The Last Guardian has been in development for almost ten years. But as time has worn on, it has gone from well-respected and eagerly awaited game to a punch line when discussing if it will ever, ever release. There was once a time when The Last Guardian was one of the most hotly-anticipated games in Sony’s wheelhouse, riding high on its impressive pedigree and history. This is why they do not tend to age well the things that were once groundbreaking and revolutionary have since become commonplace to the point where they’re aggressively ordinary, and attempting to play things from a bygone generation with the knowledge and expectations we have today often yields disappointing results.Įnter The Last Guardian, the long-awaited game created by the same team behind Shadow of the Colossus and Ico.
Games are a patchwork in many ways they take old ideas and standards, mix them in with a handful of new ones, and hopefully create something familiar enough for the basic concepts to be understood, but complex enough to feel like its own unique creation. In games, we iterate and we iterate, and we iterate again. Films like Seven Samurai, Casablanca, and even the venerable Citizen Kane, though not the flashiest as compared to the films of today, still hold an inherent value and contain lessons yet to be mined by modern filmmakers. The difference, however, is that the films we revere as “classics” still largely hold up today with the same majesty they had in their prime. It could be argued certain aspects of film do this certainly, there are scripts that have handled cultural issues with a gross amount of insensitivity, and filmmaking technology as a whole has vastly increased from its humble beginnings at the turn of the 20th century. Games are unique to themselves in that they are one of the only mediums whose past predecessors were once the height of technological improvement, but have not aged well enough to retain their longtime value. But it is commentary for a much larger issue, and central for understanding my concern over The Last Guardian: it has not aged well, which hurts it in the eyes of today. This is not to say Shadow of the Colossus no longer has significance in fact, I’d argue a lot of the things we see in action/adventure games now were heavily influenced by Shadow of the Colossus’ design.
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