In the fall of 2006, Capcom released Okami – a game that mixed Japanese folklore with the exploration of Zelda. It was praised for its lavish cel-shaded visuals, which at the time were among the best ever seen on the PlayStation 2; many even said it was better than The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which released that same year. Among the team at Clover Studio, where Okami was developed, was a young Ikumi Nakamura, who was just getting started in the industry as a “newbie” artist.
Nakamura remembers that time as something like the Wild West. Many of the shaders commonly used today were not available, the visuals were comparatively low-res, and there were “lots of limitations.” Challenging as it could be, though, she also remembers it being “really fun” discovering different development techniques that could aid her as she went. It was an experience that would inform a career that has spanned 20 years and numerous classic games.
Today, Nakamura runs Unseen, a studio she formed in 2022 in the wake of her departure from Tango Gameworks, where she helped spearhead the development of Ghostwire Tokyo. Nakamura’s energetic performance at E3 2019 made her a fan-favorite, and in her subsequent appearances she’s made a point of playing up her role as studio mascot. But talking to her in a Google Meet call, she comes across as soft-spoken and deliberate. In real life, she’s a mother who splits time between her day job as a studio head and her passion for urban exploration, with her first book due to be released in March.
She is coming off the reveal of Kemura, her stylish new action game blending “traditional Japanese folklore, modern culture, anime aesthetics and international flair.” It is in many ways a summation of her career to this point, which has taken her from Capcom to Platinum, then to finding fame introducing Ghostwire Tokyo at E3 2019, and finally on to running her own studio. Revealed at The Game Awards 2023, Kemuri reflects Nakamura’s childhood love of the supernatural with its array of spirits and fashionable Yokai Hunters.
It moves at the pace of Bayonetta, with Yokai Hunters able to run down surfaces in much of the same way as that game’s Umbra Witches, and it carries on Ghostwire Tokyo’s theme of “making the supernatural, natural.” In many ways it’s more ambitious than either of those games, though, mixing freeform exploration with multiplayer gameplay, though she’s hesitant to compare its scope to what she considers to be “true” open world games like Cyberpunk 2077.
Kemuri’s biggest influence is also one of Nakamura’s formative experiences in the games industry. Okami was where she got her start, and its visuals are a big part of the look and feel of Kemuri. In a 2020 interview with IGN Japan, Nakamura said that Okami 2 was the project that she wanted to “make reality the most.” Kemuri isn’t exactly a sequel, but Okami’s artistic flair remains alive and well within it. In one example, Nakamura describes a technique she derived from her time at Okami, and how she passes it on to her artists.
“[W]henever I’m actually working with a character artist to, let’s say develop the character’s face, for instance, I always tell artists to really put in quite a bit of attention to detail on just one single stroke, even on the face and stuff like that. Just to give a certain impression or certain detail. And this idea is definitely from my experience with Okami, for sure,” Nakamura says.
She ticks off the games she’s worked on and how they’ve influenced Kemuri over the years. “Okami, I was actually working on coming up with a visual design and stuff like that. With The Evil Within, I was working more towards a leadership or management role on top of doing art and design,” she says.
She remembers working on Bayonetta, and how director Hideki Kamiya was heavily involved in the world design and writing, but couldn’t draw so much as a basic sketch to help artists with his concepts (“He was an F Minus,” Nakamura remembers.) This led to a somewhat inefficient process in which artists had to create “countless” images before Kamiya would finally say, “This is it.” Nakamura was better than most at being able to hone in on his particular vision, leading him to give her more responsibilities as a lead artist. In her own projects, Nakamura tends to be similarly uncompromising in her vision.
In 2010, Nakamura helped found Tango Gameworks with Shinji Mikami, where she remained for nine years. Ghostwire Tokyo was her first chance at the director’s chair, and it was a game that was made out of “all of the stuff that she likes” – an urban setting, a mix of the natural and the supernatural, and action. She worked on it for four years before ultimately deciding to leave in the middle of development.
“Maybe my lack of experience was why I couldn’t quite finish it to the end,” Nakamura says. She admits that she’d been “stuck in a closed-minded world for quite a while, so I felt the need for a mental reset.”
Still, she says, it’s not so easy to leave behind what you love in your childhood.
“Ghostwire Tokyo is the first time I ever actually became a director, so I was in a place where I got to make what I like,” Nakamura says. “So with Kemuri…in a way it’s like the combination of all these things and all these experiences…Perhaps that’s what Kemuri is.”
An oasis in a troubled games industry
Not long after leaving Tango Gameworks, Nakamura visited Sony Santa Monica and met Cory Barlog. It was an experience she enjoyed so much that she considered working there, but “all such discussions vanished” when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Still, the experience had a positive impact on her, and she began to wonder if she could recreate the “friendly vibe” of Sony Santa Monica in Tokyo.
The result was Unseen, which she describes as something like an “international school” – a vibrant and diverse collection of artistic talent from all over the world. Among them is Unseen Chief Technology Officer David Steinberg, who moved from France to Tokyo in 2010. The approach is not without its challenges – work is frequently slowed by the need for constant translation – but it gives Unseen an optimistic air that it likes to highlight as much as it can.
