Since I only owned Nintendo consoles growing up (oh, and my Genesis and Game Gear), I missed out on a lot of classic games. I've been doing good about catching up lately, but there's still a long way to go. This path has many steps to cross over, and the step I have recently reached is Shadow of the Colossus.
I must admit, I know shockingly little about this game outside of the basic premise. But I do know that it is held very highly as a work of art. And by now, you guys should all know how I feel about games as art!
So I've decided to do something different for this post. Instead of doing one big review post after finishing the game, I will be keeping a journal. After I defeat each Colossus, I will write up my thoughts on the game at that moment, and how I'm progressing. I'm hoping that his proves to be an interesting read for everyone, even if you've never played the game before. I'll try to avoid outright spoilers, but keep in mind that it is very unlikely that I'll be able to leave everything out.
How will I view the game? How will my views on it change as I progress? We can only know by starting at the beginning...
Initial expectations
The player is dropped into the middle of a huge land with nothing but a sword and a horse. The player then explores this land in search of gigantic monsters, which must all be slain for some plot-relevant reason. I am excited to see what interesting things I must do to bring down these Colossi, and to have this huge world to explore.
Colossus 1
So the game has blown its huge exposition load at me all at once: I am Boy. Must revive dead Girl. Mission: kill Dudes with Stick and Curved Stick that shoots Smaller Sticks. Horse and God will help.
Got it.
Now it’s time to find my first Colossus. But my oh my, these default controls are horrendous. Let’s go ahead and swap the “jump” and “horse” buttons. And the “action” and “attack” buttons too. And the “weapon change” buttons, too. Those seem backwards.
Much better. But the camera controls are still throwing me off. Let’s go mess with the camera inversion controls-
Huh. Those don’t seem to work. Well crap. Let’s hope that doesn’t throw me off too much.
Anyway, enough of that. God has given me a quest, and it must be fulfilled if I am to ever again see Girl, with whom I hold a nebulous, undefined relationship with! But in doing so, he has already ruined half of the experience I hoped I would have with this game. I was looking forward to a lack of direction, in which I could find and defeat the Colossi however I pleased. But God has numbered them and given me a magical compass in which to find them, in order. I would be lying if I said that this didn’t discourage me at least a little bit.
But enough derails, onto the Colossus! I found it easily, and defeated it even more so. This was clearly a tutorial Colossus, which I’m OK with. I just hope the others put up more of a fight than this guy! I had him dead before I even really knew what I was doing!
Colossus 2
My hopes have fallen yet again. It seems that upon victory against a Colossus, I am teleported back to the starting temple. To some, this would be a convenience. To me, this is heavily detracting from what I had hoped the experience would be. The huge world ripe for exploration has now become nothing more than the standard video game hub world, with the temple serving as the central hub, branching out to each new level. Will the entire game be broken into segments like this, where at the start of each I will do the same motions of running outside, aiming my light compass, and hopping on my horse? If so, I must say that half the game has already been spoiled for me.
Anyway, on to #2. The path to this one is a bit more complicated than the last, and is showing me just how terrible the horse’s controls are. I must constantly tell him to stop slowing down, and steering is frustrating at best. I pray that there is no horseback battle in my future.
Things began looking up once I reached the Colossus, however. Finding a way to climb onto this one was quite interesting, and taught me to use my bow in creative ways. My mind is already processing different strategies for possible future battles.
Colossus 3
I may have been a bit hasty in bashing the horse controls. It seems that holding down the “horse” button will make him maintain a steady speed. Good to know for the future, although navigating that narrow bridge was still a bit of a chore.
I was also introduced to water. Multiple times, in fact! The next Colossus was perched atop a tall platform in the middle of a lake. Boarding this platform involved climbing a long ramp, and jumping from the side of the pillar that said ramp lead to.
This jump was aaaawful to make. I fell numerous times, leading to many an annoyed grunt as I was once again forced to slooowly swim back to the ramp. Although I suppose some good came of it: When I finally made the jump, I realized I had been doing it improperly. Until then, I had been performing these jumps with the memory of every platforming game I had ever played. But this game does things differently, and it took me many, many attempts to break my years of conditioning to relearn how Shadow of the Colossus wants me to do things.
But the important thing is that I made the jump. And what had that jump lead me to?
A solid 40 minutes of pure, teeth-pulling horror!
As God was more than happy to repeatedly point out, the gimmick here was to break the Colossus’ bracelet so I could climb up its arm. But nothing I did worked. So in a fit of frustration, I turned to the internet. And what the internet told me to do was so incredibly unintuitive I could only laugh. The solution made so little sense that I had to question just how one was supposed to discover that on their own.
But that wasn’t even the main thing that annoyed me here. See, to me, boss battles are a difficult thing to nail down properly. Do it right, and you have an epic battle that the player gets right into. Do it wrong, and you have Colossus #3.
For those readers that haven’t played the game, #3 is one of those bosses where you need to wait for the boss to perform one specific attack that gives you the opening you need. When fighting a boss like #3, it stops being an epic battle and starts being, well... a video game. You are no longer fighting a living thing. You are instead leading an end-level boss around its arena, trying desperately to make it trigger its one preset attack animation so you can stop screaming at the TV in a vain attempt to make the game do something.
That was me when fighting #3. I was no longer immersed in the game. I was very aware that I was yelling at my TV. I was very aware that I was running away from the boss just far enough to trigger its long-range attack, but not so far that he just followed me. And I was very aware that I was not having fun. At all.
Colossus 3 almost made me quit the game.
Colossus 4
Things were much better here. For one, I finally learned how the horse works. You do not control the horse, you guide it. You tell it how fast you want to go, and you point it in the direction you want to go, and then it goes. It navigates around obstacles for you, it follows along cliffs and walls, and it does so without you telling it to do so. This is actually really nice, and I like how it makes the horse feel like more of a character rather than a game mechanic.
And then there was the Colossus. At first, I was completely lost. I had no idea how to climb up this thing. But not in a bad way. I was eager to find a way to start climbing. But I couldn’t get a good look at it. So I retreated, and stumbled upon some old ruins. I figured they must be related to the Colossus- No, it would be more accurate to say I knew that they were needed to fight the boss. Little moments like these often pull me out of a game and remind me that, yes, I am just fighting something that a team of programmers designed. I realized I didn’t “stumble upon” some old ruins, I was lead there by a shaft of light, no doubt placed there specifically to guide players to where they needed to be.
Anyway, I used these tunnels to sneak up on the Colossus, and used the hills they were built into to grab ahold of its tail. The fight was pitifully easy from there.
But as I watched the Colossus fall, I realized something. When I brought one of these beasts down, I did not have a sense of victory, or accomplishment. It just felt like one more step towards my goal. I did not feel sympathy for these creatures, or remorse for my actions. I just felt... nothing. Was this a feeling the game wanted to convey, or was it because of my detachment from the game world? Was that detachment intended from the start, to reflect Boy’s detachment from everything besides his goal of bringing back Girl? I could only know by continuing on...
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