"The Last Guardian" Review

After 10 years in development hell, The Last Guardian finally sees the light of day. Developed by the studio behind Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, many people went out and bought a Playstation 3 in anticipation of this game. Now, on the Playstation 4, it is finally here. Whenever a game is in development for such a long time, it begs the question of what exactly the developers were doing in that time. For the developers of Final Fantasy XV, the answer was that they were crafting a combat system that they had never built before. In the case of The Last Guardian, I really am wondering what the answer is, because I know for a fact what the developers weren't doing. They weren't updating their engine so that their game could run at a framerate that wasn't nauseating. They weren't fixing the terrible climbing controls from Shadow of the Colossus. They weren't creating puzzles with intuitive solutions. They weren't crafting a sophisticated AI for the titular guardian. They weren't developing an in-game camera that does what the player says to do. Maybe I'm giving my opinion away right off the bat here, but I just didn't like The Last Guardian very much. Not only have I had to split the playtime up into hour-long stretches each night supplemented by better games afterwards, but I wrote this opening paragraph at maybe the halfway point of the game. I really wanted to enjoy this game, but if I legitimately can't stand to play for too long each night, we have a problem. At time of writing, I just don't know if I can do it anymore. The puzzles are too unintuitive, the AI is too infuriating, the framerate makes me too nauseous. I might be able to make myself finish in a year or so, but I can't finish writing my end of the year lists until I write this review, and I just don't know if I can finish the game at this point, so I'm going to be writing this review based off of the experience I've had so far. Who knows? Maybe towards the end everything changes, but I highly doubt it.
*sigh*
Some might argue that there isn't a point in continuing this review because you already know what I think, but as an aspiring critic, I need to go into detail here. This will be a rather short review because this game is so insubstantial that I can cover everything I need to cover in very small paragraphs. So, dear readers, sit back, relax, and allow me to tell you why The Last Guardian is a colossal (get it? Like Shadow of the Colossus?) disappointment.
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In The Last Guardian, you play as a little boy who wakes up in a prison. As he awakes, he notices that he has strange markings on his skin and he is next to a gigantic beast that is part rat, part dog, part cat, part bird, and part weasel. This beast, Trico, becomes the boy's companion in a manner resembling the fable of the Lion and the Mouse. Basically the story from that point is just "they try to escape."
Really, the only good thing about the premise here is Trico himself (I'm just going to call him "he" because it gets confusing I refer to him as "it" as I would a Pokemon). He is so cute I can hardly stand it. Maybe its because he reminds me of my black Labrador, but I got attached in spite of everything.
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Earlier I mentioned that the developers definitely weren't working on Trico's AI for the past ten years. Allow me to rephrase that. You see, my aforementioned black Labrador is incredibly dumb. He once tried to eat a poptart while he had a gigantic plushy soccer ball in his mouth. Were the developers to hook my dog's brain up to the game and have Trico run based off of his intelligence, Trico would be a far superior AI companion. He just can't seem to follow directions. You tell him to jump up to a ledge and he'll just end up jumping down to a previous ledge. You point in a direction and tell him to go in the direction you are pointing, and he will go in whatever direction his giant fluffy heart desires. There are times when the camera goes into slow motion as you leap into the air hoping for him to catch you. Then he will just sit there and watch as you fall to your death. This happened more times than I can count on two hands! Now, the apologists are likely to tell me, "You need to call Trico when the camera goes like that!" To them I would like to say, "Well then, how come he eventually caught me without me calling him?"
I remember one time right before I decided to stop playing the game for good. I was in a flooded room with a small island in it. I needed to get Trico to dive down, but the game never explained how this could be done. I stood there telling him to jump, and he would go to the island. I would point in the direction that the cavern was in and he would go to the island. I would hang upside down on his sides to make it so that I was literally pointing down at the cavern, and he would go to the island. I would be in that same position and tell him to jump, and wouldn't you know it? He would go to the island. It has been so long since I have gotten so viscerally angry at a game. I think the last time would have been when I was a child. In the end, games are about having fun one way or another, and if I am legitimately getting red in the face and swearing under my breath because of how angry a game's terrible puzzle design is making me, then I'm not having fun. One way or another, Trico's AI is terrible, and the fact that the game gives you nothing to work with doesn't help.
Last Guardian apologists are likely rolling their eyes and gearing up to accuse me of not being able to handle a challenge. Let me set a scene for you: Let's say I steal your phone and hide it in room A and you're in room B and you spend every waking hour combing every inch of room B because I neglected to tell you that it was in room A. That isn't a challenge. Likewise, if I'm studying pre-Algebra and the teacher gives me a Spanish test, this isn't a challenge. Puzzles in The Last Guardian are not challenges, they are just poorly designed. Going back to the phone scenario, if I were to tell you that it was in room A, not tell you anything else, but happen to leave a house phone in the room, that would be a challenge. It would test your critical thinking, and hopefully you would come to the realization that you could call your phone from the house phone. A challenge is a puzzle that gives you some way to ponder through it logically. Putting a super secret water cavern too deep down for you to swim to and not telling you that such a cavern is there is not a challenge. It is just bad design.
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Ohohoho, but the bad design doesn't end there. The game is terrible from a technical standpoint as well. It baffles me how a game can spend 9-10 years in development and still have the nerve to not run at a stable framrate. My first few hours with The Last Guardian were absolutely miserable as turning the camera would cause the framerate to become so inconsistent that I would nearly vomit. I'm not exaggerating here, within the first few hours of this game I would have to pause and regain control of my breath because of how terrible it was. Had it just been a low framerate it wouldn't have been a problem, but as it stands, it jumps and stutters and light effects randomly pop in and out and the entire practice makes me wonder if I'm unknowingly epileptic. After the first few hours, the framerate never quite gets a grip. It doesn't make me nauseated anymore, but I may have just gotten used to it. That is to say nothing of the texture and lighting pop-in in especially dense areas. Anytime you go outside, expect for lighting to suddenly appear on certain areas, and if you are in an area with foliage of any kind, expect the game to constantly be rendering the texture.
The time has come for me to put up a really unpopular opinion...
Shadow of the Colossus wasn't a very good game. In its atmosphere, sense of scale, and myth-like storytelling it was definitely a success, but every last bit of its actual gameplay was a disaster. When I reviewed the PS3 remastering of it for The Right Trigger a few years ago, I gave it a 6/10, I believe. I sugarcoated it in the review, but I just didn't have a good time with it. The climbing was terrible as I would end up constantly losing track of where the character was going. He would get tossed around and flipped around and he would end up not even moving an inch despite my commands. I get that the difficulty in climbing helped with the sense of scale, but it was terrible game design. None of my failures in that game were my fault. They were all due to the climbing mechanics being terrible and the controls being unresponsive.
Now the Last Guardian fanboys (assuming such a thing exists) are gearing up to label my opinion invalid because I didn't like Shadow of the Colossus very much and therefore was doomed not to like Last Guardian either. Well, fanboys, Team Ico had ten years to improve its game quality and win me over, but they chose to sit back and twiddle their thumbs and stagnate in the same mediocre game design they've been peddling in this market since day one instead.
Look, all of this is to say that the climbing in The Last Guardian is terrible as well. Literally the only way it could be worse (short of never working at all) would be if there was a grip gauge like in Shadow of the Colossus. When climbing up Trico, the boy will get caught on one of the hundreds of invisible barriers on Trico's body and have to climb some other way. Likewise, the game seems to have a fairly liberal interpretation of directions. I could have sworn that pushing the left stick to the right meant I wanted the character to move to the right, but The Last Guardian sometimes has other ideas as to what that means. Beyond climbing up Trico, there is also a fair degree of platforming involved in this game that depends on climbing. SOME pieces of architecture that jut out from the sides in a very climbable fashion are climbable, but hell if I know which ones you can actually climb! The only way to know which pieces of walls are climbable is to try and climb them, and even then, there are times when the boy simply won't grab onto a climbable wall the first time. The result of this is that you'll scour the area looking for a climbable ledge, return to a place you've already tried in the hope that maybe you missed something, and then magically grab the ledge this time around.
And then there is an aspect of climbing that normally games make far too easy but The Last Guardian makes borderline impossible: getting down from a ledge. Normally it is all too easy to accidentally fall off a ledge to your death in games centered around climbing. However, in The Last Guardian, you end up trying to get down for half-minutes at a time. You'll be on a ledge needing to drop down, so you'll press the button meant for dropping down only to have the boy crouch on the ledge and not move. Then you'll try and push the left stick while pressing that button and the boy will approach the ledge and freak out and stop the animation. It is a constant battle, and it's especially bad when trying to get off of Trico. You'll leap from the top of his head only to grab onto him again on the way down, and no matter how hard you try you'll always end up grabbing him until you've successfully fallen, grabbed, fallen, grabbed, fallen, grabbed all the way down his body. Sometimes, at that point, you still hold on.
None of these things could be forgiven, but they might have sucked a bit less if the camera were even remotely stable. Much like moving the left stick to the right, I could have sworn that moving the right stick to the right meant I wanted the camera to move to the right and stay there until I told it otherwise. However, The Last Guardian interprets this to mean: move to the right and then bounce right back to the center..and then get caught inside Trico. There is one instance that summarizes this problem perfectly: I was standing still in a room and Trico came up behind me. The camera then proceeded to move around the room as if autocorrecting every second. It wasn't a cinematic thing, it wasn't an idle thing, it was just the camera being so terribly made that it spazzes out every chance it gets. I can't count how many times I made mistakes because the camera decided to autocorrect independently of my input.
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I've heard that the ending of The Last Guardian is a real tearjerker, but I don't care. I love to look at Trico because he is cute, but actually interacting with him is a chore. Team Ico ought to be ashamed of themselves for this travesty. The fact that they had the unbridled nerve to charge money for a game less technically impressive than your average Early Access game is appalling. The Last Guardian isn't any fun to play, in fact, its many frustrations are enough to make you want to scream. When Ubisoft can put out an Assassin's Creed game every single year and have even the worst of them perform better than a game you spent 10 years on, maybe it's time to quit. One thing is for sure: Team Ico needs to get its act together. If it can't do that, then I sincerely hope they never put anything else out. The Last Guardian? A more ideal name for it would be Their Last Game.
Let's review:

Nauseating framerate - 1
Texture and lighting pop-in - 0.8
Obnoxious camera - 1
Brain-dead AI - 1
Awful climbing mechanics - 1
Unintuitive puzzles - 1

The final score for The Last Guardian is...
4.2/10 - Below Average
Shame on you, Team Ico, shame on you.