While that title might imply that I’ll be talking about the surprisingly impressive Where The Wild Things Are movie trailer, Lusipurr.com is not the venue for such discussion until the assumedly horrible liscensed video game tie-in hits stores.
No, instead I wish to weigh in on the recently leaked trailer for Project Trico. While nothing has been officially confirmed yet, the gaming world has pretty much universally accepted that this is the real deal with even reports of gaming journalists confirming that they saw this trailer behind closed doors at last year’s E3. So I’m going to write based on the assumption that this is a legitimate concept trailer for the spiritual follow-up to Shadow of the Colossus and Ico.
Anybody who has read any of my work has likely seen at least one billion drooling references to Shadow of the Colossus in which I sing its praises and defend its glory. So it’s no wonder that I’ve been desperately waiting for over three years for even a taste of Team Ico’s next project.
Well I finally got that taste, and what do I think?
Meh.
For those of you who didn’t click the YouTube link or haven’t seen the trailer, the premise is this: You play a young boy who has befriended a cat-like griffin beast and the two of you skip around a beautiful world exploring carverns and sharing heart-warming moments.
I wish this was still all I knew about the game...
While I can appreciate that Team Ico wants to keep their games fresh, and while bringing in the Cat-bird-mouse is certainly a way to do that, I’m just not convinced that this isn’t a step backward for the series. The game appears to be focused on partnership. The boy uses the creature to reach places he couldn’t normally while the boy seems to find barrels of water for the creature and also use his smaller size to explore certain areas and caverns the creature can’t get to.
My issue is this: while Ico‘s partnership mechanics were innovative and occasionally satisfying, I found them to be primarily more annoying than anything else. Shadow of the Colossus was liberating because you didn’t have to maintain anything or keep track of anyone except yourself and so the game truly progressed at your own pace. The horse was there for the companionship and worked as a partner for some of the colossi battles, but I never had to think “oh crap, have I watered the monster?”. I’m aware that this is just a trailer, and I hope seeing more of the game turns me around, but as it stands, I’m not excited.
What do you guys think of the trailer? The response seems to be overwhelmingly positive from Team Ico fans, so maybe I’m alone with a negative opinion for once in my life. Hopefully E3 shows us more than this apparently year old trailer, but this is all we have to go off of for now, so discuss below!
