The Last Guardian is a Masterpiece
[ This piece contains some spoilers ] Here’s a game made by my favorite designer, Fumito Ueda, 11 years in the making. He made (It’s stupid to say any ONE person “made” a game since there’s usually a giant team and most of them are indispensable in making it happen, but that’s the parlance.) some of my favorite and very seminal, influential games: ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. These games were groundbreaking for several reasons. One reason was something called “design by subtraction”, nicely articulated here. In the early 2000’s console games were getting more and more complex, demanding and using all the buttons on the controller, competing with each other to be the game with the most features and mechanics. Ueda, an art student with no game design history came onto the scene and wanted to do something different. Instead of breadth, he went for depth. He decided on a core mechanic that was both unique, and quietly subversive. I’d go so far as to c