Note: The Last Guardian: An Extraordinary Story” Facts Compilationhttps://landsoflightanddark.tumblr.com/post/173720194643/the-last-guardian-an-extraordinary-story-facts
“The Last Guardian: An Extraordinary Story” Facts Compilation
This post is a compilation of all the most important and interesting facts from Parts 1, 2,3,4, and 5 of my posts gathering everything I learned from An Extraordinary Story, the official companion book to the game that serves as strategy guide, artbook, and an extended interview with the devs.
There was a lot of minutia in the book about the game’s areas or its development, but I figured people would be most interested in seeing the facts about the lore or other things of interest, so I decided to make this post. Let’s start with the most important fact of all.
- The blue balls that Trico poops are not the same as the slime it covers the boy with when it spits him out. Yes, that’s said in the book.
- According to the book the boy was NOT fated to be taken by Trico or defeat the Master or anything like that, but then later he is referred to like he was a “chosen one” before he was taken, so mixed messages there.
- The armored soldiers are called “Yoroi”, which is just armor in Japanese! The white tower is called the Sentinel Tower!
- The Yoroi are controlled by the “Core” (Master) through their horns, though Ueda says they do have some consciousness of their own.
- The Environment Art Director won’t comment on how the crater the Nest is inside was formed other than that it’s “A landform you wouldn’t see that much of on the globe.”
- The key-shaped patches of grass seen throughout the game are actually supposed to be beds for the Tricos.
- The big important quote from Ueda: “ I’m not saying that it connects The Last Guardian and Shadow, directly, but the spring (pool) is a thing like the Mirror, and the underside of the Mirror could be connected to the world on the other side of the pool. Another world could exist on the other side, though…Maybe it’s a world of things that haven’t happened, or maybe it is the world of Shadow…You think about what it means.”
- The mirror room is NOT under the white tower but the “door” that seems sealed up in the final game does connect to it.
- The full list of animals that can be found in the game: Fish, lizards, doves, bats, butterflies, moths, and small worm-like bugs that are very hard to see.
-The Master controls the Tricos through their horns, not the helmets. Trico was kept in the cave so his horns could grow back. The cage in the antenna room is so the Tricos can’t fly away.
-The Yoroi have the same designs on their armor as many of the blocks in the environment, which shows that they have common origins. So, that might disprove the theory that the entire Nest except the white stone structures was built before the Master and Yoroi ever got there.
- Another important Ueda quote: “It’s not just the barrels themselves that matter for the tricos. The chosen ones aren’t transformed into barrels or anything, but into something much more important - and as a byproduct, the stuff that’s in the barrels is produced. It is probably related to the mist that comes from the pots, and the energy that powers the Yoroi. But at first I was thinking about the sarcophagus in the mirror room, and that energy being used to revive or bring to life whatever is in it.”
- Ueda on the possibility that others have walked the same footsteps as the protagonists in his games:
“It’s a system. In ICO for example, there’s a sense that it hasn’t been just this protagonist, but others who have been brought there [e.g. the shadow creatures]. In Shadow of the Colossus, I’m not sure how many heroes there have been, but in my image of the world there’s a sense of time having stopped. In The Last Guardian, probably many Trico creatures have been hit by lightning and have spit up children and have been left to recover - it’s not as rare a happening as you might think. But maybe, if there is this repetition, it’s the player who causes the disruption, who steps in and helps Ico save Yorda, who takes down all of the Colossi.”
Does that explain the title, maybe?
- The blue doors are all portals that lead to the Master’s room. Here’s a screenshot of that.
- The “Evil” Trico is the opposite gender from our Trico. It lacks fully developed wings so it can’t fly.
- There are a lot of villages in the world of The Last Guardian. A person living in one will only see a Trico attack maybe twice in their life. The villagers fear Tricos but also view them as “a god of sorts.”
- Not only does an entire day apparently pass during the segment where Trico is injured and he in the boy sleep, but “the entire journey takes place over several days, perhaps even a week, or a month.” A month!? If it was really supposed to take that long I might have liked seeing more evidence of time passing, though I can understand how that would have taken a lot more time to design all these different lighting affects and they might not have wanted to break up the story like that.
- Believe it or not the “Master is an alien” theory is addressed in this book. “The team admits that the crater was designed to have a sci-fi bent to it, and that Ueda was on a similar wavelength when coming up with the concepts, but that doesn’t mean that’s what is going on in the game,” the author writes.
- Confirmed: Every Trico can shoot lightning from its tail, but only our Trico does because the mirror is “paired” with it at the beginning of the game. The pairing, along with the antennas and references to the controller buttons, are part of this technology theme that’s brought up a few times in the book.
- Turns out, the chosen are not just limited to children. Ueda tells the authors that the Tricos may take older people as well.
- When Tricos swallow people, the tattoos start spreading “as if the human has been transformed into some different type of substance.”
- The other Tricos all have different faces and feather colors/patterns from ours.
- Ueda on the possibility of Trico dying:
“That option was never there. I came up with the plot knowing I wanted an ending other than a death.”
- Both the author’s words and the storyboards confirm that there are MULTIPLE baby Trico in the final scene - the storyboards show 2.
- Ueda on the game’s title:
“Who the last guardian is is more of a mystery, but you can come up with a lot of ideas. The title itself has been around for a long time from the American side, and it was eventually decided to keep it that way. We had thought to make it closer to the Japanese title, but the Americans asked for a simpler title and so it became The Last Guardian.”
So….Did Ueda even come up with that title…?
If this post interested you, and you don’t plan on getting the book, I’d recommend reading the actual posts because there are a lot of very interesting things about the gameplay and development that didn’t make it into this post. This post is actually a little shorter than the average length of one of the real posts, I would say.