About an hour from the end of ‘The Last Guardian,’ I wondered whether during the 7 years of ‘development’ (Yes, I know they actually didn’t spend the entire 7 years) Studio Japan ever took the time out to play test the game. Never have I played a game where the issues were so glaringly obvious. Before I go any further however, I should probably just add a disclaimer that, whilst I won’t be spoiling anything without a direct warning, You may want to play the game yourself, if only experience the disappointing gameplay first had.
First off, I was pretty excited for ‘The Last Guardian.’ Even though I didn’t own a PS3 when it was first announced, I still thought it was a tragedy when it was seemingly cancelled indefinitely. Its re-announcement was one of the reasons that I decided to jump ship from the Xbox One and pick up a PS4, and I was enamoured with Trico’s design. Unfortunately, even then, I knew that Trico was the only thing that I was looking forward to. The controls looked a bit off and the camera, whilst being heavily scripted in the trailers and gameplay demos, still appeared to be a bit too loose for my tastes. My biggest concern, however, was the frame rate. From the first time that we saw PS4 gameplay, it was very noticeable that the frame rate was not holding up under the pressure.
Even though I had recognised that these problems existed before the game released, I was still blown away when I started play by just how much worse they all were in the final product than what I had expected. The controls fared the best in it all, usually only being a minor annoyance at a few parts and only infrequently causing rage inducing deaths. The camera and the frame rate are another story. I can’t decide which is worse. The camera has a complete mind of it’s own, which would be at least tolerable, if it weren’t for the fact that it constantly changes to an unhelpful angle at the most inopportune times. One of the most baffling things about it, however, is that it doesn’t smoothly correct it’s angle. This is going to be really hard to explain, so stay with me. When the camera gets caught against a wall or detects that there’s a problem, it tries to correct itself. That sounds good, right? The problem is that it doesn’t correct by automatically and smoothly moving away from the problem area, it fades to black and re appears where it thinks it should be. This constantly breaks the immersion, as the entire screen goes dark and the camera pops up in a seemingly random location. This became utterly infuriating about an hour from the finale, when I was trying to move the camera to look in the opposite direction, but whenever I turned it, the system would detect that there was a wall withing the camera’s post code and fade to black, returning it to it’s original position. Precision platforming when you can’t see the platforms is a new kind of hell. It also has huge trouble keeping up with the main character, often times lingering on the floor or sky as I was running around off screen trying to wrestle it back onto me. During scripted sections, I’m willing to blame this on myself as I would sometimes run in a way that it hadn’t intended, but during the moments when I’m trying to avoid the sentinel guard things by running back and forth across a room, the camera could at least have the decency to keep my movements on screen. During a sequence towards the end, all of the action was happening off screen as the camera struggled to follow the movements. The kicker though? I wasn’t in control of the sequence. This was a sequence where I wasn’t doing anything, and the camera was dragging behind the action so all I could see was the tail of the beast I was riding.
One of the things that baffles me the most about ‘The Last Guardian,’ is how awful the frame rate is. It almost constantly rests bellow thirty fps, and sometimes there are extended periods where it sits between ten and twenty. The only reason this seems to be happening is because the environments are filled with individually animating physics items. This is the most noticeable outside, where huge patches of grass flow dynamically, and the vines swing realistically in the breeze. All at the expense of the frame rate. It’s clear that Studio Japan decided that the performance was a necessary sacrifice, and that goes against almost every gaming bone in my body. Not targeting 60 fps is acceptable I suppose, but when you’re targeting 30 fps and still manage to have large stretches that can barely make it above 20, you are spitting in the face of gamers. The cherry is placed in this cake, though, during the credits sequence, where short snippets of gameplay are shown as the text rolls down. I remember looking at one sequence in particular and thinking, “Why is this scene running so god damn well here, but when I played the exact same scene myself it ran at about 20 fps?” Then I saw it. There were no individual blades of grass flowing on the floor in this scene. The area that they would have been in was instead a nice, simple but still recognisable, decently detailed grass texture. Not a physics object in sight. “So,” I thought to myself, “They could have had the game run far closer and far more sustained at thirty fps, but decided that individual blades of grass were more important. Thanks guys. You fucked up.
The sacrifice of performance to have good graphics is unfortunately not a new phenomenon, but the problem with the last guardian is that trading off performance should have meant better graphics, but it apparently didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the art direction is pretty good, with impressively imposing towers (That I can’t see because the camera is shit) and ominous structures, but the actually graphics themselves range from decent to laughably bad. Some textures look quite nice, even though they probably still could be confused for being from a high end PS3 era game, but there are some other textures that look as if they were ripped right out of a play station 2 game. I went and had a look at a rock wall texture in a mine shaft and was amazed by how low quality it was. Everything around it was pretty good, but this rock wall looked like the floor texture from “Lego Rock Raiders” (How fucking good was that game though, right?). I wouldn’t normally care about these sorts of things, but when I look at ‘The Last Guardian’ and when I think about how it was delayed from being a PS3 era game, I start to wonder what was so taxing that it needed the power of the PS4. Ahhh, of course. Grass physics.
Let me get onto the only reason why I didn’t microwave this game at around the half way point. The story is, thankfully, pretty good, and I’m not ashamed to admit that at the end I genuinely started to tear up. Like full on eyes starting to get watery and all that. The ending is just so touching. No spoilers, no spoilers, no spoilers.
I’m not even sure why I got teary at the ending. I mean, it’s really well done and cements how attached to Trico I was, but I’m really not sure how I became attached to him, considering only two hours earlier I had yelled a particularly rude expression at him that I can’t repeat here under fear that the RSPCA will hunt me down and slit my throat. His AI flips from being brilliant to being infuriating at a disappointing frequency. Much was made during the lead up to the game’s release about how Trico would act like a real beast, sometimes disregarding your commands in favour of doing something else, not unlike a dog. Lest not beat around the bush here. It was cute the maybe first time that Trico didn’t listen to my commands in favour of looking around, but at the 200th time, it had lost all of it’s endearing qualities. I also get the feeling that the excuse that he would act like an animal was given to cover up the fact that his AI actually isn’t particularly clever. I only found myself bonding with him during the heavily scripted sequences where one of us saves the other or during the cut scenes, because during the gameplay moments the flaws with his coding really become apparent sometimes. I like that he sometimes solves a puzzle himself, looking up at a ledge that he can jump to and waiting for you to get on so he can take you with him, I makes him feel like a smarter creature, but when the AI fucks up, it really fucks up. Moments where Trico starts walking in and out of a doorway for upwards of 30 seconds whilst I try in vein to command him to jump up to the surface I am on show the holes in his coding. These problems seem to come up more and more as the game progresses. I actually think that this isn’t a result of the problems being more frequent, it’s just that the moments in which they can happen become more frequent. The slower areas where Trico finds a large open area to run around in and frolic in the sun all but vanish towards the end, replaced with semi-controllable climbing sequences in which all you do is try to tell Trico where you want him to jump.
Actually, speaking of climbing sequences, lets talk about puzzles, which normally would be implying that more than one exists. OK, that’s harsh, there are, in honestly, like 3 different types of puzzle that are repeated verbatim. There’s the puzzle where you find a lever to open a gate so Trico can come with you, there’s the puzzle where you use Trico to get to a lever so Trico can come with you, and there’s the puzzle where you sit on Trico and tell him where to jump, although whether he actually jumps is left up the the whims of the gods, and he will more likely just whine that he can’t find anything to jump on, whilst looking directly at the surface that I wan’t him to jump on… because the AI recognises that it’s where he needs to go… But doesn’t at the same time… What? Whilst there are a few other puzzles that are mixed in with these, they are either very brief, or tightly scripted. There is one other type I suppose, in which Trico will be tired and hungry, so you have to go and find him one of those food barrels. When this first happened I was like, “Hey, that’s kind of cute.” Then it happened again, and again. And again. I realised what this was. Not an attempt to make Trico appear more lifelike, but a means of padding out the game. How does a game spend 7 years in development, and still need to be padded out? There are so many moments in which what I’m doing doesn’t feel like I’m making any progression. This may be caused by the fact that I had no idea what the end goal I was aiming for was. There was a line at the beginning where the main character said he needed to return to his village, but all he seems to really want to do is beat his tower climbing record. Eventually I stopped trying to solve the puzzles myself, instead turning to a guide, because for the most part, they’re really terribly designed. Even though they all have subtle differences, they mostly boil down to finding the one part of the huge environment that you’re meant to interact with. I’m not joking. This is the most egregious when the solution to a puzzle was drag a box to a certain, unmarked, un remarkable part of a partially flooded room, stand on top of it, tell Trico to jump, move to another unmarked spot, then tell him to jump again. I’m not shitting you. How anyone could have solved that without a guide is beyond me. And it’s just one of many moments when the solutions to puzzles are either just finding something to interact with in the environment that’s hidden away in a massive room, or to stand in a specific place that you have no reason to stand in so the game can continue. This isn’t really a spoiler, but during the end, to initiate a cut scene, I had to stand in one, seemingly random, place for a few seconds, then right after the cut scene ended, to start the next one I had to stand in another seemingly random place. WHO THOUGHT THAT THIS WAS GOOD GAME DESIGN? the game is just littered with questionable design choices.
It’s telling that the first trophy I unlocked for this game was for watching Trico defecate, having caught him in an embarrassing moment. If I didn’t know how god damn long this game took to make, I would make a joke about how it’s kind of a metaphor for how it ended up. It feels almost like they needed to get the game out, but didn’t want me to actually play it out of embarrassment, realising that it was kind of shit. Fine, fine, that’s harsh. The game isn’t actually shit. Well, not only shit. I really want to like the game, and in some ways, I do. I really started to like Trico, and it’s impressive how lifelike some of his animations and actions are, but for every moment like that, there are a dozen situations in which Trico’s AI fucks up, or the camera has an emotional breakdown because you had the nerve to try and move it, or the controls have you climbing the wrong way across something, or there’s a puzzle with a solution that only makes sense to the person who designed it. I know it’s a bit of a cliche, but when I left ‘The Last Guardian,’ I wasn’t angry so much as I was disappointed and tired. It’s truly depressing that even with such a long development time, such a huge base of fans supporting them, and such powerful hardware, all they managed to do was push out a thoroughly mediocre game that verges on actually being pretty bad. It’s only saving grace is the story and, by association, the relationship between Trico and the protagonist. I thought that would be enough for me, and if the rest of the game had just been mediocre, it might have been. Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of the game is actually, kind of bad. The game will still sell well, so hopefully Studio Japan makes amends with their next game, whatever that is.
Just a final note, I used VG24/7 for my guide, and whilst I’m thankful for it’s help in my journey as I would probably still be stuck in that flooded room without them, I felt it was my duty, neigh, my calling, to say that their guide was actually very unhelpful. I’m pretty sure that at one point it told me that to get to the top of a tower, I needed to get to the top of the tower. Thanks. Still, it shouldn’t be understated just how much I eventually decided to rely on the guide after I realised that the puzzles weren’t going to get any better. I’m definitely willing to say that because the game has only just been released, it’s impressive that a full guide exists already (even though they likely got a copy of the game sent to them early). So, thank you for your help VG24/7.
Y, Though? 