#its the only time in the series where the gameplay style itself portrays the emotions of the scene and its SO GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!! AUAGGHH

[razzafrazzle]

[image description: a redraw of official headshot art of sebastian debeste from ace attorney, drawn in a more rounded and brighter style. sebastian is looking smugly at the viewer and smiling. the original official art is on the left, and the redraw is on the right. the redraw is surrounded by doodles of sparkles. end id]

been rewatching a playthough of aai 2 and god. sebastian is so good. not a thought behind those eyes. hes an absolute crusty small dog of a boy. thus, i am dedicating my first drawing of 2023 to he <3

[bozzworld]

Is the Last Guardian Art?

I just finished playing the Last Guardian on PS4 by Fumito Ueda. I am going to start with this: The Last Guardian is one of the most important games of this century and you should, nay must, play it. I warn you now, it is not an easy game and it doesn’t do much to lead you through it. It is also often challenging from a technical point of view. Those of you who know me well know that I rarely finish games all the way through, often getting bored or distracted by some new shiny object, so the fact I finished it is unusual in itself. Its doubly unusual because the game can be frustrating to the point of distraction and I generally have no patience for games that expect you to make very precise jumps or movements but have cameras that not only don’t help, actively work against you.  But enough ranting, first some history.

Fumito Ueda was born in Tasuno, Japan. After graduating from the Osaka University of Arts, and a brief stint as an artist, he decided to pursue video games. He worked as as animator for some time before joining Sony as a first party developer. He created two games prior to the Last Guardian - Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, which were both critical successes if not huge sellers. In 2007, he announced he was working on a new game, the Last Guardian, for the newly announce Playstation 3 (yes 3, not 4). After 10 years, development hell, and many changes (Ueda left Sony to start his own team but was contracted back to finish Guardian) Sony finally released The Last Guardian on the Playstation 4 in autumn 2016. While it was much praised, it was also criticized because some felt the gameplay style dated and questioned how much the creature of the title would frustrate players. Ueda believes in “design by subtraction”, effectively removing anything that is not in direct support of the story and gameplay. This leads to a sense of isolation that runs across all of his games but it is often a shared sense - the player feels as though they are experiencing the isolation with the characters rather than as the characters. This is no more true than in Guardian where it seems like everything in the world is against you (including the engine but more on that later).

The Last Guardian is a story, told in retrospect of a young boys relationship with the creature of the title, “Trico”. Trico is an Griffin-like amalgam of several animal archetypes: it has the body of a bird and feathers and bird like claws (although it is 4 legged not 2). Its head has a combination of cat and bird features with big cat ears as well as horns. The interesting thing about building a creature this way, rather than say, just building a cat or dog, is that you can make the creature do any kind of animation and never suffer the “well a cat would never shake like that”. Guardian uses this to great effect, with Trico sometimes itching itself in the way a puppy would, or rolling its head when you pet it. When the boy first meets Trico they have a somewhat adversarial relationship but over time, they develop a bond that is well developed, and portrayed by the game. The challenge with Trico is as the game progresses, you start to learn commands you can give Trico to do certain things such as jump. And he does them. Sometimes! And that’s the problem - Trico definitely starts off feeling puppyish and while he does mature and control gets a little easier, there is a certain random sense to his nature that makes him .....challenging .... (full disclosure, several bad words and phrases were uttered in Trico’s direction during the game). Whether this is by design or accident, it is sometimes incredibly frustrating when the creature does something entirely opposite to what you intended.

The art direction of Guardian feels a little ... erratic. It is undeniably beautiful in places, particularly outdoors, where the sense of scale can be breathtaking (and vertigo-inducing if you are so inclined) and the use of light and shade is often very effective. The creature is also well done, although I feel that there could have been more fidelity to the feathers that cover his body. But there are also places where, frankly, it looks like ass. There are strange choices in some of the textures and the main character the you play looks like something from a PS2 era game not a modern PS4 game. Some of these problems are exasperated by a camera system that borders on the preposterous at times. I have worked on a lot of 3D games and I get it: camera systems are one of the hardest things to get right, especially in games with claustrophobic interiors where the camera frequently bumps up against the scenery its trying to navigate through. There are multiple ways of dealing with these problems but there is never a single solution and the camera programmer and director inevitably end up making a series of compromises that never quite work in all situations,  Having said that, the camera system in Guardians is frequently unusable to the point of making even lining up for even simple maneuvers an act of faith.  In most games there are points where the game has to use a preprogrammed camera movement either to telegraph some important event or to deal with a difficult positioning task. While Guardian does some of that, it does not do enough, often feels misguided when it does and sometimes completely misses the point of what its trying to do.

However, despite all of this, I have to tell you that Guardian is a truly beautiful game. There are moments of huge pathos and a couple of moments where the true grandeur of the game shines through its limitations. There are two or three moments of true bravado and pathos, where the emotion flows out of the game. Despite the limitations and frustrations of the engine, there is always something pulls you on and gives you the “just one more try”. The puzzles in the game are not terribly hard (well, except for one which I wont relay because of spoilers but I’m not sure whether it was a bug in the game or whether the designer truly meant it to happen. If its the former, well shit happens, if its the latter, bad designer BAD). There were only a couple of places where I got truly stuck and they were either due to having to back track or a reliance on a physics engine that has some .... foibles. The game does rely on backtracking but it doesn’t often feel like its an excuse to reuse geometry for expediency’s sake as much as a part of the story.

There is no doubt that the Last Guardian is art. True, it is often frustrating, challenging and sometimes just plain annoying but true art doesn’t have to be perfect. Art conveys the artist’s thoughts and feelings but there is no requirement for it to be accessible or even understandable. It conveys a sense of something to the viewer and that will often be different for each person. It feels like this a far more personal work for Ueda although it definitely shares thematic elements with his other two games. There is a joy here, the joy of a young child interacting with a pet and forming a bond that can last a life time. I hope it doesn't take him 10 years to do his next game.