The Last Guardian, the latest game by ICO and Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda, has finally come out. It’s taken a long time – nine years to be exact, but for the sake of this review I’m just going say a decade.

Story

The Last Guardian is a story about a giant creature named Trico and you, the player, a young unnamed boy. The story is told back as you in the future retelling about how you met Trico when you were younger. It is an emotional journey full of heart, which we don’t see much nowadays, not like this anyway. I have decided not to talk much about the story, as this is one that you should go into not knowing much to best experience it, just like Uncharted 4 or The Last Of Us. As for the basics, you wake up after being unconscious and find strange tattoos on you which you didn’t have before. You also see a giant creature (Trico) who is tied up by a chain and who doesn’t trust you, that is until you feed it and help free it from the chain.

Gameplay

At its heart, The Last Guardian is a platformer and puzzle game. However, the interaction with Trico makes it something more. At the start of the game Trico doesn’t trust you, but will begin to as you try and escape the castle, which is the setting of the game. You and Trico start to bond. The AI controlling Trico is what makes the gameplay really special, because he really acts like a live animal. Sometimes he will listen to you, and sometimes he won’t. This will probably annoy a lot of people, so you do have to have patience. Another instance that make Trico feel like a live animal is that when you walk away from it and it’s unable to follow, it will start to lie down and cry out for you. Transversely, when it’s happy it will roll around in the water.

Control-wise, the game feels like a PlayStation 3 game. The controls don’t fight against you like in ICO or Shadow of the Colossus (which I didn’t mind personally), but the camera can be an issue, especially in small corners or when Trico is right near you. There are some frame rate drops, but by the time I was able to play the game (it came out in Ireland and the UK a few days after the US and Europe) Sony had already released an update addressing the issue. So I haven’t experienced that much of a FPS drop, but it is still noticeable. Combat in the game is also done by Trico. Your character is unable to fight so you have to avoid being captured while Trico protects you.

Graphics

The Last Guardian was originally a PlayStation 3 game due to come out in 2011. However, because of development issues, the game was moved to PlayStation 4, which also put development of the game behind schedule even more as they had to move the engine and everything they had already completed to the new system. Because of the art style used, The Last Guardian still looks like a great game, especially Trico, whose individual feathers you can see. If a part of its body gets wet, such as its tail, only that part will be wet.

You can definitely tell this is a game that has been in development for a long time. However, because of the art style and some impressive technology, The Last Guardian definitely holds up.  If you’re playing on the PlayStation 4 Pro, you are able to play at 1080p 30 FPS or 4K 30 FPS, while the original PS4 and PS4 Slim are limited to 1080p 30FPS.

Final Thoughts

The Last Guardian is a game that we don’t see much nowadays. It is full of heart. Your journey with Trico is emotional – you bond with the giant creature as you both help each other escape from the castle in which you are both held captive.

Should The Last Guardian have taken a decade to be created? No it shouldn’t have. However, was it worth the wait? Definitely.

When games are in development for this long, they either are a hit or a miss, there’s no in-between. Thankfully, for me at least, The Last Guardian is a hit. Gorgeous graphics which still hold up pretty nice in 2016, solid gameplay and an emotional journey with Trico are all standout aspects of the game. However, the camera issues and the patience required when Trico won’t listen to you will certainly annoy some people.

While this game won’t sell as well as Uncharted or God of War, it did come in 7th in the UK sales charts, which I think is impressive considering everything the game has gone through in the past decade.

So, should you play The Last Guardian? Yes.

It is a game that, just like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus (it’s spiritual predecessors), show how games can be art and can invoke emotions that you did not think you would be able to feel from a video game.