Ico and Okami Creators’ Return Show Sequels Can Still Be Surprising
Sequels don’t have to be more of the same.
The video games industry’s annual trailer festival masquerading as an awards show returned this week with a look at plenty of upcoming games and hurried recognition of the best of 2024.
As in years past, much of what was shown off at The Game Awards 2024 had one foot in the past, with sequels, remakes, and other games with connections to already-popular titles leading the show. But this year, the appeal to gaming’s past didn’t just result in pointless remasters (though those were there, too), as the show celebrated series and developers deserving of recognition.
The first and — to me, anyway — most exciting of these reveals came early in the show. A trailer opens with a robotic voice speaking over a black screen, before text appears: “From the creator of Ico.” Frankly, the trailer could have ended there and still be the best announcement of the night, but it continues, showing a figure in a cloak bearing a pattern that recalls the clothing in all of Team Ico’s games, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. The figure launches themselves into the air, grasping onto, and then climbing an enormous robot before blasting off into the sky in its head to avoid an incoming wave of darkness.
GenDesign debuted its first game since The Last Guardian at The Game Awards.
Despite being extremely light on details, this trailer might be the most interesting thing ever announced at The Game Awards. Ico creator Fumito Ueda left Sony’s Japan Studio in 2011, bringing many members of the disbanded Team Ico to a new studio, genDesign. The game revealed at The Game Award, codenamed Project Robot is the studio’s first release since The Last Guardian.
It’s exactly the kind of revival worth getting excited about. Not because it’s the sequel to an existing franchise with a recognizable name or a game giving players more of what they already like. Rather than either of those much more marketable ideas, it represents the return of a team that’s repeatedly proven its ability to make masterpieces of the kind most blockbuster developers would even attempt. Where the nostalgia-laden throwback game offers more of the same, the return of Ueda and his team offers something that’s impossible to predict.
Onimusha: Way of the Sword looks like it will infuse some of Sekiro’s spirit into Capcom’s dormant samurai action series.
Speaking of unpredictability, who saw another Onimusha game coming? Left behind on the PlayStation 2, Capcom’s Onimusha is a beloved series that somewhat awkwardly mixed survival horror and action in feudal Japan. Set a little later, in the Edo Period, Onimusha: Way of the Sword looks like it will modernize the series, adding in the tense parrying and massive boss battles of Sekiro. Onimusha’s revival as a modern action game might not be quite as surprising as Project Robot’s reveal, but it still feels like the right way to approach such a revival — keeping series staples like its protagonist absorbing foes’ souls while innovating enough to keep it from being a rehash.
Capcom had one more announcement at The Game Awards sure to excite old-school gamers, though it offered even fewer details than Project Robot or Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Unveiled with an onstage musical performance played over a teaser trailer, a new Okami sequel is on its way, 18 years after the original. The live audience cheered the game’s title, but were even more enthusiastic at what was revealed next — the original game’s director, Hideki Kamiya, is returning to lead the project.
Okami 2 is a surprise no one could have seen coming.
Like Ueda, Kamiya is a legendary figure in game development who left a major studio (Capcom) to found a smaller one (PlatinumGames) with several members of his old team. Kamiya left PlatinumGames in 2023, but it wasn’t until this year’s Game Awards that he revealed Clovers, the new studio behind Okami’s sequel.
Plenty of interesting but more predictable sequels like The Witcher 4 were on display as well, along with revivals of Virtua Fighter and Turok, which we just don’t know much about yet. Sequels and remakes have been among the most popular games in recent years, but Project Robot, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and Okami 2 feel like something other than cashing in on a trend. Rather than giving players what’s already proven to work, they either give a legendary team another chance to surprise us, or give a second chance to series that were beloved by fans but shuttered by their publishers. There’s still a chance any or all of these games could disappoint, but they may just represent a way for developers to combine nostalgia for a bygone era of gaming with the pursuit of something genuinely new.
