Review: Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus was one of the primary reasons I actually put down the money for a PlayStation 2, so I was hoping for one helluva gaming experience when I finally popped it into the disc tray. Fortunately for me, I wasn't disappointed.

Colossus is like if Princess Zelda and the Prince of Persia, as representatives of their respective franchises, were to get utterly shitfaced at some shinding for the video game elite and wind up having incredibly hot, totally unprotected sex on the couch in the back room. Then, in the morning, they find they're both incredibly embarrassed, vow never to speak of that night again, and return promptly home.

Then six weeks later, Zelda discovers she's pregnant, and Link flips out and leaves her because he's been off questing for the past eight months. So, in grand romantic comedy style, Zelda and the Prince wind up together because of twue wuv, and when the little tyke is born they give the Cloverfield monster a call and ask him to be the godfather, which twists the kid's development in a serious way*.

The baby, if you follow the extended and painful metaphor, is Shadow of the Colossus.

In Colossus, you play as Wander, a seemingly archetypal young male heroic sort, who has come to the cursed, unpeopled land that serves as the game's setting in an effort to bring back to life a young woman named Mono. Wander's relationship to Mono is never made clear in-game. Is she his wife? Girlfriend? Sister? Mother, by dint of time-traveling weirdness? Does she owe him money? You never bloody find out. All you know is that she was sacrificed because she had a cursed destiny, and the story (for the sake of simplicity) seems to leave it at that.

Anyway, Wander arrives with Mono's body in a shrine, and there is given instructions by a voice from above calling itself Domin to slay the sixteen great colossi in this cursed land to complete the spell that will resurrect Mono.

So Wander sets out, astride his very talented stair-climbing horse Agro, to kill the terrible beasties and bring his girlfriend/sister/debtor back to life**.

As implied by the anecdote at the beginning of this review, the game plays like a cross between The Legend of Zelda and The Prince of Persia. Wander has a decidedly Link-like arsenal (a bow and a very European sword) but has some very Prince-like moves (the ability to grab hold of ledges and shimmy along them, for instance). His animations are very fluid, transitioning easily from one to the next.

Fluidity, however, does not imply grace. Wander has a tendency to stumble as he runs--a purely aesthetic addition, as it doesn't actually affect the distance he traverses, but it makes considerable sense. If you were hauling ass away from a sixty-foot titan that uses chunks of buildings for armor, you'd probably stumble a bit, too. Also, he freely flails about in grand ragdoll style as the colossi try to shrug off the deathgrip he uses to scale their furry hides.

The controls that make Wander do all these things--jump, shimmy, climb, and stab--are fairly intuitive. I'd hardly any experience at all with the PS2 controller when I began to play, but had little trouble in picking it up. There's even a button specifically used for targeting the colossi, which is really bloody sensible if you think about it, seeing how there are no other enemies in the entire game. I will warn you, however, that your right index finger will feel like it's about to break off from holding down R1, which is used for climbing. Also, it would've been nice if the jump button had not been the same as the mount button. There were a number of spare controls left, so I don't see why that wasn't possible, but having the same button do both leads to tedious moments when you're trying to mount Agro but instead wind up hopping beside him like an imbecile.

Riding Agro is something else to be considered. Agro is very much a character on his own terms, and acts considerably realistically as regards general horsiness. What this means is that any and all commands you issue Agro are more or less suggestions, which Agro may or may not take. He tends to be fairly agreeable, but he certainly isn't Epona. It takes him some time to respond to kicks that prompt speed and to tugs on the reins, which is frustrating initially but actually turns out to be incredibly useful as that same horsey intelligence means that you don't have to control Agro directly to keep him from running smack into walls--a definite bonus in one colossus battle where you have to ride him backwards in order to shoot the massive sandworm chasing after you.

This game pretty much redefined "epic" for the entire industry, I'd have to say.

Unlike Zelda and Prince of Persia, Wander gets no equipment upgrades and learns no special moves during the course of the game. He has everything he's ever going to have at the start of the game, and it's up to the player to make the best use of the lot of it. This basically means that each colossus battle is a puzzle resolved by divining how to make use of the tools and tactics at Wander's disposal to bring down the beast. You'd think that would get old fairly quickly, but let me assure you that it doesn't. Each colossus brings something new and entertaining to the table, keeping the game's central conceit from getting stale.

The game is short, clocking in at around nine hours, but that seems to be a good length for it. It manages to finish out the story (albeit in an anime-ambiguous sort of way) and make its exit before it wears out its welcome. Those nine hours, unfortunately, don't have a great deal of replay value. Once you've figured out the schtick that'll take down each of the sixteen colossi, there's not much left to do. There's not really anything left to do. The game is composed wholly of pretty landscapes, epic boss fights, and dark, bittersweet storytelling.

To sum up, I enjoyed this game immensely, even if its resolution left me as emotionally confused as a budding bisexual schoolgirl. The attention to detail is extraordinary, and everything from the colossi's models to the voice acting is excellently executed. Certainly worth the purchase if you're a freak like me who is only just now getting around to playing games released in 2005.

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* Sadly, it would not surprise me if there was a fanfic somewhere whose plot unfolds in precisely this fashion. The internet is a scary, sad place.
** If you're more the thoughtful sort (i.e. not Wander) you'd be asking serious questions at this point. Questions like "Why am I doing what a voice in a skylight tells me to?", "Why are there no people around here?", and "You want me to kill fucking what?"