August 19, 2026 19:30
Souls like it didn't grow out of Shadow of the Colossus, but Fumito Wade is still involved. Alexander Kuzmenko
Souls like it didn't grow out of Shadow of the Colossus, but Fumito Wade is still involved.
Alexander Kuzmenko on the YouTube show didn't recognize the screenshot from Shadow of the Colossus, and when he was told the title of the game, he said he couldn't stand it and, say, with Shadow of the Colossus started soul-likes. People noticed and offended: what does soul-like have to do with it?
Shadow of the Colossus Miyazaki never publicly mentioned in my English and Japanese interviews, but he talks a lot about Ico. In December 2021, Famitsu was collecting the creators' comments for Ico's twentieth birthday, and the head of FromSoftware gave a full confession:
I'm sorry, my friend, but I was sitting quietly, shaken and silent.
And then he quit and went to FromSoftware. And I'm not going to exaggerate to say that this game changed my life.
It turns out that the author of Shadow of the Colossus has a connection to soul, but not to the colosses, but to the past game. And not to the mechanics, but to what actually drew Miyazaki into the profession. It's not a genre relationship, but a biographical one. There's something about Weda in soul that really lives: a world that doesn't explain anything to you and isn't going to; a silent hero; a story set on ruins instead of rolls.
The mechanics of soul is from their garden. King's Field, December 1994, the debut game from FromSoftware, before that studio had been drinking business software for eight years. Dungeon-crawler from the first person, darkness, isolation, punishing complexity, and blows and spells are tied to a scale of endurance that must be restored before you turn again. Plus a moon sword and ring.
Demon's Souls was actually ordered as the spiritual successor to King's Field: the idea was promoted by Sony producer Takeshi Kadzia, who wanted to restore the extinct form of the action. Only the development of the puzzle was unsuccessful.
Then he dragged his childhood into the game. His parents wouldn't let him play until college, but he dragged from the library an English-language fantasy that he understood through the word and drew from pictures, imagination. That's where the firm's unreportedness, from which loreologists have been drawing theories for 15 years, comes from the gamebook Sorcery! by Steve Jackson (from which he derives his fantasy ideas), Dungeons & Dragons and RuneQuest, the manga by Meura, Lovecraft and Stoker.
So what do the souls have in common with the Colossus? In short, you don't have to invent anything. But if you stretch: the size of the bosses, the silence and the refusal to burn the story. In Shadow of the Colossus there's no ordinary enemy, there's 16 bosses and the empty land between them, and the progression is the tails of lizards, fruits and the colossus itself. #game
Alexander Kuzmenko on the YouTube show didn't recognize the screenshot from Shadow of the Colossus, and when he was told the title of the game, he said he couldn't stand it and, say, with Shadow of the Colossus started soul-likes. People noticed and offended: what does soul-like have to do with it?
Shadow of the Colossus Miyazaki never publicly mentioned in my English and Japanese interviews, but he talks a lot about Ico. In December 2021, Famitsu was collecting the creators' comments for Ico's twentieth birthday, and the head of FromSoftware gave a full confession:
I'm sorry, my friend, but I was sitting quietly, shaken and silent.
And then he quit and went to FromSoftware. And I'm not going to exaggerate to say that this game changed my life.
It turns out that the author of Shadow of the Colossus has a connection to soul, but not to the colosses, but to the past game. And not to the mechanics, but to what actually drew Miyazaki into the profession. It's not a genre relationship, but a biographical one. There's something about Weda in soul that really lives: a world that doesn't explain anything to you and isn't going to; a silent hero; a story set on ruins instead of rolls.
The mechanics of soul is from their garden. King's Field, December 1994, the debut game from FromSoftware, before that studio had been drinking business software for eight years. Dungeon-crawler from the first person, darkness, isolation, punishing complexity, and blows and spells are tied to a scale of endurance that must be restored before you turn again. Plus a moon sword and ring.
Demon's Souls was actually ordered as the spiritual successor to King's Field: the idea was promoted by Sony producer Takeshi Kadzia, who wanted to restore the extinct form of the action. Only the development of the puzzle was unsuccessful.
Then he dragged his childhood into the game. His parents wouldn't let him play until college, but he dragged from the library an English-language fantasy that he understood through the word and drew from pictures, imagination. That's where the firm's unreportedness, from which loreologists have been drawing theories for 15 years, comes from the gamebook Sorcery! by Steve Jackson (from which he derives his fantasy ideas), Dungeons & Dragons and RuneQuest, the manga by Meura, Lovecraft and Stoker.
So what do the souls have in common with the Colossus? In short, you don't have to invent anything. But if you stretch: the size of the bosses, the silence and the refusal to burn the story. In Shadow of the Colossus there's no ordinary enemy, there's 16 bosses and the empty land between them, and the progression is the tails of lizards, fruits and the colossus itself. #game