Now that I finally played it, it is a bit of an experience because its one of the weirdest game I've ever played. The game has no instruction. There's no hud aside when it shows the controls and subtitles. Without YouTube, I don't think I would have finished this. The game takes a lot of patience. I knew Trico wasn't easy to control, but sometimes it took a while before it did something correctly. I also just reminded the game is short, so I also took my time because of it but I still finished it in 5 days.
The best parts of the game were the heights segments, whenever the boy was about to fall and Trico caught him, I felt the adrenaline rush. Those moments were wow. The bond between the boy and Trico is the best thing about the game. My criticisms: I'm not sure this has HD, though when I played this, the screen automatically switches to HD, so I guess it is. Some of the textures could have been better. The camera sometimes was off especially when riding Trico. There were also these "floating feathers bug" towards the end of the game. Even if I already restarted, it was there in the gameplay, cutscenes and credits. I don't like the enemies, there was no variety.
I'm not totally satisfied with how this ended. I'm fine with how short it is, but the boy and Trico didn't have a proper goodbye. I feel like their time together was cut short and things just happened so fast towards the end. Then the post credits scene cut to the boy already as an adult. I'm not a fan how it ended. But proper goodbyes don't really happen in the real world so in a way I can see why they made that way.
This is definitely not better than Shadow of the Colossus. I played that back in the ps2. I bought it only because of the cover. Those were the days, when the cover was the selling point for me. I had no idea, it was such a critically acclaimed game. It ended up as one of my favorite ps2 games. I bought the remake as well. That game led me to following The Last Guardian up to when it was released (as seen in my 2017 posts). I watched an entire walk through of the Last Guardian many years ago but I already forgot most of it. Before the pandemic, I tried to buy a physical copy of this but I couldn't find one. Since then I didn't bother. Then this year, I was looking through the shelves in the store, to see if something would interest me and I saw The Last Guardian. It was a long time coming. Now Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian are side by side in my cabinet.
Its also weird that the creator of the game still hasn't released anything after this, not even a teaser. Its odd that his games take so much time to make. I'm intrigued to know if his next game would act like as a spiritual successor of The Last Guardian.