SCEJ Revisits Feudal Japan and Prepares Ico Sequel For Unveiling?

SCE Japan has just launched an intriguing teaser website for two forthcoming games. It’s far from self-explanatory, offering viewers a countdown and some mysterious (and brief) animations of symbols and fluttering blossom leaves. At face value, that’s not the most informative of web-pages.

However, the gaming community has got its head down and delved deeper into the mystery. A spot of reverse Flash engineering was apparently all that was needed to reveal two key words on this promotional page, ‘Nico’ and ‘Gengi’.

The ‘Nico’ bit, if popular opinion is to be believed, is the title of Ico’s sequel. It’s a game many have been eagerly anticipating, and if more details are to surface next week (when the countdown will reach zero), that will make extremely interesting reading for fans of the cultish arthouse PS2 platformer. We can’t really provide any further details, except the stale point that Nico might contain a horse…

As for understanding ‘Genji’, we had to don our musty tweed blazers, light our pipes and revisit the world of historical academia to glean a reasonable explanation. The Tale Of Genji, you see, is the name of a Japanese novel written in the eleventh century – one which is widely believed to be the first full novel ever produced. Although it is a work of fiction, attributed to author Murasaki Shikibu, its portrayal of feudal Japan in that period is enlightening nonetheless.

Those mysterious symbols on the website, although they could be Nico related, more probably refer to the characters and symbols used in Japanese texts at that time. If that’s the case, these symbols would be classed as ‘Genji-mon’(don’t ever say reading SPOnG isn’t an educational experience!). As for the falling blossoms: they could also be Nico related, but The Tale Of Genji makes numerous references to falling blossom petals. There’s even a whole chapter that tells the tale of ‘hanachirusato’, which translates as ‘the village of falling flowers.” So we’d be inclined to think that there is a strong link between this ancient book, its ancient settings and at least one of SCEJ’s upcoming titles.

As soon as the countdown has finished counting down, we’ll bring you the full skinny. If we draw any other conclusions prior to that point, expect an update.