By the end of this past semester, I had been able to beat about six of the sixteen colossi in this game, before the push to finish all of my projects got in my way of finishing the game. Last week I was able to set up my PS2, pop in the game, and beat the rest of it over the course of a few days. Needless to say, I needed to sit back for a few days to wrap my head around the story, and the numerous strengths this game had. Plainly stated: this was one of the best games I have ever had the opportunity to play.

For those of you who have never heard of Shadow of the Colossus, here is the description provided in the game’s Wikipedia entry:

The game focuses on a young man named Wander who must travel across a vast expanse on horseback and defeat sixteen giants, beings collectively known as colossi, to restore the life of a girl. The game is unusual within the action-adventure genre in that there are no towns or dungeons to explore, no characters with which to interact, and no enemies to defeat, other than the colossi.

The game succeeds immediately through its incredible simplistic (yet detailed) movement and weapon system. You have two main weapons (a sword, and a bow with an infinite amount of arrows), and two main methods of transportation (your feet and your horse Argo). All of these methods of attack and travel are given to you at the start of the game, and there are no tasks required to acquire them. By the time you reach the first colossus, you have learned all of the major movements needed to beat the entire game.

The battles against the colossi are incredible, both in that they are challenging, and incredibly rewarding. Each battle is a puzzle as you must find a way to first get atop of the colossus, and then you must find its vital points to attack to defeat the monster. Retrospectively, games of the past where “boss battles” were the culmination of a level’s worth of beating through the motions of a platformer, SOTC is a collection of sixteen of these epic boss battles one after the other, bringing you closer and closer to reviving your loved one. Without going into too much detail, the last boss battle was perfect in so many ways. The various levels of complexity that needed to be seen through to beat the boss, along with the difficulty made it exactly what I’ve been looking for in a game for so long. Too often nowadays games have been “dumbed down” to make the play-through easier on casual gamers looking to play titles that would be enjoyed predominately by the “hardcore” titles. By example, by no means is Super Mario Galaxy considered a “hardcore” title, but I was incredibly disappointed when I beat Bowser on my first run-through without even breaking a sweat. So needless to say, the three and a half hours it took me to learn the motions to figure out what needed to be done to beat the boss I was contented by the entire experience. Although incredibly frustrating, I respected the fact that the final boss was not handed to me on a silver platter.

(SPOILER NOTE: Stop here if you want to save yourself from spoilers about the end of the game.)

In hindsight, the main strength of the game that makes me find it so compelling against the small (but growing!) library of games that I’ve beaten is the emotion that the game successfully evokes throughout the game, especially at its conclusion. With Wander having absolutely no interactions with NPCs or players other than your horse, and being surrounded by a vast, seemingly unending landscape to explore and discover the locations of your enemies, you are reminded how truly alone you are throughout the quest. From time to time during the colossi battles, the one hint you get from Dormin (the omnipresent voice in the game) just isn’t enough to tip you off on what to do to defeat the colossus, putting into perspective what your character is doing for love.

Finally, after defeating the sixteen colossi, after 8-12 hours of gaming you realize that you are finally able to have your love revived, and you will live happily ever after. In the final cutscene, your progress is interrupted by what would be interpreted as the shaman from the town/city/area which you are from, castrating you for stealing the sacred sword you have wielded all this time, and entering a forbidden land. Dormin, the creature that had been guiding you through defeating the sixteen colossi was ultimately an incredible evil that had been broken up into sixteen pieces to protect the world from its reign. With the sixteen colossi having been defeated, you now have unleashed true evil, opening up a proverbial pandora’s box on the world, tricked under the guise of an undying love for a woman. Dormin then assumes itself manifested through your body, and you control him as the shaman escapes with the sacred sword in an attempt to seal you off back into temple, again banishing Dormin to protect the fate of humanity. You briefly control Dormin, attempting to kill the shaman and his henchmen, and then trying to retreat from the gravitational pull towards the enchanted pool of water that will lock your soul away. All attempts at recovering from this fate are futile, which make the ending of the story so incredibly powerful to the gamer. You are given control of the player which has but one doomed fate, with no ability to change the outcome, but the opportunity to believe that there is a chance. This event makes you think not only to the last few minutes of the game, but the entire story, and every story driven game you have completed in the past. Ultimately, we are dragged along a predefined path until we reach the conclusion that was decided before we even loaded up the game for the system in the first time. It’s an ultra-realistic view at story-driven gaming as a whole, and your entire journey that you just suffered through ultimately for an outcome you will never be able to enjoy or experience. The game itself hits on every major point that I look on in a game, removing all the bullshit developers put in to increase gameplay and add to the feature set of their ultimate product. Shadow of the Colossus is a pinnacle of game design, development, story, and intertwining all three aspects into an awesome, amazingly entertaining experience

The game itself is a prequel to Ico, a game by the same Sony development team. While I recently purchased the game, I have yet to dive into it, but I can’t wait to see how the gameplay and story of Shadow of the Colossus leads into Ico.

What I would change/improve:

One thing Cory Barlog (creative lead of God of War 2) suggested at a symposium we both talked at was that every game you play has flaws and features that could be changed for the betterment of the game. He said that coming up with a list of ten things you didn’t like about the game can show your creativity and mindset in game design. Shadow of the Colossus was one of the greatest games that I have played, but it wasn’t without its flaws. I will not always come up with ten items, but at least explain a few of my rants about the gameplay and story as I see fit through my future game reviews.

Air collision, movement. For all the simple movement with complex implementations that the game had for movement, I was thoroughly disappointed with the little control you had with Wander after he had jumped. Jumping onto Ando was not always as easy as it should be, and you would have to mount him from a direct position on either side of him. This was very easy in Zelda: Twilight Princess, and coming back to this game was somewhat of a disappointment for how specific you had to be in order to mount Ando.

Ando’s movement. Ando is animated incredibly well, keeping the mannerisms of what riding a horse is like from its acutal animation to the controls that integrate with riding the horse. There are even incredibly minute details that I notice that impressed me. When you turn into a direction on Ando, the reign becomes taut on the side you are turning, just as you would when riding a horse. Having ridden one myself, the game accurately displays the wide turning radius that a horse has when running, but I found this – coupled with the collision with trees and cliff edges that steering Ando through thinner sections of land was tedious and annoying at times.

Lack of animation/movement changes. Maybe I was spoiled rotten by the beautiful playable cutscenes of God of War 2, where you would be able to preform incredibly epic movements by simply pressing a button on time, but the animation potential of Wander when fighting the colossi left something to be desired. I can think of one colossus fight, I think the 13th or 14th that you come up to, where you need to deflate the bubbles on its stomach, then use Ando to get near its lowered wings and jump on to get atop the colossus. With the exception of the final boss, this was my favorite fight as the movement required of you was intricate, and looked incredibly cool when you pulled it off correctly. I think there could have been more of these scenes that kept the frailty of Wander that was trying to be displayed, while giving the player some eye candy to do some great looking tricks when fighting a colossus. For instance, using your bow as a zipline piece when fighting the wall-climbing colossus would have been sweet!

Camera. Throughout the game the camera is the clutch of the game, as it creates a beautiful long shot for the traveling sequences with Ando, and the fighting sequences with the colossi. All this hard work however quickly falls apart when you find yourself in close quarters (both on Ando and off), and makes movement incredibly frustrating and your position in the game incredibly disorienting at times. Some experiences come to mind when riding Ando in a forest near the walls, or fighting the colossus that you needed to bang the tooth-looking crown on his head to move him. The swimming to get onto his back was very frustrating and took me much more time to figure out which way I was going versus what the camera was showing me.

Improper difficulty distribution. The difficulty of the game increases as you continue on with the colossi, having to figure out more interesting puzzles, dodge colossi fire, and continual movement changes. My major complaint is that 50% into the game, I fought some colossi that I figured out how to beat in the first camera fly-over before I had even started. Since there (for the most part) no real order to the colossi fights, I would argue that the ordering of the battles should have been rearranged to create a increasing challenge to the player.

Story holes. The game itself does a great job at telling its story, but I would have liked to see more about the girl, why she was dead, and what Wander had to do to get her out there, out of the village. I liked being surprised at the end by finding that he had stolen the sword, but seeing the whole “escape” from his village may have put a larger stress on the importance he placed in the task at hand.

Direction/Map resolution. Overall, finding some specific colossi was not as easy as I had hoped it would be. I understand that the difficulty of finding all of the colossi adds to the gameplay, but I became frustrated finding maybe two of the bosses and needed to seek some information as to find the missing pieces for where I should be following my sword’s beam of light. A few more in-game hints (via posted billboards) that I could have read or hints from Dormin after it was recognized that I was riding around for more than 15 minutes and had not found the colossus yet would have made the gameplay slightly smoother and left the frustration for the battles, not reaching them.

Again, I would stress to anyone that has not played this game to get their hands on a PS2 and a copy of the game to see what the hubbub is all about. It is a must-play if not a must-own for any one serious enough to look into the industry’s crowning achievements.