, I actually enjoyed most of the game. It sorts of feels like a Ghibli movie, but that’s really about it. Even the story is honestly pretty uninteresting, Ueda gets praised for the minimalistic approach but I really don’t see anything special in this case, the story doesn’t complement the game or add anything, neither artistic nor a message. It doesn’t even particularly tie into the lore of the previous games. This game is basically Ico 2.0, some things better and a lot worse and it’s not terrible by any means but it’s definitely disappointing overall. I've seen people praise this story telling style but I feel like the game is very generic, it's almost just a Ghibli movie in my opinion. Yes, I like a minimalistic approach but really, what is left here? If I missed some details, I'd be happy to hear about it. I know there are some details in the game but they are really way too sparse. Compare to a game like Dark Souls for example, which is inspired by Ueda and also has a unique style of story telling. I'm not talking about how it has lore through item descriptions: have you noticed how much the environment tells you? You'll find statues of specific characters, broken things that indicate something was removed here, paintings, etc. and they clue you into additional lore. TLG just has bland environment, there's maybe two rooms (like the one with the mirror at the beginning) which clue you into anything but it's so lackluster that I think anyone theorising about this game's story is just inventing their own, entirely.

Even if you're a fan of Ueda's previous games I'm not sure I would recommend it. I would like to say that it's worth playing at least the first few hours and then you can drop it, unfortunately many of the good short events happen lategame so you'll still miss a lot.

I though that this was as good as Ueda’s other games. Wish it had a cooler title like those tho. “The Last Guardian” sounds a bit generic.

Love this game. It is crying out for a PC release, while applying some needed tweaks.

I love the recalcitrant birddog Trico and his stubborn behaviour. I found it very true to real dog.

The terrible camera was the great downfall for me.