Thyroid

The Last Guardian

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Well, I'm officially euphoric. Monkey Island, incredible Brutal Legend footage, and a new Fumito Ueda game all within 24 hours?

Description of the game:

From the award-winning creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus comes a new gaming experience – the graphically-stunning, emotionally involving story of a child who encounters a legendary mythical creature. Trapped in a forbidding fortress, the pair must learn to trust each other in order to find their way to freedom. Prepare to live out a fairytale with The Last Guardian – a tale like no other.

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I was kinda blah about the creature in the leaked trailer (too much sweetness, not enough darkness), but after seeing the extended E3 cut (with it's own music as well), I'm feeling pretty good about it. I think Shadow of the Colossus is the Empire Strikes Back of the series, tone-wise so it'll prolly remain my favorite, but it's safe to say that for me the gameplay will be compelling - and I already know I enjoy spending time in that world.

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So apparently the game is the final part of a trilogy - at least, that's the word going around. It's the same source that told me it was called The Last Guardian (this was before they announced the game), so it's reliable.

Interesting. I wonder what Ueda would move onto next.

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Bubbles of the Kraken - a game based entirely underwater, in which you ride a seahorse. :shifty:

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Well, as it's being developed by SCEJ (Sony Computer Entertainment Japan) I would say likely not.

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New interview I nabbed from the guys over at TIG (Team ICO Gamers), translated from Swedish:

Here it is folks, I hope you don't mind that it is soaked in blood, sweat and tears! :)

Oh, and since it is translated from japanese to english to swedish and now back to english some parts are probably lost in translation, just a heads up. :P

Dreams about reality

Fumito Ueda creates the most beautiful of fantasy worlds, though what he struggles for is to create something that resembles our everyday reality.

He wants to leave something for future generations but doesn't want to see his games in a museum.

He prefers to stay working at his desk but gives LEVEL a chance to get to know one of the modern gaming-worlds most original producers a little better.

Fumito looks a little lost.

He's once again in the center of attention without necessarily wanting to be there. The shy game designer seems to be caught between the will to explain when everybody misunderstands him and the will to just stay in his Tokyo-office and let his games speak for themselves. His face is almost totaly free from signs that reveal his allnighters and the fact that he is soon to turn 40. His apperance is more like that of a young boy than a middleaged man.

Not since Shigeru Miyamoto gave interviews att ETCS 1998 at the age of 45, dressed in a colourful red t-shirt and a bright yellow plastic watch has somebody impersonated his own games so well.

Fumito Ueda always speaks in japanese and with a calm thoughtful voice even though he clearly understands english as he from time to time stops his interpreter and corrects him when he is not satisfied with the translation.

When we meet him it's only days after the "Priject trico" leak and while he doesn't comment on the game we soon understand what he means when he tells us that the new game lends inspiration from of his old school projects.

With a nostalgic smile on his lips he talks about how he filled an aquarium with sand and put an airpump in the bottom of it.

a couple of meters away he put a big red button and encouraged people to get involved with his project. When the button was pressed the pump shot small bursts of sand in random directions and made the impression that something was living under the sand in the aquarium.

Ueda called this installation "The cat under the sand", and with this he wanted to make people curious and surprised.

These are themes that have followed him from being a student to becoming an internationally acclaimed producer.

- My deepest hope is to entertain people. I know a lot of people point out how emotional my games are, but the way I see it I get to the players heart by pulling their emotional strings, to make a person cry is never the goal but if I create an entertaining experience by using that tool I feel that I have succeded.

With the scenes from the last guardian fresh in our memory it doesn't take mush to see the connection to his earlier games, namely the relationship between someone weak and someone strong. he seems more interested in the dynamics of two different creatures than any other game producer, from the way they have different basic conditions to the way they have to aid eachother. It's also an interesting contrast to the rest of the gaming industry where games tend to circle around a physicly or psychologicaly strong and powerful main character who is ready to carry the world on their shoulders.

- One of the main reasons why I decide to design my games this way is because of the underlying game mechanics. Ico Needs to be weak and the boy in shadow of the colossus to, otherwise as a gamer you wouldn't identify yourself with them. It's also about credibility towards the puzzles and game world. A weak character makes easy looking puzzles work as they feel consistent. A powerful character could just beat the collosi with raw power you know. Ofcourse there is something estheticly appealing with a weak character in an adventure game, but it's also about me getting into the mechanics in a different way and therefore needing different tools.

It's an answer that would surprise most people who thought ICO and SOTC was esthetic perfection. but it's also an answer that makes perfect sense when thinking of what he often talks about - namely realism.

The fact that his games look and feel the way they do perhaps comes from that he works so hard to hide the underlying mechanics of the games.

- I always want to use the full technical potential. Even before we start developing our games I try to predict how close to reality we can come, and then start working from that point. Reality is actually the keyword. After we come to a conclusion regarding that we start deciding what type of game we are making and how it should look.

He laughs and seems to have gotten a new idea.

- I both hate and love the technical limitations. It's kind of a catch 22 for me. If we don't have any limit to work from it becomes hard to make anything good out of an idea. But if we on the other hand have a very distinct technical limit it's impossible to go beyond it.

It will put the bar in a certain place without any way to raise it. It's thanks to that my games have a very special esthetic profile. It's a way to make the player forget about technical limitations and focus on the gaming experience. If a player see a beatiful landcape or pretty light effects that's probably what he will remember and not the bad texture next to it.

That the reason Uedas games looks so beautiful is because he is trying to make it look like our own (often grey) reality may seem strange. Maybe he is seeing something most people don't. His vision is good and so is his hearing.

Ueda talks about why he left ICO with almost no music at all, and instead focus on ambient soundscapes. It wasn't an active choice but rather something that came naturally. He asked his composer to try and make music that would fit every part of the game. It ended up being a heartbreaking soundtrack full of emotional strings and pianos. Ueda listened to the first track but felt that it somehow took away much of the illusion of strange reality he had been trying to create with the graphics. Ueda asked him to take away that track and instead replace it with naturally occuring sounds. History repeated itself and the first time Ueda played through the whole game he realised there was no music left. He became suprprised because he had thought that atleast half of the soundtrack was kept, but he trusted his gut feeling and kept his silent game as he felt that the game unconsciously told him it wanted to be that way.

- I could talk about realism here to, but instead choose to call the sounds natural. for me they are just natural, nothing to notice, if you stood alone out in a giant forest you would hear the same sounds we put in ICO. Calm, wide, open landscapes like the ones in our games sound just like that. so why force something else into the soundtrack?

Ueda patiently explains that he doesn't talk about realism in the traditional sense, He is more than aware of the shadow creatures and supernatural things that occur in his games.

- If people don't believe what I'm trying to tell there is no need to tell it at all.

Freedom and Theft

Something that kind of goes in the opposite direction to the ambition of reality is the fact that Ueda has created his own languages in his games. And The last guardian doesn't sem to be any different.

- The made up language gives us freedom. I think that people more easily can identify with something he or she is interpreting themselves, but most of all it's about freedom in our development of the game. A real language creates invisible barriers for developers as real life voice acting is hard to change and replace. Most developers stay in that situation but I want to have as much freedom as possible. If we feel that something should be changed in the last minute we have the possibility to do that. In ICO we actually made changes to the gold copy just before mass production.

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The rest:

Fumito Uedas well-known perfectionism shows itself once more. He talks about his inspirations and that his will to strive for fulfillment often makes it hard to enjoy culture.

- Inpiration comes from music, books and movies, but more than anything from games. I play alot of games and always look at them with critical eyes. In the middle of a death-scene I can stop and think "That was a good idea but I could change it like this, correct this and make it much better".

One example is a little bit surprisingly Grand theft auto 4. He talks about the biggest problem with that game being the lack of original game elements. The graphics are impressive but not the basic foundtation wich is just like the earlier versions. after making it clear that one of the last years most beloved games was boring he continiues to the next one. When we ask him if he have played super mario galaxy since it holds a level that is a clear tribute to SOTC he makes a shy smile.

- Ofcourse I have played it, I couldn't resist after hearing that Miyamoto-san was inspired by me. but I have to say that I had expected a little more. That particular level (and the rest of the game) wasn't as entertaining as it could have been. I think the press and the fans made to much of a fuss about him (Miyamoto) stealing from me. and the athmosphere on the internet became a little heavy. What I'm critical against isn't the fact that they borrowed something that actually isn't even originaly from me, but the fact that they didn't make anything more interesting out of it.

Impossible expectations

To say that the expectations of The last guardian is enourmous is hardly an exaggeration. He expresses a frustration that the press and fans makes such a big thing out of, and finds such pretention in his simple fantasy worlds. they are hailed and made out to be something they aren't, and never was intended to be. The silent relationship between Ico and Yorda was interpreted as a symbol of the problems with communication in modern society.

- We built the game around the concept of "holding hands".

He smiles.

- Thats all there is to it, thats why Ico and Yorda doesn't speak. If they had been speaking the whole game-mechanic would have been unnecesary, instead they communicate the only way they know of, physically. The special language in ICO didn't make it into the game until the very last moment. At first, the plan was to make Yorda totaly mute.

ICO was subtitled in the PAL-version and if you played it again after completing it once the symbols that represented their language was replaced by english text. This gave the game depth and clarity, but also robbed the game of some of it's mystery.

When Ueda hear that we have played the PAL-version he askes us how we liked it. He starts talking about the japanese tradition to write everything out on the screen with subtitles, something that is common in japanese game-shows and video games. and he comes to the conclusion that it was a very japanese thing even in ICO. SOTC also was developed with the japanese market in mind, ICO was made with the huge playstation player-base in mind but ended up being released on the PS2, and after rather poor sales SOTC was decided to be developed differently. In ICO it was important for everybody to identify with the characters, but SOTC was made for the hardcore players since those where the only ones who actually bought and liked ICO.

- We made the game (SOTC) for people like me, who love to play games, and that made SOTC a little more advanced than ICO. Every aspect of the game was raised to a new level and that unfortunately made the game selective and hard to get a grip on.

Fumito Ueda tells us that he feels just like any other hardcore gamer out there, but it's hard to think of this superfamous game developer as a regular hardcore game fan. He goes on and talks about how he gets hyped over upcoming games and makes countdowns and surfs international webshops to import games. he even takes days of from developing just to play new games.

From Colossi to kittens

Ueda keeps talking about SOTC, what he have described as a game full of compromisation. Because he can't talk about The last guardian directly everything he says becomes small clues and hints to what the game might actually be like.

- Riding Agro is something I have spent much time thinking about, I wanted to add enemies but felt it would become to much like other games and didn't want to do that. Today I think that the segments between the colossi feels like they are missing something, not enemies, but something. unlike what have been criticized though, I really like the long rides on agro, It gives the feeling of searching for something, if the search didn't take time and effort, finding the colossi wouldn't feel so rewarding.

Even though interviews with Ueda often end up in less than romantic rambling about game mechanics his games are always used in debates wheter or not games can be seen as an artform.

- It's unbelievably honouring to hear my games being talked about as being art. I'v heard that you have a deeper game research in europe. And nothing would make me happier than to hold a speach on the subject for those who concentrate on my games, I'm thinking of a university researcher who made a long document about SOTC. It was a 60 pages long document about a game starring a boy riding around on his horse, fighting colossi to resurrect his loved one. 60 pages about that seems a lot if you ask me, but I'm very honoured!

My intentions are never to make games that are art, It all comes from my background as an artist and my will to create things that I think are beautiful. The goal is to make games that are fun, entertaining and interesting to play. If people think that my natural style is art then I take that as a huge compliment but it isn't anything I'm aiming for.

It's easy to believe everything that Ueda says when you watch the trailer for the last guardian, everything looks so natural. the mythological creature (a cross between Cat and bird as Ueda himself says) plays the role of the strong even though it seems young, maybe it's just a baby in need of constant care and guidance? It's a relationship somewhere between ICO and SOTC.

- To leave something to future generations would feel great. But I don't want my games to end up in a museum, I'd rather see that someone in a hundred years from now finds one of my games and play it. that way it's solid proof that I'v made something timeless. and therefor lasting. that would be my legacy.

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Can't wait to get home and read it whilst naked.

I like to pretend that you really are the woman in your avatar picture when you say shit like that.

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I like to pretend that you really are the woman in your avatar picture

I like that too.

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Bubbles of the Kraken - a game based entirely underwater, in which you ride a seahorse. :shifty:

Like Eye of the Kraken? That game was fucking ill.

I'm crapping tears into my pants that I won't be able to play tLG. Go to heck Sony! Why couldn't you have just made a console that was a worthwhile investment? The Playstation 2 was fantastic...what went wrong?

(Sorry for getting all internetty on you, guys)

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I'm crapping tears into my pants

nice!

Also, by the time this comes out, PS3 should be a bit cheaper & slimmer. Start saving now! Because, you know: BluRays. Also: Uncharted. Just sayin'.

I really wish I could add "living room Hulu player" to that, but I can't anymore.

Edited by zomboid

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"I'm crapping tears into my pants that I won't be able to play that game" -IGN.com

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- If people don't believe what I'm trying to tell there is no need to tell it at all.

That's a great quote.

-If we feel that something should be changed in the last minute we have the possibility to do that.

That seems very Japanese to me, and also awesome.

Thanks for posting the interview!

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Bad thing is, Ueda is fucking depressed that the leaked footage ruined the surprise he wanted to make and also that someone on his team betrayed him.

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Good read. Thanks for posting that Kroms.

Man! I really need to manage my expectations for the Last Guardian! I fear they're way too unreasonable/unrealistic. Reading that interview made me want to replay both games, but especially SoTC. Jesus H. Christ I love this guy's games!

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Is anyone else kind of dreading the inclusion of trophies in this game? I'm guessing that the development team probably doesn't want to add them but I wonder if Sony would allow that. They just seem a bit inappropriate for some games.

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post-2489-13375603166411_thumb.jpg

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There's no reason they couldn't make trophies for incidental bonus stuff, like say... something similar to finding the mace weapon / lightsaber in ICO, or doing the time attacks in SotC.

They don't have to interfere with the core experience and I'm sure Ueda + team are perfectly capable of making them unintrusive.

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Some things I've heard: 1. The damn bird eats enemies; there was footage of that at E3 that they didn't show the public. 2. It's called Toriko (and Wikipedia confirms). 3. The graphics engine has been given a major update recently; the footage they showed wasn't finished yet.

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Yeah the name is a several layered pun :)

Toriko = Tori + neko (bird and cat)

Toriko = baby bird

Toriko = prisoner

Toriko = Trico (the game's codename of sorts)

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Oh, by the way, it occurred to me a few months ago that the reason the kid must look so, uh, cartoony, is that the camera will be angled. You have this huge creature on one side, very realistic-looking, and this really tiny kid next to him without all the fluff; far enough, they look the same. It's so obvious that I'm surprised I didn't immediately figure it out.

My friend has this excellent idea on what the ending is going to be like.

He figures that, since Team ICO know that people will expect either the boy or Toriko to die, they'll have you kill Toriko.

Because Toriko is dumb and doesn't understand things (lending puzzles where the solution is obvious but the damn thing won't sit still), it contributes towards the ending

when it doesn't understand that you're about to harm it

.

Heart-breaking, eh. They'll have to have a really, really spectacular ending to top that one. (My own idea was that

they leave it open-ended

, but I figured that was a cheap idea; execution could change it though.)

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It's really weird that a while ago I bitched in this thread about how I wanted to play this game but couldn't buy a PS3, because I was just thinking right now that this game will be the tipping point that finally gets me to bite.

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