Ueda: The Last Guardian Uses Mechanics From Shadow of the Colossus and ICO

It was just under a month ago when some snippets of an interview between Fumito Ueda and Edge came to light, with Ueda explaining how he was “terribly sorry” for making people wait so long to get The Last Guardian.

Today, the full interview was published by Edge, with Ueda revealing why his games always have emotional themes, while also detailing how The Last Guardian borrows from Shadow of the Colossus and ICO:

When I started working on ICO, I didn’t set out to make such an emotional game; it just happened naturally. Whether or not I aim to make something emotional, it inevitably becomes so. I wanted to make a game where multiple characters onscreen weren’t fighting each other, but rather you could touch them directly. With this in mind, and also taking into consideration the hardware specification at that time and the skills of the team, the best way to represent that idea seemed to be holding hands. And as the team’s skills increased, I introduced the idea of ‘clinging’ as an extension of that hand connection in [Shadow of the Colossus].

Then, rather than invent a new mechanic, we started production of The Last Guardian to make use of the mechanics we had created so far. To create a system that lets you hold hands or grab onto a gigantic creature and move around, we had to fuse technology, mechanics and design in the closest harmony possible. There are lots of things [that I’d like to improve], but it would become endless, so I try not to think about that. The way I see it, that was the limit of what I could do at the time.

Sticking with Shadow of the Colossus, when the eight scrapped Colossi were brought up, Ueda talked about how “the map in the game is designed to house 16 Colossi,” so if they had added those extra eight, “It would be a completely different map if we’d included all 24.” Ultimately, they chose the 16 best Colossi, a decision that came about halfway through the development process.

Which game do you think we’ll see first, Agent or The Last Guardian? Let us know in the comments below.

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