![]() ![]() On this occasion, she was spurred on by a recent examination of Ico‘s script files, which revealed that the game comprises 115 subtitle cards, of which a massive 77 are completely unused. She’s a self-confessed Ico fan and translator who enjoys delving into games to excavate the information that was previously hidden away from our eyes. GlitterBerri did the majority of the work. While Runic is a neat detail to observe inside an already mysterious game, translations of it recently led to a breakthrough: the discovery of Ico‘s deleted scenes. It’s there to reinforce the communicative distance between the game’s characters, as we’re only ever allowed to understand what Ico says (apart from in New Game Plus-also exclusive to the Japanese version-in which the Runic subtitles are replaced with English ones). It appears as subtitles when Yorda and her mother, the Queen, are speaking. The reason you probably haven’t seen the Runic language before is due to it being exclusive to the Japanese version of Ico. Runic is produced by writing Japanese words in the English alphabet, getting rid of the vowels, and then reversing the spelling. While the ghostly prisoner of her mother’s stony coastal castle, Yorda, communicates in “Runic”-a fictional language invented by Team Ico member Kei Kuwabara using a simple cipher method (a symbol for each letter in our alphabet). Ico, the horned boy, speaks in an unknown language acquired from the village he was outcast from. The relationship between the two main characters-and what much of the game works around-is one without a shared tongue. The reason for this is obvious: it lacks dialogue. It’s all waving gestures, holding hands, slumped sofa sleep. But memories of our time with it tend to playback in our minds as if it were. ![]()
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