Headscratchers / The Last Guardian

• Trico will devastate any guards it comes in contact with, but the few times you run into another of it's species it's basically owned easily. Is that supposed to be indicative of the other Trico having more power from mind control, your Trico being the 'runt' of the group, or just that he can't bring himself to harm another of his kind since he knows they're not attacking of their own free will?
  • TBH all the beasts our Trico fights are wearing full armour and helmets that give them a massive advantage when it comes to protecting themselves. Plus, the tricos at the end had the advantage of numbers. It's also worth nothing that the dark trico is confirmed in the guide/art book to be the opposite gender of our trico, so it's also possible that it simply had a size advantage due to sexual dimorphism. It's not confirmed whether or not our trico is the male or the female, but since tricos are based on cats and dogs (generally males are bigger) and raptors (generally females are bigger), it really could go either way.
  • It’s most likely the last point. The game very heavily implies that neither Trico and the rest of his/her species are inherently malevolent, and are, despite appearances (and how the Master uses them), inquisitive, highly intelligent, gentle creatures. It’s not out of the question, therefore, that our Trico does remember what he/she did while under mind-control, and knows that the armored Tricos are still under it’s effects.
• After Trico kidnaps you and makes his way back to The Nest, he is struck by lightning and crash-lands. In the next scene, we see a group of the living armours carrying him to the location where the game starts. It gives the impression that they are giving him a funeral, but one of the first tasks is to free Trico from his chains. If they assumed he was dead, why did they chain him up? And if they assumed he was alive, why did they carry him off to such a remote location?
  • Trico's horns seem to part of the mind control and the lightning strike freed Trico by destroying the horns. So it is possible that they are locking Trico up until it re-grows its horns and the Master of the Valley has full control over Trico again.
  • Not sure if that's it since Trico's horns are completely grown back by the end of the game and the Master can't control them even when they're right next to him. My guess is they knew the Master couldn't control them again so the knights locked Trico in that cave till they eventually would've starved to death.
  • Later in the game Trico actually manages to resist the Master's control by will alone. My guess is that they chained Trico again expecting they would fall in line again, and not actually considering resistance.
  • The signal used to control the trico is probably the same thing as the text that pops up on screen whenever an enemy tries to paralyze the boy, so Trico should be able to resist it just like the boy can. Taking control of them would require a strong enough signal to overcome their will. So perhaps the Master takes control over them when they're very young and then never lets go, and it would have taken control of Trico as soon as its horns were regrown, while it was weak from not being fed.
• Is the Boy an orphan? Why was he sleeping in the same room with the other children in his village?
  • Possibly the villagers are well acquainted with beast raids on their village, so they keep the children together for safety.
    • In this case, why do you keep them at the top of a tower when tricos fly? It would make more sense to keep them in a bunker.
  • Or maybe there's a tradition where the children aren't raised by the biological parents, but a nanny (the old woman in the scene). But the one above seems more plausible.
• How exactly did things play out with the shield buried in the dirt? Did the boy find it as a child, and inadvertently summon Trico? Or did Trico show up on his own, drawn by whatever the man in that cutscene was referring to when he said "go be with the chosen ones"? (The boy was sleeping restlessly even before Trico showed up, so something was going on with him. His selection was not just random.) And in the latter case, was the shield in the dirt then the same shield the boy had the whole game, which was dropped by Trico in the end and not found until decades later?
  • I thought it was pretty obviously the shield you pick up in the game. The boy didn't have it prior to waking up in the cave. It was lost in the flight back, and when the kids find it, they show it to the now-grown boy and he's relating his tale. Hence why all of the speech during the game is in flashback form.
• Is Trico the name of the individual or the species?
  • The boy is rather quick to name the creature Trico, and if you listen close to his older narration he appears to say "turiko" whenever mentioning "the creature", so it would appear their entire species is indeed named this.
• At the end of the game you find out that the Tricos feed human children to this device that spits out barrels for them to eat. That device was destroyed when the tower collapsed. Does this mean the Tricos are without a food source?
  • It does raise the question whether the creatures were created somehow for the sole purpose of the Master of the Valley, or if they were normal, free creatures once which the Master Computer-like thing figured out how to control. In the latter's case they would likely just go back to eating smaller animals and/or plants again, while in the former's case it should be possible for them to learn how to do so anyway.
    • Unless the food is somehow magical or pre-processed and tricos aren't capable of digesting anything else (that fetal slime coat the humans are regurgitated in would suggest a highly unusual crop, at least). However, it's possible the barrels are just addictive or delicious; note that, thanks to Gameplay and Story Segregation, Trico can lay down and refuse to move until you feed him even if you've been finding every barrel along the way, whereas other times he goes extremely long stretches without a snack. That seems more like the behavior of a very stubborn individual who's decided he wants his barrels, and you can't make him move until he gets some, rather than an animal who's genuinely hungry. Kind of like a dog who only remembers what "come" means when you've got a treat and develops a sudden case of deafness when a squirrel runs by.
• The ending. The Boy says he couldn't do anything but say the words to tell Trico to leave. Um, if you're awake enough to say, "Trico, get out of here," then you're also awake enough to say "Stop, Trico's my friend; he saved me." Even if you can't shout so the whole village can hear you, you can tell the guy who's holding you in his arms, and he can shout at everyone else to knock it off with the spears. They were standing right there; it's not like they rushed him off to the village healer or anything.
  • Rule of Drama. The boy could also have been afraid that they wouldn't believe him.
  • The villagers are full of fear, and would likely think they knew better than a child, or turn against him for associating with a trico.