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The Last Guardian
Dec. 28th, 2016 09:20 amThe premise of The Last Guardian is that you are a boy who has mysteriously woken up in a hole in the ground next to a chained creature that looks like a giant long haired Chihuahua with feathers. Either the species of animal is called Trico or the boy decides to call this particular puppy-bird Trico, but Trico is not doing okay. After the boy and Trico work together to escape the underground area where they've been imprisoned (or discarded?), they emerge onto a cliff overlooking a giant floating castle, which turns out to be totally empty. Since Trico really wants to go to the castle, and since the boy has nothing better to do, into the castle they go.
The game is very pretty, but it suffers from terrible controls, a terrible camera, Trico's terrible AI, and several terrible glitches.
These are the first three times I rage-quit the game:
(1) During the opening sequence, the boy needs to feed Trico three barrels of food. When I started the game, one of the barrels was not there. Even though the initial area isn't that large, I spent twenty minutes looking for the last barrel until finally going to the internet for answers. Apparently it's a glitch that one of the barrels will randomly not generate.
(2) A bit later on in the game, when the boy first enters the floating castle, Trico is too large to fit through the doorway. The boy is supposed to run through an upper hallway to emerge back outside at the front of the building, where he is supposed to call for Trico. Trico will eventually make his way outside; and, if the boy stands for long enough on a high balcony, Trico will hop on up and follow him back inside. Although this sounds simple, my description doesn't convey the sheer gigantic scale of the architecture. There is absolutely nothing to indicate to the player that Trico can "hop on up" to a ledge easily as tall as the Washington Monument, or that it can hear the boy calling from several football fields away and through multiple stone walls when its attention is focused elsewhere. That the poor game design forced me to get up, turn on my laptop, and use a walkthrough for such a seemingly easy puzzle was infuriating.
(3) You know what? It would be tedious to explain what happened here, so I won't.
Now that I'm back in DC, my homework is to play this game for half an hour every evening, which is about as much of it as I can take in one sitting. I'll just keep telling myself that it's supposed to be good, and maybe my patience will pay off.
In the meantime, I started replaying Link's Awakening and Earthbound on my Nintendo 3DS XL. Both games still manage to surprise me with how brilliant they are, and both are absolutely gorgeous on the handheld system's large screen.
The game is very pretty, but it suffers from terrible controls, a terrible camera, Trico's terrible AI, and several terrible glitches.
These are the first three times I rage-quit the game:
(1) During the opening sequence, the boy needs to feed Trico three barrels of food. When I started the game, one of the barrels was not there. Even though the initial area isn't that large, I spent twenty minutes looking for the last barrel until finally going to the internet for answers. Apparently it's a glitch that one of the barrels will randomly not generate.
(2) A bit later on in the game, when the boy first enters the floating castle, Trico is too large to fit through the doorway. The boy is supposed to run through an upper hallway to emerge back outside at the front of the building, where he is supposed to call for Trico. Trico will eventually make his way outside; and, if the boy stands for long enough on a high balcony, Trico will hop on up and follow him back inside. Although this sounds simple, my description doesn't convey the sheer gigantic scale of the architecture. There is absolutely nothing to indicate to the player that Trico can "hop on up" to a ledge easily as tall as the Washington Monument, or that it can hear the boy calling from several football fields away and through multiple stone walls when its attention is focused elsewhere. That the poor game design forced me to get up, turn on my laptop, and use a walkthrough for such a seemingly easy puzzle was infuriating.
(3) You know what? It would be tedious to explain what happened here, so I won't.
Now that I'm back in DC, my homework is to play this game for half an hour every evening, which is about as much of it as I can take in one sitting. I'll just keep telling myself that it's supposed to be good, and maybe my patience will pay off.
In the meantime, I started replaying Link's Awakening and Earthbound on my Nintendo 3DS XL. Both games still manage to surprise me with how brilliant they are, and both are absolutely gorgeous on the handheld system's large screen.
