Honest Game Trailer Takes Aim At The Last Guardian

One of the most highly anticipated games of the entire generation is a game that was in development for an entire decade... The Last Guardian. It finally released last year for the PlayStation 4 and was generally well received by critics and gamers. However, that didn't stop it from getting honest treatment from an Honest Trailer.

The Smosh Games YouTube channel posted up the three and a half minute Honest Trailer for Team ICO's The Last Guardian. The trailer goes through some of the basic motions of what you do in the game, such as petting Trico to increase your bond with it, feeding it barrels to get it to follow your commands, and directing it around while trying to keep it focused from being distracted by birds, butterflies or other things that usually distract giant bird-dog cat-chickens.

They praise The Last Guardian for Trico's lifelike animations -- which in my own personal opinion I must say are the best animal animations I've seen in a video game ever. The animation tree blending for Trico are just out of this world. You don't see where he clicks into a new pose or where an animation cuts off to start anew; it's all extremely smooth and very well done.

Smosh does, however, take shots at the little boy's animations, where his procedural adjustments can sometimes render him flailing around spasmodically. It happens usually when he gets caught on objects or in between tight areas. However, the procedural animations for the boy combined with his amazing voiceover work all help to make the bond between the boy and Trico in The Last Guardian absolutely top notch.

The boy confidently telling Trico to leap up to a ledge only for the momentum to cause the boy to fall off Trico's head and barely hang on to the bird-dog creature results in the boy yelping out for his life. The actual gameplay elements blended together where it was tough to tell the game from the cinematics at times, which was a real testament to how mechanically adept Team ICO made the gameplay in The Last Guardian.

The Honest Trailer also brings up something that a lot of people did complain about in The Last Guardian: It has no waypoints. There is no HUD in the game, so you literally have to find your way around manually. I thought this was both creative and bold, and liked that the difficulty in the game was understanding where you had to get to or how to get there, with no hand-holding whatsoever.

The trailer does poke fun at people who complained about all the linear navpoints in games like Call of Duty only to find themselves in the complete opposite situation in The Last Guardian where there's nothing to guide you at all.

The Honest Trailer rounds out by taking a complete dump on Duke Nukem Forever since both games (along with Final Fantasy XV) were vaporware for the longest. The Last Guardian completes the trifecta of infamous vaporware that actually managed to make it to the market over the last 15 years. Although, as mentioned in the video, at least The Last Guardian managed to turn out to be a decent game, something that can't be said about Duke Nukem Forever.

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.