The Last Guardian Catch-All

Hmm! I've been eyeing this for awhile, and a price drop makes it more tempting. Unfortunately, I'm sticking to my challenge to not buy more than two games this year. Hmm!

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

So, I fired up the intro on my shiny new PS4 Pro, and it's so much better. I really look forward to playing through it again at a steady framerate.

Dammit. I don't want to buy a pro, but going forward I think this is going to be required if you want smoother frame rates and all the shiny.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Hmm! I've been eyeing this for awhile, and a price drop makes it more tempting. Unfortunately, I'm sticking to my challenge to not buy more than two games this year. Hmm!

You know, I'm just so busy right now and there are a GLUT of games coming out soon. Honestly, I'm not going to get through Gravity Rush 2 before the games I really care about hit like a ton of bricks. If you want to borrow my copy for 6 months or so max, let me know via PM. The game is still to fresh for me to bother with a second playthrough.

I'd just ship the disc via USPS in a cheap plastic case to keep the weight down vs sending the steel case.

Orphu wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

So, I fired up the intro on my shiny new PS4 Pro, and it's so much better. I really look forward to playing through it again at a steady framerate.

Dammit. I don't want to buy a pro, but going forward I think this is going to be required if you want smoother frame rates and all the shiny.

Gravity Rush 2 is a good example of how it all SHOULD work. You get the 30 fps on both but you get some nice upsampling that smooths out jaggies on the PS4 Pro at 1080p.

Last Guardian is a bit of a crapshoot because of what they're trying to do with animation and AI. It's in its own category where you can't really compare it to anything else in terms of performance. Frankly, I can't believe they got the thing running on PS4.

There's a well thought out and insightful article written by Jeremy Parish that went up today: Design in Action | The Last Guardian: How to be Trained by Your Dragon (Or: How the players got played)

This arrived yesterday (thanks, tuffalobuffalo!), and I got to play it for about an hour last night. I played through the starting area, right up until you get outside and see the tower for the first time.

Trico is astounding. I've said before that the trailer for The Last Guardian and its seemingly perpetual delay launched a thousand indie games built around the same idea: a young child, a ruined tower, a mythical companion. I worried that when it finally release, The Last Guardian would have missed its moment; what was amazing in 2009 would be rote and played out in 2016. I was wrong, because Trico still feels ahead of its time. I have never seen an animal in a game so convincing or so expressive as him.

The game built around him has issues, and I could spend a lot of time picking nits and complaining about stylistic choices, harmful concessions to accessibility, and some lack of polish. But all of that is backgrounded by the joy of simply interacting with Trico and watching him do things. The care and level of detail in his design and behaviors is so captivating. I can't wait to spend more time with him.

Looking forward to your thoughts on the rest! I felt similarly about that first section.

I've now played up through the E3 demo section with the collapsing bridges and Trico catching the boy in the air. I assume it's not a spoiler to talk about things in that demo since it's been around for years.

When Sony first played that demo during their stage show, I remember there was a lot of question about whether or not it was actual gameplay and, if it was, was it representative of the rest of the game. It was interesting to play through that section tonight and to find out that, yes, the sequence really does play just like that, but no, it's not representative of the game.

The rest of the game is so much better.

After playing everything else up to that point, the demo section stands out for feeling very canned and very forced. Up until then, your interactions with Trico and everything that happens between the two of you feels very organic and player-driven. Even when you're struggling to get him to do something (and I'm still figuring out what all the commands actually mean), there's still a feeling of collaboration and of dialogue between you and the creature. Moments of satisfaction and accomplishment grow out of your understanding of what Trico can do and how to get him to do it.

The E3 demo section is at odds with that. It starts out that way, but it quickly begins to feel less player-driven than designer-driven. Mechanics and behavior are reshaped into something that plays better for the viewer but contradicts what the player knows. I know how to make Trico jump over a gap; I don't know how to make him catch me in slow motion with his tail.

It's a big Naughty Dog moment in a game that's much more organic than what that studio produces. There's a moment not long before where Trico comes to your aid in a moment of desperation, and it feels much more satisfying because it's a moment you craft yourself.

I understand that the pleasures of this game simply don't demo well, but I almost wish that the designers had cooked up that sequence for E3 and then left it out of the released product. In the final game, it feels like a misstep.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

It's a big Naughty Dog moment in a game that's much more organic than what that studio produces. There's a moment not long before where Trico comes to your aid in a moment of desperation, and it feels much more satisfying because it's a moment you craft yourself.

There are a few more moments like that up ahead, but I think they do feel more like your setting it up before it happens, so I don't think you'll get that Naughty Dog feel. I can think of a specific one in particular. Let me know if you run into any more you think fall into that category and just spoiler them if they are spoilers. I didn't mind that particular scene, but I totally get what you're saying, and that moment was fairly forgettable during the course of the game. Definitely not a top 10 moment. I think that's one reason why the game surprised me so much. I expected it to be a Naughty Dog adventure type game the whole way through with tons of cutscenes and quicktime events, and it totally isn't that.

I finished this tonight. It was wonderful. I recognize that it's a game with many barriers to enjoyment (perhaps even more so the more experienced you are with games) and that not one in ten players is likely to enjoy it, but I found it to be a remarkable and unique experience. I can't think of anything else quite like it.

Also, I learned that this has the best Japanese title: The Great Man-eating Eagle Toriko. That's way better than "The Last Guardian". (I also wish that the localization team for this game had stuck with Toriko instead of Trico. I know that Trico was a long-standing nickname for the third Team Ico game, but not only does "Trico" sound a bit silly to me, but Toriko had a double meaning in Japanese that's lost. "Toriko" is the Japanese word for "prisoner".)

High praise, ClockworkHouse. You're helping move this from a 'No' to 'Maybe' for me.

The current pricing of the game (£22 on Amazon this morning, 5 months after release) supports your suggestion that it appeals only to a small proportion of gamers.

Is this the first of the PS4's 'Greatest Misses', I wonder...?

Solid genre. Check. Technically impressive. Check. Storied development studio. Check. Poor sales. Check.

Nice! I agree that being more experienced with games can hinder your enjoyment of it.

Dev Game Club has a few podcast episodes on Ico/Shadow/Guardian I enjoyed. Worth checking out.

detroit20 wrote:

Is this the first of the PS4's 'Greatest Misses', I wonder...?

I'm not surprised it didn't sell well, and I'm not surprised that the reviews were mixed. It's a very different kind of game, and there's a certain level of unavoidable messiness to it that's going to rub some people (but perhaps especially enthusiast players) the wrong way.

It doesn't really demo well, and its appeal is tough to articulate in traditional gaming terms. There's a satisfaction to slowly and carefully expanding your ability to communicate with Trico and feeling that connection reciprocated. The closest thing I can compare it to are blind cooperative experiences like Journey, or maybe a silent co-op play of Portal 2, but with player two taking on a role with wildly different abilities and limitations than player one. But even that doesn't quite get to it.

This is a quiet, patient game that requires the player's investment not only of time but of heart. There are very few games that ask you to care without also trying to manipulate you into it. By the end of this game, I was invested in the relationship between Trico and the boy and was genuinely distressed by parts of the ending. (I had nightmares about it, to be honest.)

If you're able to break outside of expectations for what games ought to be like and to meet them on their own terms, then I'd strongly recommend this one.

detroit20 wrote:

Is this the first of the PS4's 'Greatest Misses', I wonder...?

Heh, it's the greatest miss of the PS3, literally! And maybe even the Playstation Move.

By the time it came out, I don't think there was still any expectation that it would be a huge success. People were happy enough that it actually managed to come out at all.

Sony had to have always known that this game would be a miss with the game buying public. It's the gaming equivalent of a prestige picture.

Glad you liked it, Clock. It's a wonderful game that too few people will play, and even fewer will appreciate.

Skimming back a bit, it looks like I never posted my full thoughts after finishing the game. Whoops. Instead of clumsily trying to recollect them now, I'll just post what I wrote for the game in the GoTY thread:

Spoiler:

While Inside is undoubtedly the more polished puzzle game, The Last Guardian is the one that will stick with me. It’s about the bond between a boy and a creature named Trico. That bond is conveyed through each and every interaction between Trico and the boy, and it is conveyed so convincingly that the game’s few issues faded into the background after the first couple of hours of play.

The strength of that bond is made possible largely because Trico is likely the most well-realized character ever created in a game. Trico emotes more with its mouth than most NPC’s do with their entire body. Often, there was no need or reward for petting Trico other than the satisfying whimper it made in response, yet I lost count of the number of times I instinctually went to pet the creature when it seemed scared, agitated, or sad. That’s what I do with my own dog when she behaves like that. There were a couple times early on that Trico and I didn’t see eye to eye. I’d bark orders and it would go roll around in a puddle. We were still feeling each other out. A couple of hours later, it had become apparent that Trico was far smarter than I gave it credit for. It didn’t appreciate it when I repeatedly barked orders. It usually didn’t even really need my orders. Instead of commanding it, I learned to guide it, to encourage it and then allow it time to act on those suggestions. I didn’t have any issues getting Trico to help me with puzzles once I stopped treating it like a tool and started treating it like a companion. The further I progressed, the more often Trico would do what I was thinking without me needing to command it at all. It was figuring me out too.

Like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus before it, The Last Guardian is an imperfect game that will be remembered by some as an overhyped mess, and by others as a crowning achievement of the medium. It is a game about action and emotion, patience and understanding, trust and friendship. The Last Guardian presents a journey with an emotional heft that few games can hope to match. It’s proof that great things can come out of development hell, and it was absolutely worth the wait.

I didn’t have any issues getting Trico to help me with puzzles once I stopped treating it like a tool and started treating it like a companion.

That is an absolutely perfect summary of both the issue a lot of players will have with the game and how Trico should be handled. I suspect that a lot of the people put off by this game were expecting Trico to be controllable like a tool or traditional video game pet. You give orders, he does them immediately. That's not a great way to approach him at all.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Sony had to have always known that this game would be a miss with the game buying public. It's the gaming equivalent of a prestige picture.

I think they were more optimistic than that. At the time, I feel like hopes were higher for the gaming equivalent of a prestige picture to be capable of being both a critical and commercial success.

Speaking to that a bit more: there was one point in my game where I wasn't sure how to proceed, and I thought I'd found the right path forward. I was calling to Trico to come follow me, to jump to a certain platform, and all of that. Instead, he picked me up, tossed me on his back, and then went back to a previous chamber and started climbing to the next area. I was shocked and also laughed a little bit, because now I was the dippy one that wouldn't go the right way.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
I didn’t have any issues getting Trico to help me with puzzles once I stopped treating it like a tool and started treating it like a companion.

That is an absolutely perfect summary of both the issue a lot of players will have with the game and how Trico should be handled. I suspect that a lot of the people put off by this game were expecting Trico to be controllable like a tool or traditional video game pet. You give orders, he does them immediately. That's not a great way to approach him at all.

Yes. But... not surprising? Half of it can probably be chalked up to conditioning, but the other half can probably be chalked up to gamers' actual preference. Goodness knows people [say they] want deep reactive companions with their western RPGs... so long as those sassy independent personalities are just a thin veneer and always line up with the player's choice or preference.

edit|add: I was thinking about this a bit the other day (in-general) while playing Zelda BoTW. I was let down that you can pretty much tame all independence out of a horse. Personally, I think it would be much cooler if a well tamed horse would occasionally tug to the side or make you have to goad them twice, instead of once, to go in a certain direction.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Speaking to that a bit more: there was one point in my game where I wasn't sure how to proceed, and I thought I'd found the right path forward. I was calling to Trico to come follow me, to jump to a certain platform, and all of that. Instead, he picked me up, tossed me on his back, and then went back to a previous chamber and started climbing to the next area. I was shocked and also laughed a little bit, because now I was the dippy one that wouldn't go the right way.

That's awesome. I never had something happen that drastic, but I certainly took queues from Trico to figure out what to do next.

As much as I would like for the game to have been a big commercial success, I'm just so happy that the game exists, and that's enough for me. I feel like it's a game where people will look back 20 years from now and realize how important it is. Also, I do not doubt that it will heavily inspire video games of the future. I sure hope it does, because there's no way we're getting another Team Ico game. At least I won't have to wait 10 years hoping for the next one.

Recreational Villain wrote:

edit|add: I was thinking about this a bit the other day (in-general) while playing Zelda BoTW. I was let down that you can pretty much tame all independence out of a horse. Personally, I think it would be much cooler if a well tamed horse would occasionally tug to the side or make you have to goad them twice, instead of once, to go in a certain direction.

Oh, that would have been awesome (except for time trails). They probably balanced it pretty well given the broad audience. It does take awhile to get them tamed at least, and they do really feel alive and realistic until you get them tamed.

Do the horses get scared in storms or afraid of big enemies even if they're fully tamed? I don't think I've checked that. It'd be sweet if you had to pat the horse to get them to calm down in the middle of a storm.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
I didn’t have any issues getting Trico to help me with puzzles once I stopped treating it like a tool and started treating it like a companion.

That is an absolutely perfect summary of both the issue a lot of players will have with the game and how Trico should be handled. I suspect that a lot of the people put off by this game were expecting Trico to be controllable like a tool or traditional video game pet. You give orders, he does them immediately. That's not a great way to approach him at all.

I certainly got that part, but there's also very little feedback about whether he even got the order/request at all. I literally spent 40 minutes on one section where I was pretty sure what I needed to do, but Trico just wouldn't jump there. After a while I gave up, thinking I was wrong, and tried going other directions and backtracking, but all of that was a dead end. I even leapt to my death three times out of frustration, and in the hope that restarting from the last checkpoint would take care of a bug. Eventually, Trico leapt exactly to where I'd been telling him to go from the beginning; I got no feedback at all about why he wouldn't do that forty minutes prior.

Another section, it was clear that the only way out of a cave was a hole that only Trico could leap to. I kept trying to get him to leap, to no avail. After about 5-10 minutes, I got off him and started to look around. While I was looking around, he leapt up, through the hole, and just left me alone. It's a miracle my controller is still in one piece.

My playthrough was full of those kinds of experiences. By the time I finished, I was hate-playing the game, out of my devotion to the previous Ueda games.

A friend of mine who doesn't have a PS4, but has played ICO and Shadow of the Colossus previously, and adores them - warts and all - as much as I do, came over a few weeks ago, wanting to get a taste of Last Guardian. I warned him that Trico was not a controllable creature, but would need coaxing, and could be frustrating (albeit impressive from an AI standpoint) in its independence. "There's a clear through line from Yorda to Agro to Trico," I told him. After about three hours, he gave up on the game. He loved the idea of it, and wandering through a Ueda castle at that level of detail was a dream come true, but finally it was just too frustrating.

We switched to playing Keep Talking And No One Explodes, which is at least hilarious in its frustration.

Evan E wrote:

My playthrough was full of those kinds of experiences.

Mine, too, and those are experiences are part of what makes this game so special. Trico is not a well-design system of cause-and-effect inputs and clearly communicated feedback for success and failure. He's not a reliable tool for puzzle solving. He's really bad at being a game mechanic.

Nonetheless, by the end of the game I felt as though I had an understanding of how Trico would react to certain situations and how to communicate with him, as well as how he was communicating with me. It felt like a two-way conversation.

That's the core of the gameplay here, though: not solving puzzles and traversing spaces (all of which is incredibly straightforward) but learning how to communicate with Trico. That's the game. The puzzles and everything else are a framework for testing and building on that fundamental gameplay mechanic.

As someone who loves - cherishes, really - the previous Ueda games, I'm delighted that some people enjoyed Last Guardian. There's clearly a wide spectrum of experiences. As a fan, I'd rather have played it and profoundly not enjoyed the experience than not played it at all.

For those who don't follow the PSVR thread, The Last Guardian VR Demo is amazing! It's super short, but it just gives you a perfect taste of being in that world with Trico. It's something I never would have dreamed would exist, and I'm happy it just popped into my life out of nowhere. If nothing more ever comes out of that studio with VR, I'll be rather sad.

Ah, I would love to try that demo. Alas, no PSVR. Maybe sometime down the road.

I'm surprised this thread died out with so few trying it or giving thoughts. I'm almost done. Just got past the flashback scene. Playing with my girls who love Trico very much. Playing this 6 years on and not finding other games that have even remotely captured the Trico experience is somewhat sad. I've had plenty of camera issues and frustrating moments with Trico but also really great ones. He reminds me of my cat so well. Loving the experience!

What console are you playing on? I seem to remember even on the Pro the frame rate struggled at times.

Yes, it definitely did. Apparently it can be very smooth on the PS5, but if you play it unpatched from the disc version. The original version has an uncapped frame rate, but they later patched in a frame cap of 30fps, so if you patch it you won't take advantage of the PS5's increased processing power. But you'll be missing out on any number of bug fixes that also come with the patched version, so it's six of one, half a dozen of another.

It'd be great it Sony released a new patch that unlocks the frame rate while keeping the bug fixes, but I don't think Ueda's studio exists anymore to test that doing so wouldn't add more bugs.