The Last Guardian Release “Not That Far” Off.

The evergreen Team Ico Gamers Blog have been studying lots of interviews with Team Ico in the Japanese press recently and come up with a series of easy to follow nuggets of information that will surely be of interest to anyone following the development of The Last Guardian.  I’ll not reproduce them all, so be sure to head over to their site for all the information, but here are the more interesting bits:

Ueda wants to release The Last Guardian (the change of title was made to cater for both Western and Eastern markets) as soon as possible but he wants the game to be complete. That said he knows fans have waited for a very long time and he says that a release date is not that far into the future as we may think.  The original title of the game was The Man Devouring Giant Eagle Toriko.  Catchy.

In terms of the various trailers we’ve seen, the music used for them won’t appear in the game, and the various typography seen in the trailers and press shots might not be final either.  According to the blog three different fonts are used in the Japanese logo of the game – this mixing of typefaces was done to “mimic the mismatching look of Toriko and to reflect the many gameplay aspects of the game.”

Finally, the young boy seen in the trailers might nearly have been a man, or a woman.  The choice to go with a young boy was ultimately chosen because the pairing with the mysterious creature reflects one of the central themes of the game – companionship. And why wasn’t a woman chosen?  The idea was dropped due to the particular requirements of level design, apparently.  Interesting…