There is no seventeenth colossus, no secret hidden in the Japanese box art, nor any special command that will bug your game and unlock a true ending. But that’s fine. Fumito Ueda's work is expressed mainly through what it ignites in our imagination, thanks to a world that suggests much more than it reveals. Each player engaged with the most far-fetched “theory” benefits more than those who settle for viewing it as an empty action game.
A lot has evolved since 2001, when Ico was first released. Game designers keep looking for new ways to secretly lead players to the exact type of experience they planned — which is great, but, unfortunately, many of their efforts result in overly presented hints on the screen, or visual resources that basically solve challenges for the players. In this sense, it is something close to the design philosophy of a supermarket product, that needs to pull you by the hand and convince you to choose it, while in a museum, on the opposite direction, the paintings owe you nothing. It is you who must approach them and open up to a dialogue, inventing its meaning. And that's how Ueda works.
I have been engaging with these games for many years, and now I want to bring together some interpretations of their world and the experience I had with them, presenting what I believe to be a thread that unites them as one great story.
Attention: Spoilers of Ico and SotC ahead. Spoilers of The Last Guardian will appear only in its dedicated section.
Cause and Consequence
In Ico — the first piece of Ueda's trilogy, whose particular characteristics, roots, and influences can be better presented to you in this excellent video by Game Maker's Toolkit — a horned boy is brought from a distant village to be sacrificed in a gigantic castle, inhabited only by a sinister queen and her daughter, an action believed to be for the good of the village he came from.
But why? Well, we'll need to jump into Shadow of the Colossus, the sequel to Ico in terms of release order, so that we can understand the beginnings of it all.
In its story, we are introduced to Wander, a teen who travels through inhospitable lands, carrying his deceased beloved on his horse's back, until he finally reaches a place that religious legends call by the name of Forbidden Land; a vast area where the ruins of an extinct society that worshiped Dormin, an entity with powers over life and death, remain. Determined to revive the girl, he faithfully follows the instructions of this mysterious being to carry out the task of killing 16 colossal creatures, in exchange for the possibility of Mono's rebirth. However, the boy’s obsession blinds him to the fact that with each life taken from the innocent giants, his body absorbs more of Dormin’s energy that was divided among these creatures, until he is completely possessed by the deity. At the end of the game, the pagan god projected from the wanderer is once again sealed, thanks to the spell of a shaman lord who had been pursuing Wander. Left behind, unsure if alive or dead, the boy who entered the sanctuary as a man is found by the resurrected Mono, in the form of a crying baby with two horns sprouting from his head.
The reason I am revisiting this tragedy with you is that I want to draw your attention to how the consequences of Wander's actions are the central pillar on which all the possibilities of connection with the previous game, Ico, are supported, with Shadow of the Colossus being the
oldest moment in this great history. Not that I have said anything that deviates from what is already consensus among the community of these games, but the continuity of Dormin’s presence in Ico is a detail that seems overlooked. Once the young Mono begins to care for the baby in a fruitful garden at the top of the sanctuary where he was reborn, he can grow and engage sexually with her, repopulating the territory until their descendants eventually start exploring beyond that isolated continent. Yes, you could argue that I’m pushing it with this entire scenario of repopulation and suggest that perhaps only Wander himself, once grown, could have left the continent and attempted to return to where he came from. However, I believe there are clues to something greater if we consider the biblical references recently confirmed by Ueda. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is the most obvious and serves us well now, and it is through it that I support the idea that the creation of an entire population from a single original couple, isolated and cursed, is given.
Furthermore, we know that at the end of Ico, the boy and the girl escape by boat from the island where the castle was, heading towards the open sea and anchoring on a beach previously unknown to us. The game’s final scene allows us to walk along this beach populated by watermelons until it ends with a light and prosperous moment, where Yorda and Ico share pieces of that fruit.
But why? Well, we'll need to jump into Shadow of the Colossus, the sequel to Ico in terms of release order, so that we can understand the beginnings of it all.
The reason I am revisiting this tragedy with you is that I want to draw your attention to how the consequences of Wander's actions are the central pillar on which all the possibilities of connection with the previous game, Ico, are supported, with Shadow of the Colossus being the
Furthermore, we know that at the end of Ico, the boy and the girl escape by boat from the island where the castle was, heading towards the open sea and anchoring on a beach previously unknown to us. The game’s final scene allows us to walk along this beach populated by watermelons until it ends with a light and prosperous moment, where Yorda and Ico share pieces of that fruit.
Interestingly, in the 2018's remake of Shadow of The Colossus, made by Blue Point with Ueda’s consultation, something interesting happened. They tried to create a new mystery that would engage the game’s community, which had spent a decade practicing data mining and exploring hidden details even in unpublished demos, as if it were a kind of archaeology of an ancient civilization and culture that only exists digitally. Knowing this, Blue Point scattered collectibles throughout the map of their remake, positioning several of them in locations that had some secret associated with previous versions of the game and the mystery surrounding the history of that world. One of those collectibles, very curiously, is placed on a beach facing the open sea, among a watermelon patch.
Those beaches have different 3D models, of course, but the point of interest lies in the characteristic of both being turned towards the infinite horizon of water, coupled with the fact that Blue Point emphasized attention to this location in its homage to the changes the game underwent during its development — by the way, watermelons are one of two fruit models contained in the hidden files of the game, but are not part of the final product. Not to mention that in the PlayStation 3 collection containing these two games, the initial menu presented us with official art, made by Ueda himself, of an extensive scenario that connected the two locations where these games take place:
Well, if we consider how, in the historical period of SotC, the continent had been isolated for being a cursed territory, especially with the destruction of the land access bridge at the end of the game, and that the descendants of Mono and Wander would develop throughout its isolated expanse without contact with other peoples, it doesn’t seem difficult to assume that they would explore the seas and encounter other populations in new continents. And it would be this way that, after ages and ages, we would have this bloodline cursed by the power of Dormin inhabiting the rest of the world again. You might even notice a boat in the painting above that sails in a direction exactly from the Forbidden Land towards the castle of Ico.
In any case, the few official statements we have from Ueda on the subject confirms only the blood connection. You can check it out in this 2006's interview for The Wired, or in this recent collection of interviews published in 2023, entitled "The World of Fumito Ueda":
Those beaches have different 3D models, of course, but the point of interest lies in the characteristic of both being turned towards the infinite horizon of water, coupled with the fact that Blue Point emphasized attention to this location in its homage to the changes the game underwent during its development — by the way, watermelons are one of two fruit models contained in the hidden files of the game, but are not part of the final product. Not to mention that in the PlayStation 3 collection containing these two games, the initial menu presented us with official art, made by Ueda himself, of an extensive scenario that connected the two locations where these games take place:
Well, if we consider how, in the historical period of SotC, the continent had been isolated for being a cursed territory, especially with the destruction of the land access bridge at the end of the game, and that the descendants of Mono and Wander would develop throughout its isolated expanse without contact with other peoples, it doesn’t seem difficult to assume that they would explore the seas and encounter other populations in new continents. And it would be this way that, after ages and ages, we would have this bloodline cursed by the power of Dormin inhabiting the rest of the world again. You might even notice a boat in the painting above that sails in a direction exactly from the Forbidden Land towards the castle of Ico.
In any case, the few official statements we have from Ueda on the subject confirms only the blood connection. You can check it out in this 2006's interview for The Wired, or in this recent collection of interviews published in 2023, entitled "The World of Fumito Ueda":
"Finally, only his baby form is left, though he now has horns as a sign that some trace of Dormin still resides within him. I thought that, if I created some sort of connection with the boy in ICO, who also has horns, maybe players wouldn’t feel it was a completely bad ending,"
To close this segment of my text, you can also check in the game’s official guide how Ueda wanted to make an alternate ending to SotC, if there was a completed save from Ico on the memory card. Unfortunately, this content was yet another among the many cuts necessary during the painstaking process of finalizing the game, and it ended up being reduced to a mere change in the visual of Agro, Wander’s war horse.
Opening up the space for more particular speculations, I believe the three main mysteries of this entire story are: Dormin, the black witch of Ico, and the past of the two environments in which they both inhabit. In order to go from micro to macro, there are interesting questions to observe in the relationship between Wander and Mono that may lead us to comprehend this bigger past.
Origins and Territory
Something that has always intrigued me about Shadow of the Colossus is that the tale it tells only covers the final part of Wander's story, while his past, just like that of the Forbidden Land itself, is only hinted at in details of the narrative. Thus, the true relationship between the wanderer and the girl is not known; it is only known that he has feelings for her, who could have been a girlfriend, sister, or even a platonic love. The fact is that Mono was sacrificed for religious purposes, something that must have been the reason for so much rage in the boy's heart. In this context, it is curious that he has access to key information about an entity fought so many years ago. Besides knowing how to reach the sanctuary of worship, he carries with him, stolen, the Ancient Sword, an item instantly recognized by Dormin, extremely connected to the colossi and crucial in different ways to the history of the Forbidden Land. Something that under no circumstances could be in the possession of a clumsy boy. If we judge by this and by this phrase from Lord Emon, who already knew the young boy:
“I don’t believe, this… so it was you after all. Have you any idea what you’ve done?!”
And if we look closely at those little outfits, this is the same aesthetic pattern found in Lord Emon, one of the shamans of the religious order responsible for repressing the entity Dormin and the cult to it for ages, and in Mono, who had her life sacrificed in service of that same doctrine. Moreover, the same sign is exposed in response to the Ancient Sword when it is brought close to the sealing points of Dormin's energy in any of the colossi — something that makes no sense as a target, to highlight the weaknesses of those beings, but rather makes sense as a “stop” warning. Anyway, we can see that this symbol is directly related to four ritualistic elements of the game: a shaman, a sacrifice, an artifact, and the colossal guardians of Dormin's power.
Wander's access to key information and items, being known by Emon, and being in love with the sacrificed soul, along with wearing a cloak featuring the same religious symbol, leads me to believe that he was part of the same social group as that old man. Being quite young, as we can tell by Wander's short stature compared to the warriors accompanying Emon and making Agro appear gigantic — he is even shorter than Mono — and being so uncoordinated using that sword, the most I could wager is that the boy was an apprentice of some kind within that religious order. And, of course, the same pattern will appear also on Ico's clothes, ages later.
But who, or what, was Dormin, after all? And why
would it need to be sealed? The power of Dormin is the link that ties Ico to perhaps even The Last Guardian. All we officially know is that he is a deity present throughout the Forbidden Land, with the ability to "control beings created by light" and the human soul. His own appearance is signaled by an intense light coming from a circular opening in the ceiling of his sanctuary. His origin is extremely ancient, as he states that his body was divided into 16 parts during an eternity as a way to seal his power. Dormin also refers to himself as “we”, and his voice echoes with both feminine and masculine tones.
The most common conjecture I encounter while surfing this vast global network of computers is
that there is a significant allusion to Hebrew legends in this game, which isn't a hard connection to make, since Dormin, when spelled backward, is Nimrod. This name — which would've been given to the protagonist of SotC if it weren't for Sony's veto — means something akin to “the one who rebels”, and refers to a mythical character present in various Middle Eastern myths, being also mentioned in the Christian Bible as the first powerful being on Earth, as well as the one responsible for the construction of the Tower of Babel. Regarding Nimrod's death, he is said to have been dismembered into several parts, which were scattered throughout his ancient kingdom. Finally, in that same guidebook I mentioned earlier, Ueda states that Dormin was sealed for committing something forbidden in the past.
What I find intriguing here is very much related to Dormin's duality. Not only is his voice both feminine and masculine at the same time, but there is also a whole relationship with light and shadows. While he is vilified from Emon's perspective and presents a body made of shadows, he communicates with Wander and
guides him curiously always through light. Whenever a colossus is slain, those bands of darkness leave their bodies and pierce Wander, while at the moment of the destruction of the idols that represent them, there is a violent explosion of light! Additionally, each time the boy wakes up in the sanctuary, a shadowy figure appears around him, and simultaneously, a radiant dove appears around Mono's altar.
Nothing points out to us that Dormin would be an evil creature, except for Emon's voice, which speaks to us from the perspective of the ones who won the war. Every colonizer demonizes those he wishes to colonize, building a myth that others are savages and that he is the enlightened one, who has the legitimate right to what originally belongs to them. A “self-defense” is forged against the people who were previously there, aiming to justify their annihilation or slavery.
Speaking of colonizers...
And if we look closely at those little outfits, this is the same aesthetic pattern found in Lord Emon, one of the shamans of the religious order responsible for repressing the entity Dormin and the cult to it for ages, and in Mono, who had her life sacrificed in service of that same doctrine. Moreover, the same sign is exposed in response to the Ancient Sword when it is brought close to the sealing points of Dormin's energy in any of the colossi — something that makes no sense as a target, to highlight the weaknesses of those beings, but rather makes sense as a “stop” warning. Anyway, we can see that this symbol is directly related to four ritualistic elements of the game: a shaman, a sacrifice, an artifact, and the colossal guardians of Dormin's power.
Wander's access to key information and items, being known by Emon, and being in love with the sacrificed soul, along with wearing a cloak featuring the same religious symbol, leads me to believe that he was part of the same social group as that old man. Being quite young, as we can tell by Wander's short stature compared to the warriors accompanying Emon and making Agro appear gigantic — he is even shorter than Mono — and being so uncoordinated using that sword, the most I could wager is that the boy was an apprentice of some kind within that religious order. And, of course, the same pattern will appear also on Ico's clothes, ages later.
But who, or what, was Dormin, after all? And why
The most common conjecture I encounter while surfing this vast global network of computers is
What I find intriguing here is very much related to Dormin's duality. Not only is his voice both feminine and masculine at the same time, but there is also a whole relationship with light and shadows. While he is vilified from Emon's perspective and presents a body made of shadows, he communicates with Wander and
Nothing points out to us that Dormin would be an evil creature, except for Emon's voice, which speaks to us from the perspective of the ones who won the war. Every colonizer demonizes those he wishes to colonize, building a myth that others are savages and that he is the enlightened one, who has the legitimate right to what originally belongs to them. A “self-defense” is forged against the people who were previously there, aiming to justify their annihilation or slavery.
Speaking of colonizers...
A Queen or an Usurping Sorceress?
When we play Ico, we are introduced to the game's villain as a queen who rules over a vast, empty, and isolated castle, where villagers abandon horned children as a sacrifice to her. In this same environment, we find Yorda, a girl declared to be the queen’s daughter, but who lives locked in a cage until freed by Ico, and they begin their escape together. But what is this queen doing in such a remote place? Why are these sacrifices necessary? And why would she cage her own daughter? Well, we can start by recalling some dialogues that occur when Ico confronts the dark lady, close to the game's final battle:
Queen: This body of mine will not last much longer…
I shall bind my will to Yorda, and use her to reincarnate as master of this castle.
That is the girl’s destiny. She is the vessel for my soul.
We understand, then, that the reason for her actions lies in the need for a process that ensures her eternal life, reincarnating successively through the bodies of her daughters. The character, therefore, parallels Dormin in her capacity to interfere with life and death, but with caveats. She does not have absolute power over this, and the extent of her power is limited to the conditions of her own body. She is not immortal and must work to manipulate her finite nature. She needs resources for this, and it is here that we can find more elements of continuity between the consequences of Shadow of the Colossus and the story of Ico. Let’s see some more dialogues:
Ico: I, I’m a sacrifice. Because I have horns, see?
Children who grow horns get taken to this place.
I'll take the liberty to include here one of the dialogues omitted in the final version of the game, but which can be found in the files obtained through data mining and translated by the site Glitterberri:
Yorda: I’m going to live the way I want to.
Even if I have to pay for it with my life.
It’s far better than surviving on the sacrifices of an innocent people.
It becomes clear, then, how something contained in the children who grow horns is vital for the Queen to perform her resurrection work and maintain her way of life. Her powers do not originate from her own nature; they are, in fact, a product of energy stolen from the bodies of the sacrificed children. She uses them, even while showing disdain for their existence.
Queen: Now, remember your place, and begone from here.
There, the wicked one is gone. Now, let’s go home, Yorda.
"Wicked", that which is evil or morally wrong. This is how she refers to the child we play as. Okay. So she uses the bloodline of Wander to borrow remnants of Dormin's power contained within him, but she herself is not of that lineage and shows absolute disdain for those who are. But what if she has stolen more than just this energy from the children? Isn't it strange how that immense castle is structured in a way that could accommodate a complex network of inhabitants? There are no subjects, no people? We could point to the processing limitations of the PlayStation 2 as the main cause of this emptiness, but I believe settling for that explanation underestimates the heavy art direction that justifies Fumito Ueda's work as a game designer.
Well, there are two statues located on the entrance bridge of the central tower. They represent men with long horns on their heads, wearing armor beneath a poncho similar to those we’re accustomed
Exploring the castle, we can find cemeteries in various locations. Most of them have plain graves without any ornamentation, while a smaller number, grouped in a specific area, feature graphic horn decorations on top of their tombstones, facing the direction where the heads of the buried bodies would be. Buried bodies. It seems strange to find this in a land inhabited by supposedly immortal creatures, doesn’t it?
Knowing Ueda's widely shared game design philosophy — famously termed Design by Subtraction, which suggests that any component in a game that doesn’t enhance the themes and feelings of a world or its characters should be cut out — I think it's inappropriate to overlook these aesthetic elements as important components of the visual narrative about the history of that space. Someone lived there. Many someones. Mortal beings who inhabited and utilized all the mechanical systems we find for the castle’s functioning. Some of them were honored with statues and unique gravestones adorned with horns. Someones analogous to Ico, as we’ve always seen suggested in the official material.
[Edit note: I've also posted this article on Reddit, and a commenter questioned me about the Queen's room full of capsules intended for sacrificing rituals, and also about those two priests wearing horns in their helmets, who take Ico to the castle. I answered him and added to my Reddit post two more paragraphs addressing these two elements. Unfortunately, they don't fit in the RetroGameTalk's limit of characters for this article, so be sure to check the RGT's comment section below to read about it.]
So, here’s the overlooked detail. There is no legitimate queen here, but rather a usurper. Someone who only takes what belongs to others. She takes the body and vitality of her daughters for herself. She takes the scattered remnants of Dormin's mystical energy for herself. She takes the castle and the kingdom of an entire lineage that managed to survive and prosper for herself.
Again, this is a story of affective resignifications. Dormin was a
It’s interesting to note how, at the end of Ico, the boy and the girl manage to completely destroy the physical structures of that castle and end up on the already mentioned beach located on the continent of the Forbidden Land. Thus, another part of the cycle repeats, in which a space that was once a tormentor becomes a place that symbolizes freedom, acceptance and new beginnings.
And here we go again, to a new repetition of this cycle.
A Last Guardian?
The name of this game has never made much sense to me. It’s common to think it refers to Trico, the gigantic creature that accompanies us throughout the adventure, or to the nameless protagonist boy. But what would they be guardians of? And more importantly, why would they be the last? If we consider the creature, it wouldn’t make sense for it to be the last guardian of that space, the valley used as a nest by all other Tricos, in which the whole game takes place. After all, we know that by the end of the story, that our Trico is not the last of those beings to survive, and we are also introduced to it's puppies. Similarly, the boy, who becomes an adult at the end of the game, reveals himself as the narrator of the story, telling to the children in his village about his adventures with Trico, so they can understand the importance of that valley and those beings, in order to ensure they remain harmonious protectors of that environment. So again, why this name? Who is the last guardian, after all?
From 2015, The Last Guardian takes us to the
Although we never see him, we witness the manifestation of his powers by the same mass of black and turquoise energy that we knew in times past, when we were in the shoes of Wander and Ico. It is true, however, that the kidnap children doesn't grow horns on their heads anymore, but they manifest black and turquoise marks on their bodies, analogous to the tattoos present on Yorda's body in early versions of Ico. Also, close to the same freezing room with the sarcophagus, we find another room, one with a pool in it. Not any pool, but a pool with the exact same design of that pool in the Shrine of Worship — Dormin's tower in Shadow of the Colossus. That same pool in which we see Lord Emon performing a ritual responsible for controlling Dormin's growing power emanating from Wander, resulting in his death and resurrection in the body of a horned child. As it seems, we have someone at least trying to replicate what happened before in the Forbidden Lands.
At this point, you already know where this story is going. Something fails in the colonizer's system and the creature breaks free, joining us to escape the prison structures that were built upon a territory that was naturally theirs. The Master is defeated, and who knows how many ages would it take to another sorcerer or scientist discover about all of that history and power. Who knows if Wander's lineage wouldn't have its Dormin's traces diluted through its new generations. The last guardian of this power has already been buried.
Ending the Cycle
I'm often questioned about what is my favorite game. I could say many, but none would be more honest than mentioning this trilogy as a single strong experience, lasting throughout my life. It is a single big story, for me. One about cycles of pain and resilience. Death and birth. A message that keeps reminding me of the joyful ingenuity from being young — a force capable of moving us to overcome any abuser imposition and gather the dissidents to secure our place in the world. That which is old doesn't want to accept its finitude and works to conserve its existence through repression of what is new and different. We must open our hearts to the tides of changes, so that we can float instead of drowning in its dark and turquoise waters. Because the new... it always prevails.
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