I'm a huge Ueda/Team ICO/genDESIGN fan, as is probably obvious from my profile pic. While the Last Guardian might be technically the overall weakest of the three games that Ueda and his team have put out in the last 20 years, it's still a one-of-a-kind experience that I recommend enthusiastically to pretty much everyone. Many would rightfully credit the game's animal AI companion, Trico, for much of its unique appeal, and upon revisiting the game on the PS5 (better performance this time around) I'm here to say that I'm still in awe of Trico from a game design standpoint.
It's no surprise that The Last Guardian almost ended up as abandonware, with the team failing to realize this vision on the Playstation 3 hardware originally. Trico is pretty much the reason why we went an entire six-year console generation without a single release from Team ICO, and while that wait for their follow-up to Shadow of the Colossus was painful for me as a fan I can totally understand how it happened. Team ICO has always excelled in melding bespoke animation work with physics/simulation-driven elements to give their games this uniquely grounded and physical feel in motion. The Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus were incredibly ambitious from both a modelling and animation standpoint on the PS2, and Trico is every bit as ambitious as they were, if not more so.
What these pictures don't convey is the equally stellar sound design that went into Trico. Playing with a set of good headphones is revelatory.
The delicate dance of artificial intelligence and inverse kinematics-driven complex animation that powers Trico is truly something to behold, even almost five years after its release as we begin to grow accustomed to the increased power of next-gen consoles. While not everyone jived with Trico's sometimes inconsistent or unpredictable behavior, I don't see how anyone can walk away from TLG unimpressed with Trico as a work of in-game character design and function. The way Trico intelligently and naturally navigates so many different situations within both the cramped and wide-open areas of TLG's ruined setting is unmatched by any other game to date in my eyes.
The boy and environmental design are also extremely refined and very distinctively the work of Ueda and Co.
In order for Trico to "work" as an AI companion that the player could bond with and believe in, Team ICO had to pull out all of the stops to realize the character to the level of complexity that we see in the final release. And this thread is just my attempt to bring some attention back to Trico and TLG as a whole for its achievements, regardless of whether or not its technical flaws put some off to the game on original hardware.
It's no surprise that The Last Guardian almost ended up as abandonware, with the team failing to realize this vision on the Playstation 3 hardware originally. Trico is pretty much the reason why we went an entire six-year console generation without a single release from Team ICO, and while that wait for their follow-up to Shadow of the Colossus was painful for me as a fan I can totally understand how it happened. Team ICO has always excelled in melding bespoke animation work with physics/simulation-driven elements to give their games this uniquely grounded and physical feel in motion. The Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus were incredibly ambitious from both a modelling and animation standpoint on the PS2, and Trico is every bit as ambitious as they were, if not more so.
What these pictures don't convey is the equally stellar sound design that went into Trico. Playing with a set of good headphones is revelatory.
The delicate dance of artificial intelligence and inverse kinematics-driven complex animation that powers Trico is truly something to behold, even almost five years after its release as we begin to grow accustomed to the increased power of next-gen consoles. While not everyone jived with Trico's sometimes inconsistent or unpredictable behavior, I don't see how anyone can walk away from TLG unimpressed with Trico as a work of in-game character design and function. The way Trico intelligently and naturally navigates so many different situations within both the cramped and wide-open areas of TLG's ruined setting is unmatched by any other game to date in my eyes.
The boy and environmental design are also extremely refined and very distinctively the work of Ueda and Co.
In order for Trico to "work" as an AI companion that the player could bond with and believe in, Team ICO had to pull out all of the stops to realize the character to the level of complexity that we see in the final release. And this thread is just my attempt to bring some attention back to Trico and TLG as a whole for its achievements, regardless of whether or not its technical flaws put some off to the game on original hardware.
