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kenister's Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
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| [February 21, 2008 02:31:45 AM]
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GAMEPLAY:
After playing the game a little bit more, I’ve come to realize that the colossi are pretty much giant puzzles each one having a distinct type of weakness that the player must exploit. I really enjoy the design of the colossi; they are giant creatures that have the skin of mountainous terrain. I feel like climbing Mount Everest each time I scale them and when I stab it with the sword I’m placing a marker saying “I was here!” It’s definitely a fun style of gameplay and I give a lot of credit to the game designers for their creativity. Agro, your trusty steed, is a great friend to have around. He’s always there to get you through the landscape faster than your feet will take you. I like the freedom that you can do with Agro; you can mount up and do a couple things like shoot your arrow, or rotate a full 360 degrees, or stand up while you shoot your arrow turning 360 degrees! These little details in a game are what usually make me happy and I’m glad to see them get implemented. The boy was well designed too. It’s amazing that someone so small can defeat such giants and I feel like the game can show this extremely well.
The landscape is a sight for sore eyes. After you leave the temple grounds there’s beautiful open land of green and earthy colors. The light breaks through the clouds and shines with intensity as you and Agro stride the Cliffside. What impresses me is how far the player can see into the game world, there are loads of mountains that we can see in the distance and the clouds move realistically with the wind. As the player rides around, there are birds and eagles that sometimes come on and off the screen. This artistic design really adds to the atmosphere of the region, it’s so desolate yet so beautiful at the same time. It’s a nice lively world with just as little as two characters present in it. When the boy is just standing around, Agro will run around him or walk off screen into some place and it really gives Agro, a horse, some personality also helps to realize the world around the player.
DESIGN:
As I’ve said before the artistic design of the game is astonishing. By creating a large world with nothing but lizards, birds, trees, and mountains, the player is forced to find a way to relate all of these things together to create a personal story for him in the game. This lack of story was intentional because the game developers wanted the player to make assumptions about the world; I know this because I made the assumption that this was a prequel to Ico because of the ending of this game (the boy turns into a baby with horns, which resemble the protagonist in Ico). This desolate tone of the game is a well decided one because I think it helps foreshadow what happens in the end. The long journey to revive someone eventually asks for the ultimate price, a life for a life, and having a world that reflects this price of death in the end sets a good mood for the game. The colossi are well designed as well. Every time I fell a giant, I was curious to see what the next one would look like or how I would take it down. This helped keep me going even though there was a lack of story. The colossi are well varied ranging from large walking ones to flying types and even one that swims (which I thought was the most interesting because you had to hang on every time it dove into the water). Every time the player had to hang on to the colossi whenever it was shaking or flying or whatever, it simply took my breath away and built a type of suspense that was unheard of during it’s time.
The game has no real reward structure aside from getting more grip gauge power and a larger health each time a giant is destroyed. But the feeling you get after each colossus death is quite an intense feeling and therefore is a reward in itself. This feeling also left me wanting for more as I would constantly want to kill a colossus bigger than the previous one. The one thing I would probably change in the game is the voice acting. I know the game is supposed to have a fictional language in a fictional world but in today’s day and age having a game on a home console (before the next gen systems) that doesn’t have voiced text seems rather primitive. But it’s a minor thing seeing as there is only one person that actually talks for the most part in the game, the deity that speaks to the boy.
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| [February 21, 2008 12:49:57 AM]
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SUMMARY:
In Shadow of the Colossus you control a young boy who appears to be unnamed (though Wikipedia states his name is “Wander”, I truly believe it was roughly translated to be “the Wanderer”) as he ventures into a forbidden land with hopes of bringing back a girl to life. The boy and his horse Agro must travel a vast landscape to battle sixteen Colossi believing that there is secret to bringing back the dead by defeating these creatures.
GAMEPLAY:
When I first played this game back in 2005, I was truly impressed with the graphics. It really pushed the Playstation 2 to its limits as seen from some of the dropped frame rates in the game. I was ecstatic when I learned I had to play this game again for the classics gamelog list. After loading it in and playing for an hour, I realized that it still had that charm that most games seem to lack today. There is something magical about climbing atop a creature that is more than fifty times your size and bringing it down with a few well placed stabs from your sword. This game does an exceptional job in making you feel like a hero and that you’ve done something extraordinary.
The controls were definitely unique for its time. As with any 3D adventure game you use the left thumbstick to control your character and the right to rotate the camera. There are a few buttons to switch your sword to bow and attack and jump. But when you fight colossi it was nice to know there was a button to lock on to your colossus, because at some point, you will fight flying ones and small fast ones and you need to anticipate where they will strike. Unlike most games you don’t just swing a sword at the giant and expect it to fall, you have to scale them. This was very interesting in my opinion as I had to make use of the R1 button which makes the boy grab on to any ledge, vine, or hair on the colossus. However you can’t hold on forever and this is where the simple interface comes in. You don’t have a HUD when riding around, which is cool because it really gives a cinematic effect to the game. When you fight colossi a grip gauge appears as a solid circle and tells you how much strength the boy has in him to hold on whatever he’s hanging on to, your selected weapon appears, and two life gauges appear, one for you and one for the colossus. The simple HUD is enough to display crucial information while not getting in the way of the action or the overall cinematic feel of the game.
The story in this game is unique in that there are no other characters besides the boy and a god-like entity to help fuel the story. All the player is told is that, to bring the girl back to life, he must kill sixteen colossi, now go find them. This story or lack thereof is actually a good thing in my opinion. This allows to player to make assumptions about the story and hence he can actually create his own story as he battles these giants. Even though every colossus has its weakness, every player usually takes a while to figure how to exploit that weakness and hence some players will play for half an hour trying to find the weakness and others will get it almost immediately resulting in a wide range of different stories for each player. One aspect about the story that I particularly liked is that every time the boy wakes up in the temple after defeating a colossus, his clothes get ragged and his overall brightness gets darker. I originally perceived this to be a dirty effect where if you’re scaling mountainous creatures you’re bound to get dirty. However I realize that each time the colossi fall, dark energy enters the boy, and we see him inch closer to death and transform into a black shadow-like entity that we all have grown to hate in the game “Ico”.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 21st, 2008 at 01:02:42.
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kenister's Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 21 February, 2008
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