While some parts of its narrative had me emotionally invested in the relationship between boy and beast, constantly fighting against the game's broken mechanics left me unimpressed. My frustrations with Trico often ignoring my commands made interacting with the world more difficult and time-consuming than I wanted it to be. There are moments in The Last Guardian with potential, but ultimately, it's more flawed than the authentic experience I was hoping for.
Other puzzles involve you weighing your mirages and their resistance to a certain element, or are tied to the dungeon’s interior, such as using the glaciers in a snowy mountain terrain to skate through a room with an ice floor. Each area in the over thirty-hour narrative is colourful and dungeons are well-structured. World design also continues the game’s nostalgic theme by basing some of its towns on iconic locations from mainline games, albeit renaming them but keeping a majority of their details.
Developer Spiders’ Technomancer had the potential to be a great role playing experience if it weren’t for its many problems. The combat, while plentiful and entertaining when using technomancy, feels stiff with an over reliance on dodging and ineffective stance system.