Shadow of the Colossus

Quite the shadow indeed

Unsurprisingly, I get into a large number of conversations with a large variety of people about the value and validity of videogames as an art form.  Until last week, I had never played Shadow of the Colossus myself, but whenever another gamer was present in the aforementioned conversations, it always seemed to be brought up by them.  I’ve heard critics and journalists praise the game more or less since the day it came out on the PS2, but I never played it myself.  This being the case, and SoC being such an apparent benchmark, I decided to take the time out to play and review it.

Walking into the light

There was a great deal that I genuinely enjoyed about Shadow of the Colossus, experiences and mechanics I had not before encountered that made me glad for the time I spent playing the game.  Most of these boiled down to simplicity.

I really liked how the game is divided into essentially two experiences: exploring and fighting Colossi.  That’s it.  There are no mini games, the main game features no unlockables and most importantly, there’s hardly an HUD at all, which makes the carefully crafted visuals clear and visible all the time, and reduces the on-screen clutter that is such a big issue for so many games.

Furthermore, the developers put this clarity to good use.  Even on the mechanically lacking PS2, SoC looks gorgeous.  This is, I think, primarily because Team ICO seem to understand that better graphics are not a substitute for better designs.  The environments, vast and empty as they are, draw clear lines of sight and give the game world a sense of identity that’s really lacking in the certainly-not-new-york in which the latest 3rd-person-open-world-crime-drama is set

Also, the Colossi and the battles therewith which make up the bulk of the interesting content are beautiful as pieces of art and intriguing as puzzles.  I can’t really say anything on the Colossi that hasn’t been said before: they’re gigantic, they’re gorgeous, they’re great.

Finally, there are certainly a number of bonus points to be had here.

1 - the score is well-crafted and well-placed

2 - I think the minimalist storytelling is a nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey.  At the least, this game borrows a few techniques, and that’s always praiseworthy

3 - This minimalist storytelling finds its best expression in a dramatic moment towards the end of (but not at the end of) the game.  The emotional shock was unexpected, and the reaction I felt at that moment was not altogether dissimilar to reading the red wedding (if you don’t know what that is, don’t look it up for your own good).

But…

Boy, what a shadow

I can see why this game has such a big reputation.

I can see (I guess) why so many people like it.

I can see how Team ICO was trying to make a big, unique, narratively ambiguous work of art.

But they didn’t make a fun game.

Right from the start, SoC failed to grab me specifically because of the whole minimalist storytelling to which it is committed.  If there was more exploration, maybe more explanation about who and what inhabited the game’s environment, I could add it all up that this is a game that’s really about the environment in which it happens.  But that isn’t the case.

All I know from playing the game is that I’m a guy riding horse trying to bring a girl back to life.  I think the main character’s name was given a time or two, maybe, in the game.  I do know what it is from doing some background research, but I won’t include the name here because it wasn’t really important to the game.

All you are told is that in order to raise a dead girl back to life you have to kill 16 colossi and that you’ll pay dearly for it.  As it happens, that is the plot of the game.  You kill 16 colossi, she comes back to life, and you pay dearly for it.  There are 2 scenes, one at the middle and one in the end, involving a shaman and a big evil demon thing that hint at some greater universe, but it’s not enough.

You’re sent trudging over empty landscapes, here and there killing Colossi, but you don’t even know why you’re doing it.  Of course it’s to raise the girl to life, but you’re not told why that’s important.  Who is this girl?  What does she mean to the protagonist?  What’s their history?  How did she die?  Why did she die?  Why should I care?  None of these are answered at any point.  This isn’t ambiguous minimalism, it’s bad storytelling.  But you’ll have plenty of time to ruminate on that.

Juxtaposing the battles with the Colossi are massive sections of the game where you look for the next Colossus.  I know what I said about simplicity earlier but the wandering around an empty map gets fucking tedious after a while.  Furthermore, the environment is so vast, so large and so open that even riding on horseback it takes forever to get anywhere.  After you’ve wandered around to the first 2 or 3 colossi it just feels tedious, like the developers are a five year old brat shoving their pretty artwork into and screaming, “Do you like it?  Do you?  Do you?”

These things being considered we come,  of course,  to the much-lauded colossi.  Frankly, outside of 2 or 3 of the fights that really did it for me, I found these to be similarly tedious more than anything else.  At one point I ended up spending half an hour running around an arena dodging blows from a giant club because I didn’t receive the divine revelation that I had to get him to hit a rock instead of hitting dirt.  That’s not fun, inventive, benchmark gameplay, that’s arbitrary curmudgeonry, and that is far from the only instance of it in the game.  Part of my real problem here is that so much of the fighting is so very inconsistent.  A few of the fights take on the simple formula of 1) piss it off 2)climb on top 3) stab its head, and those are really the best because you actually feel like you’re fighting something.  At other times, the path by which you fell the foul beast is amazingly convoluted that I seriously wondered upon completing them whether I had actually figured it out or if the game just decided to be nice to me.

At one particularly unforgivable point, I fell off of a falling structure during a cutscene and was beaten to the ground by the colossus in the cutscene.  Because the protagonist takes about 8 minutes to gather the willpower to stand again once he’s fallen, I was about halfway to my feet after having been knocked there in a cutscene which was out of my control when the colossus knocked me over again.  This happened cyclically until I died, out of no fault of my own.  That’s not okay.

Finally, there were a few things that really irked me as detractors to the game as a whole.

1)  I said it already, but some of the battles are so convoluted that they really ruin the rest of the game.

2)  What seems to be the most effective, dramatic moment in the game is undone and rendered meaningless within a half hour of its occurrence

3)  There are a bunch of unlockables, but they’re only accessible by completing the Time Attack, and they’re thus rendered completely irrelevant to the rest of the game.  Good use could’ve been made of almost all of these items ala Zelda, but they wasted the opportunity and removed them from the main game.

A NOTE TO MY READERS:

This will be the last *review* that I write for this blog.  In the future, my reviews will be relocated and reformatted to “Janus Reviews” on Notsorry.net

I hope you’ll join me there, and keep up with this blog as I explore more abstract concepts in gaming here at Robbed of All Compassion.