Thoughts on The Last Guardian

There's an important lesson that anyone interested in art and entertainment needs to keep close to their hearts: beware of anything that has an abnormally long production time. If something's been in the work for, say, a decade or more, there's a natural tendency to build it up to build it up to such an unrealistic level that disappointment is inevitable. It also doesn't help that these things, for some reason, tend to be objectively disappointing across the board. The examples are endless, and span virtually all modern media. In movies, The Phantom Menace was anticipated for years and years, and look at how great that turned out. In music, Guns N' Roses promised us Chinese Democracy in the '90s, and when it finally came out in 2008, nobody wanted it, not even Best Buy bargain shoppers.

STOP GIVING AXL ROSE MONEY, FOR THE FUCK'S SAKE

In video games, the most obvious example is Duke Nukem Forever, a game that honestly deserves its own series of blog entries. But The Last Guardian certainly should be included among that crowd. Originally created by Team Ico in 2007, the game suffered delay after delay after delay, with many, including myself, thinking it was never going to be released at all. Well, imagine my surprise when, in 2015, we were finally given a release date, and in late 2016, the game came out for the PS4. After playing through a good portion of the game, the question must be: was this game worth the nearly ten year wait we as gamers were subjected to?

Like all of Team Ico's games, I can sum up the point in a few sentences. You're a young boy, and you wake up in a field next to a giant beast named Trico, which, I have to say, is probably the best part of the game. Trico's design is so fucking adorable.

I mean, come on - look at that little face. Don't you want a plush of this guy?

Anyway, I'm distracting myself. You and him are essentially set on exploring this ruined world, a world that's filled with colossal broken towers, demonic suits of armor, and titanic cliffs. Like Team Ico's other two games, the plot and characterization is minimal, with story progression often given through suggestion and, on occasion, brief flashbacks. What's important, instead, is atmosphere, and the intense focus, through the gameplay, of the relationship between you and Trico.

I opened this blog by asking whether this game was worth waiting almost a decade for. I now think that question is irrelevant - instead, we should be asking, was it worth paying $60 for? The answer to that question is much easier: no.

The Last Guardian is simply too short to justify that price - if played correctly, the game can be beaten in a matter of hours. This is a criticism I had of both Ico an Shadow of the Colossus, and such criticism is harder to accept, in 2017, than it was in the mid 2000s. When I play The Last Guardian, it feels, now, like a game that would be offered exclusively on the Playstation Network and sold for $15 or $20. Something like Journey, for instance. Such a price would, I think, be fair - you can be taken in by the astonishing setting, the powerful relationship between your character and Trico, and be done with it quickly.

As it stands, we're asked to pay the same price for this game as we are for, say, Final Fantasy XV, a game I'll bring up again since it seems to be a reoccuring theme of this blog. I've probably put in close to 50 hours in that game, and I still am not anywhere near close to finishing all that it can offer. I paid full price for that game, and I feel that price was justified for such a massive game. The Last Guardian has no justification.

This all sounds pretty negative, and I suppose it is, but honestly I really like the game as a whole. Trico is actually surprisingly responsive to commands, which I wasn't expecting for a computer AI character. The settings, as I've said, are gorgeous, and Team Ico stands second to none when it comes to creating mood in their games. There is an overwhelming sense of loneliness in their worlds - though there are, technically, other people, the games make you believe that you and your companion are the only living things left. What each game does with that feeling is different - Ico makes you feel like a protector, while Shadow gives you an intense feeling of sadness when you're done killing all those colossi. The Last Guardian, in purely tonal terms, is my personal favorite - the cooperation of the main character and Trico is the only the only guarantor of survival (and meaning, if I'm being honest) in this ruined world.

That feeling alone is worth playing the game, and so it's with sadness that I feel the need to recommend for gamers to wait until it reaches an appropriate price. Team Ico took nearly ten years to make this game, but in the process, they stopped paying attention to the evolution of the video game market. Thankfully, in the future, the game will drop in price, and you'll be able to buy it on the PSN for $20 like I've said. At that point, we'll no longer have to concern ourselves with these pedestrian economic issues, and the game's true merits will be what we remember.