Japan Studio is housed within a nondescript office block a few minutes walk from Shinagawa Station in Tokyo’s Minato ward. At present there’s no signage on the building itself, just a small panel on the sidewalk outside, and the inside proves to be just as low-key. Aside from a reception area with trophies and posters on the walls, this is a restrained, neutral space.
The lack of character is very much at odds with the studio’s output over the years, which has been driven – in large part – by vibrant art and ideas. Japan Studio, after all, created (and co-created) PlayStation exclusives like Ape Escape, Ico, LocoRoco, Echochrome, Tokyo Jungle and Puppeteer. It became known as a go-to for first party quirkiness; for the games that made PlayStation platforms different.
Ico was a breath of fresh air.
The studio is still negotiating its place in the modern-day landscape of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, however. It saw significant restructuring in 2012, and the last few years have been uneven; Bloodborne, a co-production with From Software, was a huge hit, while in-house platformer Knack was a huge disappointment. The studio’s Vita co-productions, such as Soul Sacrifice and Freedom Wars, sadly amounted to little more than the last gasps of a dying platform.
There’s plenty to be excited about for Japan Studio, however, as its current slate includes Gravity Rush 2, The Tomorrow Children, The Playroom VR, and the title I’ve come to Tokyo to see - one of the most long-anticipated projects in gaming history – The Last Guardian.
Much like the tale told within it, The Last Guardian is the stuff of legend. In development now for around ten years, it has become almost a fable – a mythical project that gamers want to believe in, but aren’t too sure whether or not they’re deluding themselves.
After years of silence, it was re-revealed at last year’s E3 on PS4, and the demo did a lot to reassure fans. Now that we’re well into 2016 – The Last Guardian’s latest release window – it’s time for the first proper hands-on and deep dive into the game.
A literal deep dive in one area.
Before we go any further – yes, The Last Guardian is a real game (you can read my hands-on impressions here), and yes, its creative director Fumito Ueda and his team “are working very hard to release the game by the end of the year.”
“I’ve never been on a game that has taken so long to develop,” he says when I ask how it feels to – hopefully - have the finish line in sight, “so a part of me feels sad but a part of me feels like I just want to complete it. I have mixed feelings.”
I’ve never been on a game that has taken so long to develop, so a part of me feels sad but a part of me feels like I just want to complete it.
Ueda is friendly, but our two long conversations leave me with more questions than answers. I’m most interested in Ueda the artist, Ueda the world builder and Ueda the game designer, but his responses to questions about aesthetics or design are oddly utilitarian or amount to polite refusals.
He’s obviously wary of giving anything away, which I can understand, given how enigmatic and open to interpretation his works tend to be, but – as is often the case with interviews through translators – the flow of conversation is more like shouting at someone on the other side of a ravine and hoping to catch the echoes of their response than it is a natural back and forth that establishes rapport and supports nuance.
And then there’s the casual comment someone makes that Ueda hasn’t slept for two days – working with his team to prep the code for the hands-on, I presume.
Five of our favourite things from the hands-on.
It’s something of an understatement to say that The Last Guardian has not had a conventional development cycle. It was first formally unveiled at E3 2009 on PlayStation 3 via a hugely impressive trailer that we later found out was “specced up” for the occasion. “We took it frame by frame and made it run smoothly,” Shuhei Yoshida told Eurogamer last year. A “making of” video was shown at Tokyo Game Show (TGS) later in the year, but a second trailer didn’t emerge until TGS in 2010.
The original 2009 trailer.
In March 2011 members of the press were invited to see a demo of the game, but by April it was officially delayed, skipping both E3 and TGS and missing its 2011 release window. Behind the scenes “progress became super slow,” Yoshida said in a later interview. “There were lots of technical issues. The game was not performing at speed… It was clear that the team had to make a compromise in terms of features.”
In December 2011 it was confirmed that The Last Guardian’s creative driving force Fumito Ueda was no longer a Sony employee and was instead working on the game in a contract capacity. A statement provided to Gamasutra said he was "committed to completing" the project.
When it was decided that the game would be transitioned to PS4 it was difficult for me to accept.
The game wasn’t seen at all in 2012, but this was the year that development was shifted across to PS4 within the studio. “When it was decided that the game would be transitioned to PS4 it was difficult for me to accept,” Ueda tells me. “Now that I look back at it, the PS3 market has become smaller at this point and now I think the PS4 market is the main market so I am happy to have this title as a PS4 exclusive title, but when the decision was first made I had some difficulty and I felt a little disappointed because I wanted to release this game earlier.”
Two more years went by with next to no information on the game. Behind the scenes things shifted again in 2014, when Fumito Ueda and Jinji Horagai, the lead programmer of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, set up an external studio called genDESIGN. From this point on development would be split between Japan Studio and genDESIGN.
“At genDESIGN we are mainly in charge of the direction of the art, game design and animations,” Ueda says of the arrangement. “At Japan Studio they’re in charge of the implementation and the testing… so I do the creative direction, and then the implementation is done at Japan Studio, and then I look at it and we go back and forth.”
“Initially I was worried about whether this kind of structure would work out,” he admits, “but when I look back at it now I think it’s gone very well. The way we have it right now is very easy for me to work, and if there’s an opportunity in the future where I can do it in a similar way I would definitely want to.”
All of which brings us to last year’s E3, when The Last Guardian was re-introduced as a PS4 title, and a release window of 2016 set – more than ten years since the release of Ueda’s last opus, Shadow of the Colossus.
The stunning PS4 re-reveal.
“We thought that Ico and Shadow of the Colossus took a long time to develop,” Ueda reflects, “so one of the missions of The Last Guardian was that we wanted to create something good in a short period of time, so the fact that it took a long time to develop was completely unexpected for me.”
“It would be nice to talk about all the struggles we’ve been through,” Ueda admits, “but there’s a lot of things that we can’t say yet.”
Looking back at the development process.
Ueda and his team, then, set out for a sprint, but have ended up running a marathon. From everything I hear, it seems as though implementation has been the biggest challenge, as opposed to having an unrealistic feature set or the project changing scope. Indeed, whether The Last Guardian could have run smoothly on PS3 is very much open to debate, particularly given the technical issues that people like Shuhei Yoshida have mentioned.
Ueda also strikes me as someone with exacting standards; a very clear vision that he wants to execute, right down to small details. He’s at pains to point out that The Last Guardian has not changed significantly in pursuit of that vision either. “We’ve always been true to the initial vision or visuals that we wanted to establish,” Ueda says.
“The idea that the boy hangs on to Trico and moves to places that he would not have been able to go [to] by himself is the main concept for this game,” he explains. “And the contrast between the small movements that the boy makes by himself and the large dynamic movements that the boy makes with Trico is at the heart of the game, and that has not changed since the very beginning.”
With a little help from my friend.
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