Ico's Original Script Contained More Mother-Daughter Angst

One of the PlayStation 2's very best games, Ico was all the more effective for its minimalism. It was a platform game that pared that genre back to its very basics: simple controls, a screen entirely decluttered of inventories and numbers, and an almost worldless story. That story saw a small, horned boy attempt to escape from a sprawling castle with a young, ethereal girl in tow, pursued all the way by a mysterious queen and her army of smoke monsters.

The basics of the plot could be inferred from the characters' reactions, with designer Fumito Ueda adding only a line or two of dialogue to help the story along. But thanks to the efforts of The Cutting Room Floor, we now know that there was once a lot more dialogue in an early version of Ico- 77 additional lines, in fact - which are still lying unused on the game's disc.

Those unusued lines have now been translated by Aria Tanner, who rendered the Legend Of Zelda book Hyrule Historia into English. She's even gone back and improved the original English translation of Ico's script, making the original meaning behind the Japanese version of the game more clear.

Tanner's new version of the script makes clear what is evident from the visuals themselves: horned boy Ico has been left in the castle as a sacrifice by the elders of a nearby settlement. "Do not think ill of us," one of them says, "This is all for the good of the village."

Ico, of course, manages to escape, and also frees Yorda, the ethereal girl locked in a cage near the start of the game. We later learn that Yorda's actually the evil queen's daughter - a revelation that was once joined, in an earlier version of the script, with more dramatic exchanges between mother and offspring.

One deleted scene, for example, would have had Yorda shouting, "You are not my mother!" to the queen, while in another, the queen described Yorda as "my beloved daughter and sole heir."

Tanner's written a full post, which translates every line of dialogue - both deleted and still extant - and it's well worth a read if you're a fan of the game. It underlines one of the themes only lightly touched on in Ico's final cut: it's about a daughter seeking independence from her overbearing mother. Much of the dialogue cut from Ico is superfluous in any case - we didn't really need to have Ico say, "Nice to meet you, Yorda!" - but it's nevertheless a fasinating insight into the creative process behind one of the best platform games of all time.