When Sony re-revealed The Last Guardian at E3 2015, the game was already synonymous with term "development hell", seeing how we were 4 years past its initial release date. The game was now a PS4 exclusive, so if your decision to get PS3 over an X360 was in any way influenced by titles like this or Final Fantasy Versus XIII, you learned a precious lesson about trust. Me? The game barely existed in my mind at that point. This E3 trailer was my first real exposure to it, and I got excited.
At this point I have not played previous Fumito Ueda games. After catching up with those, I've concluded that Shadow of the Collosus was a masterpiece and Ico might be a rough gem, but sadly, I don't have patience for those, so I'll never know. In any case, time went on and TLG's reported issues and reputation started influencing my image of the game. After release the discussion seemed to have centered around some of the technical issues and controls, but few of my friends were absolutely marveled by the game and talked about it in nothing but superlatives. Now that I've played it, I can easily understand why.
Perhaps the biggest triumph of the game lies in its main duo, a boy and a giant cat-dog-bird hybrid, trico. When animating the two, developers decided to use time-consuming key animation rather than popular mocap, and it really payed off. The boy feels very lively and energetic, with slightly exaggerated, overexpressive movement - think Disney movies. But then he also feels to be truly interacting with the surroundings thanks to small details such as extending his hand to press against the wall when we're forcing him to run into or close to it. As for trico... There's no animal creature in video games animated like trico, with its body language meticulously and realistically portraying a wide array of emotions. The way he looks around with curiosity, but approaches certain areas and objects with caution. The moments when he just sits down and observes us, or loses interest and starts scratching itself, or stretches after taking a nap. Those times when we have to leave him behind to search for means to open a way for him, and he peeks inside windows to make sure we're safe and see what we're up to. All of these are crucial in creating an illusion of a real, living and breathing animal companion. But that's not all.
The other avenue for affirming trico's existence is its behaviour and interactions with the player. It's a completely independent creature - we can never take control of him, and there's no interface to select him and issue intricate commands. We can call him to get his attention, we can point at a direction, we can pet him or feed him. What's important is that we never lock him into simultaneous animations with the player character. And sometimes it takes time for him to notice and respond to our actions. Sometimes he may not understand us whatsoever and will just keep on looking with confusion. Other times he will completely ignore us as he's busy with something else. In combat, he's the one defeating our opponents and most of the time all we can do is hide away, wait until is finished and then come to calm him down and treat his wounds. And just like animations, or rather in tandem with them, it creates the illusion that trico is a real living creature like nothing before did. The work done with that aspect is astonishing.
When trying to boil down what Ueda's games are about, I would have to say "exploration". Bulk of the game is about looking around and searching for passages or ways to open them. Moving the character feels nice, although it doesn't stand out from its contemporaries like SotC did 12 years ago. Because of that the heavy lifting is left to level design, but luckily, the game is also absolutely fantastic in that regard. Now, I think that aspect of game design is relatively difficult to describe in words and just like filmmaking, it can only really be appreciated by analyzing specific examples. But there's several trends that persist through entire game that I can point out. For one, the game doesn't shy away from putting lots of climbable objects or seemingly open paths in actually unreachable areas, which forces the player to not only pay attention to particular elements of environment, but also whether they are in their reach. Also, Trico can jump long distances, but requires sufficient landing space, so we need to be on lookout for areas which only he can reach at all times. Additionally, the game is one, long level, and it's designed in a way where as we progress, we see locations in the distance that we just might access later. Or the other way around - as we climb higher, we can look down and see areas we were exploring hours ago. And then there's the fact that some views are just breathtaking, and some paths quite unobvious and creative.
Because of how well the gameplay and animation build the bond between the player character and trico, game's story can be built around that with relative ease. It's a fairly standard fairy tale that doesn't over-explain things unnecessarily, letting our imagination fill the gaps. However, unlike SotC and Ico which were very mysterious in nature, TLG does have a narrative provided by older version of the main character, spoken in a made-up language (but subtitled in English, or whatever language you're playing in). Aside from providing that little bit of context which previous Ueda games lacked, it serves as an elegant way to provide tips to the player when necessary. In any case, the story gets emotional at times, which is equally on its own merit as it's thanks to game's soundtrack, composed by Takeshi Furukawa (also known for the music from "The Clone Wars" TV series). There was a lot of discipline involved in creative process as the author didn't want his work to get influenced by previous Ueda games in any way, "neither being conscious of nor deliberately avoiding the heritage of the previous soundtracks". But he also didn't want the music to overstate the emotions conveyed by other means and said he drew inspiration from "muted aesthetic". I recommend reading interview with Mr. Furukawa conducted by Gamasutra.
The only issues I have with the game are on the technical level - its low framerate, equally low resolution textures and some weird particularities of controlling the character while climbing a rope. I'm not the biggest fan of how they handled control prompts, but thankfully other than that game has very elegant ways of leading the player (including a spoken narration by presumably older version of the boy). And while on the technical level the game's visuals are generally still in PS3 era, the lighting is nothing short of amazing, standing head and shoulders above most of its contemporaries.
As it stands, The Last Guardian might be one of my favorite games of all time. It's top notch when it comes to exploration, it does narration of this type of story really well, and it's unprecedented in creating a strong bond between the player and an animal companion. It's flaws are few and unimportant. And it's also really refreshing and unique in its overall structure compared to pretty much everything else that comes out nowadays. I'll be patiently awaiting what Mr. Ueda brings next.
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