Collecting My Thought on The Last Guardian—Guppy of a Griffin

The man-eating hybrid beast Trico may be as mighty as they come, but Fumito Ueda's The Last Guardian is decidedly not. The ambition in creating a game based around a stranded village boy's relationship with his enigmatic gargantuan companion is commendable, and the wavering dynamic between the two is quite intriguing. However, it is in the fundamentals where this game so shockingly drops the ball.

When the game is booted up, you are greeted by a main menu and UI that seems to have come straight out of a pre-alpha game. Then more atrocities start to rear their heads as you actually play the game. I'm talking about the player movement that lets you only either sprint or tiptoe, the camera that constantly lags behind and resets, the unsightly prompts that occupy ample screen space and never goes away, and perhaps most unacceptably, the complications of communicating with Trico and navigating its body. On a different fundamental level, this game also fails to establish the adequate tension it needs through overuse of tacky cinematic effects like slo-mos in near-death sequences and a lack of the threat of failure. It serves as a perfect example of how if a player knows it is virtually impossible to fail in supposedly tense moments, tension is unachieved. The dichotomy of success and failure is the keystone of most video games (and games in general). Without uncertainty of outcome between the two, you better hope the game you're making doesn't require such tension.

All these shortcomings in the game's fundamentals take away from what would otherwise be a passable game. There are admittedly a good number of things that The Last Guardian does right. The mutually dependent relationship of Trico and the boy is reflected well in puzzle and world navigation mechanics, and the retrospective narration makes for a versatile form of video game storytelling. The actual representation of Trico itself with all its feathers and talons, tics and tendencies, and yipping and yowling (or mooing?) is immaculate. But ultimately it is hard to appreciate a game that distracts from its own story with so many nagging faults when the story itself falls far short of a knockout. Thus unlike Trico, The Last Guardian comes off more like a trifling guppy than it does a mighty griffin.

#ReminiscentOf Avatar: The Last Airbender (TV show). Mainly for the whole boy with weird markings on his skin riding on a giant furry flying beast.

#FavouriteMechanic Tormenting Trico with an eye shield.

#FavouriteScene The mutilation. By far the boldest and most exciting moment of the game.

#WeirdestSound Some weird spine-chilling demoniac bellow Trico made in one instance when facing a balcony armour (could not replicate!).