One of the problems with deciding what is objectively bad when it comes to play mechanics, is that there's still a lot of subjectivity. For example, some people are 100% convinced that the combat in every single Souls game is objectively wrong and designed badly, because there's follow-through on attacks. They believe every action game should never have a character that punches or swings a sword that lasts longer than the next button press and that every animation should be canceled by the next command input, so that the player can go fast fast fast and not stop for an instant.
Are they right? If so, then a huge number of famous games are made "incorrectly", not just the Souls series. (Incidentally, I've listened to some people say they hate fighting games because of this - they cannot accept ideas like block stun, or character attacks that have recovery time and leave them vulnerable.) What "gets in the way of the gameplay" is itself very subjective because different people have different ideas about how the player's interaction with the gameplay should proceed, at a fundamental level.
Interestingly, when I originally played Ico and SotC on the PS2, it never occurred to me that the games had poor controls. They player interaction felt appropriate for controlling fragile characters that had weight and reaction to the environments. When I replayed the games on the PS3, years later, my feelings didn't change.
However, I can understand intellectually that some might think that method of character interaction is "bad". Because it's different from a lot of popular games, and always has been in every generation. This goes all the way back to games like Prince of Persia, or Out of this World, or Flashback. Games where simulating the weight, physical limitations, and body awareness of the in-game character is itself part of the mechanics. It has always seemed that many, maybe even most people who play games, prefer feeling of the most instant response possible to physical input. That's not wrong and many games are built around it. However, it's also not right, and a lot of people have always complained that any game which deviates from whatever is most typical and commonplace in a given year of releases is "made wrong by 20xx standards."
I don't actually intend these observations as a pre-emptive defense of The Last Guardian. I've actually been skeptical about the game for a while and personally, none of the footage I've seen has looked all that fun to play. I'm concerned it could be Ico with a bigger, slower, more frustrating companion, and present no evolution of the underlying design of Team Ico's two previous games.
