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Good Graphics How Does Mirror's Edge Still Look This Good The Grounded Architecture of Fumito Ueda

The Grounded

Architecture of

FUMITO UEDA

There are few threshold-crossing moments more dramatic than the one in Shadow of the Colossus, the intro is just pure untouched nature. There are rocky cliffs and deep forests and pouring rain and they all kind of smother our protagonist. Apart from him, there’s really nothing man-made to be seen. And then there’s suddenly something. There’s a building on the horizon, an enigmatic shrine that could be fifty years old or a thousand. And then we step through it.

And then.

It just keeps going. Every time I see this I think “ok now we’re almost at the end.” It’s those arches, they never double back, they never vary in their structure. They give the impression that the bridge might as well be endless, its fundamental architecture would never change. The bridge is this kind of perfect microcosm for Shadow of the Colossus. It’s beautiful but lonely, enigmatic but foreboding. It seems unnatural in context of its environment and yet somehow, it’s an indelible part of it.

Lonely and gorgeous, unnatural and organic, these qualities don’t end with Shadow of the Colossus. This is the style of Fumito Ueda, the director and designer for all of Team Ico’s games. And despite my love for his colossus slaying epic, the dense sculpted worlds of Ico and The Last Guardian are where Ueda’s architectural sensibilities really shine. He’s an auteur of ruin and decay, and using the unique aspects of video games, Ueda has created some of the most strangely believable worlds in any recent fiction.

 Ico  

The Last Guardian

3:00

Surprisingly, Fumito Ueda appears dismissive of his own architectural themes. In a recently released book on The Last Guardian, he was asked why he sticks to the ruined beauty style he is famous for and he states,

“I was thinking about the limitations of level design… for example if a player wants to get ot a high place, they first need to get through this narrow place, or they need a bridge”
“Or places where the player would want a staircase and instead it’s destroyed. I neither love those things nor hate them – it’s not that I have as strong a desire to express a ruined world as everyone thinks I do.”

There are a couple ways this quote can be read. On the surface it appears that Ueda isn’t particularly attached to the themes of this world. He destroys bridges and stairs simply to give the player an obstacle to overcome. Where is the game if players can simply walk forward to their goal? But let’s take a minute to think about this a little more, what he’s implying by saying he destroys staircases to create puzzles is that the worlds exist fully formed before he builds a game into them.

In reality, yeah places are built to be easily navigated. Even the most austere castles have ladders or stairs or other ways to get around, but in a game there’s no need to have a preexisting staircase before destroying it. He could, as most games do, design a number of challenges and then build the world to fit them. He could design levels with no staircases at all. But instead, he makes games in decayed environments because it’s seemingly inconceivable for him to create structures without their own internal logic. First and foremost, they exist. And only after they exist are we given the privilege of exploring them.

5:02

Level design in games sometimes feels at odds with the majestic art of the world surrounding it. For example, this vista in Dark Souls 3

Look at how sprawling the city is, how beautiful and ornate it appears. This is the closest to that city we’ll ever get. As I wondered through the handful of alleys I was allowed in, the Ringed City felt less like a city, and more like a projection. It felt like it kept reminding me that this world only exists for me and it’s made only to be conquered. But Ueda defies this convention. Ico and The Last Guardian take place in fantastical worlds, but they are worlds you’re forced to reckon with.

Ico takes place entirely within a massive castle, and there is no single part of this castle you don’t explore. Every courtyard, every island, every parapet, you even traverse its horrible mechanized underbelly only to ultimately loop back around to where you were first dropped off. I remember when I first played Ico, I was amazed when I would look down and see places that I had already been far below me in the world. Playing it now, I realized that’s true of every space in the game. Nothing is spurious, everything is really there.

And honestly, the brilliance of Ico just seems like a warmup when compared to The Last Guardian. The level of interconnected design here is staggering. Some of the structures reach higher than you can even crane your neck towards, and yet every part of each of them play some vital role in your quest to escape. I can’t get over the scene where you’ve just spent ages climbing this tower, up and up and up, and then it falls and it takes you across basically the entire map.

And yet these worlds are carefully paced to not feel like a checklist of places to traverse. Every piece of exploration is necessitated by realistic feeling obstacles. There aren’t arbitrary “collect 10 lizards and then you can pass” barriers, they let you get tantalizingly close to your goals before smashing you down to earth. Your relationship with the environment is frequently antagonistic but it never feels forced. There is no projection in Ueda’s work, I left both Ico and The Last Guardian knowing that my blood, sweat and tears littered every inch of their ruined worlds.

8:06

As he’s mentioned in a couple interviews, Ueda has never visited a castle, and nor apparently does he want to. This seems almost inconceivable given the locales of his games, but real life knowledge he says would just get in the way of his imagination. Instead of real places, his imagination is therefore sculpted by other artists.

Ueda cites French architect turned painter, Gerard Trignac, as a major inspiration. Trignac’s arches, waterways and towering facades are so reminiscent of Team Ico’s games that they could be mistaken for concept art. I mean look at the sense of scale in his artworks. How the old world interacts with the modern. Or where the sharp edges of a brutalist aesthetic are dulled just a little by encroaching nature, vines wrapping themselves around the unfinished concrete.

Another source of inspiration is Giorgio de Chirico, an Italian artist at the forefront of the Surrealist movement. Fixated on sparce environments, unusual buildings and yellow lighting, Chirico’s paintings have a sort of disquieting childishness. One that defines many of Ueda’s characters. Chirico, Ico and The Last Guardian all feature children in locations that children should never be found in. In fact this cover for Ico was drawn by Ueda himself and practically screams Chirico.

And Ueda’s work isn’t just a static piece on a wall. His worlds are alive, created in accordance with the laws of the game’s own universe. They are rich with untold backstory and ravaged by time. A walk down the street in New York feels completely different than a walk down the street of Minneapolis or London or Jerusalem. Places carry the weight of their past in architecture and somehow Ueda has imbued a wordless history in his own and surreal inhospitable worlds.

The Last Guardian’s crumbling structures are intentional anachronistic. A rusted metal gate inside a tower of polished marble, it’s like they’ve been built and rebuilt on top of each other in a sort of rushed architectural colonization. Was there a war here? A disease? The specific answers aren’t important necessarily, we might not understand the history but we feel it.

Ico’s castle could’ve once been warm and hospitable, but generations of isolation and regression have turned it into an unforgiving fortress retrofitted for the sole purpose of keeping its subjects in and outsiders out. Again, none of this is said but all of it is felt.

Personally, the worlds of Ico and The Last Guardian remind me of Hayao Miyazaki’s flying city Laputa from his 1986 film Castle in the Sky. Its enormous and abandoned, futuristic but overgrown, shockingly beautiful and dismayingly temporary. When I first saw Castle in the Sky, I was ceased by this profound longing for a place that never existed outside the creator’s mind. Knowing that I’d never get to wander the root choked streets or gaze up at the vine covered skylights caused me an almost physical sense of heartache.

I remember feeling similarly as a kid when I first learned about the Colossus of Rhodes or the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Fictional or not, the commonalities between these structures that captured my imagination are clear, driven by artistic ambition and probably hubris. Humans created buildings that even today seem almost impossible and I guess they were, maybe that’s the last link between all these buildings. Ultimately all of my obsessions crumbled into the sea.

12:25

Fumito Ueda’s games have a sort of reverence for nature. In Ico, all that’s visible of the outside world is trees and the conclusion takes place on a beach, the only naturally formed location in the entire game. Shadow of the Colossus paints the player as the villain for destroying remnants of the environment. And the boy in The Last Guardian simply wants to get back to his quiet forest village.

But artificial structures get no such deference. Like Castle in the Sky or the skyscrapers of Alexandria, each one of Ueda’s creations is ultimately destroyed. The castle falls into the ocean, the marble tower collapses in on itself and even the bridge shatters under the feet of its trespassers. Everything created by man is finite in Ueda’s work and all that created history is eventually meaningless in the face of an unforgiving environment.

But for a few brief hours, these three games gave me something I could never have from a painting, book or film. I was allowed to wander, to explore a world that never was

but felt like maybe

it could
have been.