"If it happens, tomorrow I'll walk naked all around the San Servolo island.", Alessandro said, happy to share the same enthusiasm for Ueda's works but while keeping a reasonable amount of scepticism.
Well, too bad for him, 'cause I was right.
The result is a one of a kind journey shaped within the dreamlike boundaries of Ueda's imaginary universe.
The game designer decided to craft his stories like Haiku poems, to explain less to say more, giving players the freedom to experience a wide range of feelings. This is Ueda's very own signature: design by subtraction, the foundation behind the development of Ueda's games, guiding the creative process since his first debut. By removing all superfluous elements from the concept, he focuses all efforts on giving consistency to its core, avoiding everything that could dilute the message. The priority and the main goal are always immersion, which is also the reason why in his games everything looks so realistic and solid. It's a matter of density of information: all the elements on the screen are useful and help to build the experience. Everything is carefully crafted and has something to tell. That's the result of this philosophy and it is simply amazing.
The Last Guardian received generally favourable reviews, winning various critical accolades and awards. One of them was the Drago d'Oro, a prize that gave me the change to meet Takeshi Furukawa - the composer of the wonderful score of the game - and Ueda-san during the Italian Video Game Awards celebrated in Rome on March 2017. While Ueda-san is an elusive guest, chat with Takeshi is like to meet an old friend.
Furukawa-san is a very nice person, in the weeks before the celebrations of Drago d'Oro we've built a correspondence made of questions about his work and curiosities about music in general. Extremely kind, his answers reflected humility and a gentle joy that he leaves spontaneously explode every time you mention The Last Guardian. This is his first solo-experience in the world of video games: an enviable debut. Growing up inspired by masters like the immense John Williams, in his blood live together East and West influences. As a result, this mix generated a musical sensibility that led him to fuse classic and modern sounds with excellent efficiency.
I approached him as a fan, eager to find out how is work with someone like Fumito Ueda and how hard is to interpret his ideas, knowing how clear and steady was the vision of the designer about the concept (it never changed since the first announcement of the game and Ueda awaited the arrival of a new generation of hardware to shape the game exactly as he wanted). Takeshi's personal adventure with The Last Guardian is an engaging story made of sound experiments: "His directions - referring to Ueda - were always broad, and never specific; which allowed us all to work and interpret his ideas very freely. Knowing how seminal the previous soundtracks were, I felt it best to start with a blank slate. So just went down my own path with the music for TLG". He recorded the score of the game at the AIR Studio in London and to convey that sense of magic of this new delicate game of Ueda he chose the renowned London Symphony Orchestra with more than ninety players to shape the original soundtrack of The Last Guardian. Furukawa believes that the warm sounds we can find in-game cannot get out of a digital instrument and we can easily agree, listening to the great result of the old school method.
Divided between Tokyo and Los Angeles, a few days ago Takeshi was in Europe to join the Gamescom and we took the opportunity to enjoy a very good pizza in Cologne together. Now he's waiting the right moment to continue his adventure in the industry, carefully evaluating all the offers - among the possible candidates, Sucker Punch is considering Takeshi as the composer for its upcoming new game, Ghost of Tsushima. -, but most importantly, he's still in touch with Ueda and hopes to collaborate again with him in the future.
Fumito Ueda followed the steps of other big names such as Yu Suzuki, Inafune, Sakaguchi, "Swery" Suehiro, creating a concept team. The phenomenon is spreading, especially in Japan, where designers are preferring to leave major companies and managerial roles to gain more freedom.
Ueda said to Polygon that he simply wanted to get away from the management responsibilities and meetings that came with working at a big company “I wanted to just work at my own pace and explore the ideas that I had in my mind.” Here is where Kowloon Night gets into action.
Created by Alexis Garavaryan and Jay Chi, it's a global fund that sees the potential in selling games to countries like China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. The group aims to support developers in a new way, less revenue-driven and more focused on signing memorable games. All the investors are based in Asia and come from the game industry.
Now Ueda and his team are using that fund to take time and realize the idea as they would like, without limits, incursions from above and intellectual property constraints.
“There were a lot of new game ideas that popped up during our extended production period on The Last Guardian, and we really wanted to take our time to explore them — on our own and at our own pace,” Ueda says to Polygon.
In his speech on the stage of the Drago d'Oro Award, Ueda said he is aware of having taken too long to release The Last Guardian and hopes to come back soon with a new game. At the beginning of the year, on the official site of GenDESIGN, a mysterious concept art appeared. It contains all the recurrent symbolism of Ueda's works, and its presence could mean a connection with the rest of the "trilogy". There are no official announcements at the moment but in the latest issue of Famitsu, kindly translated by Gematsu, an interview with Ueda reveals that "What GenDESIGN is making now doesn’t feel like an indie game. They're ultimately aiming for something on the scale of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian.”. Also, the game will be a completely new title and not a sequel. So times are ripening again for a new wonderful adventure but, as this generation of consoles is coming to an end, it's not sure we will see it on current platforms. In any case, I'm ready to wait for another decade, with no regrets.
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