The Last Guardian asks you to cede control, to embrace and accept that feeling of powerlessness and to find alternative ways to achieve your goals. Trico will panic whenever the boy is in danger, while the cries of distress are gut-wrenching whenever Trico is in pain. Your stomach drops the first time Trico plucks the boy out of a death fall, and there’s real tenderness in your efforts to calm Trico after a battle. That independence makes Trico a collaborator rather than a tool, and it makes the relationship much more dynamic than the average NPC interaction. Trico has a mind of his own, and will often be more interested in passing butterflies than he is in you. There’s always a slight delay between your request and his response, and since Trico’s behavior is more cat than bird, you have to learn to be patient while he does things at his own pace. – you don’t have direct control over Trico’s actions. The catch is that while you can issue commands – jump, sit, move, etc. That means that you’ll spend most of the game persuading the creature to assist you with various tasks. You need Trico’s size and strength to escape, while he needs your guidance to figure out where to go next. Without Trico, the boy is helpless, a tiny, fragile thing trapped in a hostile world that exists at a menacing scale.
The Last Guardian flagrantly violates those principles. As the player, you are self-reliant, which makes you solely responsible for your own forward progress. Hit the right buttons in the right order, and you get to move on to the next stage. You hit a button, and then something happens as a result. Most mainstream video games are power fantasies, and even the ones that aren’t are built around the concept of cause and effect.
That relationship is also what makes The Last Guardian unique.
#The last guardian gameplay time series#
The game is primarily about the relationship that evolves as you make your way through a series of caverns and crumbling towers. After pulling a few spears out of Trico’s hide, you team up to climb out of the valley where you’re both held prisoner. You play as a nameless boy who wakes up with strange tattoos next to a massive cat-bird creature named Trico. The fact that The Last Guardian’s core concept is still innovative makes Ueda’s original vision all the more remarkable. Fumito Ueda’s follow up to Shadow of the Colossus arrives with relatively little fanfare on the heels of Final Fantasy XV, making December a very good month for games that spent ten years in development. It was one of the games I was most excited to play when I started reviewing games way back in 2010, but the hype gradually withered into nothingness every time the game skipped another release date. Playing The Last Guardian in 2016 is a little surreal, if only because it’s tough to believe that anyone is playing it at all.
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