The Last Guardian (From Team ICO )

Just as a courtesy heads up, the TLG soundtrack is available for pre-order in a very attractive-looking double vinyl-form right over here.

I'm still amazed that the game is actually coming out this year!

The game is only a week away from release now - December 6th, if you're curious for the date.

And we got a video showing what you'll get if you purchase the collector's edition.

I really, really hope this game lives up to the hype. I usually buy digital, but I think I want to get the physical disk for this one. I also expect this will bet the last in the ICO series, so I also hope that it does answer some questions and ties some things up. I wonder if it takes place between Shadow and Ico.

I'm going to wait for the reviews first. For some reason, my gut is telling me that a lot of people are going to be disappointed, and that it won't have much replay value. So we're probably gonna hear a bunch of people whine that it's $60 price tag is too much for a roughly 20 hour (or less) experience, or something like that.

I doubt it'll be a 20 hour game. Ico wasn't anything like that long (the remaster has a trophy for completing it in less than two hours), and Shadow of the Colossus is considerably shorter than that in terms of the bare minimum you need to do to finish the game.

To be fair a lot of time is spent figuring out the puzzles on a first playthrough. This game has been shown to have puzzles, so it may take a while to get through on the first time. I doubt that there will be any padding from cutscenes.

We still don't know very much about the story or setting yet, do we? Was the boy taken to the ruins as a sacrifice to Trico? One of the trailers shows other Trico's one wearing a mask. Maybe it's where living creatures got turned into Colossi? The bad guys seem to be souls inhabiting suits of armor, which wouldn't be unlike Colossi possessing stone constructs.

The boy does look a lot more like Ico than Wander, but no horns. Hard to tell what time it takes place in.

From what I've seen of the (admittedly highly manipulative) trailers (have yet to own a PS 4 or Xbox One, it seems like something I'd exclusively buy for the PS 4.

On a side note, I saw the 2016 remake of Pete's Dragon (2016), and the mannerisms of Elliot the Dragon somewhat reminded me of the mannerisms of what I saw of the bird dog in clips and trailers of The Last Guardian. Am I the only one?

IS IT GOOD

I'd be skeptical of early reviews myself since many probably will buy into the hype and be disappointed.

But, factor in how much time it takes to figure out the Colossi first time around.

edited 6th Dec '16 7:46:51 AM by Soble

Oh yay we have a thread for this.

I honestly consider ICO to be my favorite video game ever (or at least it's up there), and while I didn't like it as much Shadow of the Colossus was still enjoyable and good. And now we're FINALLY, FINALLY, FINALLY, are getting The Last Gaurdian, and I'm so excited. My dad just needs to hurry up and buy us a PS 4. (C'mon, Valve, Team ICO beat you to the comeback, it's about time you picked up the slack.)

Anyway, in what ways do you guys think (or want) this game to be connected to ICO and Shadow of the Colossus?

Either a prequel to both or a sequel to both.

I'm fine either way.

I plan to get this sometime this week. Best Buy is having a Buy 2 Get 1 Free sale on all PS 4 and Xbox One games this week. I will get this and my two nephews will get the other two games.

I've mostly been looking at the actual content for the reviews rather than the scores for whether or not I'll enjoy it. The general consensus for issues is that there are a decent amount of framerate issues at times and Trico is very, very stubborn, like a real wild animal. Whether the latter is an actual problem or not mostly depends on who's playing.

edited 6th Dec '16 10:05:09 AM by Nap1100

Framerate issues? In a Team Ico game?
But for real, I'm going to cozy up with this after the Christmas madness is over, as long as the story/experience is solid I'll most likely have a wonderful time.

Also, in some bizarre-yet-neatly-perfect coincidence, this and fellow development hell honoree Final Fantasy XV are resting at the exact same score over at Metacritic at the moment.

The framerate issues in Sot C honestly didn't bother me.

I question the worth of a numerical score but even operating by that metric, an 83 on metacritic is pretty respectable.

10/10 GOTY yes I know Phantom Pain did it first

Just finished the game yesterday, and now I have about a dozen WMGs worth of thoughts about the story and setting.

So, the Nest used to have human inhabitants. Not just sacrifices, but people who actually lived there. The sarcophagus with the mirror is a fairly clear sign of this, but there are plenty others. If it was just the tricos, which can fly, and the Master in the valley, there would be no need for all these structures to be human-accessible, which they are, despite many of them being ridiculously dangerous. The armors wouldn't need to be humanoid. They could be insectoid instead, with climbing abilities to help them get around.

And something else about the structures is their size and strength, or lack of it. So many things crumble and break over the course of the game. But these are gigantic constructs. You wouldn't build something like that unless you could be confident that it would stay up for a long, long time. So however these structures were being maintained, magical or otherwise (and it pretty much has to be magic) they obviously are not being maintained now. The central tower is. It's in excellent shape, aside from a few broken grates. But nothing else.

Another interesting feature is the wooden structures, like the rebuilt skyway leading to the central tower. While they are old and crumbling as well, it's clear that they are newer than the broken stone parts of the bridge. And they aren't simple either. They have lots of metal parts, suggesting that whoever built them had the infrastructure needed to produce them, but weren't able to put in the time and effort needed to rebuild them out of heavy stone. Also, stone is really not strong enough to build structures that large without support - magical support, almost certainly. So perhaps the people who built the wooden bridges were short on magic for some reason.

That's some background musing, none of which is directly confirmed, because how could the boy possibly know, but it makes logical sense, I think. So what about the tricos? Well, it seems to me, first of all, that they were selectively bred and domesticated at some point in the past. That would seem obvious, right? But I'm saying that that was separate from the control exerted by the Master. That came later. But being domesticated first would explain why Trico bonded with the boy as quickly as he did.

I think that originally they were ridden by and worked together with people just like the boy. They're well suited to it. Their physiology is extraordinarily robust. And those tails are especially curious. The tricos don't seem to be able to use them on their own. But they do respond to the signal from the mirror, even when their host is unconscious, or they have been completely severed from the body. That smacks of magical modification for the purpose of making them more controllable while still maintaining their strength in combat.

A lot of effort seems to have gone into manipulating and controlling the tricos. The green vapors, the glass eyes, the barrels, and the Master. The barrels seem to be the only thing the tricos eat, though not the only thing they can eat, as evidenced by their survival in the epilogue. Indeed, they seem to go out of their way to preserve the people they abduct, until they get back to the Nest - their ability to do so is another likely artificial adaptation. Perhaps the contents of the barrels are addictive, or some kind of superfood needed to efficiently fuel the tricos' abilities. They seem to have known how to command the tricos' attention and interest super well. But that's not an especially important detail. One thing people have noted is that when bodies are delivered to the central tower, barrels pop out almost immediately, which is an oddly short time for them to be processed. Maybe so, but my suspicion is that there's just a stock of barrels ready for delivery. I think the Master needs part of the offerings for itself, and it gives the rest to the tricos.

So, it should have been made clear where I'm going with this, but it seems that the humans who lived in this valley were warlike, and they used the tricos as battle mounts. And at some point they were wiped out. It's hard to imagine they were defeated militarily. Aside from their insanely strong natural defenses, which would have to be breached by anything other than another airborne force, the damage in the ruins doesn't seem to be extensive enough for that. Realistically, I suppose disease could be another culprit. The population of the valley couldn't have been that large, which would render them vulnerable to a well-adapted infection, especially if they're bringing people in from every direction. But that wouldn't be a very fitting end, would it?

Excuse me for meandering a bit, but I wonder if the tricos were originally used as hunting partners to bring in food from outside the valley. Then they found themselves in situations where they had to defend their human partners from other encroaching forces. But as the culture in the valley grew increasingly advanced and numerous, protected as they were from outside forces, eventually they found a need to start attacking their neighbors. And maybe the tricos, though now known as man-eaters, were so friendly to humans that they objected to being used this way, and this is why the humans of the valley started taking steps to control them more completely. I imagine there being multiple steps in this development, with the final one being the creation of the Master.

The Master is definitely not an alien or anything like that. With the giant cooling fan on top of its tower, the "tron lines" it has, and the multiple layers of defenses that can only easily be opened or defeated using the mirror, a human tool, it was clearly made by the people of the valley. It is a magical AI meant to control and manage the tricos and the magical armors as an absolutely unquestioning military force.

But what happens when you build a Master AI like that? More often than not, it's gonna end up turning on its creators. They may have been the most advanced civilization in their immediate area, but that doesn't mean they had the foresight to predict a robot uprising. This goes back to what I was saying about the wooden structures. I suspect the Master cut off foot access to its tower in an early surprise attack, but the people of the valley still had the materials to build that wooden bridge to it while holding off the tricos with the eyes and such, in an attempt to take back control that was ultimately unsuccessful. And once they were all dead, the Master either had no need to maintain the rest of the structures in the valley, or couldn't.

And here's the last major piece of the puzzle, as I see it. The reason they abduct humans, and go to all the trouble to bring them back alive, is because those people have magical potential. Magic in this setting does not last forever. Whether it's the markings on the boy that render him insensate, or the force holding the stone towers up, it runs out of power sooner or later. And the same thing with the Master. Even before its creation, the people of the valley were probably abducting those with magical potential from outside to fuel their civilization. I can't say I have any direct evidence of the boy having magic, but it would make sense. The boy being chosen was clearly not random, as something was already going on with him in his sleep before Trico arrived. You might say that the village shows no signs of anyone else having magic, but of course they don't. Everyone with the potential has been abducted over the centuries, and now the knowledge has been lost.

So yeah, that's what I think.

Never played ICO but I did play Sot C back in the day and I recall enjoying that, so I got this game on positive reviews on the 31st. I completed it yesterday. Only thing they had was the collectors edition. Some garbage collector somewhere is currently enjoying his new Trico statue, 'cause everything but the game went into the first trash can I crossed paths with on the way home. The game itself may yet follow.

Trico's sounds are annoying and completely ruin the ambience, the hint system is vague and obnoxious, to the point where it would have been better if they had left it out entirely.

It is utterly impossible to control Trico so you're completely at the mercy of the random number god to decide whether you get to complete the game or not. Combine all of that with the lack of a map so I got turned around a lot.

It was a very pretty game but that's all it was. All flash, no substance. 4/10.

Your issues seem more related to the controls and Trico base-breaking AI responces than the game lacking any substance. Those do take you out of the game quite a lot though, with platforming sometimes becoming trial and error sometimes.

edited 3rd Jan '17 3:50:57 AM by UltraWanker

I don't think the barrels are actually part of the humans.

They just seem to be a seperate reward to the creatures for delivering energy to the master.

The best advice I got from Forbes: don't play this game for more than two hours at a time. It's wonderful, but after a while the controls, Trico, and camera get on your nerves.

So... did any of this connect to Shadow of the Colossus?

The whole point of the Team ICO games is that they are connected thematically, not directly.

They're also connected directly in that they're in the same world.

According to the director though they're also ages apart

If there's any connections it's probably through the final boss

edited 4th Jan '17 10:23:41 PM by Ukokira

My personal theory is that the people who created Trico's species and the Master of the Valley where a Magitek based offshoot of the same civilization that imprisoned Dormin and made the colossi (with Trico's kind being originally created with similar methods except mostly flesh and blood)