Fumito Ueda is the august visionary responsible for ICO (a little boy saves a little girl from an evil castle), Shadow Of The Colossus (a grieving boy murders several huge stone animals), The Last Guardian (a little boy and a huge, goofy dog cat escape from another bad castle) Now he’s getting into Gundams, although it looks like the little boys are still there. Epic Games has just presented the latest work by Ueda and genDESIGN – Project: Robot. Find the trailer below.
To summarize this material: it appears that the boy has set the giant robot to self-destruct mode, hence the garbled countdown to defeat this tsunami of evil black goo. Then the robot flies away in the head – a sequence that reminds me of the anime Gurren Lagann. Look, I’m trying to formulate this elegantly and draw the right conclusions because I’m very tired. It’s 3:00 here. You shouldn’t be writing about Fumito Ueda’s games at 3 a.m. – they usually require a bit more thought, I dare say, a bit of reflection, not Game Awards madness.
There’s not much to say beyond the trailer, although you’ll notice there’s a lot of text at the end written in a mockingly narrow, illegible font. It might just be the end credits, but maybe there’s a synopsis hidden there. When I can see clearly, I will try to decipher it.
Tiredness and snarl aside, I love Fumito Ueda’s work and it’s good to see that he and his colleagues are still creating crazy originals. A less committed soul would have already made Ico 2: Iconic. Project Robot seems closest to the style of The Last Guardian, considering you’re a little thing riding on a bigger thing. As you might expect, I fear that the game will make me develop an emotional bond with a giant robot and then destroy it in a heartbreaking, tragic way. Remember, we just saw a robot get his head cut off. So maybe it’s more of a tool than a friend.
Release date? None yet. More as we understand it. Speculations welcome.
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