"The Last Guardian" will make you bawl your heart out and you know it.
 

New-ish trailer. Graphics are looking nicer (although someone seems to have gotten a bit bloom-happy). My only complaint is that I liked the design on Trico's muzzle better in the proof-of-concept trailer.

There seems to be more information available on it now too. Apparently a lot of the gameplay will focus on just interacting with Trico and getting it to do the things you need.

Is Trico the official name for the griffin?

I believe so, but I'm basing this purely on Wikipedia, so who the hell even knows? It's just easier than continuing to say "that cat-bird-fish thing."

"The name of the creature, "Trico" (トリコ, Toriko?), can be taken to mean "prisoner" (toriko), "baby bird" (tori no kodomo), or a mashup of "bird" (tori) and "cat" (neko).[7]"

It looks...

honestly like crap. Who the Hell thought it would be a good idea to put a photorealistic gryphon next to a cel-shaded kid with a style ripped straight from Spirited Away and an idiotic amount of Bloom? o_O

I mean, not to diss the game or anything, but it just strikes me as bass-ackwards to have the fantastic creature look so real and the realistic things in the game to look so animated.

Love*Hate (not really)
 

Me!

Blues, I hearby rescind anything I've ever said nice about you, ever (technically I don't know if I've made direct comments about you, so, take that)! Also, you've just become the enemy of all that's good! (That's not me, just in case that wasn't clear.)

Seriously, though, the style actually works very well for me. Granted there is a slight oddness or disconnect between the brighter lit kid and Trico, but - and I'm assuming you've played the previous two games - it works very, very well for the world of ICO. They've always had a thing with light, shadows, and unusual glows/darkness. Really, this is the way the team presents their humans. I think if they'd gone for a photorealistic kid it would have ruined his innocence-look, and possibly made him look unfortunately adult or freakish (the uncanny valley may not be science, but it often holds water). On the other hand, a "cell-shaded" as you put it, dragon would look much stranger in an Ico-based environment compared to the other stuff else we've seen there. Think of what the colossi would have looked like if they were so presented! I think it adds a depth to the creature to better measure the character's location in-game, as well as look friggin' gorgeous. If it's not your taste, that's understandible, but man alive is it mine. I also think the difference is more pronounced than previously because the graphics have improved. Visible hints of this style have always been there, however. Oh, and the character - although a bit more 'grecian' in look - also fits perfectly with the characters from the rest of the series, right down to color-palette and clothing style (Ico's box-designe was horrible, I mean the in-game stuff).

Was this different from the one shown at E3? It may just be me, but I couldn't tell much difference. And interacting with Trico sounds like a perfect Team ICO concept to design a game around.

That's a wierd thing. I'm not a veternary-person-thing by any means, but I'm pretty darn certain that muzzle is of a dog, not a cat. Especially the way the eyes are set above it, and the tears/eye-goop that seems to be in some trailers. Which reminds me, one thing I've noticed is it looks like Trico is slowly getting more and more beaten up throughout the game, but I can't be sure. Were those feathers askew or actual spears embedded in his flesh when he was swimming, for instance?

Don't bash the trailer... just focus your anger on the fact that it's 90% likely that by the end of the game Trico dies or something like that... I belive we all learned our lessons with Shadow of the Colossus.

Er... um... you see...
 

Er... I didn't and, while I'm making good progress every third month or so that I do play it for two hours (I'm at around four hours so far and have gotten just about a third of the colossi... MAN that world is large*), I know neither what this statement means nor wish for people to clarify without spoilers.

*Also, I missed the ONE FRIGGIN' LINE OF DIALOGUE (thanks to a cat on the controller and a brother-in-law waking up simultaneously) that explained what to do to find the colossi. So, being the logical thing to do, I mounted my horse and proceeded to track as far into the other side of the wilderness as I possibly could before realizing "dur-hey, the sword turns into a rather focused beam in ONE PARTICULAR DIRECTION, GEE MAYBE I SHOULD FOLLOW IT. I apologize for the caps, however, having discovered I spent an hour doing nothing because of two simultaneous events causing me to miss a single line, I was a bit miffed. Especially without much opportunity for playing time in the first place... *sniff* :(

Arrows. One of the things you're supposed to have to do throughout the game is fix Trico up when it gets injured.

Also Blues is wrong and smells bad. Except for the bit about bloom, but I'm kind of guessing they amped it up a bit in that trailer for visibility due to it being meant for a room full of people.

Seriously though, Blues; take a damn shower.

HELLO THERE, SPOILERS!

Hey Bit, gonna quote a post for ya.

Do you know what you did in the post immediately following that one?

Please don't do that.

I'll have you know I showered this morning, thank you very much. :p

Actually, no, I haven't played other Ico games. I HAVE seen a ton of footage of them and liked they style (or at least just Ico). I also thought the style was kept a bit more consistent (in Ico). This just doesn't hold the same mesh for me. See, from what I saw of Ico, it was very much a parallel between dark and light, a symbolism for innocence, but the overall style was consistent. Even in just this here, the knight that got trashed was photorealistic. I can understand having the human kid be more cartoony. It works. In fact, I was fully willing to accept it when he was running through the tunnel.

It's. Just! BLOOM! >U

Seriously, I could understand trying to make the kid ethereal, as odd a choice it is for a guy who is probably going to have to worry about his voice changing soon, but there's just a stark visual contrast that I'm not liking in this one. It doesn't even have the softness that the girl had in Ico. It's just blinding, and it makes it look inconsistent. Maybe if they toned down the bloom, I wouldn't feel that way. It's not his design I dislike. It's just how utterly stark the contrast is, where in Ico, there was some amount of blending, that helped make everything fit. There's no blending here.

Maybe they'll fix it up a bit. I dunno. Right now, though, I'm going to express my reservation on the style without shame, because I honestly think they could integrate things better visually, since they did so before.




Edit: Re-watching it more closely, some spots are better than others, but I just can't shake the impression that light works differently for the kid than the rest of the world in ways that sometimes completely disregard his placement in it. The kid isn't realistically shadowed, but I'm starting to think that's just the style of it. It just bugs me when the kid is absolutely glowing when one would think some parts of things would be blocking the light.