What game developers are saying about The Last Guardian

The Last Guardian was one of the most hotly anticipated games of the year. It made the ten best list assembled by Gamasutra staff, and we continue to be impressed with the game's ability to foster an emotional connection between player and creature.

Many regard it as a masterpiece, and a worthy successor to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, the previous games made by Fumito Ueda and the team at GenDesign. Others say that the game is a buggy, frustrating borderline-unplayable mess. Some argue that both reactions are true.

We reached out to several developers to get their takes on the design of The Last Guardian. Thanks so much to everyone who participated. (Some responses were trimmed for length, or to minimize overlap.)

Hidetaka "Swery" Suehiro (D4, Deadly Premonition)

Trico is not AI-- he/she is just a living creature. It's really nonsense if you call Trico an AI.

Cat Musgrove (Color Thief)

Firstly, I'm really impressed by the technical achievement of having such a large (difficult) AI character (difficult!!) who moves and acts believably in tight spaces.

But much more than that, I was struck by how instantly I connected with Trico! His design is brilliant - it would have been easy to give him large expressive eyes to connect with, but keeping them dark keeps him just a little bit strange and alien. So much of his expressiveness comes from his mouth, which is something I wouldn't have expected.

I think the game does a wonderful job of constantly reinforcing your connection with him (petting him is even used as a mechanic!) and simply interacting with him is rewarding and fun (I *always* toss the food barrels). I think this is a game that lives and excels in the details in a way I haven't seen before.

Bennett Foddy (Sportsfriends, QWOP)

I’ve heard people complaining about the controls in The Last Guardian, and it’s true at least that the camera can be ornery. But for me, the control of the boy is Ueda’s design at its best. Like in Ico, the way he moves embodies you in a sense of who he is: young, gawky, brave. These games have a human physicality about them that is rare in a genre full of auto-animating parkour robots and iceskating tanks, and as a result they don’t feel like other games. 

The Last Guardian is also one of the most visually arresting games ever made. Like Shadow of the Colossus, it’s spending a huge amount of its GPU budget in places where other games don’t, and as a result it doesn’t look like other games.

The reason I like getting to play Ueda’s games once in a while is that they remind us how hidebound the most popular genres of games can get… and how much of the creative depths of those genres go unplumbed. They have a certain roughness, like the classics of the genre Another World and Prince of Persia, but that is just a side-effect of their boldness.

Mohammed Taher - Brave Wave Productions

The use of music is sparse in this game, but I love how it's implemented. Whereas titles like Dark Souls embrace the feeling of dread by restricting the use of music to boss fights, director Ueda and composer Furukawa weave the cheerful score through little moments, like coming out of a cave to abundant sunshine, or traversing from narrow to spacious areas. In a game as confined as The Last Guardian, it feels elevating and hopeful to have this rapport with the player.

There's a lot of deserved criticism about the camera and how it works against the player. What disappointed me, however, was seeing command prompts littering the screen, instructing the player near every object. This creates dissonance when progressing to areas that require thoughtful observation to solve puzzles, or the handling of something that requires more thought than a command prompt would instruct. Sometimes the prompt can even work against you, suggesting something that you shouldn't do, something you wouldn't even have thought of if the prompt hadn't brought it up. This can rob you of the chance to solve puzzles entirely on your own. It's doubly surprising when you realize Ico – Ueda’s first game – is free of this handholding.

Rami Ismail (Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers)

The Last Guardian is a PlayStation 2 game with a PlayStation 4 main character. I say that not as a negative, but to offer a context.

The PlayStation 2 existed in a time in which AAA games reigned the world, in which AAA budgets hadn’t become unbearable yet, and in which strange creative risks could be taken. The games back then had a specific type of soul, a specific type of irreverent, creative soul, that is hard to replicate in the cut-throat focus-tested world of 2016. That’s not to say AAA in 2016 is worse than it was in 2008, just to say that it is different. The Last Guardian, by all means, is a 2008 game in 2016. Games have become smoother, easier to control, better signposted, more focused - there’s a decade of extra design knowledge and experience behind a AAA game today.

So within this 2008 game, with all its flaws and problems, we find Trico - the giant creature that is at the heart of the game - and it is remarkably PlayStation 4. The level of emotion, the level of technical prowess, the level of intelligence that the creature exhibits is unbelievable. The creature is endearing and terrifying, playful and destructive, a weapon and a danger. Every interaction between Trico and the player character feels genuine and alive, and it is the heart of the game.

The Last Guardian by all means should not exist, but thanks to the determination and financial support of Sony, we get to see what the heart of a PlayStation 2 game would look like in a PlayStation 4 game. It looks like an unflinching focus on the core experience of the game - the bond between a person and a creature - with an almost complete disregard for everything around it. 

Whether that’s something you’d want to play, I can’t tell you.

Sarah Fossil (Silence! The Elder Speaks)

I can't imagine I'll have this kind of relationship with any other game. That image of the rusty chain and the hole has been burned in my mind for nearly a decade. Right before release, when I heard people were getting mad that Trico wouldn't do what they wanted right away, I got really stoked. I love that. That's the major gameplay mechanic right there. That's the fun part!

I think a lot of developers build games that deliver immediate gratification, and many players expect that, but for me, there's nothing like the excitement that comes from the unknown, of patiently waiting for a big payoff. Knowing about the game for almost ten years before playing it certainly a