CESA announced the CEDEC Awards 2021 winners. It gave a total of five awards to Mark Cerny, Edelweiss, Sega’s Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, and Sucker Punch Productions. The latter, in particular, won two awards simultaneously thanks to its latest game, Ghost of Tsushima.
Sucker Punch Productions won the Excellency Awards for Sound and Visual Arts. Despite coming from outside Japan, the studio created Ghost of Tsushima in such a way that even native Japanese people did not feel anything unusual when playing it.
Ghost of Tsushima won the Sound award for its usage of musical instruments and voice script localization with help from SIE and the Visual Arts award for the beautiful graphics inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s movies.
The Dragon Engine development team from Sega’s Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio won the Excellency Award for Engineering. It developed and shared an integrated QA (Quality Assurance) support system by combining automation and project management tools. The team used screenshots from Yakuza: Like a Dragon in its presentation slide for the awards.
Edelweiss, the development team most known for Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, won the Excellency Award for Game Design. CESA praised the team for establishing a game design based on a niche theme like rice cultivation while maintaining the gameplay balance.
The CEDEC Awards 2021 Special Award went to Mark Cerny. He has been involved in the development of PlayStation consoles, including the latest PlayStation 5. CESA also noted Cerny’s participation in the productions of game series like Crash Bandicoot and Ratchet & Clank.
In last year‘s CEDEC Awards 2020, CESA gave the awards to Hideo Kojima and the development teams behind Capcom’s RE Engine, Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure and Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Remake.
