The Last Guardian Review

The Last Guardian is finally available to the user! Fumito Ueda’s creation took a very long and difficult path, as the work began back in 2007 and was supposed to be exclusively released for PlayStation 3. But during this time, the project was frozen several times and the development team changed. Nevertheless, thanks to the support of fans, the game managed to reach the stores.

The game begins with an unnamed boy, whom you will control, waking up in the midst of ancient ruins and seeing a wounded creature named Trico in front of him. Trico resembles a mix of a griffin and a cat and can release lightning from its tail. From this moment, your fantastic journey begins, in which everything is built on the relationship between these two heroes and all the challenges along the way are overcome together.

After a quick tutorial, where you are introduced to the controls and mechanics of the game, you help Trico. And that’s when the magic of friendship begins: since early childhood, we all dream of a pet that needs to be taken care of and nurtured, bringing joy and true loyalty. The Last Guardian is built on such a bond between a human and an animal.

Over time, Trico will start to listen to your commands. You will teach the “fluffy one” to jump, dive, and attack. Of course, sometimes it misbehaves and refuses to follow commands, but then you have to repeat them multiple times. After all of this, you can’t help but feel like Trico is truly a living creature.

A charming episode at the beginning of the game is the scene at the underground lake. The boy jumps into the water from a great height, but his pet refuses to follow him – it is afraid of water (which means it definitely has some cat genes). In order to lure Trico to you, you will have to find a barrel of food in the cave. And only when you throw the coveted treat into the water, the scaredy-cat Trico will jump after it, creating a three-meter wave that covers the owner.

In The Last Guardian, you will have to solve a lot of puzzles that may take you more than a couple of minutes. However, it wouldn’t be correct to call them difficult: find a barrel, pull a lever, crawl through a hidden tunnel. Sometimes the process of solving puzzles may seem too boring. But there aren’t many moments like that in the game, and usually they are followed by encounters with enemies or important plot events that will definitely not make you bored. Gradually, the game becomes more difficult, which makes the gameplay even more interesting. Under no circumstances should you give up on the game halfway: it’s definitely worth completing.

Violence is presented moderately here. The game is not filled with dynamic battle scenes against enemies. It’s as if it was created for those who come after a hard day of work and want to distract themselves from worldly problems.

Visual game looks amazing, even though the graphics are essentially at the level of PS3. The most impressive thing is how detailed and animated Trico is. I would like to draw attention to the emotional aspect. You catch yourself thinking that he will now crawl out of the TV and start licking you like a pet cat. In addition to this, I will mention the surrounding environment: living nature, bubbling water, fluttering butterflies, running lizards. The world in this game is not static, it is alive.

The game’s sound design stands out as well. Thanks to the music, the atmosphere completely absorbs you and it is impossible to tear yourself away from The Last Guardian, spending days on end in it. Without the soundtrack, which The London Symphony Orchestra worked. Orchestra, we wouldn’t be able to care so much about the main characters.

But The Last Guardian couldn’t do without a hitch. The main irritant of the game is the camera. Often, it chooses such a bad position that it becomes impossible to control the boy. Because of this, I often fell into the abyss or jumped past the rope. Several times the camera simply immersed itself in some object or there was just a black screen. The game also has some minor visual flaws: parts of Trico’s body sinking into the wall or any other object. From time to time, there are frame rate drops, especially when rendering the surrounding world in the distance. I think the developers will be able to fix this in future patches.

The Last Guardian is an incredibly cute game where relationships and emotions take precedence over the plot and action scenes. The game will make you think about friendship, loyalty, and those bright feelings that are sometimes lacking in real life.