2016 video game
The Last Guardian is a 2016 action-adventure game developed by Japan Studio and GenDesign and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 4. Players control a boy who befriends a giant half-bird, half-mammal creature, Trico.
Team Ico began developing "The Last Guardian" in 2007. It was designed and directed by Fumito Ueda, and shares stylistic, thematic, and gameplay elements with his previous games, "Ico" (2001) and "Shadow of the Colossus" (2005). He employed the "design through subtraction" approach he had used for his previous games, removing elements that did not contribute to the core theme of the connection between the boy and Trico.
Sony announced "The Last Guardian" at E3 2009 with a planned release in 2011 for the PlayStation 3. It suffered numerous delays; Ueda and other Team Ico members departed Sony, forming the studio GenDesign, and hardware difficulties moved the game to the PlayStation 4 in 2012, drawing speculation that the game would not see release. Ueda and GenDesign remained as creative consultants, with Ueda as director and Sony's Japan Studio handling technical development. "The Last Guardian" was reintroduced at E3 2015. Upon release, it received praise for its art direction, story, and depiction of Trico, though some criticized the gameplay.
Gameplay.
Like its predecessors "Ico" (2001) and "Shadow of the Colossus" (2005), "The Last Guardian" is a third-person game that combines action-adventure and puzzle elements. The player controls an unnamed boy who must cooperate with a half-bird-half-mammal creature to solve puzzles and explore areas. The name of the creature, , can be taken to mean , , or a portmanteau of and .
The boy can climb on structures, carry objects such as barrels, and operate mechanisms such as levers. Trico's size and agility allow it to reach areas that the boy cannot reach alone, and fight off guards who attempt to capture the boy. Conversely, certain obstacles, such as gates, or glass eyes that frighten Trico, prevent Trico from progressing, and must be removed by the boy. The boy must locate barrels to feed Trico when it is hungry, pet Trico to calm it after a battle, and remove spears thrown at Trico by enemies.
Though the player initially has little command over Trico, the boy learns to command Trico to leap onto ledges or head in a certain direction, among other actions. Although players are encouraged to train Trico to move in the right direction, new areas can be discovered by letting Trico wander independently. At various points, the boy wields a reflective mirror that summons lightning from Trico's tail, which can be used to break certain objects.
The player is returned to the last checkpoint if the boy is captured by guards, or if he falls from too great a height. Multiple playthroughs unlock additional costumes based on previous Ueda games.
Plot.
"The Last Guardian"'s story is framed as a flashback told by an older man (voiced by Hiroshi Shirokuma) recounting his experience as a boy.
The boy (voiced by Tatsuki Ishikawa) awakens in a ruined castle in a deep valley known as the Nest. He discovers an enormous creature called a Trico, chained and wounded. Though Trico is hostile, after the boy removes the spears from its body and feeds it, it begins to accept him. The boy unchains Trico and they explore the area, discovering a mirror-like shield that summons lightning-like energy from Trico's tail. The pair make their way through the castle ruins, evading the ghostly soldiers, and Trico's broken horns and wings slowly regrow.
In a flashback, Trico flies to the boy's village and steals him from his dormitory. It flies back to the Nest, but is struck by lightning and chained up by the soldiers. In the present, Trico resuscitates the boy after a cave collapse. After fending off an attack from a second, armored creature, Trico and the boy enter a mysterious tower and discover a malevolent force, the "master of the valley", which manipulates creatures and soldiers. It summons several creatures of the same kind as Trico, which regurgitate stolen children into the tower and savage Trico, tearing off the end of its tail. The boy uses the mirror to summon energy from the severed tail segment and destroy the master of the valley, causing the creatures to plummet from the sky.
Wounded, Trico takes the boy, near-death, and flies to his village. When the terrified villagers attack him the boy instructs Trico to leave. Years later, the boy, now grown, discovers the shield and raises it to the sky, sending a beam of light to the Nest, where Trico resides.
Development.
In his previous game, "Shadow of the Colossus", director Fumito Ueda had intended to create an emotional interaction between Mono, the character that Wander wants to save, and the colossi that Wander must fight to save her. He was surprised and inspired to find players felt a stronger connection between Wander and his horse Agro. Ueda wanted to make the relationship between a human and a creature the central concept for his next game.
Ueda found that people were drawn to games with lifelike creatures, and felt "The Last Guardian" needed something similar to attract a broad audience. He wanted to create a virtual creature that behaved as realistically as possible, avoiding the unnatural behavior of other virtual animals. He based much of Trico's behavior on his childhood experiences growing up in a home full of animals. The final version of Trico is an amalgam of several creatures; the design was "deliberately unbalanced because looking strange was important", according to Ueda. The team wanted to avoid making the animal cute, and instead focused on realistic-looking behavior with "animal-like expressions". Trico's ears react with a cat-like "twitch" if they touch ceilings or other tall features, using the game's mesh-based collision detection. The team added the ability to summon lightning from Trico's tail to have players understand Trico's "force and ferocity". Ueda described Trico as "adolescent", allowing the developers to add humor through its actions. The team used programmed key frame animations instead of more common motion capture techniques, allowing them to capture subtleties that would be difficult using live animal subjects.
As Trico functions similarly to the colossi the player climbs in "Shadow of the Colossus", journalists have described "The Last Guardian" as a combination of "Ico" and "Shadow of the Colossus"; Ueda stated there was "a bit of each of those [games] in there". He described the relationship between the boy, Trico, and the guards as a game of rock-paper-scissors that changes throughout the game; at times, the boy needs Trico to protect him, while at others the situation is reversed. Though "Ico" and "Shadow of the Colossus" have a similar changing connection between pairs of characters, Ueda said there was more "dynamic range" in "The Last Guardian".
"The Last Guardian" is the first Team Ico game to use voice-over narration. As much of the game relies on non-verbal communication between the boy and Trico, Ueda felt the voice-over helped immerse the player in the mindset of the boy. It also provided a way to provide gameplay hints and other context to the player.
Whereas the team had designed the areas of previous games for the characters they had designed in advance, for "The Last Guardian" they made Trico as flexible as possible, allowing them to create levels and have Trico adapt to them. The size difference and interactions between the boy and Trico were informed by the limitations of the PlayStation; if the characters were of the same size, the team would have needed to determine the animation interactions for both, whereas Trico's size meant the boy's animations would not need to affect him much.
Although the boy is less detailed than Trico, he was animated via key frame animation. He places hands on nearby walls, and reaches to pet Trico without player interaction. Ueda felt these animations were necessary to help convince the player of the game world. The animation system uses layers of animation that mimic real-life physics, taking advantage of the greater processing power of the PlayStation 4. The team considered making the player character a girl, but felt it would not be realistic that a female character would have enough stamina to climb Trico.
To create the game's art and architecture, the team used the same "design through subtraction" method they had used to develop "Ico" and "Shadow of the Colossus", removing elements they felt distracted from the core experience. Music is used sparingly to highlight key emotional moments, such as when Trico uses his tail to catch the boy as he falls from a collapsing platform. The game uses vertical space to emphasize the boy's small size.
"The Last Guardian" game engine builds on the team's previous development of AI processing from "Ico" and transformative collisions from "Shadow of the Colossus". It is the first Team Ico game to use a full physics engine, Havok. According to Ueda, the effect of wind was modeled separately for each of Trico's feathers. Yasuhide Kobayashi, vice president of Japan Studio, stated that the title "The Last Guardian" was chosen to appeal to the larger demographic markets in the United States and Europe for the PlayStation 3, hoping to avoid the cultural problems in title and artwork blamed for "Ico"'s low sales in western countries.
In August 2019 interview Fumito Ueda mentioned that Trico they were creating on PlayStation 3 actually had more motion patterns than the PlayStation 4 version did, as they were unable to transfer everything due to transition time issues.
Technical development.
With initial ideas for "The Last Guardian" envisioned by Ueda since around 2005 after completing "Shadow of the Colossus", the game was in active development since 2007, a year after the release of the PlayStation 3. The working title was "Project Trico", revealed to the public due to a leaked video posted at "PlayStation Lifestyle" in 2008 that showed the current "Target Render" of the game at that time. Ueda had long considered the development time for "Ico" and "Shadow of the Colossus", and had anticipated being able "to create something good in a short period of time" with "The Last Guardian" at the onset. By 2009, the development team had completed enough of the game for it to be showcased during the E3 2009, using an improved render of the same set pieces previously seen in the Target Render and later provided a short vertical slice of the game to the press for the Game Developers Conference in early March 2011. Ueda had considered including this demo on the then-upcoming remastered "The Ico &amp; Shadow of the Colossus Collection", though it was ultimately not included.
Behind the scenes, the development of "The Last Guardian" was considered slow by Shuhei Yoshida, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide. Yoshida explained that the vision for "The Last Guardian" was based on a video prepared by Ueda to demonstrate the concepts and style of the game, a process Ueda had used for "Ico", and Sony wanted to stay true to that vision. Team Ico, which is a small studio compared to other Sony studios in Japan or other Western developers, were struggling with achieving Ueda's vision for the game on the PlayStation 3 hardware. In 2015 Yoshida revealed that the previous 2009 trailer was "specced up", running at a much lower frame rate on the PlayStation 3 and sped up for the presentation. Around 2011, Sony brought in many of their core development teams such as Santa Monica Studios to review the code and try to improve the performance. In 2012, with Sony preparing to announce the PlayStation 4 and still recognizing the sluggish development of the PlayStation 3 version of the game, it was decided to change the target platform to the PlayStation 4 so that Ueda's concept could be fully realized. Ueda stated that this choice was primarily Sony's decision, speculating that the PlayStation 3 version of the game at this point would still have been sufficient to convey his concept. Following the target platform switch, Ueda and other members of Team Ico were not as involved with the process, as other teams worked to take the highly customized PlayStation 3 code to adapt it to the PlayStation 4; this included the help of PlayStation 4 lead architect Mark Cerny. With the reintroduction of the game at the E3 2015, Yoshida explained that the game engine is now