The Last Guardian (2016)

Training a dog is not an easy task. It takes discipline and most importantly patience. This game took a lot of patience between guiding Trico to do the right spot or doing the right command. The way the controls are set up made me realize that I am really playing a boy, he’s clumsy, unsure about things just like the controls and how they don’t tell you what command is what. You just have to figure it out like a boy would do.

The story was beautiful it reminds of something out of dreamworks, the graphics are beautiful with great lighting, I wish they were different areas to explore besides ruins and forest, but it’s ok.

Overall, this was a fantastic game, it’s not the best Ico game I’ve played but it’s great nonetheless. I wish the pacing was slightly faster, again you need patience to beat this.

Side note: I’ve played this on ps5 and I read that this game is 60 FPS, but only for the physical version which I thought was kind of weird. I feel like if this game was 60 FPS it would enhance my experience a lot more. Great game

I recently picked up The Last Guardian where I left off in 2017 and flew through the rest of the game.

The game is still gorgeous, the level design both vast and detailed. I had problems with the controls at various points—especially those moving the barrels through the physics mazes—but was able to make it through the trickier parts after a handful of attempts.

I developed a kinship with Trico that was only interrupted when he wouldn't heed my commands or went in a direction I very much did not point to. I often forgot he was my AI buddy and played with him like a friend online without voice chat.

The ending was worth the effort—even considering those barrel puzzles—and I'm happy to live in a world where The Last Guardian exists.

So I beat The Last Guardian last night. What a rollercoaster ride!

It lives and dies on its being as realistic as possible. Beautiful environments without a hint of where to go next. A legendary creature companion, made to be as wild and frustrating as a real creature to tame. A playable character who stumbles around the level like an avatar from Human Fall Flat.

It's everything that's right and wrong with trying to create an immersive real world. There were times I wanted to give this game 4 or 5 stars, because when things are working, it's amazing. Then when things don't work, you're lost and your companion just will not cooperate, I was infuriated to the point I wanted to give it 2 stars.

I've settled on 3 because i never want to play this again, but also, can't not reccomend giving it a go if you liked previous games Ico or Shadow of the Colossus.

It's a unique experiment, not perfectly executed, but you might just love it.

So after finishing this game the main take away I guess it's probably just Trico by itself.

The thing is impressive, sometimes you really feel like you're dealing with a real animal, a wild beast. But this game is far, far, really far from any masterpiece status and other grand adjectives that have been used by the press to describe it. The problems are too many and too serious for the good parts of the title to overcome or overwhelm them. It simply doesn't happen.

I'll just list the good and the bad here as a way to contrast.

The good:

• Trico. As I said earlier, this thing looks fantastic, sounds fantastic and it's just really impressive at times. I really like how expressive its eyes are and how different situations make Trico behave differently and show a nice range of emotions or attitudes. It's obviously the best thing of the game and the main attraction here.

• Visual design. The world of The Last Guardian can feel quite empty at times, and it is for the most part, but that's ok. They were going for this sort of quiet, solitary ruins vibe and they certainly got it right. The different areas of the game feel pretty big and imposing, even the inside of the caves or ruined buildings. If Trico itself wasn't enough, the world around you makes you feel even smaller, vast structures, tall towers, wild overgrowth, etc. all contribute to convey this feeling of vulnerability and smallness to your character. Details and textures don't always look their best at places but generally speaking is a very nice world to take in, even if somewhat dominated by muted, dark green and grey.

• Story. I guess it's ok, pretty simple with a nice plot twist towards the end but barely explored since you're just thrown in and left alone with Trico to traverse the world fighting empty suits of armors occasionally and that's pretty much the game until the plot twist and the final part. I guess the idea is that you kinda fill the backstory of the sparse cast of characters and the world itself just off the scenery and the info you get from the couple of cutscenes the game offers (which are pretty nice btw).

• Music. It was ok, maybe too quiet and reserved for most of the game and trying too hard to convey emotion when something of note actually happens.

The bad:

• Performance. Wow. Just wow. Who needs frames right? Good thing this game has barely any action in it because on a base PS4 you spend half of it under 30 FPS with very deep dives to low 20s... Horrible, criminal, performance to the point of taking you out of it and being practically unplayable for a while. Next slide please! Also of note, I had the game crash once (I thought crashing was mostly a PC thing, but I guess not lol). It wasn't too bad because of the autosave but damn...

• Trico. If there's a word to describe dealing with its AI it's frustrating. Trico won't follow commands half of the time and it won't do what it needs to do even when it's the only way for you to move forward. You may argue that it's intended to be this way since real life animals can be frustrating and just do whatever they feel like at times and not what you want to. And I get that, I do. But I'm pretty sure only part of it was intended, because just making it so hard and frustrating to simply advance through the game, to traverse the world when you've already solved some puzzle or found the correct path can't be intended. I just don't believe that, there's no point. Plus there's the issue of just how very long it takes Trico to do even the most basic thing like walk straight. It's a very slow game by design, but the amount of time you spend just waiting, watching the thing move its head, wondering when will it finally do what you want it to do, which is the only way to progress... is just astounding. I suspect part of the problem here is probably the way the game handles commands and environmental triggers, feels like the system is really picky at times when it comes to the exact places you need to be looking at or where you need to be for it to work. I don't know, the thing is that it just doesn't work well and since there's no feedback at all and Trico is SO SLOW the game keeps you constantly guessing if you're doing the right thing or not.

• Controls. Not good. The kid you control seems to have way too much momentum for every action, he keeps stumbling into things, tripping over everything, looping edge animations, some input delay it seems too, etc. It's not pleasant control, it just doesn't feel responsive enough. The physics are a bit weird, not just for the character but for items in the world as well (pushing a box has never been so frustrating for me in a video game before I think, same goes for throwing a barrel). Another issue is with the level design, which at times can get confusing since some walls appear climbable and aren't and some that don't seem to be actually are. It can throw you for a loop sometimes. Also I've lost count of how many times I've had the character spasming uncontrollably when clipping over some edge or while riding Trico. The camera is quite bad at times too, specially in smaller spaces where it'll get stuck on the ceiling or the walls, etc. All in all, bad weighty controls that I didn't get used to at all through the game. Maybe that's why the game keeps spamming you with tutorial prompts for basic things like jumping all the time, even when you're several hours in.

• Puzzles. There are mainly 2 kind of puzzles: Trico puzzles and platforming/enviromental puzzles. They're all pretty basic and fairly simple and both end up being just annoying and repetitive because either the unresponsive weighty slow controls or because of the unresponsive, slow, janky AI of Trico. Pulling levers gets old pretty fast when it's pretty much all you do through the game and it's almost always just to lift some gate...

Conclusion: Too many problems, some serious and annoying issues, simplistic gameplay and just ok story. It's quite unique tho, and probably worth playing or at the very least watching. But... a masterpiece? Please.

I neither played Ico nor Shadow of the Colossus and thus started The Last Guardian completely unbiased with a decent amount of pleasant anticipation. I was looking forward to seeing the relationship between the boy and the creature unfold, which will result in a cute and heartwarming gaming adventure without a doubt - or so I thought. However, the game has been an immensely tedious and frustrating experience, testing my patience to the absolute limit. The atmosphere and the overall environment are great and well presented, making traversal of the surroundings a joy at times. In addition, the behavior of Trico is true to a real animal - oftentimes reminding me of my dog - and his relationship with the boy does indeed develop beautifully. The story unfolds slowly and reveals more and more mysteries with time. The great ideas are all in place, so where did it all go wrong?

Yes, the interactions with Trico are endearing... if they work at all, that is. More often than not I found myself giving commands, pointing in directions only to have the creature walk exactly the opposite way or jump back to where we came from instead. And that is after I had to wait forever for him to react at all, sometimes as much as three minutes or more (Yes, I stopped the time on a few occasions, just out of curiosity and utter frustration). In addition, climbing on the feathered animal turned out to be a tedious chore as well. Frequently I got stuck in a certain spot and could not move, pushed the stick upwards but instead the boy climbed downwards, and was thrown off - sometimes into chasms - because Trico decided to suddenly move along a wall while I was climbing up his side. The horrible camera did not help in that regard and in combination with terrible performance issues made me feel physically ill at times. The constant zooming, panning and swinging around of the camera made it hard to see anything on a number of occasions and was the reason for me running against walls and falling to an untimely death more than a dozen times. Moreover, how many times can one use the same slow-motion scene without it becoming laughable? Definitely not as many times as The Last Guardian incorporated the scene where our protagonist falls before Trico catches him with his mouth (and sometimes fails, just to catch him with his tail). Furthermore, the regularly experienced severe framedrops in cutscenes as well as gameplay areas were headache inducing. And on top of this, the game is riddled with bugs, glitches and clipping issues, one of which even forced me to reload an old save.

The gameplay could not save this wreck of a game either, as it is decent but not great. Many sections were just a chore to go through due to repetition or being uneventful in general, with my frustration rising to new heights whenever I had to repeat those due to the awful camera or clunky climbing mechanics. However, there are a few highlights regarding the gameplay and puzzle ideas that work well and are fairly fun, so this part is not a complete failure. The story starts off interesting but slows to a crawl soon and it becomes apparent that it fabricates question after question without giving any real answers. While I am all for games where you have to piece together the majority of the story yourself - a few of my favorite games have stories with heavy emphasis on player interpretations -, The Last Guardian hardly gives me anything to work with. In the end, it accumulated into a pretty forgettable tale for me.

Due to the few enjoyable gameplay sections, the lovely relationship between Trico and the boy, the mostly beautiful environment (albeit sometimes lacking in detail) and the story ideas that made me interested in more, I have decided to still give this a 2/5. Overall, it was an unpleasant and very frustrating playthrough and I am sad to say that this has been one of the worst and most disappointing games I have played in a while. This is made so much worse by the simple fact that this could have been an amazing game if any of the mechanics worked right.

I'm going to be honest: I didn't have a very good time with this game. It could be because I was trying to complete it as quickly as possible, as it was a charged-daily rental. It could be because I was unable to update my copy of the game due to internet issues. Whatever it was, the game I played was extremely buggy and, as a result, immensely frustrating, to a point that I found myself losing connection with the bond the game was trying to generate between Trico and I and instead found myself screaming obscenities at the screen. There were times where Trico started backtracking through the level which lost me several minutes as I desperately pleaded for him to turn around. There were times where Trico dived underwater, only to smash his face into a wall over and over while I desperately restarted the checkpoint and tried again and again to no avail (finally achieving success a whopping 50ish minutes later, with no real explanation as to why the game decided to do this). Hell, that restarting checkpoint thing was probably the worst: there were roughly 15 times throughout where the game glitched in ways that I was only able to get past by restarting the game. There isn't much more infuriating than knowing what it is you want to do, knowing how to do what you want to do, but being unable to do it because the game refuses to allow you. What's even worse is wasting 30+ minutes on trying different solutions and then realizing that the thing you were trying to do was among the first, it was simply that the game refused to cooperate. Completely unforgivable, and finally pushed me to one side of the day 1 patch argument---I no longer want to support games that are unplayable on day 1. Unfortunately, they seem to be a depressing reality of the modern era of gaming.

That being said, though, I'm a big fan of how artfully delivered this game is. Everything about it, from an aesthetical viewpoint, is extremely my shit, and looking back in retrospect, or perhaps replaying it with patches, I have a feeling that my score will jump up a full point if not more. As it stands now, though, my experience was a 5.5 and I can't really convince myself that it's worth it to give it any other score.