Both a wonderful and frustrating experience. While some parts are wonderful and truly unique, the gameplay is often sloppy and unforgiving.

From a technical level I admire it as its completely unafraid to tackle “hard” problems. A fully AI companion that navigates the world naturalistically and you can climb on is a massive achievement. Tricos is one of the most convincing pet simulations I’ve seen.

From a design perspective I also admire how uncompromised the it is. The beast is not a minion you control but more of a imperfect cooperative partner. While it is often frustrating I respect the choice as it really sells the idea that you are playing with another living thing. This interaction can also lead to very funny results that are a highlight of the game.

Art and music are also excellent. Like everything else it is imperfect and unpolished but it almost doesnt matter. The game feels like a painting, look closely and its a mess of paint strokes, but if you stand back its a masterpiece.

What makes the game unique is also its downfall however. Often you are spend time waiting for the beast as your at the mercy of its opaque AI. Beautiful moments are ruined by being trapped in physics objects and camera obstructions.

While I can forgive the sloppiness the bigger issue for me was the limited gameplay. nee mechanics are few and far between and often get repetitive. The game could really have used some “one and done” mechanics or level specific ideas to keep it from getting stale. As it is the game is a few hours too long and very much overstays its welcome.

Ultimately like many other team ico games, this is a game I admire and respect but do not love.

You already know this is bad, as this game is super infamous, but my god is this just as terrible everyone makes it out to be. This isn't even a funny kind of garbage. It's complete agonizing putridness. Quite easily the worst game I've ever played. Nothing in it feels well made or even remotely finished!

The controls are the main highlight of this game's infamy, and for good reason. They're stiff as all hell and makes the basic movement you have to constantly do an uncomfortable chore. Plus none of the levels in this game feel like they were made with these controls in mind and all just feel like nonsensical messes of platforms scattered around for the sake of having some sort of level design. It also doesn't help when the game wants you to do things with precision, which you just can't easily get with controls like these. It's a struggle to handle with enemies because of this, as the most reliable way of killing them is by jumping on them. The only other method of attack aside from certain power-ups, the atom projectile move, quickly becomes very situational as the game progresses with more complex level layouts and more annoying enemies. Some enemies will just be an extreme pain no matter what you do, like the snake and the bird enemies, both of which have a very active presence in the last third of the game.

Speaking of more complex levels, they just get worse the further you get. Most people never see past the first few since they get so fed up with this trash that they drop it very early on. But I decided to go the extra mile and fully complete this for some goddamn reason, and my god do they just keep getting worse and worse after each one! Especially the last third of the game, it gets fucking BAD. Right after the first boss the game decides it's a good idea to introduce water levels, and they're so goddamn slow. Luckily there's only three of them so you don't have to deal with much, but the last six stages will make you wish you had the water levels back. The last third of the game is full of overly long, confusing bullshit that constantly wants alot of precision, which you just can't get with these controls. With the earlier levels, screwing up the platforming will often make you backtrack an uncomfortable distance back to where you started to make you do the platforming over again, but these last few stages really enjoy instantly killing you with tons of water everywhere instead, and like I said, you just can't get precision with controls like these! ​(Plus I would like to bring up walking off any sort of edge above water locks you into an instant death animation, and it happened to me so many times in the last few levels due to the controls so that's an extreme annoyance made all for a tiny sliver of comedic effect.) Stages 16 and 17 are extreme offenders of this, and they're the two stages that pissed me off the most. They want you to jump off of moving vehicles onto other vehicles of small platforms so many times, and almost always punish screwing it up with death. Hopefully you have a good surplus of lives, as the final third of the game will drain through them ludicrously fast. I never found out what happened if you got a game over since I kept restocking on lives in the first level (it's very useful to grind there for lives if you didn't use cheats to start the game with a bunch), but I'll assume it'll make you do the stage you were on all over again. I don't wanna imagine if getting a game over made you do the whole game all over again.
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And don't even get me started on the rockets. There's two in every level except for the two bosses, and you need to get them all to get the 'good' ending. They can range from lying out in the open, to overly cryptic bullshit that you'd need a guide to find out how to get. But either way they boil down to having to deal with Bubsy 3D more than anyone normally should. It's especially agonizing looking for them in the water stages, since their format makes them giant mazes for exploration, making you slog around looking for wherever they are or where hints on how to get them could be.

Two times through the game you'll get a boss stage instead of a normal stage, and these bosses aren't anything special. The first one is rather annoying with how you have to maneuver your glide onto a flying opponent (and confusing if you didn't know the area where he shot at also functions as a fan for some reason), and the second one is pretty easy but also rather confusing if you don't know that you have to make him slip on the bananas into the barrier and not just jump on him. You won't have to collect any rockets in either of these, as I don't know how they could shoehorn rockets into these situations. You do have to collect rockets on the final stage, since it doubles as both a normal stage and a boss stage. There's even two bosses there as well. The first one isn't very hard, just use the trees to jump on him, I'm not sure if I got lucky with the projectiles he drops but they weren't hard to dodge. The game's final boss however is terrible! They relentlessly shoot at you if you're anywhere near them, so you have to jump around towards the switch to activate the atoms you need to shoot, and jump around towards the atoms too. You're invincible whenever you're shooting an atom, but not whenever the atom shooting animation ends, and the Woolie Queens really like getting convenient shots at you right when that animation ends, so you just have to hope one of their shots don't conveniently hit you right when that animation ends. Luckily if you die after defeating one of them you won't have to deal with both of them all over again.

And after all of that, suffering through all of these increasingly bullshit and terribly designed levels, extremely frustrating enemies, confusing rocket part exploration, potentially annoying bosses, and one terrible final boss all while having to deal with these god awful controls, you're rewarded with a shitty ending no matter how well you did. Spoiler warning for here, by the way, but this is Bubsy 3D, so I highly doubt you care. If you don't get all of the rocket parts, Bubsy gets stranded somewhere out in space. If you do get all of the rocket parts, Bubsy gets warped through time all the way back to the prehistoric ages. In both endings the Woolies get rid of Bubsy and go forth with invading Earth. You just get shat on regardless of how much effort you put in. You don't even get a credits sequence or anything, just a massive middle finger of an ending. Oh well, I don't even care that much, I just feel relief to not have to play this any longer. Just getting to say that I 100% completed this is enough of a reward for me.

Whatever you do, stay away from this game. Most people would abandon this within the first few stages, and I wouldn't fault them for it. You don't even get a congratulations for making it all the way, just a slap in the face for finishers and completionists alike, but you're actively getting shat on if you're even playing this game, so don't waste your time and sanity on this. I went the extra mile and all I got was proof that this is absolute garbage.

"I know a lot of gamers out there don't have much patience". This line was as true in 2007 as it is now. With that in mind, it's easy to see why The Last Guardian is a pretty divisive game. Doesn't help that the game's lack of polish makes it kinda hard to tell what's intentional and what isn't, at least at first.

To anyone that played ICO, the parallels in The Last Guardian are obvious. In ICO you're in the position of power, taking care of a defenseless girl, in TLG you're actually the small one and have to rely on a huge bird dog thing for pretty much anything, bar some choice moments. While not really original, this dynamic is rare enough to feel different, and the game makes sure to always involve both the player and Trico (hugebirddogthing) at the same time. For people who stick with the game, this is very effective: eventually you'll feel some sort of bond with Trico, considering you went through so many puzzles/platforming sessions with it, making the narrative moments much more earned than they usually are in games of this type.

Trico itself is the main point of contention with The Last Guardian. Instead of what other developers would've done, and probably would've been more immediately functional, TLG aims to make Trico and the experience of bonding with it as realistic as possible: you don't press a button to make it do something, as much as you suggest it does something. You'll point where to go, tell it to jump or break something, and see how Trico reacts to it. This requires patience especially early on, as Trico won't react much to your commands and its animations will be much longer for everything. This is where I think people are mistaken when they say that Trico has faulty AI: they see that their command isn't getting an immediate response, and so they try different things or keep telling it to look at something, when the game did in fact read the command, it's just that Trico itself has to process what's going on. The trick is all in observing the creature, how it moves, how it reacts. I'm not sure how much trickery there is to Trico, but it really did seem like its AI was improving, or at least understanding the commands better, as the creature itself got faster at responding and by the end of the game even mostly understood by itself where to go. What's really impressive is how second nature this becomes eventually, you don't even notice that you're waiting a few seconds every time Trico has to jump, and you figure out when Trico is in the process of doing something or waiting for a command. If Trico were just a big item like in something like Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom (raise your hand if you're one of the 5 people that played that) the game wouldn't resonate nearly as much, for better or worse.

What isn't a point of contention, at least from where I'm standing, is how unpolished the game is. There's some framerate issues, some visual glitches, some really bizarre physics engine flubs, but what I really can't excuse is how bad the camera is. It generally does a good enough job as the game is pretty slow, but in platforming and generally more action-y sequences it has a really hard time tracking what's going on. Which can be made even worse by the fact that the game's collision detection isn't great, especially when it comes to recognizing ledges to grab. I died in perfectly normal platforming sequences more often than I'd like to mention because the boy just doesn't feel like grabbing onto a platform.

Despite all my reservations built up over years of word of mouth, I think The Last Guardian is a worthy sequel to ICO. I can't say everyone who liked ICO will enjoy TLG, as it's not nearly as immediate and requires a lot more time to soak it in, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants something a bit different out of their videogames. Now if you'll excuse me I have to wait for Trico to take a dump for the trophy