The Last Guardian

Ok, so I’m going to talk (to no one) about The Last Guardian on PS4.

The third game by Team Ico and visionary director Fumito Ueda, The Last Guardian borrows heavily from the previous two games, Ico (a platforming, lead-your-partner-through-abandoned-ruins puzzler), and Shadow of the Colossus (a climb-the-giant-monster-in-a-series-of-abandoned-ruins puzzler). It features the player taking the role of an unnamed boy with no combat skills and the lovable, completely heart-warming relationship he has with the giant Trico, a winged griffin beast that also has no name of its own.

What follows is a 15-to-16 hour thrill ride of jumps, falls, tumbles and rumbles through dilapidated old stone ruins as you and your new friend attempt to escape and make it out of this giant crater in the ground, avoiding ghostly armored warriors and another Trico with less than pleasant thoughts about the well-being of his two adversaries.

Let me get this out of the way in this (review) – The Last Guardian is by no means better than either Ico or Shadow of the Colossus (the latter being one of the greatest video games of all time, so I’m not going to fault it for paling in comparison). But at the same time, neither of those games worked for me as well as the core mechanic in this game did.

The bond you will (and you WILL build it, you can’t fight it) with the lovable Trico you call friend is so real and so immensely satisfying that you will have heartstrings tugged and you will laugh. Oh my how you will laugh. The number of times I found myself rolling on the floor because of his antics were neigh innumerable. Example: every time you take a leap of faith in the hopes that he will catch you, the sound vanishes and time slows. The only sound is the boy’s breathless gasps as he prays the beast will catch him.

The first few times I was like “AWESOME” but by the fifth time I’d had enough. I vocally, out loud, said “you’re not gonna get me with this trick, again) to the game. And then the Trico caught me in his mouth, as expected. But THEN! He dropped me. And my heart leapt out of my throat. Then WOOOSH! in comes his tail at the last second and the boy reaches out, grabs on, the music swells, and I’m crying and laughing and being in love with an AI creature.

I’m not going to spoil much else about the game because I really think it should be experienced – like all Team Ico’s titles – as raw and mysterious as you can make it. I pretty much blitzed this one in one sitting, just went to bed once in-between two longer sessions. By the end of the credits (and the post-credits sequence which, obviously, you need to stick around for) I was welling up and wishing there was more. Which is saying something because for all the praise I’ve given it, the game gives you the tools you will need to play the game fairly early and then never really changes them. You don’t get new weapons, you don’t learn new abilities. It is very, very repetitive.

But that speaks to the game design and the love the creators had for the world and the two main characters: even if you are doing variations of the same four things over and over again for 16 hours, the world is beautiful, the music is chillingly cool, and the splendor of the sunlight every time you step out of the caves or fortress walls is worth it all. And there are some set pieces that need to be seen to be believed. I’ve read on reddit where some people hated the cage puzzle with a passion, but I just kept laughing and not believing what I was seeing the entire time.

So get the game.

Uh, I’ll give it a 9.3/10.

Why .3? Because, that’s why!