The Last Guardian is one of those old oddities about the gaming industry. When it first hit audiences with a stunning trailer, crowds of fans were willing to rush out and buy a Playstation 3 purely to jump onto the latest game by the creators of Ico. Yet, as we all saw, the project suffered from delay after delay, until here we are well over a decade onward and it has finally been released. As a result, The Last Guardian proves to be charming, intelligent and stylistic, but woefully archaic.
I've been tempering my expectations for this for years now, ever since I saw some of the really stupid reasons the game was being delayed (the lead designer wanting to individually animate feathers and also making the team redo the barrel eating animations because he thought it wasn't realistic as two quick examples).
ReplyDeleteIn the end the game is pretty much exactly what I expected it would be (and it certainly looks enjoyable enough to me, but not enough to warrant a full priced purchase).
The only defence I can offer it is that the AI not perfectly listening to you might be more intentional, or at least it has the unintentional effect of making you feel like you're trying to command a semi-wild creature. I remember the horse in Shadow of the Colossus and also Yorda in Ico being the same way, where they'd just do stuff on their own (even stuff you didn't want them to do) because they added little personalities to both (even if it's incompetent AI, at least it gives the illusion of a personality).