Finished
The Last Guardian. Man, oh man, where do I even start.
The game is a beautiful piece of art. It has lots of great high moments up there with the best of Ico and mid-tier SoTC moments. It is absolutely gorgeous and it's crazy how much you don't realize the game looks gorgeous because the game starts out with the Ico washed out color pallet. But the lighting is crazy and when the mist fades and the colors quick in visually it's goddamn breathtaking.
I'm glad the game was uncancelled, I'm glad I got to play it and experience some of these wonderful moments.
...that said, I will never, ever play this game again. I've played Ico probably 4 or so times including twice in row jumping right in after I beat it because the 2nd playthrough added subtitles iirc. I've played SoTC at least that many times as well. I will never replay TLG because unlike Ico/SoTC....it isn't actually fun to play. Like half the game is spent sitting on Trico's back as he gorgeously moves through areas. It creates this wonderful cinematic adventure, but yeah that's not gameplay. The other half is full of good platforming mixed with glitches and shoddy AI, really unfun combat type sequences (at least in Ico when the shadows monsters came out it was fun to beat them down with a stick; the enemies and their grab you while you bounce around in recovery frames and then MASH MASH MASH BREAK YOUR CONTROLLER gameplay is awful. There is one section that's sorta the final enemy setup that is one of the worst moments of gaming 2016) and some very boring moments.
I had so many glitches. I gotta imagine reviewers who gave this 9s got lucky and didn't run into this stuff. One time for instance the boy and trico froze. Like I could rotate the camera but none of the buttons would respond and that just sat still boy on trico, trico not moving. Had to restart from checkpoint. Another time trico broke a cinematic scripted moment and the ai was confused and wouldn't work after. I don't even want to get into the non-glitch ai stuff like when you tell trico to go in a direction when you're moving vertically upwards and he thinks that means turn around and go back down the way you came.
The game to me reeks of a trouble development. There are tons of really great moments and then there are parts where the game breaks. Just going by all the bugs I encountered in a single playthrough, it seems like the game needed another 6 months in the oven. But maybe it wouldn't have done anything because I get the feeling the game's AI is too ambitious and no matter how many years they spent on it, it'd never be work correctly 100% of the time. It feels like they got it to about 80% and had a celebration party and pressed the gold master and ran and never looked back. Even glitches aside, the game feels way more incompletely paced than Ico/SoTC, there's too much high/low/high/low with some real low dips. It's a pretty long game and maybe it needed some more pairing down to have a more consistent quality experience that is Ico/SoTC.
On top of that even if the game had zero bugs, the AI was perfect and it was tighter paced getting rid of some of lows, I'm still not sure if it'd be able to hang with SoTC, maybe Ico. I feel like story/world building was a lot less interesting in this one than the other two. It's not bad, it's just that Ico and especially SoTC were really good in their interesting mythological world and story. This feels a lot lighter until the finale.
While I'm not going to say I'm the biggest Team Ico fan out there because man, some of you guys are crazy dedicated, I'm a pretty huge fan of Team Ico and Ueda. Ever since I played that PS2 demo disc with Ico and the windmill I fell in love and I can pick either Ico or SoTC any day and still have an absolutely wonderful time with either. Ico is a great game every few years to just do a single play run through and it's basically perfect from start to finish. Coming from that, TLG feels half-baked. It's better than no game at all, because goddamn some of the moments are amazing like:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
When bad trico is fighting trico in the vertical tower and you're using traps and mechanics to team fight against bad trico to turn the upper hand. The puzzle boss fights (basically just that and the final boss) were so good (not a surprise since Ico's final boss is great and SoTC is nothing but fantastic puzzle bosses) I really wish there were more puzzle boss fights and less here's a room of statute guys take them out with Trico :|
But as I keep harping on, it wasn't a particularly fun game to play. Because of the nature of Trico and all the auto-traversal where you just stand on his back (I mean couldn't they have added SoTC type gameplay to these parts where you need to actively try to hang on?), it's much more a passive art adventure experience and less a game with gameplay that is fun than Ico/SoTC. I think also part of it is that even if Ico was a bit light on gameplay, at least you're always in control and moving Ico through the world. I think the best parts of TLG are when you're without Trico and you're platforming on your own Ico style. Since TLG takes away control from you so often and for so much of the game as you ride Trico it just feels less gameplay to me.
Anyhow, in the end even as a big Team Ico fan I couldn't recommend people buy it in good faith. I think it's worth a rental for the gorgeous art adventure experience and those amazing highs, but trying to be objective as possible I couldn't give it more than a 7/10 whereas I'd give Ico a 9/10 and SoTC a 10/10 (with SoTC being a top10 of all time game).
Also for everyone with sob sob attachments blah blah blah, I thought Trico was cute and loveable but I didn't feel the game was particularly emotional. Ending was good. I found SoTC very emotional, Ico a little less so. I think I had more of a connection to Trico earlier on when he was a cute dog/bird thing and not dumb ai stupid fucker as I would often call him by the end
