#gen design

It's some dude (gender neutral) with a mask who climbs on top of some gigantic robot, goes on top of its head and has it detach, taking flight to avoid some kind of massive storm approaching. It's like a cross between Dormin's darkness and space debris as seen on the rings of Saturn/an asteroid belt. The head and its occupant are however quickly taken away by the storm itself and that's where the trailer ends. Some have speculated that this might already be a gameplay loop on its own, but – given the sheer amount of setpieces displayed by The Last Guardian – I'm inclined to think the exact opposite. My hopes are as follows: not only is this not representative of the final gameplay loop, but this is literally just the game's intro, or something.

Check this out: what if it's like Shadow of the Colossus, wherein perhaps there's a repeating gameplay loop of sorts that focuses heavily on exploration (of some deeper, fuller world than that of SotC – or maybe something even emptier, better conveyed through more powerful technology), but with the added narrative thing from The Last Guardian thrown in for good measure. Sort of à la Death Stranding when it actually starts gaining steam, in a way, but with the added Ueda thing where everything is melancholy and faraway and stunningly silent and meditative. Which is actually why I called this series a set of meditations, of all things – these are games that invite a level of thought that doesn't necessarily take the usual steps that Aristotle-based logic – for lack of a better word that isn't "Western", which one could see as sort of a cop-out in this scenario – would deem indispensable.

Such an approach, for starters, would explain the use of English in the spoken bits of the game. I've been playing Outer Wilds lately (thank you @alexswordsman for insisting that I give it a shot – you were right all along) and see, now that's a game that sounds like a solid peer to what I hope this one big ass robot game turns out to be. The idea is that the so-called plot of the game may be lived entirely in retrospect, but keeping the usual cryptic approach that Ueda and the team seem to favor in their storytelling. So there's this dude (gender neutral) who has to repair their robot, or somehow traverse a landscape, and in the meantime they come to learn… something, I guess, about who was here before? Or maybe just who was hit the hardest by that debris storm from the trailer, mere hours ago? Who knows, not me, I'm just speculating because I have way too much free time on my hands. Would love to hear you guys' thoughts on the matter. Gender neutral, of course.

I realize I'm still trying to think of Ueda as a creative, after all of these years, in one of two ways:

he's doing his usual thing, and he's thinking within his own box.

he's looking out to other developers in attempts to make a mishmash of random cool titles that might have interesting elements.

The problem with both of these lines of thought is that it makes no sense to close off one or the other. I can't shake the feeling that there will be, simultaneously, more and less than what I've discussed above. Again, this entire post is nothing more than a bunch of speculation and opinions piled together into a trenchcoat, but I'm still feeling way too up in the air about this. The one thing I'm sure of is, I am really excited about this. My best hope for this is not that it finds its market niche, or its "target audience", or any of that BMA crap. I just hope it's a good Ueda game, one that strikes emotional chords with the same grace and poise and elegance as the others do.

Now for another robot song, and it's the last one, I swear.