Let’s get a few things that I think are problems out of the way first, before I gush too much. The three flaws are as follows:

1. Framerate
2. Camera
3. Prompts and Hints

Framerate then. It dips. Not all the time, and it’s never game-breaking, but the game does slow and chug on occasion, usually when going from small areas into wide open spaces. I never had a moment where it dropped into single digits, like some - it was always playable, if not always optimal.

Camera. The camera is quite floaty which actually isn’t really a problem as it gives the game an almost etherial quality. Where the camera does have issue is when in tight spaces and riding Torico. There were times when all I got was a full-on shot of Torico’s neck or side and struggled to angle the camera to get a clear view of what i was doing. It also made jumping from chains or platforms to other platforms needlessly fiddly.

Prompts and Hints. 2 issues rolled into one here. First, button prompts are highly visible for the whole game which is a massive shame given how little HUD there is otherwise. I’ve felt that this is a reaction to control gripes from pre-release media playtime, but I can’t be sure. Also, there are narrated hints, which work fine, but I had 2 occasions where they screwed up - one time it told me something happened BEFORE it happened, the other time it gave me an old hint in a room where it was no longer useful. Minor gripes, overall, but gripes nonetheless.

So, let’s move onto the positive stuff then. I actually wrote down my thoughts earlier by bullet point to try to help myself organise my thoughts better - there’s a lot I want to say and I was worried I’d forget a lot.

The Basics

At the heart, The Last Guardian functions as a puzzle game. While you are effectively moving up, down or across a single persistent area, you are doing so room-by-room and each room presents a puzzle that must be solved in order to progress. Of course, in terms of traversal, this bears distinct similarities with Ico. People noted earlier in the TLG thread that the beast would function as a multi-purpose bridge, transport, platform etc. and that is not entirely inaccurate. It’s a remarkably simple game, dressed up with complexity.

There are 2 main things that underpin and elevate the puzzle design, though - scale and physics.

In terms of scale, puzzles take place across seemingly massive areas. Torico might be perched on a pillar and frozen in place, unable to move forward, due to an eye rune suspended by wires across an open area. And so you climb down its back and tail, walk along a pathway below. Shimmy across to another tower, climb a wire, tightrope walk across and, finally, flip a latch and drop the rune down into the depths below.

This could have been done on a much smaller scale - the size is purely a stylistic choice, but it does so evoking a feeling that you are tiny. And yet this huge beast relies on you, just as you rely on it. Looking across a huge chasm to see it perched there, calling to you, is incredibly emotive and an experience that games have never done before.

The game doesn’t just do wide, though, it does tall. An example later in the game requires climbing 2 towers by jumping up their sides and then moving across to the other to continue a vertical ascent. As you move up both, you’ll need to remove enemies and obstacles along your way, open gates to allow Torico to move on, and finally lift a large bridge to allow Torico something amounting to a runway. Take a moment before that jump and look down, and you’ll see how far you’ve come. Look in another direction and see a building you were in earlier, look elsewhere and see a ceiling you feel through…it goes on. The game is one huge level that has been meticulously scripted and designed to within an inch of its life, yet never feels overly constrictive. It’s a Call of Duty corridor game that feels like an open-world and for that it should be applauded.

And the physics? The best example I can think of is related to water. There’s a room that you drop down into which is filled with a large pool of water. On one end is a gate, and below that gate is a lower gate that is both shut and underwater. You swim down, alone, and go through a hole and rise up behind the upper gate. You climb a ladder, flip a switch at the top and the lower gate opens, signalled by air bubbles and flotsam rising to the top. You beckon Torico over to you, climb on its back, then instruct it to dive below to the next room.

The next rooms seems functionally identical, save for a couple of key differences. There’s a small cave with a barrel in, for starters, but the main difference is that now, when you go behind the gate in the new room, the ladder is broken, so you can’t reach the higher platform for the switch.

At this point I decided to look around the room. I went back to a part of dry land and looked around and saw a platform above. I then spent about 10 minutes trying to coax Torico to either jump up or lift its head up to that platform so i could get up there, convinced that was the only way to go. But no dice, the big bastard wouldn’t humour me and I was starting to get frustrated. So, I decided to look elsewhere. While I’m doing this, Torico is basically just fucking about - walking, looking around, and bombing into the water. Basically, doing anything except the thing I want it to. I have an idea that maybe I missed something in the cave, so i call Torico into the water. When it dives, the waves throw me up and back, and a lightbulb goes off in my head. I wait for it to head back to land, and then swim down behind the gate again. Then I call it. The resulting waves send ripples of water through the gate, lifting me to the platform above, so i am finally able to flip the switch. The lower gate opens, and on we move.

That’s the brilliant thing about the beast. Its actually “smarter” than the player a lot of time time. Rather than try to get it to go somewhere it doesn’t want to, most of the time you can just watch it and it will point you in the direction you need to go, or show you a solution to the puzzle. You just have to pay attention to it. It’s not a car, its a partner.

After that water room, I was expecting more water rooms of increasing complexity. Except, I didn’t get that. The game does that a lot. It introduces a mechanic, makes sure you learn it, removes a crutch and increases difficulty, then moves on.

Another twin puzzle requires opening a gate from the other side while sentries scan around you. Between the 2 rooms the sentries double, forcing you to pay attention to location and timing, but from then on it doesn’t repeat the exact same trick.

Early on the game introduces the beasts fear of the eye runes, but puts them in easily reachable locations for you to destroy. Then it hangs them around, forcing you to utilise platforming and spatial awareness, then it places them on enemy shields. But the first time it does so, the enemies are static and Torico is out of harms way, so it teaches you that you can barge enemies and knock the shields out of their hands, giving Torico a chance to attack. Then, the next time you encounter these enemies, they are mobile and in front of Torico, forcing you to drop down onto the battlefield and assist him actively.

This power inversion is a fantastic trick. The early game means you can attract enemy attention then climb onto Torico without fear of being hurt, Torico is far more powerful than anything you had encountered in the game thus far. But when introducing shield enemies, you are forced to assist despite having no weapons. Later, when you reclaim the laser shield, you take an even more active role, directing ranged attacks on elevated enemies. The same laser shield can also be used to temporarily collapse enemies who are trying to chase and grab you.

Every new element introduced is given a small variety of variations, all forcing you to utilise skills in new ways and removing pre-existing crutches. It’s a masterwork of difficulty curve design. Nothing outstays its welcome, and yet nothing is wasted. It’s tight yet feels generous. The length and difficulty is absolutely perfect.

Set Piece Design

Smattered throughout the adventure is a good number of set pieces. Well, I suppose every room was a set piece from a technical design perspective, but by this I simple mean where an action in the game triggers an event which requires, or encourages, a more intense reaction from the player.

One of the most common of these would be crumbling bridges or towers of which there are several. While in many games this might seem like repeating the same trick too many times, in TLG I think it works. This valley, this place, is crumbling. The floors constantly feel like they are falling apart under Toricos weight and the design of numerous locations make them feel either decrepit (if made of stone) or rickety (if made of wood).

Pillars fall, bridges collapse, walkways crumble. And the outcome of each requires different skills from the player - one time you might need to find a way to drop a bridge from the inside to let Torico clamber in, another might require you to find for for it after a large fall, or you might need to push some scenery into Toricos reach to give it some grip to hold onto and climb up.

Another triumph is the fantastic foreshadowing that takes place. There’s 2 great examples - early on when you find the shield and crawl through a tunnel into a cold and alien feeling room where you find the shield, and later when you are followed repeatedly by the second beast, with noises and flashes of it appearing above and around you, only to forget about it when a new set piece kicks in, leading to one of the games great GOTCHA! moments.

You might notice that there’s lot of pairs here. Many set pieces are done in pairs, puzzle rooms are done in pairs, and many mechanics are done in pairs or, at the least, have a direct parallel. You nurse Torico back to health, as it does you.

And it’s not uncommon, later in the game, to revisit a room you arrived in earlier. Except now there’s a new route in or out, or you have some new skill at your disposal to find a different exit. The game keeps throwing new things at you, then lets you play with it and memorise it, before moving on to something new.

And of course, there are some moments of immense brutality which are genuinely stressful. The ending, of course, which I will get to later, but also the fight with the other beast. It ranked as one of the most powerful and emotive moments of any game that I had every played, and was only surpassed by what followed in the very same game.

World Design

It’s weird. The ice games, especially Ico and The Last Guardian, have a very similar sense of architectural design. SotC took place in a far more open world, so has a slightly different flavour, but the way the first and last games render their walls and stone is rather different from most games. They seem more influenced by painting and abstract design that most games (and i don’t mean painting in a literal sense, like Okami). Tempy recently posted an interview with Ueda in the TLG thread and there was an answer (regarding art style) that really stick with me.

When I got to university, there was a layer of culture shock that hit me. I began to learn about modern and abstract art. Until that time my drawings were more realistic in style. Then I was opened up to abstract images. I was encountering things I’ve never paid attention to or recognized before. I liked that, behind those abstract images, there was always an idea. That set me thinking about art in terms of ideas, rather than depictions. What could I make that had a clear idea behind it, looked unique, and yet wasn’t alienating? All of that led me to the aesthetic of my games.

Emphasis mine.

There are moments in TLG, especially when moving into an area with lots of sunlight and flora, where the game takes on an almost impressionistic quality. Forget the “is it art?” debate - there are times when the game is, quite literally, art. Toricos feather also have that same quality, with eyes that have a blackness seen not from an OLED screen, but in the great European masterworks.

And none of this would mean anything if the game wasn’t tonally consistent. As you move through the world you will encounter hallways, mines, something akin to a colosseum, gardens and caves. It all fits together, yet also feels unreal. Not for an internal inconsistency, but in the feeling that this place is simply impossible. Yet by the end it feels natural and the game throws another massive change into the mix by introducing a final stretch that feels truly alien, and invokes that earlier foreshadowing.

Key to underlining this world are a dozen little touches. Wind is a thing here. The way the feathers move and ruffle (matched by sound design, more on that later), the butterflies (another piece of symbolic foreshadowing), the puddles of water, the use of lighting and the geometric complexity of many of the rooms, all go to making this feel like a living breathing place.

And while we’re talking geometry, there’s a lot there. Walkways buckle under Torico and it feels not like a preset animation, but like the animal actually has weight. The way the world is designed to interpret your traversal of it is second to none, and everyone involved in creating it should hold their head high. There’s a lot of objects that seem to have some pretty complex physics in play, and I refuse to believe this game ever ran to any standard on the PS3.

Control

Ueda has previous when it comes to using physical input to match action in his games - from handholding to gripping in Ico and SotC respectively - and here it is no different. There’s a few little actions which are given direct or semi-direct replication on the controller:

1. Button Mashing!
2. Cross and Triangle for up/down
3. Pulling Spears and Barrels

So, when you die or get grabbed by an enemy, you can effectively button mash to get out of its grip. While you do so, the boy flails and throws himself about in the hold of the enemy. It’s a simple, if apparently crude, little design quirk, but it perfectly matches what is going on - this boy is not powerful and he is no ninja - instead he squirms and struggles and throws himself about to try to escape. A simple design choice, but a very good one indeed.

Similarly, I know some people don’t like the controls, but jumping with triangle and dropping with x is another way that controls mimic animation and gameplay.

Finally, having to grab the spears and then use an analogue stick to pull them out, with minor rumble, lends a real physicality to the action of removing it from Toricos body. It made me wince more than once, and the effect would have been nowhere near as strong if it was a simple, single button press. It’s a press and a pull, and it works.

Parallel Design, Symbolism, Mirror Images and Butterflies

As already noted, there’s a lot of pairs in the game. Paired rooms, paired mechanics, you and Torico as a literal pair, Torico and the other beast as the original conflicting pair. The game also begins and ends with the laser shield, while the story begins and ends in the village - being stolen from and returned to.

There’s also butterflies. The butterflies are ever present and originally seem like nothing more than decoration (and what beautiful decoration they are) but they are also linked to the barrels and, as we later learn, to the lives of children. This is a nice way to deliver on something that originally seems quite unimportant and give it context and depth.

Torico is also like a butterfly, eventually spreading its wings after a games worth of development.

When you are swallowed and spat out of Torico, you are encased in a cocoon-like material.

Many small things are given direct parallels or foreshadowing in the game, yet it is mostly up to he player to interpret them in a way they see fit.

Sound Design

The sound of this game is one of the easiest this to miss. It’s there and it does its job, and it rarely throws itself to the fore. Also - I, like many people, don’t have the best sound setup at home, so it would also be easy for people not to appreciate how good the sound design is because they don’t have a system which really shows it off.

So, lets just say it is worth getting a good pair of 7.1 headphones, like I did, or hooking up a decent sound-system for this.

A huge amount of work has gone into environmental sounds. The splashes of water, the way different footsteps (as in different people) sound upon different surfaces, the cracks and crumbles of stone, the splinters of wood, the howl of the wind, the way voices echo and reverberate differently in various locations, inside and out, the way wires whip and snap in the air - it goes on. A lot of work went into this, and it is so easy to miss. And that’s not to mention the huge range of sounds that Torico itself is capable of.

And then there’s the soundtrack which…just listen to it.

Torico

Fuck me, this animal is incredible.

I know a lot of it is smoke and mirrors, and I know that the underlying systems and actions are actually relatively simple - it is mainly a presentation of complexity. But, my word, what presentation.

Team Ico games have often been about the verbs, and never is that more apparent than in The Last Guardian. Torico is predominantly limited to Pulling, Lifting, Climbing, Jumping, Diving and Attacking. The boy does Jumping, Climbing, Pushing, Pulling, Healing, Crawling, Aiming and Instructing. There’s a lot of overlap, obviously, but each character is given a unique set of strengths and weaknesses - so much so that separation anxiety is a real thing. And yet that separation anxiety comes not from necessarily feeling more limited when away from the beast, but from missing it. It looks sad and distressed whenever you leave it, and there’s always a rush to get back to it as quickly as possible.

Behaviourally, there’s a lot to take in, and a lot that is easily missed which can lead to frustrations if you don’t pick up on the hints. For most of the game, you can’t really direct Torico to jump up or down onto a path that is directly above or below an established route for it. This is most evident after being ambushed in the colosseum-style place. There’s a second route above which it refuses to jump up to - you have to first find a way up, then direct it to join you.

I imagine many people would be frustrated with this - they can see it, Torico can reach it, and they instruct it to go up, but it won’t…it’ll keep going down the main path. And yet this behaviour is already established - Torico doesn't really like new places, you have to lead the way. This behaviour changes slightly later, as Torico gets bolder and requires less direction.

Indeed, by the end of the game (as i was climbing the two towers) I had actually stopped directing it entirely - I just aimed the camera and let it go, patting it after each jump and movement. There was no need to point and shout, you just have to wait for the reaction.

And that reaction time - there’s a fantastic delay which is a lot to do with the animation. Early on i would want it to jump then wonder why it was taking so long, but then i picked up on the signs. The slight step backwards, the drop of the neck, the slight twitch of the wings - I started to know when a jump was coming. Someone who didn’t pick up on that would undoubtedly just spam the instruction again, but a little bit of patience goes a long way.

Not to slam on reviewers who disagree with me, but there’s some dumb shit out there, and I quote:

No joke, I spent fifteen minutes putting two barrels next to his mouth, only for him to keep attempting to grab them and miss every time. They were practically touching his mouth, yet for some bizarre reason he couldn’t grab them, and in the end I had to physically stand with them in my hand until he stole them from my grip.

If it takes you 15 minutes to feed it 2 barrels then you are beyond useless. There’s frustrating behaviour and then there’s blaming your own incompetence on the game.

Torico is temperamental and hard-to-control, sure, but 9 times out of 10 that disobedience is actually very subtle handholding for the player. Look at this! Go this way! The greatest trick the game pulls is making you feel like you are leading Torico, but really it is the other way round. You have to solve puzzles its way.

All of which is basically mechanical - there’s movement telegraphing, verbs and progression signposting. But, it’s the sound and the animation that makes it work. It’s funny that Eurogamer said that Torico is definitely feline inspired, while the Guardian said it’s definitely dog. I imagine anyone who has had a pet is gonna see a lot of nuance in there - there’s evidently some Disney-level animation and behavioural research that’s gone on here and it shows.

The way the ears drop or flap, the snarls, the whimpers, the clumsy rubbing of its head against you when it’s happy - what has essentially happened is that a gameplay mechanism has been turned into a living breathing thing. I mean, Torico is a gameplay mechanism through and through and yet it feels utterly reductive to write it as such. Torico is the greatest NPC in video gaming history and i’d imagine would remain so for some time.

I believed that Torico felt scared when it was trapped alone, I believed in its anger towards your aggressors, I believed it felt stressed, and sad and alone when it thought you died. I actually believed this thing had feelings - real painful, complex feelings that it couldn’t parse in any language we know except noise, body language and facial expression. How amazing is that?

Torico is as much a character in this game as you are - it has an arc, it develops and grows, it fails, it nearly dies and then it flies. And then, with Torico, you reach the end of the game…

The Final Stretch

The final area is tightly woven and consists of 5 simple parts which show off nearly everything you have learned in the game. It is incredibly trim and wastes no time.

First is the fight outside the building - you have enemies on the main floor and above. You must aid Torico in the fight by aiming at the spear throwers above and knocking the shields out of the enemies below.

Once inside you need to activate a lift by dropping down below and activating several panels with your shield. The game has taught you how these panels work, it has also taught you how to reactivate enemies, and it has also taught you how they follow you. By utilising a central room you can lure them to one side then jump across and quickly activate panels on the opposing side. You are alone but the game has taught you how to deal with this.

Then there’s another fight up the top of the elevator, similar to the one downstairs. Same tricks, but less protection and you now have to cover a full 360 degrees.

Then you need to get past the fan.

And, as you would have noticed by now…this place is weird. Of course, it is visually related to where you first found the shield at the beginning of the game, but suddenly the abstract architecture and geometry of the earlier areas seems normal and it’s this place that feels alien. It seems so much more technologically advanced to the rest of the game - chains and gates have been replaced with levitating platforms and a…master of the valley.

Once again the game separates you, but in doing so it teaches you one final lesson - the shield can pacify the master. If you don’t learn this, you can’t climb up so it makes you prepare for the final confrontation. The game has been acting like a game all this time, but it’s only apparent when you sit down and analyse it. Up until this point there’s a word for how the game feels - organic.\

Up until this point in the game, everything has felt natural. Despite how tightly controlled the environments are, how tightly controlled Torico is, how guided your path has been, it has never felt that way. I know it may sound weird, now that I am 4,700 words deep into a review, but at first I didn’t really want to write want I thought about this game, because I had no idea how to describe it. It’s only once I sat down and started writing a couple of notes, followed by arrows from this notes, which further split off, that I started to piece everything together. But until then I only had the idea that this was the best thing ever, and that I loved it and that it meant so much to me.

Looking at it now, I can see it’s not just a masterpiece of story-telling, but a gameplay and design masterpiece.

And so you stop the fan and reach the top. And what you see is nothing. Not nothing as in no view. But for the first time you are above everything. There is no tower in front of you, no obstructions. You have reached heaven and are ready to make your way. And, it’s just so beautiful. You know that, whatever comes next, that this is it. For whatever reason you know this is the end, and that you should just take a moment. We sit there and we look at the horizon and I love Torico and know that, whatever happens, I want to make it out together.

There’s only one thing of note up there, you activate it…and then all hell breaks lose.

The ending (or rather, the ending up until the post-credits ending) is one of the single most distressing things I have ever encountered. Ueda knew exactly what he was doing and he went for it. And, it’s more effecting than it is in the previous 2 games, for a rather simple reason - it is elongated to breaking point.

Agro dropping off the bridge was gut-punch design, and Ico’s bittersweet pseudo abandonment of Yorda was only slightly less quick. But this? For minutes Torico is being attacked and brutalised and the feeling is distress and panic. It doesn’t happen in a flash - it is nasty and drawn out and vicious. Watching its tail get ripped off was horrendous and I wanted it all to end there. But it couldn’t end there, and suddenly my controls and actions mimicked the looseness of the boys, as we both struggled to save our friend.

And save we did. Of course, that tail being thrown where it was could easily be seen as contrived, but there was no way I was thinking that at that moment. There was only one thing on my mind, and I would do anything to accomplish it. Killing the boy or killing the beast wouldn’t have made it any more effecting, it would have just turned the pain and sacrifice into something nihilistic - instead it managed the ending perfectly. Saving it with the last of the boys energy, pressing that button for one last time as i see the villagers surround it, that was the moment I physically couldn’t hold the controller anymore. Thankfully, that’s all the game asked of me. I watched the credits, from beginning to end, and saw the post-credits sequence - the tease and the lead up, and then the two pairs of eyes, and that was when I lost it. Lost it due to love, and pain and relief and…who the fuck knows? It was an emotional crescendo and then it was done.

Game structure and conclusion

And about that crescendo. SotC had quite a unique structure, as the game settled into a 3-beat pattern. Exploring to find a colossi, solving the puzzle of how to beat it, then defeating it.

Explore - Solve - Defeat - Explore - Solve - Defeat and so on. What this meant was that it didn’t continually build up. The foreshadowing to something bigger was done by a gradual change of appearance and occasional cutscenes. But it wasn’t like every colossi was bigger and better than the one before - everyone had their own favourites, and the game had this undulating tempo.

By comparison, The Last Guardian is much more typical. It does build up, the scale does increase. It does build up. In many senses, it is quite traditional. And that’s also why it worked its magic on me so much, I think.

You see, as I said earlier, I just wanted to be not disappointed and so after the first hour, I felt relief. This is good, I like this. But I wasn’t bowled over by it - indeed, I think g.man’s reaction to the opening hour or so was stronger than mine. So after that first hour, that was all I expected - something mostly calm and enjoyable in the way that Ico mostly was.

But it wasn’t that way. It had moments of calm, aye, but it also had set pieces and battles which made my heart pump as much as SotC ever did, and the scale and complexity increased in parallel. It started off as good as the previous games but where they entered their own rhythms, this game kept ratcheting things up, kept introducing new areas, kept trying new puzzles, and always managed to surprise me and make me gasp.

If that sounds like i’m slamming Ico and SotC, then i assure you that’s not the case. They are magical games and there’s still not much, if anything, which can replicate their feeling. But TLG took everything great about them, combined and then added to it. And in between all that, it had moments of genuine reflective calm and beauty.

So, that’s about it. That’s the rambling, messy explanation of why The Last Guardian is gamings greatest masterpiece.

I wanna leave you with one more quote from the Ueda interview:

The younger me — the me at high school — he would never have imagined that this would one day be the case. It would have been incomprehensible. It feels like a dream, often. It’s unreal.

That’s how I feel about The Last Guardian. I always said that SotC was gaming finally delivering on the huge adventure you always imagined in your head. The Last Guardian is the game you never dreamed could even exist.

Just on how the story is told, I think there's something pretty interesting in having it almost exclusively from the boys' POV even when they're not around to see big plot events like when they find out about Insomnia falling early in the game by reading about it in the newspaper.  I wonder if it was for creative reasons that kingsglaive scenes were inserted to fill in the details, or they simply didn't have the time or budget to redo them in-game.  I'm not sure it worked all that well but I do apprecaite that it was a different spin on a fairly standard rpg style story.  I think there will be some great Making Of articles about this game.

Further to that, am I going silly or was there no Journal/Glossary?  I couldn't see it, and I think it would have been really helpful with remember who was who and what we were doing at any particular time.

they decided not to indulge anything regarding the nature of Max's powers I assume on the premise of making you think they're not the point, but I was more than expecting to see Rachel Amber turn up alive and time hopping like you towards the end (explaining how she became such an almost fantastical messiah figure to so many different people in Arcadia Bay). Especially in Ep 5 when things get very fucking weird very quickly and I was hoping for some malevolence going on in the background. But of a missed opportunity as I was very creeped out by those sections and I think it showed what they could have done if they went a bit more horror.