The Last Guardian is a Masterpiece

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cDuKShhQOA

Here’s a game made by my favorite designer, Fumito Ueda, 11 years in the making.  He made (It’s stupid to say any ONE person “made” a game since there’s usually a giant team and most of them are indispensable in making it happen, but that’s the parlance.) some of my favorite and very seminal, influential games: ICO and Shadow of the Colossus.  These games were groundbreaking for several reasons.  One reason was something called “design by subtraction”, nicely articulated here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmSBIyT0ih0

In the early 2000’s console games were getting more and more complex, demanding and using all the buttons on the controller, competing with each other to be the game with the most features and mechanics.  Ueda, an art student with no game design history came onto the scene and wanted to do something different.  Instead of breadth, he went for depth.  He decided on a core mechanic that was both unique, and quietly subversive.  I’d go so far as to call it revolutionary.  In a market full of gruff men shooting at monsters, or wacky/cool anthropomorphic mascot characters spinning and jumping on monster heads, Ueda gave us a game about holding hands.  ICO is still structured like most games.  You play a protagonist in a conflict.  You traverse an environment to resolve it.  But within the bounds of this sandbox, Fumito’s toys were very different than the other kid’s toys.  There are monsters, yes.  You can’t kill them.  You are almost powerless against the smoky (that is REALLY not how smoky should be spelled!) apparitions.  When they come, they come for a mysterious girl you’ve freed from a cage in the massive labyrinthine castle the game is set in.  They try to pull her into a pool of shadow they emerge from.  You get a stick.  But you have something far more powerful.  A hand to hold.  

The verbs (game mechanics) that games gave you back before the indie revolution of the mid-late 2000’s were mind-numbingly small.  Jump, shoot, punch, flip, reload, block, shoot-some-more.  Imagine the shock to the system caused by a new verb entering that lexicon called… hold-hand.  Suddenly your paradigm of aggressive-forward-momentum-towards-destroying-enemies is inverted.  Now you’re tenderly moving back to grab the hand of a friend.  This was the beginning of a revolution.  The headspace you occupy while playing ICO is usually relational, not confrontational and violent.  As you lead and protect the mysterious, passive girl you can’t help but form a bond with her.  You save the game by falling asleep on a couch with her.  You get nervous the further a traversal puzzle forces you to walk away from her.  Your success in the game was tied to her survival, not an arbitrary health bar or number of enemies killed.

Then, in 2005 Ueda followed up that masterpiece with another called Shadow of the Colossus.  Bigger and more ambitious, but still building on the inverted paradigm that ICO offered.  In this case, the contrast with the rest of the industry that stands out the most is the narrative delivery.  It’s minimalistic in a time of bloviated cutscenes.  It’s vague and subtle in a time of over-emphasised-technobabble and hit-you-over-the-head-dumb-Hollywood-wannabe scripts.  And it took the hero paradigm almost every game dealt with and made you question the assumptions that the game medium had always leaned on as a crutch.  (Mainly, the implicit assumption that the player/character must be ‘the good guy’)  All of this, and again, a jaw dropping new core mechanic.  Climbing.  Climbing had been in games before.  Never climbing on building-sized, moving, living creatures.  This was both an aesthetic and technical marvel at that time.  It’s only even been attempted in games a handful of times in the 11 years since then.  It’s REALLY hard to do, from every angle.  Technical, design and art all have to be absolutely brilliant to pull it off.  Team ICO was absolutely brilliant.  

With that background established, I want to talk about some of what The Last Guardian means, both to me, and to the medium of games as a whole.  I’m going to start with the common criticisms that I’ve seen.  There are three main complaints.

First, the controls, camera and physics are really squirrely.  It’s just really hard to control the boy, too easy to fall in many places, and impossible to fall in others.  Many puzzles rely on the physics working right, and since they usually don’t, there’s a lot of trial and error and luck involved with progression.

Second, the AI of your animal companion, Trico, is frustrating.  Many puzzles rely on Trico following your… suggestions.  And, like a real animal, it seems to usually just be confused by what you’re asking it to do.

Third, and I think most interesting and full of implications for the artform of games, is the idea that the first two issues would not be issues if the game had come out a handful of years after Shadow of the Colossus like it was meant to.  (Around 2007 - 2009) It didn’t.  It went through development hell for at least 11 years.  Here’s a brief history, but it doesn’t mention the fact that Ueda said in an interview that work had actually started on it before SOTC had even finished, which means it really started in 2005.  http://kotaku.com/5964547/kotaku-timeline-the-last-guardian

This criticism about the ever-changing standards of modern artforms has always eaten at my soul.  It really bothers me that people can’t create a truly timeless film or video game.  And to a more limited extent, even a novel.  Whereas we can appreciate paintings, pottery and sculpture from thousands of years ago.  (Not to mention physical games like chess or dice and cards)  I want to know why this is.  Why is a film like Citizen Kane a ‘classic’ and a ‘masterpiece’, yet it’s unwatchable to most modern viewers?  There’s a lot of specific answers to this.  Modern sensibilities, pacing, acting styles, etc.  But WHY do those sensibilities change?  Old arcade games are very similar.  Classics like Pacman and Donkey Kong can’t hold my attention for more than a couple minutes.  I … HATE this.  I hate that the art we developers pour into our work is so ephemeral.  It’s like writing for a newspaper or something.  Pointless.  

I mean, it’s not.  But it FEELS pointless to ME.  Probably has something to do with a primal subconscious desire to escape mortality.  If I’m going to pour my heart and soul into art, I want the biggest possible impact, which means the biggest possible audience, which means as many people from the future as possible.  This sounds like a personal problem.  There’s certainly no solution that I can imagine.  You can’t stop the changes in cultural tastes and expectations.  It just takes the wind out of my sails a bit.  I mean, I am still driven to create art because that gives me joy.  It is only diminished by the fact that its impact is ephemeral.  And I suppose I ought to just come to grips with the fact that everything all humans do is ephemeral… and get over it.

And THAT’S my review of The Last Guardian!  Hope you liked it!  

Juuuuust kidding.  

Let me tell you what is brilliant about The Last Guardian, and I why think it deserves to be considered a masterpiece despite the truth of the criticisms.  First, let me get one thing out of the way.  I didn’t have much fun playing this game.  For the uninitiated, the idea of playing a game that isn’t fun sounds bewildering.  Saying a game that I didn’t have fun with a masterpiece of a game is doubly so.  That’s because you think games are toys.  Some games are toys, and I love them.  Some games are not.  Just like a film can be not-fun, yet still a masterpiece, so it is with games.  However, I don’t think this game was INTENDED to be not-fun.  It’s just that the primary mechanics revolve around things I don’t particularly enjoy.  Progression is almost completely environmental-puzzle-based.  I’m bad at environmental puzzles.  I don’t enjoy them.  Though I LOVE making them.  Weird, right?  Anyway, the fact that this game is mostly a series of puzzles that rely on sketchy controls, physics, and unclear AI makes the moment-to-moment experience pretty bad for me.  There were many times where the solution seemed clear, but the randomness of the physics objects you have to interact with, vagary in what is and is not climbable, or Trico not cooperating, made me seek out other solutions for what felt like interminable amounts of time before finally coming back to my first impulse and finding that stuff just happens to work right this time.  I can almost guarantee you that this convoluted soup of problems is what took the game so long to make. (Along with Trico, which I’ll get to later.)

If all of those systems worked together flawlessly, the moment-to-moment game would have probably been… fine for me.  Probably still not really FUN, but fine.  This is exactly like what ICO did.  It was also mostly environmental traversal puzzles.  But they weren’t as dependant on wonky, semi-broken systems.  

So WHY do I love this game so much?  Two reasons.  First, it’s for what it attempts.  Second for the a long list of subtleties that demonstrate how execution focused around a central idea can create a new and powerful experience.  

So what does this game attempt?  Well, it takes the companionship-forming mechanics from ICO, and the exhilarating experience of climbing on a gigantic beast from Shadow of the Colossus, and puts them in an even more epic environment.  It keeps the minimalist narrative form of the previous games, leaning heavily on environmental storytelling and a handful of voice overs.  All of this is FOR something.  And that something is the experience of bonding with an animal companion.  

A brief aside.  I am a creature accursed by God with allergies.  Not just fur and hair, but animal saliva as well.  Doubly accursed because I LOVE animals. And animals love me.  They always find a way to run up to me and lick any exposed skin, giving me an itchy rash for a couple hours.  I want a little dog so bad.  I had a couple dogs as a kid. My favorite was a French Bulldog named Bilbo.  I miss him.  But I don’t miss itching all the time.

SO, Ueda wants to make a game about forming a bond with an animal.  There are animal games out there.  Tamagotchi, Seaman, Creatures, Petz, Foo Pets, etc.  They all revolve around a simulation of a cute (with the exception of Seaman) creature(s) that you virtually feed, pet, train etc.  There’s usually no goal.  Maybe a competition you can win by training them well or something.  But any emotional investment comes from a gameplay loop of earning things to give to the pet that makes them play an animation.  I don’t mean to be flippant about this.  Any time you break down a gameplay loop it seems facile and pointless.  It’s true of sports too.  Anyway, the thing that sets The Last Guardian a league apart from these kinds of pet sims is that the relational loop takes place in the context of an adventure.  In real life, if you put two dudes together in a waiting room for a couple days, they may learn each other's names and maybe their jobs.  Put them in the trenches of a war and they’ll be bonded for life.  I think this is the phenomenon that the game is leveraging.  It’s not giving you a toy, like every other pet in a game I’ve experienced.  There are games that give you animal companions that do similar things.  Dogmeat from some Fallout games.  That dog in Fable 2 and 3.  Various pets in MMOs.  What these games are attempting is to find those heartstrings by way of trial by fire.  But what set’s TLG apart from those other games is that Ueda trims the fat and FOCUSES on the animal companionship like a laser, organizing all the other elements of the game around this goal.  And, if you can get past the physics, camera and control issues, it succeeds brilliantly.  But why?  How?  That’s the second part I want to get into.  The execution of the concept.

Here’s a list of the great ideas that all worked towards a brilliant execution of Ueda’s goal of giving players the experience of bonding with a giant fantasy animal.

Ultimately, the reason I’m classifying this game as a masterpiece despite it’s flaws come down to the fact that it did what ICO and Shadow of the Colossus did in their times.  It set a new bar for what video games can do.  The fact that a game creator can head three games in a row that do this is… unprecedented.  You might be able to say that about Miyamoto or Sid Meier or Will Wright.  But I think there’s a lot more noise-to-signal ratio in their portfolio.  I’m saddened that so many reviewers are focused on the obvious flaws with the controls and AI, and apparently unable to see just what an achievement this masterpiece is.  I think in time the brilliance will be recognized, but I’m worried it won’t be soon enough to commercially reward that brilliance.  And that’s the biggest crime for the medium of games.  When we don’t reward our true visionaries, we’ll continue to stagnate, and spin our wheels making more games that make us feel like a badass... and nothing more.

Also, because it’s related, here’s a tutorial I made for upgrading the base of the collector’s edition statue.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyavDidpdyk