Thyroid

The Last Guardian

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I didn't tell anyone here to 100% every game. Just the ones that are their favorite or if they are perfect. I 100% and finish a lot of games but not everything. That's also different story and often I'm telling friends what they can skip because of my compulsion and NOT actually telling them to follow my footsteps. But my very favorite games, I do everything and always have.

I didn't finish the time attack stuff in SotC, I may go back one day, but I've got other stuff to play. I do think it's only if you really think it's that amazing that you need to experience every portion of the game as it was designed.

The Yoshi's Island and MGS3 are a good example of rewarding those who really love the game. Lots of people do MGS non lethal speed runs and many people finish. Yoshi's Island is pretty much about getting all that stuff, otherwise why would they show you a results screen and your progress to the secret levels. Those parts are well designed in both of those games. Yoshi's Island is basically a perfect example of how to do that correctly, because you are mostly getting a much more boring game if you just ignore a lot of the secrets and little puzzles along the way. Zeldas, especially Majora's Mask make good use of this sort of thing.

If you love Yoshi's Island or Majora's Mask and you didn't get everything, considering those games consistantly take completion into account, I will not think you actually love that game as much as you may think. And I don't really run into this anyway, since usually when I meet someone who loves Majora's Mask or Yoshi's Island in particular, they pretty much did it all anyway and there's so much more to talk about it in particular.

It comes down to if a designer is going to put in a bunch of stuff to 100% the game, it needs to be just as well designed as every other thing in the game. If it is not, they deserved to be criticized for it. Putting time attacks in a game with super janky controls and gravity issues isn't very good design, barring a bunch of the other junk I have issues with that isn't even beyond the main game.

And yeah anyone who has played a game in and out whether through speed runs, hard mode, exploring the full world, getting all the crap, etc. I will take their opinion much more seriously over someone who casually floated from save point to save point until they finished the game at the most basic level. The people in the other category are the people that write guides to this stuff, who tend to discuss the games at length, make fan sites, and then tend to be the ones we always take their opinions of. You don't go to Gamefaqs to get a two paragraph text file if you need help or tips.

Comparing any of this to films doesn't make sense. Commentary, extras, references, that is not part of a game. If you are really into a story game, I would hope you'd try to pick the whole story apart if you love it greatly, but games are so much more complicated than that.

 

There's still design philosophy when it comes to putting layers on top of the basic game. A designer shouldn't just badly copy and paste a bunch of collectables and say it's fine because you don't have to get them. That kind of laziness should be taken into account. There's something that separates a good and bad time attack, hard mode, collectable, and overworld. The craftsmanship should be shown throughout and taken into account even if 90% of the players may not see it all. All of this layered stuff in Shadow of the Colossus is just fundamentally broken.

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Dedicating yourself to seeing every nook and cranny is great and cool but people can go too far in defense of a game they got into. I find it insufferable when people who are really in to a game criticize those who didn't enjoy it when played at a more surface level because they "just didn't get it" or they "didn't play the 20 hour side-quest that makes everything click into place". I for one adore Shadow of the Colossus, and will happily call it one of my favorite games, but have no desire to play any extra content past the title-to-credit experience.

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If we consider that some of the staff of thatgamecompany founded another studio (Funomena), then we have three possibly great games in the making. However, Keita Takahashi (the guy from Katamari Damacy) is in this studio, so I wouldn't expect anything similar to Journey.

 

Wow, did Keita Takahashi come back to games? I thought he was off designing playground equipment and painting and being endearingly odd.

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If you love Yoshi's Island or Majora's Mask and you didn't get everything, considering those games consistantly take completion into account, I will not think you actually love that game as much as you may think.

I'm sorry, but this reads to me like you're saying, "My way of playing games is the only true way of playing games." It seems really narrow minded and gatekeepery and I disagree in more ways than I can type on my phone.

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Funny I don't remember writing that.

 

Plus all any of this does is factor in what I think about what you think as a guy on a forum saying things to strangers. I'm not the gatekeeper of anything. I'm not expecting you or anyone here to to change your mind, but instead explaining my thought process.

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Wow, did Keita Takahashi come back to games? I thought he was off designing playground equipment and painting and being endearingly odd.

 

He did! He consulted on Glitch and he's working on a game that, if I recall correctly, is about holding hands.

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He did! He consulted on Glitch and he's working on a game that, if I recall correctly, is about holding hands.

It's called Wattam and it also involves blowing up!

 

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OOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FUUUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKK MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

 

 

OH GOD I'M LITERALLY CRYING RIGHT NOW

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It honestly didn't look great. Was pretty disappointed with what was shown.

 

On the other hand, it looked real, which is more than I can say about most debut trailers.

 

...This counted as a debut trailer, right? I mean... it's been at least four hundred years?

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Really it looked exactly like the PS3 version, the move to PS4 was probably purely for marketing purposes. But yeah that was real gameplay and I think it could be really good.

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I'm not really talking about the graphics. They looked fine. Just everything about it felt off, just a little bit, enough to make me wonder what's the point.

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It honestly didn't look great. Was pretty disappointed with what was shown.

 

On the other hand, it looked real, which is more than I can say about most debut trailers.

 

...This counted as a debut trailer, right? I mean... it's been at least four hundred years?

 

that gameplay looked excruciatingly slow

 

It looked like Ico with a giant dogbird instead of Yorda. That is exactly what I want.

 

I may need to go back on my promise to myself not to buy a new console.

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Yeah I suppose so. Ico is really dang good. It might just be that I need to get my hands on it!

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that gameplay looked excruciatingly slow

 

 

It's an environmental puzzler. 

 

Yep. The gameplay just shows why Team Ico games are so unique. 

 

 

The subtlety of this game is pretty great, no overdone soundtrack, just you, the wind, and the "catbird" and his reactions with you figuring out what to do. It's awesome how you must figure that those purple structures are bad for Trico based only on his face and reactions, which looked really subtle and well done. The animation is top notch. 

 

People might feel weird about it because E3 trailers are usually packed of action, so it might feel weird to see a game so quiet and introspective, but this is exactly what I wanted from this game. 

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The slow motion parts held for sooooo long.

 

But I thought the details in the stuff they showed were fantastic. The animation for the kid running down the stairs in particular I thought was tremendous.

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Yeah that animation is very well done-- ueda is one of the few visual artists who leads expensive game projects, they are really nuanced and heartfelt productions.

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They're also expensive 'cause they take decades!

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I will say that it's still unclear how all that will work systemically. Ueda's games, while heavily reliant on atmosphere, are also really reliant on clean, simple systems. Everything in that trailer felt very scripted - or at least, looked too good to be entirely systems-driven. So who knows how this will actually play. It still looks awesome though.

 

Also, Twig, we joke about how long this game's been in development, but it's still just been 8 years and only 6 since it was first publicly shown. That's a lot, certainly, but not any more outrageous than the other big vaporware titles.

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I'm way into this. Less of that Shadow of the Colossus battle stuff and more of the solving puzzles, area traversal style platformer.

 

My hope is that it's really good AND ACTUALLY CONTROLS WELL FOR ONCE and so I can get a much better game than Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, which I feel like tried to steal Last Guardian's fire by sating a need for a game that would probably never come out. Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom had a lot more Zelda type elements, but it was a good game with neat ideas, although often times very clumsy.

 

Hopefully the 2016 release year still stays confirmed. I'm guessing things were probably scrapped at some point and started over. Maybe like how Ico was for Playstation, the first.

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