as an unconventional rendition of video game levels. The quality of the battles with the colossi was of critical importance to Ueda, who saw them as an outgrowth of his appreciation for boss fights in video games as a player. During development, the team considered including fights with smaller enemies beyond the colossi and with "optional Colossi you wouldn't need to defeat" in the game. Those suggestions were rejected due to Ueda's belief that the title's play value would not benefit from those confrontations. Relatedly, Shadow of the Colossus was made exclusive of human non-playable characters (NPCs), although the team placed discoverable small-sized animals in the game per Ueda's specifications. The creation of the colossi, as the focus of the game's separate segments, required Team Ico to provide input across disciplines. The ensuing distribution of duties between the title's artists, animators, programmers and designers meant that they needed to make their contributions to the game intercompatible so as not to engender design issues. Ueda wanted the game's presentation to be outstanding and to exhibit "the density of a painting". He visited geographical landmarks of the Western United States such as the Grand Canyon and Death Valley to seek inspiration for the game's setting. The modeling of the game's environments, whose arrangement stemmed from independently constructed battlegrounds tied to each of the colossi, followed a pattern that Kouji Hasegawa described as "a repeating cycle of creating, testing and tuning". The team initially struggled to carry out Ueda's instructions for the shaping of the scenery and altered the game's locations frequently so as to find a satisfactory design for the setting. After researching several visual arts genres, Team Ico crafted a distinct graphical style that utilized both grayish and light color tones to underscore the game's ambiance, identified by Ueda as "firm-feeling". This aesthetic was exemplified by the game mechanics of searching the setting for the colossi, which came from Ueda's desire to determine a straightforward and visually defined reference for the player. He remarked that the game's completed graphics–as well as its gameplay principles–were produced similarly to those of Ico, as an invocation of stylistic parallels between the two titles. Among the game's characters, the appearance of the human personalities was established prior to that of colossi. According to Ueda, Wander and Mono, while fitting the literary trope of "a little boy and a little girl", were not meant to occupy