The Large Man-Eating Eagle: TLG Secrets

In a series of posts I will try to analyze every little secret and detail of the game. I will treat this a collaborative effort, using as a source the many smart people who have been searching the game since it was released. Here I will try to put every discovery in order, making it more accessible for casual readers as time passes. I will also try to put the links for the source of everything accounted here.

I’ll mostly talk about the finished game. To see the details of the 10-years development of the game check out Nomad’s excellent post.

Note: please finish the game before reading any of this! Spoilers ahead.

Part 1 – The initial video

The first thing we see in the game it’s the mirror, buried in the ground of the village after the events of the end of the game. For more about the village, click here. For more about the mirror, click here. A kid shows up above the mirror…

The Name

Then the name appears. The name of the game has a bit of a history that goes back to the days of Shadow of the Colossus. This is Fumito Ueda’s third game, after Ico and SOTC.

Right when Ico was finished, the studio started to work on its next project, which was going to be SOTC. However “In the first stages of development, "Wander to Kyozō" [SOTC] was called "Nico," short for "Next Ico." However, "Nico" was nothing more than a temporary project name and it was clear from the beginning that the title would change. (Ueda Fumihito).

Then the day came that they started to work on The Last Guardian. Project Trico was the name for the game's working title, which is a combination of Tri and Ico (third Ico).

As development continued it was revealed that the name for the western release would be The Last Guardian, a more commercial name that would hopefully attract more players than “Trico”. You see, Ico had really few sales, and Ueda partially blames the name for it. That’s why SOTC had a different name too.

Still, TLG had a different name for its Japanese release: Hitokui no Ōwashi Trico (literally "Trico the Large Man-Eating Eagle") so the original name was not completely lost for all players.

The name Trico is also a pun with its Japanese pronunciation Toriko: Toriko is the Japanese word for "prisoner"; possibly given during the initial predicament. Toriko is also a combination of the Japanese words tori (bird) and neko (cat) and also has the suffix -ko which can refer to a child or a baby.

The illustrations

Now we see a series of illustrations of animals and insects.

User Black0 on Reddit identified the source of this drawings: they were created by the engraver Matthaeus Merian for various “historiae naturalis” books he made. They’re dated around 1650. Here’s a book-game comparison:

User VirtualCalrissian on Reddit made screenshots of every animal in the loading screen and where you can find them in the books. He also gave links to check the books online!

You can check the screenshots here and read the books here and here. It’s worth noting that once you start the game you can see more illustrations that the ones shown at the beginning of the game. The loading screen depicts them randomly, but if you’re lucky you can see some rare ones like this whale over here, which was shared by the official GENdesign twitter as a “secret”:

Of course, the final Trico illustration was made especially for the game :)

The runes

Once the intro ends, you see a “death screen” or “rune screen”

Ueda himself designed these symbols (read here).

Brian Davidson noticed here that they reassembled the buttons of the controller. The buttons you press correspond to the runes that disappear. And if there are no runes which correspond to the button you press, some other random rune(s) will disappear instead, and this is how it's possible to clear the runes without pressing all of the appropriate buttons.

The boy and the language

Now we see the boy, whose name has not yet been revealed, and we hear the language for the first time.

The markings in the boy’s body were also designed by Ueda (read here). In the same interview Ueda said: "The boy does have a name, but we just don't use the name in the subtitles. At the end, when the boy returns to the village, the villagers call his name but there's no caption in the ending so it's not apparent in the game what his name is." If someone could decipher the game's language, at least some words, we could be able to get the name.

Here we also hear the voice of the boy as an adult. At the end of the game the adult-boy meets a couple of kids that are curious about the mirror, so it’s pretty plausible that the game is the story the boy is telling to the other kids. And that’s why we hear so much narration. I put together every piece of narration and added the missing bits so we could see a possible version of the boy’s tale. Click here to read it!

Regarding the language we hear: Japanese players here have confirmed that the language in TLG is the same that in SOTC and Yorda's: It’s Japanese spelled in Romanji (japanese kanji spelled with English letters), spelled backwards. For example when you give Trico the Square button order the boy says “ikego” wich is backwards “kogeki” wich is the japanese word for “Attack!” I made a detailed analysis here.

The costume

In 19th May of 2009 a trailer for the game was released. On it we could see a very different, less developed version of the boy. The 2nd June of 2009 an updated trailer was shown where the boy had mostly the same costume he’d wear in the final game.

After you finish the game for the first time, you’ll be able to unlock more costumes. The more barrels you give to Trico, the more costumes you can use. BwolfTheWolf Did a nice video showcasing the different outfits.