"The Last Guardian" was released today exclusively on PS4. For almost a decade, players have been waiting for one of the most important "author video games". The wait has two immediate consequences. If, on the one hand, it creates progressively anxiety and expectations that will lead to an emotional build up. On the other hand, it can quickly lead to withdrawal and exasperation, creating an irreversible split.
In the case of "The Last Guardian", the nine years of developing, coupled with the seven years since its announcement, have made this wait something truly embarrassing for all fans. To understand the importance of this eagerness for The Last Guardian, which was released today, people must realize the purpose of its creator, the Japanese Fumito Ueda, and his creative team, Team Ico.
With only two games in the curriculum before "The Last Guardian" (not taking into account the two he previously worked as an animator, a few years after he finished college), Ueda is for many the pinnacle of the artistic definition of "author video game" . If the first game with its authorial name, Ico (whose name prefixes its team) is undoubtedly one of the great works of the 10th Art, Shadow of the Colossus. Its second game, is consensually one of the best games ever.
Ueda builds "The Last Guardian" with a recurring thread: relationships, and the emotional pain and complexity attached to them. In Ico, players control a mysterious boy in the long journey of rescue of a girl called Yorda of certain death to the cruelty of its mother, simply denominated by 'The Queen'. However, this is not the typical story of the princess-at-the-top-of-the-tower. The whole path of rescue is done in two, in which the subtlety of the touch between the two characters. He controlled by players and the companion always present at his side - and the way the union of both functions to overcome any ordeal .
Ico's value in the history of video games does not focus on a mechanical or design issue, but rather on how Ueda managed to create and develop a relationship between two strangers who need each other. He was constructing a world in video games. Furthermore, the narrative aesthetic of "The Last Guardian", that has become his signature subtractive design, in which the whole plot and the connections and development of the few characters is made progressively by the interconnection between the two, and not by interferences of the narrative.
