The Last Guardian's hero would have been a girl, were it not for upskirts and weak upper arms

The young boy who stars in Team ICO's (do I have to say "highly anticipated?") new game,The Last Guardian, was initially going to be a girl. It doesn't particularly matter to us if the hero is a thin, scrappy boy or thin, scrappy girl, but Lead Designer Fumito Ueda's reasoning for the change is nevertheless amusing.

"The Trico is a very powerful creature," said Ueda in an interview with PSM3. "If we'd had a beefed-up, powerful hero, it would have thrown off the balance a little bit, so the design naturally drove me to create an adolescent female character who was light on her feet.

"But in the end I decided a boy would have a little more grip to climb the Trico. Another problem is that girls tend to wear skirts, and The Last Guardian features a lot of climbing..."

So The Last Guardian's hero is a boy because... boys have better grip and don't wear skirts? It's not as if they're designing a character from scratch who can do anything they want regardless of sex. That's crazy talk, everyone knows there are two characters available to any game designer: a strong-armed boy and a skirt-wearing girl!

OK, done jabbing. The creative decision was probably a little more complex than that quote suggests. But where would we be without out-of-context snippets like this?In a forumhaving a serious discussion aboutDRM, that's where.

[Source: PSM3 viaCVG]

Oct 26, 2010