The Power Review

The Last Guardian’s sales: Destined for Mediocrity

It pains me to write this article, but there is a purpose behind writing it.  Hopefully if I can illuminate this issue, then more people can be aware of it and correct it in this third iteration of the “series” by Team ICO.

Let’s start from the beginning.  Fumito Ueda and the rest of Team ICO released ICO for the PS2 in 2001.  Despite being an incredibly innovative game in the sense of gameplay, musical scores, graphics, and story, the game largely fell under the radar for the mainstream market.  The real shame of the situation is that the game is even to this day still hailed as one of the best exclusives for the PS2 system with a Metacritic average score of 90/100, however the overall sales worldwide hover right around ONLY 700,000 for the lifetime of the game.

Fastforward four years to 2005 when Project Nico (“ni” is two in Japanese) is finally renamed and released as Shadow of the Colossus.  This is highly regarded as one of the most beautiful and ingenious games ever released, largely due to that fact that it makes you question all of these moral decisions that you’re acting out in the game.  But most importantly, all of this is done without a single word of dialogue.  No one argues that this game was a vast improvement from ICO, and that is reflected with the review scores, giving it a Metacritic average of 91/100, but 9 of them are perfect scores!  Unfortunately the same fate that befell ICO was destined for SotC as well.  It flew under the radar for the majority of mainstream audiences and became a cult classic that sold barely over 940,000 worldwide since its release.

Finally, look at “Project Trico” or The Last Guardian as it has been named as of E3 2009.  This is obviously following in the same vein that ICO left off in, mostly as a 3D platformer.  (Hopefully it’s not going to be an 8 hour long escort mission again *crosses fingers*) But in the age where titles are selling more than 10 million units on consoles, how can you regard a game that sells under a million units as successful?  One of my favorite titles this generation, Valkyria Chronicles has failed to move more than ¾ of a million units, yet I consider it one of the best games of this generation.  I fear that The Last Guardian will be a victim of the same fate as its predecessors since they hadn’t sold massively to large audiences.  But one thing is important to remember: Sales aren’t a measure of the quality of a game.  I can’t reiterate that point enough.  Oh wait, I can… I’ll repeat myself.  SALES DO NOT MEASURE THE QUALITY OF A GAME! So, do the gaming industry a favor and yourself a favor.  Buy this game when it is released so that smaller developers like Team ICO will continue to release games that  fall outside of the “conventional norm” of first-person shooters that have flooded (dare I say, polluted) the marketplace.

A last sidenote.  The smartest thing that Team ICO could do to not only boost sales of  this upcoming game, but also to increase publicity and hype building up to the release would be this:  Give the original two games the same treatment that Sony Santa Monica gave God of War.  If they re-released ICO and SotC in HD on one blu-ray disc, they would be exposing these games to another generation that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten to experience them because they’ve moved on from the previous cycle of consoles.

*Sales Data taken from VGChartz.com*

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