Blue sea thinking

Nomura was “really picky”, he tells us, about the realistic art style in the Pirates Of The Caribbean world. Naturally, making hyper-detailed versions of Disney characters was bound to be complicated. Donald Duck’s down ended up being handstacked, feather by feather, polygon by polygon. Disney was very anxious about its characters fitting this kind of style: everyone agreed that too many details would lead to the characters starting to look “too creepy”. (We can’t help but wonder about the metric it’s going by, however, once we notice the tiny veins in Goofy’s eyeballs.) The environment of the Pirates world, too, was challenging to tune. Based on the third film in the series, the colour palette was made to look deliberately washed-out to match the film’s complex colouring and lighting. The typical fantasy blue sky, for instance, was put aside in favour of a more grey-blue cast.

In the naval battles in the Pirates Of The Caribbean world, you’re controlling the ship itself rather than Sora. A new kind of combat system proved “difficult to tune”, Yasue says, which helped make this world one of the most difficult and costly to put together