One More Go

A few years ago I tried playing The Last Guardian but for whatever reason I gave up on it fairly early on. Sometime in the last couple of years I played through Shadow of the Colossus for the first time, and I absolutely loved it, so when I recently came across The Last Guardian in the PlayStation Plus Extra collection, I thought I should give it one more go and see whether I could overcome whatever had made me bounce off of it the first time round.

The Last Guardian was developed by Japan Studio and directed by Fumito Ueda. It is a game that had a very prolonged development cycle, first announced for PS3 in 2009, after many years of rumoured cancellation, it finally saw release in 2016 on PS4. As is common in Fumito Ueda’s titles, The Last Guardian is a game about companionship. The protagonist, The Boy, awakes at the bottom of a ruin with an enormous creature, Trico, chained up nearby. Throughout the game Trico and The Boy earn one another’s trust by helping each other solve environmental puzzles as they try to escape the ruins where they are trapped. Mechanically the game is fairly light, split between direct control of the boy, where you run, roll, and jump through the environment, and indirect control of Trico, where the boy can issue commands and hope that the creature understands their meaning.

When playing The Last Guardian, one of the first things that will strike you is just how beautiful it is. Glancing at a few screenshots should be enough for anyone familiar with Ueda’s work to recognise his trademark style. As in Shadow of the Colossus and Ico, the world he and his team have created is both stark and stunning. The colours used to paint each environment are desaturated, a tight range of greys and browns with the odd splash of colour used to draw the players eye, but the contrast between light and dark is where this game excels in bringing beauty to its world. Light will cascade from windows high above, cast playful shadows through foliage, or blind players as they exit dark tunnels, shocking them with new vistas to explore once they’ve emerged. There are no health meters nor objective markers on screen, nothing that could distract or pull players out of the experience. Instead players get to focus on the characters and their environment.

The sense of minimalism extends to the game’s soundscape. Bar the occasional voice over by the narrator, or calls of “Trico” as the protagonist tries to command his creature companion, the game is wordless. When exploring environments the only sounds that can be heard are the footsteps of our two main characters and the sounds of the world around them. Falling stones, the buzz of cicadas, and bird calls echoing around the crumbling ruins all play a part in bringing this abandoned location to life. The largest contributor to that feat, however, is how excellently animated the characters are. Trico is an amalgam of creatures, and as you would expect has inherited mannerisms and traits you would see in each of those animals. Trico moves as a feline would, pouncing from precarious outcropping to precarious outcropping with a telltale wiggle in the build up, nuzzles the boy headfirst when being soothed, and flicks their ears as they brush up against low ceilings. At other times Trico’s behaviour is more canine, especially in the ways Trico looks to The Boy for guidance and reassurance, or when trying to draw attention to something in the environment (usually food). The subtle ways that this clearly fantastical creature emulates our own real life pets make Trico feel more grounded and the relationship that grows between them and The Boy more relatable.

You might expect that a game so delicate might be quite a slow to play, and while that’s true in places, especially in its puzzle solving sections, the Last Guardian is actually pretty set piece heavy, filled with exciting action sequences as both The Boy and Trico try to escape danger. These encounters are used both to propel our protagonists into new environments, but they also allow for the two characters to bond as they fight against the odds to save one another. Combat encounters often swap back and forth between The Boy relying on Trico to fight enemies on his behalf, and Trico needing The Boy to clear an area of obstacles or enemies before they can intervene. This back and forth of desperate flight and determined fight endear the characters to one another, and adds plenty of emotion to a game without many characters or much dialogue.

One fight that neither character can win, however, is their battle with the in-game camera, which often finds itself floating and dashing awkwardly, adding unnecessary difficulty to the platforming challenges. It will sometimes get caught in one of the many enclosed spaces causing the camera to fade and then reappear at a slightly different perspective, an issue that is exacerbated whenever Trico is nearby. Another complaint that is sometimes levelled at The Last Guardian, is that Trico can be unresponsive when issuing them commands. For me that never really felt like too much of an issue, sure it can sometimes be frustrating, but Trico’s “disobedience”, intentional or not, felt like a success in accurately trying to simulate an animal’s behavior. Far more egregious is the difficulty in issuing commands to The Boy, control input can be delayed, causing many frustrating game overs. One section of the game sees the player navigating high wire platforms where any fall leads to a game over. I must have failed that section ten times before making it through, which in a game that is about challenge wouldn’t bother me so much, but here each reset just pulled me out of the world, breaking any immersion and attachment the game had worked so hard to achieve.

Despite its clunky camera, and the odd difficulty spike, The Last Guardian is definitely a game worth experiencing. That being said, I would love an opportunity to experience this again after a retune. Bluepoint Games who have done an excellent job of updating Ueda’s previous titles surely deserve a chance to enhance this game, though it wouldn’t need the visual overhaul that those other remakes were sold on, some slight tweaks to the camera and controls would make The Last Guardian an essential modern classic.