Shuhei Yoshida left PlayStation earlier this month after a 31-year-long career. It’s safe to say that in those years he has probably played a hand in multiple games that are loved by gamers across the world. There might be so many cases where an input by Yoshida may have improved or even saved a game in development.
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While it’s not exactly beloved by all, The Last Guardian has a cult following, and is among the games that Yoshida helped get published. We already know that it had a troubled development cycle – it finally launched in 2016, nine years after development began. It sees he was so impressed by the game, that he pushed for it to get published even when it was on the brink of being cancelled.
Shuhei Yoshida Really Believed In The Last Guardian
As spotted by GamesRadar+, Yoshida spoke about this with IGN Japan during the Taipei Game Show 2025. Thanks to translation by Genki, we know that Yoshida was determined to get The Last Guardian published. A lot of questions were asked after the game was announced for the PS3, with no information for a long time after that.
The biggest problem was that the developers wanted Trico to move in a very realistic manner, but the PS3 was just not powerful enough to handle such a large character moving in such a way. As a result, the game would run at 10-15 frames per second and there was no way to improve it further. Thus, the decision to move it to the PS4 was made, with the devs having to rework it again.
Yoshido said that any other publisher would have probably cancelled the game entirely, but he loved director Fumito Ueda‘s vision and wanted to deliver it to fans of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. He decided that the game would get published one way or another, and kept encouraging the dev team to do its best.
The game’s release was finally announced on stage at E3 2015, much to Yoshida’s happiness.
