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Fumito Ueda Reflects on Ico, Shadow of the Colossus Remakes

He could have added more to the remasters. Why didn't he?

 

By Kevin Gifford, 09/14/2011

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Ico and Shadow of the Colossus: The Collection, a compilation of Team Ico's groundbreaking PS2 titles with new HD-remastered graphics, is coming out here in a scant two weeks. For Team Ico director Fumito Ueda, it wasn't an idea that he was too excited about at first ." I had received suggestions from several different places within the company to put out remastered editions," he told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. "The problem with that was the games were really engineered exclusively for the PS2, so I didn't have a very proactive attitude about seeing them on other systems. At the same time, though, PS2 software is getting scarce and a lot of current gamers don't own PS2s at all, so I reconsidered my stance and realized that being able to play the games on modern systems really isn't such a bad thing."

The enhanced ports were both handled by Austin, TX-based Bluepoint Games, the same outfit that remastered the first two God of War titles for the PS3 two years ago. "The thing about that outfit is that they won't just take on any project," noted Ueda. "They won't accept projects that their head doesn't personally like. They're real craftsmen that way, and they really understood everything about Ico and Shadow before accepting it, which is something I really appreciated."

 

Was there any temptation to do more with the games than simply port them? "Some aspects of the PS2 Ico and Shadow were a bit rough when you look at the games now," Ueda admitted. "Some of it wasn't as kind to gamers as it could've been. Still, that's how the originals are, and if we started fixing things there'd be no end to the work, so the remasters are wholly faithful to the originals."

 

Not that there weren't ideas along those lines. "There were some grander ideas," Ueda said, "such as changing Shadow's ending or adding some of the colossi that got cut from the original, and honestly having features like that would've been attractive from a business perspective. If we put just a few extras in, though, gamers would naturally expect more than what we could provide. Instead of just putting in a few half-baked things, I thought it'd be better to stick with the original concept of staying faithful to the base work. If I get another chance in the future to do a remake, I might wind up changing quite a lot more."

 

One new feature in these remakes: full support for 3D televisions, something that surprised Ueda in how well it panned out. "Seeing the games in action made me realize that they were both a lot better suited for 3D than I thought," he said. "The way Ico's camerawork emphasizes the height of what you're standing on, and how Shadow has the camera zooming toward the colossi; that sort of thing really works. Bluepoint Games played a major role in making this effect work, because 3D isn't just about making an image; you need to fine-tune everything and keep in mind where the player's looking. Making the games 3D-compatible was our idea, but Bluepoint made it into something beyond what I imagined."

 

When asked what he thinks of Ico -- his first shot at directing a game -- Ueda is proud, if not entirely satisfied. "The idea with Ico was to make a game that didn't feel like a game, something I think I was half-successful with," he said. "During the development period, there wasn't must appreciation for the details that made Ico Ico -- Yorda's little animations, all the touches that didn't have anything to do with the game but added to the reality. Ten years on, after having received assorted rewards and now getting the game remade, I really feel like we had the right idea, that we've been rewarded for the effort."

 

Four years later, Shadow of the Colossus was released. "Shadow was my second game as a director, so design-wise it's a bit better put together than Ico," Ueda said. "But the fact that there's this huge field with no enemies whatsoever on it was definitely something we could have only done at that point in time. Ico had no text-based tutorial, and Shadow went the next step forward by having zero non-colossi enemies at all. Those were both deliberate design decisions, but looking back now, I probably should have come up with a kinder approach."

 

Next, coming at some indeterminate time in the future, is The Last Guardian. Does Ueda see his past two games and the upcoming one as a trilogy? "They share a common thread of AI-driven characters," he replied, "whose charms can only be portrayed in game form -- Ico's Yorda, Shadow's Agro and the colossi, and The Last Guardian's Trico. You can build intriguing characters in movies and novels just as well, of course, but these artificial characters driven by human-like personalities are something you only see in games. Each project has grown from the knowledge learned in the previous, so in that respect, I do see it as a trilogy, though I can't guarantee that it won't become a quadrilogy or more in the future."

 

Something that strikes Ueda, just as it does the gamers who still place Ico in best-games-of-all-time lists ten years on, is how little the original PS2 games have really aged -- a rare thing in an industry where a game's often considered "old" only a month after release. "It's a funny thing," Ueda said, "because nobody ever bats an eye at watching a movie or listening to a song that's ten years old. The impression a movie or song leaves on you depends a lot on yourself -- how old you were, whether you had a partner or children or not. Just like with that, I look forward to hearing from people who played Ico ten years ago or Shadow six years ago, and seeing what sort of new discoveries they make with the remasters and how it makes them feel. As for new players, neither game requires a great deal of time to finish, so I hope they'll play them to the end and hopefully they'll feel something on the way."

 

 

http://www.1up.com/news/fumito-ueda-reflects-ico-shadow

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playstation Newbie

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Anyone who has ordered the team ico LE from playasia...can you guys please inform me when your card gets charged here .....i need to know before hand when cards start being charged....i know they usually charge when ship...but that is not the case for preorders ...it takes places few days before only if specially the quantities are limited.....

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playstationdude Grand Master

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Anyone who has ordered the team ico LE from playasia...can you guys please inform me when your card gets charged here .....i need to know before hand when cards start being charged....i know they usually charge when ship...but that is not the case for preorders ...it takes places few days before only if specially the quantities are limited.....

What's extra in the limited edition? :unsure:

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