It’s weird that The Last Guardian just kinda...came
out, right? If nothing else, the sheer force of the developer’s
history is hard to beat. Team ICO had previously released two games:
ICO, a quiet game with influence still being felt generations later, and Shadow of the
Colossus, which...did...a lot. The games’ lead, Fumito Ueda, has a level
of recognition that vanishingly few game devs have. Of course, I’ve got his name tattooed on
the inside of my eyelids, but that notwithstanding, he’s still one of the very few granted access
to the semi-mythical and maybe-misleading title of gaming “auteurs.” He’s a big honkin deal- even for people
who aren’t me. But this wasn’t just a follow-up. The Last Guardian started development in 2007,
was first unveiled in 2009, and didn’t come out until 2016. In other words, Team ICO started putting the
pieces together a year after the PS3 came out, and didn’t finish until three years
after the release of the PS4. In other words, while The Last Guardian’s
was being made, Ubisoft released the first NINE mainline Assassin’s Creed titles. And while plenty of games go through a lengthy
development process, what made The Last Guardian’s so painful is that we were so horribly aware
of it. By all accounts, showing this first trailer
was a mistake, prompted by an even earlier leaked demo reel. Ueda and his team say that much of the footage
could barely run at all- to put it together, they essentially had their system play the
game in slow motion and then sped it up to normalcy. It Was Not Ready. But I mean….look at it. It is wild to see how much of the game was,
at least conceptually, almost in place. This, to an outside observer, does not look
like a game barely hanging together. It almost looks like a launch trailer (and
in fact, the comparison isn’t that far off). So for this to come out, and then get years
and years with only a trickle of new information, accompanied by news that more and more of
the team was leaving the project, was pretty devastating. I made my peace with The Last Guardian being
a lost dream several times within this period, only to have that hope resurrected and then
dashed again. All that is to say, It’s weird that The Last Guardian just kinda...came
out, right? One reason for its muted reception, I think,
is that we-with-Ueda’s-name-tattooed-on-our-eyelids forgot how weird these games were. Just because Colossus had mainstream success
didn’t mean it wasn’t a complete subversion of video game tropes, an empty world with
only one task to do and no accolades to be gained along the way. Just because ICO’s mechanics led to games
like Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a slow and
narratively obscure puzzle game where you had to escort another character who couldn’t
move faster than a light jog. I think time and many, many playthroughs have
dulled my sense of just how many edges these games have. They are not mass-market fare. They are singular, uncompromising, specific
to a fault. It’s why I love them. It’s also why The Last Guardian, which combines
the obtuse puzzles of Ico with the deliberately-disobedient animal behavior of Agro, probably got as mixed
a reaction as it did. Even in the reviews, you can really feel each
critics internal struggle- it’s not that they didn’t like parts of the game, it’s
just that they also, really, didn’t like parts of the game. And for consumers, with limited time and finite
money, it probably just didn’t seem worth it to take a risk on a game this ~out there~. The second reason is, I think people didn’t
finish it. Because- Okay. Look. I will be the first to admit that The Last
Guardian is not capital F Fun, or capital E Engaging the entire time. Trico is a LIL PUNK sometimes. Running away from these guards can get pretty
tiring, and tasks as simple as jumping from place to place can progress agonizingly slowly. You spend a long time just walking around
these ruins, nothing much happening except you and this big furball attempting to get
from Point A to Point B. And, as anyone who’s played the game or had a pet knows, getting
to Point B is never as easy as it seems it should be. Like, it’s right- it’s right ther- Trico
it’s RIGHT THERE. I get why people wouldn’t stick with that. But I did. And towards the end of the game, things really
pick up speed. For your entire runthrough, the goal has been
the same: get out of here, this desolate caldera, this beautiful no-man’s land. You are from the forest, and the forest is
where you should return. Through attempts and failures, it becomes
clear that the only place you even might be able to pick up enough speed to fly on Trico’s
broken wings out of this hollow mountain is the tower, right in the center of it. Impossibly tall, architecturally anachronistic. And getting to the top requires flight that
you’re just not ready for, the biggest fights in the game, the strangest machinery. It means a confrontation with the “master
of the valley,” an entity so entirely unlike anything else in the game that it retroactively
calls into question the entire world you’ve been traversing. After so many hours of navigating vine-swallowed
ruined cities, this cold white marble is…alienating. But you still have Trico. At this point in the game, you really have
Trico. The first few hours of the game, it’s hard
enough to control your own gangly run. Much of the middle is that uneasy alliance,
where there is a lot of mutual dependence, and probably a lot of affection, but not a
huge amount of reliability. I mean, Trico does eat you. Can’t really forget that. Hard to get over being eaten. But after the fights and the flights and the
wounds, the climactic jumps and the last-second rescues, you and Trico truly have each other. And because you’ve gone SO long with that
unreliable cooperation, because the game has buried its intuitive control at the shrine
of AI believability, it is immensely meaningful to be able to depend on Trico like you can
at the end of this game. None of it was easy. You clawed your way into this strong of a
bond. But in this last tower, swiftly approaching
the end, I felt something else, too; dread. Years before The Last Guardian came out, people
made jokes about how it could only ever end two ways: the boy dies, or the beast dies. I am pleased to report that neither of these
are the case. But there is no option where you get to spend
the rest of your life with Trico. You’re a boy from the forest, a village
that won’t accept, and simply isn’t built for, an animal like this. The ultimate goal of the game is to escape,
to get back to your home, but your home is not Trico’s home. There is no way this ends where you get to
live out that bond forever. And I didn’t know this when I first played
it through, I didn’t consciously know how the story ends. But there’s just this sense that what you
have here is fleeting. No matter how things wrap up, it will never
be the same as this. So when you get to the top of this tower,
when you’ve seemingly surmounted every obstacle and passed every test, and you’re just left
alone with Trico in the sunset and the wind, I just...lose it dude, I just- There’s this thing that Fumito Ueda almost
never does. His games never let themselves get sentimental. I bet that sounds wrong, because these games
live in sentimentality in our memories. Ico is a beautiful fairytale of children breaking
free of their destinies, Shadow of the Colossus is a mournful tribute to loss and regret. These are themes that reside in the most emotional
parts of our brains, ideas that I’ve returned to over and over at different points in my
life. But the games themselves are shockingly spartan
in their storytelling. Characters rarely speak in these games, and
when they do, it’s sharp and to the point. Virtually never will you find someone explaining
haow they feel. Ico is a game entirely resting on the backs
of two children, and yet they literally never smile, not even once. Even the very end, where you find your companion
after thinking she died, the game gives us this: [ICO END]. Not even a word spoken to each other in relief. Shadow of the Colossus never gives us a reunion
between the protagonist and the woman he ostensibly loves. Never a kiss, a joke, a hand. Nothing. The closest we ever get is this dream, in
which she rises, unseeing, for a fraction of a second before pulling us cruelly back
to reality. It too, is a game without a smile. Apart from some clunky narration in the beginning,
The Last Guardian plays largely the same. The moments of wonder and love between you
and Trico feel wholly organic, evoked by the situation instead of being told to you by
specific scripting. And that holds true, even at the very end,
even as you summit this tower. There is no cutscene in which you say “I
love you Trico,” and Trico does googly eyes back at you. But there doesn’t need to be. What it does is give you time and peace, if
only for a second. And then you run right to the edge of this
tower and look down, and are reminded of everywhere you’ve been, everything you’ve been through. You look down, and then you look back at the
one constant that’s been there the whole time. You look back, and- A few years ago, I was in a...really rough
spot. I had moved back home, and I was working part
time at a restaurant, and I had, through my own actions, isolated myself from like 99%
of the people who had been in my life. And in my search for reasons to like, keep
being a person who did anything meaningful, I...got a dog! You know, the animal that has to be friends
with you because that’s basically wired into its brain. So. I named her Tori. Actually, full name Toriel, because we stan
a cow mom, but Tori for short. And I mean look at her, you have never seen
such a ball of fluff and joy and companionship. As anyone who’s ever had a puppy knows,
they are a huge amount of work and so I was up at all hours of the night, taking her outside,
begging her to please just poop so we could go back to sleep, and falling deeply, deeply
in love the whole time. But Tori had this issue, which was that she
realllly liked food. She liked it so much. She liked it so much that she’d basically
turn into another dog when she was around it, and attack anyone who came near her, and-
There was this one time when I left a loaf of bread on a table, some bread! And then she saw the bread, and she couldn’t
reach it but she decided it was hers and she started really guarding the table, and I took
away the bread but she still kept guarding the table and then I put on gloves to try
and get her away from the table and she bit through the gloves and- I took her to this dog trainer, to try and
figure out what was going on, and the trainer told me that she’d only ever seen two other
dogs with this level of aggression as a puppy, and both of them ended up being put down. This is the part of the story where I tell
you that Tori is still alive, still fully alive, sleeping in my bed, licking up my crumbs,
playing with her favorite toy which is part of the gutter? for some reason?? And she’s still around and she doesn’t
guard food anymore because we just worked at it every day, we just worked every single
day and there wasn’t a magic bullet, there wasn’t a cure-all, we just clawed ourselves
into this bond where she trusts me and I trust her and neither of us bite each other when
we take away bread. So when Ueda gives us these uncharacteristically
sentimental moments, this fleeting minute of perfect companionship on top of the world,
with the sun burning a line on the horizon and then wind so strong it almost blows you
backwards, it’s just so beautiful I can hardly take it. There is more game after this. There’s a climactic battle, there’s a
tearful farewell, there’s a hint at a reunion. But this, right here, reminded of the past
just enough that you can appreciate everything you’re lucky enough to have in the present. In this generation, we had spectacle like
I’ve never seen, worlds bigger and more detailed than I could have imagined, tech
pushed far past the bounds of what was initially promised. I’m sure this is all going to continue as
we dive headlong into the next one. But I also think it’s telling that the most
indelible part of all this to me, what I keep coming back to, is Trico and his boy, huddled
together at the top of the world, taking a second to just be with each other.
