The Last Guardian: Fumito Ueda's quest for epic minimalism

When the Japanese game designer Fumito Ueda was a child, he loved to capture and care for wild animals. He was obsessed with the way they moved; and later as a young game designer he imported a copy of the Amiga classic Lemmings, seeing in it something other than a colourful puzzler. “I sensed life on the TV screen for the first time in my life,” he said.

Since then, he has become famous for games that explore humanity and companionship. After joining Sony Japan’s development studio in 1997, he oversaw two of the most fascinating and beautiful action adventures of the PlayStation 2 era: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. These doleful, reflective titles, with their hazy visuals and vast silences, showed us new ways to tell stories and invoke emotions through games. The moment in Ico where the eponymous lead character takes the hand of Yorda, the princess he seeks to rescue from an evil queen, has become one of the great images of the medium.

But then, after the wonderful Shadow of the Colossus – a game that brought themes of loss, grief and the fundamental importance of friendship to the standard monster hunting archetype – came the wilderness years. A game codenamed Project Trico, about the relationship between a boy and a giant griffin-like monster, was mentioned, and then officially announced as The Last Guardian at E3 in 2009. Then years of uncertainty as the project shifted from PS3 to PS4, and Ueda announced his separation from Sony Japan.

Six years later at E3 2015, Sony began its hugely nostalgic press conference with a revelation: The Last Guardian was definitely in production for PS4. We now know that it is a joint project between Sony Japan and a new studio, Gen Design, formed by members of Ueda’s old Team Ico group. The release date is a tentative 2016. There is still much work to be done. But you get the feeling that Sony Computer Entertainment chief Shuhei Yoshida, always a fan of Ueda’s work, will do whatever it takes to push this through. It is happening.

In a quiet meeting room, above the maelstrom of E3’s main halls, Fumito Ueda is showing off the latest build of the game. At the beginning of the short demo, we meet the lead character, a little boy who has been kidnapped (“under mysterious circumstances,” explains Ueda, cryptically) and left in the ruins of a vast stone city. Here he meets a giant creature, Trico, and the two, we’re told, will embark on a journey of friendship.

As The Last Guardian world appears on the large cinema screen, it is unmistakably the work of Ueda. We’re in a beautiful but ruined chamber, the intricately carved stone pillars cracked and crumbling, the paving stones punctured with weeds. The light is hazy, the air filled with dust. Pigeons gather and peck at each other in darkened corners, colourful butterflies flutter above. The atmosphere is pure Ico: beauty, solitude and silence.

But then Ueda guides the boy into another room and we see Trico, lying still and despondent on the stone floor. Reflecting some of the earliest concept art from the game, he has clearly been attacked. There are two spears protruding from his back, and when the boy climbs up to pull them out, Trico yelps in pain.

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This creature is glorious. Vast and feathery, but with a sad-eyed canine face, it seems to be the culmination of Ueda’s childhood interest in animals. During the demo he explains that Trico is inspired by family pets – dogs, cats, birds – because he wanted players to develop the same sort of affinity for Trico as they would for the creatures they look after in their own homes. Clearly, there is a communication system for giving orders to this giant – the boy can call for him, and enact actions like jumping, to tell Trico what to do.

But Ueda was also keen to give this giant pet its own stubbornness and intelligence. “It is based on pets, and people think of their pets as cute, so Trico is cute,” he explains. “But it is also a wild animal, and sometimes even with household pets, you don’t have total control over them. That’s part of the design.”

We see an element of this in the demo. The boy needs to reach a balcony, high up on the wall in order to escape the chamber. He orders Trico to reach up to the ledge with its front legs; the creature does as he’s told, but as the boy attempts to climb up his “pet” to reach the higher level, Trico gets back down again. He needs to be encouraged, once again, to get up on his hind legs and form the bridge to the platform. “Sometimes when you’ve taught your pet a trick, you invite your friends around to show them, but he won’t do it,” says Ueda. “Trico is like that.”

The scene is important for two reasons. It shows that this is very much the game that Team Ico was making all those years ago. Screenshots released in 2009 seem to show this very sequence. But now, Trico is rendered with much more detail and character. The glossy feathers ripple across his body, catching the light as he moves, and his beautiful, globe-like eyes, his little movements, the way he watches the boy wherever he goes, these are animations filled with life and authenticity. Uedo wants us to think of Trico as our own pet, and when we see its head bob upwards with concern when the boy climbs high or gets close to an edge, it is almost heartbreakingly resonant.

The sense of formative cooperation between the two continues throughout the rest of the demo. Jumping down into a new room, the boy finds that Trico’s access is barred by a cell door, so he must find and pull a lever to let the animal through. As in Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Ueda says that players have to read the landscape in order to progress – there are few hints or directions.

Then suddenly, they’re both out on to a ledge and the light from outside, bursts across the screen momentarily blinding us. Then we’re in the vast mountainous arena seen in Sony’s E3 press demo; an ancient city, built into the rock, a spectacular huddle of vast circular towers reaching high above, and interconnected with arched walkways that suspend above a vast chasm. Ueda explains how he often uses height to symbolise universal human fears. “It shows the psycholgical stress that the player has to overcome,” he says. “It also shows the vulnerability of the little boy.”

To reach one part of a broken wooden catwalk, the boy makes a jumping motion, ordering Trico to go on ahead. Trico leaps a gap and lands on the platform, and the boy jumps after him; in a moment of slow-motion tension, the boy seems to fall far short, but then Trico leans forward and catches his friend, pulling him up to safety. A similar thing happens later, as the walkways begin to collapse – the boy makes a jump toward his companion, but this time trico can’t catch him in his mouth. Instead, at the last moment, he curls down his tale and the boy catches hold.

It is beautiful and frightening, the atmosphere accompanied and enhanced by a rush of symphonic music. But Ueda stresses that these aren’t cinematic cut-scenes: this is gameplay. As with his previous titles, Ueda’s desire is to bring the player into the narrative, the moments of drama are emergent and personal; the worlds are vast but quiet and understated. He calls his approach “design through subtraction”, chipping away at superfluous detail until the heart of the thing is clear. His stories are about epic minimalism. The grandeur of even the smallest tokens of love. Two hands joining together. A boy removing an spear.

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Next, there is a simple puzzle where the player must push a large wooden cage along its tracks and over the edge of the precipice, but this sets in motion a destructive sequence as the fragile landing begins to collapse. The two characters rush for a building and leap across to it, the boy on Trico’s back. Trico grasps for a ledge, hanging onto the side of a stone wall, and the boy must climb up him, onto the ledge and find a way to help his friend haul himself up too. Finally, the two are safe, standing together on a balcony, Trico pecking at his feathers, the boy looking out over the collection of jutting buildings. “Everything you see is explorable,” says Ueda, perfectly timing his comment as the camera pans out to show the scale of the ruins.

And this is all we’ll see for now. We’re promised more information about the story later, perhaps at Gamescom, or Paris Games Week, or maybe at the Tokyo Game Show. There are concerns that we’re still seeing elements of the adventure that we were seeing in 2009 – but then perhaps that is part of the emerging marketing plan. Ueda’s games are about hope and vulnerability, and about how desire and ambition can mislead us. Perhaps what Ueda has learned from the last six years is that game development is like those animals he caught as a child - it is never something entirely under his control. So best to go cautiously.

The lights go up in the demo room; there is a warm ripple of applause and then we file out into the long crowded hallways of the Los Angeles convention centre. Downstairs there are many hundreds of games telling their stories of revenge and honour, many of them doing it extremely well. But none of them do it quite like Ueda, with that sense of intimate sadness, that sense that life and friendship are brittle gifts far too easily lost or wasted on spurious escapades.