First of all, I'm sincerely honored that my website and the manual comparison was worth so much of your limited library computer time. I also appreciate having more media to look into. I know Ueda worked part-time at a video rental store in his college days, which exposed him to a lot of foreign films, including "Mauvais Sang" and "My Own Private Idaho". But he has never mentioned Pasolini or his works when speaking of media that has impacted him, and he has mentioned lesser known works as inspirations, especially in a media timeline he charted out in 神話を紡ぐ (the book that came with the ICO + Shadow box set). So, though I can't confirm it one way or the other, I personally doubt he would've neglected to bring it up at some point over the years, if it was really important to his style. The IMDB screenshots I see for these movies are really interesting. And they remind me a lot of the unofficial, budget ICO film from Anatael Productions: ICO - Luz y Sombra. Unfortunately, they haven't found an opportunity to release the film online, I presume due to many legal concerns. I sent the studio an e-mail at the start of last year asking if and when such a release might happen, and they said they were hopeful it would occur that year, but that was last year, so... Not looking likely. But you can find a lot of pictures from production far back in the image gallery on Anatael Pérez Hernández's LinkedIn page.

Thanks! I appreciate you saying so.

I took a single course on Language Studies as part of my education. I learned some things about phonemes and the basics of transcribing IPA, but not much else to be honest. I also watched a lot of jan Misali's conlang series, though I don't think that contributed much to me picking apart Yorda's Language, which functions more like a code. There's strong potential for Nonomori to be a revised line. This is not to say it wasn't originally synonymous with 'Thank you', just that it might have been phrased very differently. [nono] if flipped into [onon] does have some potential readings that play into gratitude, through the kanji 恩 (on). However, I need to do more research into Japanese to see how likely some of these readings are. Since 恩 seems to pair with a lot of uncommon terms, the kinds of things you only see in a dictionary but never hear in real conversation. On the other hand, an awkward or stilted original line would be a candidate for revision. It's hard to say. There's also some potential for it to be onomatopoeic or mimetic term おんおん (onon) which is the sound of crying (also rarely used in conversation). But how [mori] would tie that into anything I don't know.

Thanks! I can't speculate on a release window, but I doubt there will be radio silence for all of this year. I think genDESIGN has kept development close to the chest ever since the expectations they accidentally built up for The Last Guardian. But because of that, we don't know exactly when their acclimation period with Unreal Engine ended and when the full production period began. Too many unknowns make it difficult to form an estimation.

From: Mystic_Ode I'll definitely be covering it in the 'Related Media' section when it's ready. Currently I've only read 1/4th of the book myself. And I'll definitely finish it after I've thoroughly gone through the game content. I want to mentally resolve as many mysteries as I can on my own, and come to my own conclusions, before I step into Miyabe's interpretation of the game's main events.

From: Mystic_Ode Ooh! Your illustration work is so cool! Thank you for commenting and sharing your site.

From Mystic_Ode: I'm really glad my site inspired you to check out the game!