Ico’s ending was really amazing. Only Mother 3 is its equal. Otherwisr I agree about generally preferring SotC
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I was thinking one big thing Ico’s ending has that Last Guardian doesn’t is rain. It completely changes the mood of the ending relative to the rest of the game. I honestly think a bit of weather might’ve been all that’s needed to alleviate the repetitiveness of this game too. It has little moisture clouds to indicate cold as you get high up in the final tower, why not some snow?
Hmm, that is odd. Presumably, in a purposefully restricted palette, they would have walked through all the obvious options to vary the mood, and I don’t doubt they could have stylized weather in some lovely way.
Wind carries a lot of the weight in this game, though they were of course beaten to the punch by Witcher 3.
I think it’s the troubled development. 9 years of technical problems and staff churn didn’t allow for work like weather.
Beat this game earlier tonight after avoiding this and all discussions of the game since release.
I liked it! Most of the flaws didn’t really bother me. I adjusted the camera within the first half hour and found something that worked well for me. The AI was at times spotty but for me it added to Trico’s charm; much like Agro acted like an actual horse as opposed to how horses in every other game were basically vehicles Trico generally acted like an animal that doesn’t quite grasp how large it is. I wished on a few occasions that it’d take the hint and go to that pillar, but I also wish that my dog would realize on walks that he can only walk on one side of a street sign without getting tangled up. Still love him anyways.
More than anything I’d say the one gift this game gives is Trico. It captures the whole pet/animal companion thing better than any other game I can name, a lot of it is the eyes but those little behaviors just ring so true.
What I find interesting from a development standpoint (aside from trying to guess what caused the most delays) is that since it is much more of an Ico 2 that Shadow ever was, the places where different choices were made felt like either attempts to fix what were perceived as missteps in Ico or were otherwise a response to them. [spoiler]The one that leaps out immediately is going from little boy who can only swing a stick in the most simplistic of ways to a little boy who can’t really fight back at all. Ico felt much more gamey than Shadow because it held closer to established genres and design decisions and while TLG is closer to that mold it also removed some of the more blatant “game” parts. There isn’t a true box pushing puzzle until several hours in, and even others that are close are much better disguised.
It wasn’t until later in the game that I realized what those random doors were for, and it was instantly chilling plus an interesting reversal from Ico. The other interesting reversal was how in this game you still had to climb to a colossus’s head, but rather than stab it there you instead petted it to comfort it. Tied in with player-character combat being removed and I have a half-formed thought about the game being more about “love”, or more specifically more peaceful “let’s just get away and live in peace”, compared to Shadow being much more a straightforward look at killing. Then I remember that Ico was a bit like that already until it wasn’t at the game’s climax, and you do sort of aim tail lasers at suits of armor.
Still while it is very much in the vein of Ueda’s other games it feels like… like the path not taken. You fill the Yorda role: unable to fight, opening doors, at risk of being drug away into terrifying portals. The colossus is friendly when he isn’t trying to eat you. You pull weapons out of it. You pet its head. You help regenerate it while in Shadow you degenerated yourself. On one hand it could just be team Ueda being lazy or only having a few tools to play with. I prefer to think of it as Ueda & Co playing with and re-examining what they made before.
I would say that the ending doesn’t quite measure up to the endings in their other two games, although the image of Trico being held down and torn away at was so… visceral that it made me shudder, particularly the tail bit. The regurgitated children reveal falls rather short of the Ico reveal, which to be fair is IMO one of the great ending-ish bit in gaming. Still while a tragic end may have been called for I would have possibly been legit wrecked if Trico suffered a terrible death and, again, one final case where the team goes the opposite direction it went before.[/spoiler]
The pacing was a bit flat in terms of signposting where you were in the story, but I was enjoying my time with Trico so much that I was just glad to have my adventure with him (her?) go on endlessly. I think it taps in to that childhood “I love my pet and would love to go on adventures with it” wish in a way most games don’t.
…My speculation for the source of delays was 1) scope 2) HD 3) AI BTW.
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it’s actually relatively unlikely that they couldn’t get the game running on the PS3 – the sort of calculations needed for trico’s movement and physics interactions wouldn’t be more than twice as fast at most on the PS4 CPU vs Cell, and a factor of two is not very much at all for a console generation. I think the development was just so problematic in other respects that by the time they finally had something they could release it made more commercial sense to give it another shader pass (and run it in like a 3x larger framebuffer) and build it on PS4
I think it is possible that the game could have run on the PS3, less pretty but presentable. I don’t think that team was structured to do so. If you pull up the teams that made Ico and Shadow they were like 30 people, 40 tops. That was still doable on the PS2 with respectable results (Ico and SOTC were technologically rather fine if prone to framerate issues) but on the next gen with full HD required it doesn’t quite scale up that way. I know they went on a hiring spree to roughly double their team size, not sure how far they got with that as Ueda was supposedly very particular about who he hired to be on his team.
Given the added resources required by the whole HD thing that tripped up near everyone to a… well less than 11 year degree and combine that with the rather large scope and I could see it quickly adding up to be simply be beyond them. Assuming it was built like Shadow was there is a good chance that what they did built was rather… idiosyncratic technology-wise which makes it hard to just toss another team on it.
But yeah, if anything I assume they had the core of Trico nailed relatively early on in the process. A lot of it was built on the colossus base and they had that mostly figured out on even older tech, I would be shocked if that was the main hurdle.
Also I’m almost certain the game was not being developed for years at a time at some point.
I also noticed particular influence from Ghibli films in this game. Trico is a more mature take on Totoro: also a terrifying wild beast with giant teeth and claws that nobody would consider being friends with except for a child. And the village scenes and beast battles remind me of Princess Mononoke. There’s some commonality in style in Ueda’s previous games but the references seem particularly direct here.
Actually I think I noticed he has no teeth at all… I guess that is part of his bird-like qualities
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This game is already half price here
just seen this in a shop. my long dormant desire to just-buy-things stirred. the slip-case is strangely gorgeous and I’m curious about the book
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“Giant Maneating Eagle Toriko” well that’s a better title by lightyears
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OK I guess this is the best game I’ve ever played
I almost cried twice and nothing was even happening
Controls/camera own
About an hour-and-a-half in
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Wow and woah
They “own” in the sense that they act of their own volition and with disregard to player intentions
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Yeah, they’re really good
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wonder what the percentage of posts in this thread/on the internet are talking about the camera or SPECS instead of the actual game
i kinda liked that the kid felt unwieldly/clumsy and that the camera didn’t accommodate the giant monster that was your constant companion ¯_(ツ)_/¯
i also rarely, if ever, felt like either impacted my ability to play. The majority of the game is pretty sedate.
Look, I played SotC and lived, the controls are fine and hardly unprecedented in their idiosyncrasies. The degree to which every single interaction feels textured and scruffy, moreso than SotC, is incredible
The camera is honestly great, like half the time it seems to be doing something autonomous + new as I’m looking at a focal point or recovering ground and I can’t tell if it’s actually doing that or if I’m not yet used to when the swiveling motion ends while controlling it
These are the best looking trees and feathers I’ve seen in a video-game and the architecture is W O W
I’m anticipating that when I finish it will not be the best game I’ve ever played but I feel like this is the same as Ico and SotC which are the best games you’ve ever played the first time you play each
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To be honest, I’ve only really had problems with the camera when I wanted to point it at stuff to look at.
Since there are a few traversal puzzles, sometimes it’s helpful* to do this and look at your environment!
I really can’t stand how the hyperactive kid goes from tiptoe to a full blast sprint with the slightest flick or the stick, though. If there wasn’t any precarious platforming at all in the game I wouldn’t mind, but sprinting with all your leg strength towards the ledge of a tower is both annoying AND immersion breaking (we know the kid, as a character, isn’t suicidal, so it doesn’t make sense for him to go full blast towards bottomless pits every two seconds)
*not really required, techically but, you know, as a player figuring things out, one might feel the compulsion to do this
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glad someone else feels this way about it, lowering the sensitivity a notch or two is a good idea i think in order to lean more into the autonomy of it.
my only real problem is the like way it resets w a black frame between and it feels like it’s about to go into a cutscene sometimes which is jarring