The Legends Return
Much has been said about Fumito Ueda's masterpieces Ico and Shadow of the Colossus since their release on the Playstation 2 many years ago. Discussions about art design, elegance of puzzle structure and environmental clues, and even emotional attachment to AI characters are all areas in which I could dedicate an entire entry to (and many others already have). Knowing that and having extensive experience with their original incarnations already, my main interest in this collection was seeing what Bluepoint games had done with the source material.
I started, as I expect most would, with Ico. This is a game that originally ran at a resolution below PS2 games of its era (a staggeringly low 512x224 interlaced, owing mainly to its development beginning on the PS1), so we're talking some seriously low resolution artwork here. Amazingly though, the game absolutely shines when rendered at full 1920x1080. I always appreciated the quality of artwork in this game, but lifting the blur of SD graphics passed over analog cables allows us to really see what an accomplishment the artists at Team Ico achieved. Simulated light bloom, hanging dust in the air, flickering torchlight on the characters and even a primitive version of the "light shafts" seen in cutting edge technology such as Unreal Engine 3 get a chance to impress all over again 10 years later.
The majority of what you see is original art, but for those wondering I did spot one or two small changes, the big one being a change to the brick textures that cover a large portion of the game world. These large textures used for floor tiles and castle bricks undoubtedly looked awful when blown up to full HD, so the decision was made to shrink their relative size on the screen and simply use more of them to texture the environment.
Walls and floors are now made up of smaller tiles and look a bit busier than the large, chunky stone look of the original. It's difficult to put in words, but have a gander at the comparison image on the right to see what I mean. It's an elegant solution to avoid creating new art assets, but I feel it bears mentioning because it's one of the only noticeable changes to the aesthetic of the game, and it does slightly alter the visual impact since the majority of the game world is made up of these bricks.
Outside of this minor change, Ico in HD is a revelation for fans of the original, and an impressive introduction for neophytes. The puzzles remain smart and just head-scratching enough without reaching the point of frustration, and the simple mechanics and fairly repetitive gameplay don't overstay their welcome by dragging on for 10-12 hours. At around 5-6 hours for a competent player, Ico is a tight, well designed action/puzzle game with a surprising amount of emotion between two characters who don't even speak the same language.
When discussing these games with their most ardent fans, Shadow of the Colossus is traditionally the favorite of the two. It certainly has been mine all these years, so I was especially eager to see it as gloriously updated as Ico. This was a game that pushed the PS2 not to its limits, but actually beyond them. If you've ever experienced the original in all its janky, jerky, 15fps "glory", you'll undoubtedly be foaming at the mouth as you watch the familiar intro movie play out at a silky smooth 30fps, accompanied by that eternally beautiful, haunting score. It would appear at first glance that this package is a dual triumph, but that feeling faded ever so slightly as I worked my way through the later game.
This is an amazing game. The design of the Colossi as monstrous behemoths who look as if they're formed from the remnants of stone and very Earth they walk on is glorious and beautiful to look at, and the elegance of raising your sword to light the path is a trick our hero Wander learned a good decade before Mr. Isaac Clark. The sadness that pervades as the gentle creatures fall to the ground by your hand is still moving to this day, and the solutions to climbing and bringing them down are some of the most dynamic and exciting puzzles ever incorporated into an action/platformer. I did mention however, that I'd be focusing mostly on the HD conversions as opposed to the games themselves, and it's there that my slight disappointment with Shadow of the Colossus lies.
Whereas Ico takes place in small, confined areas with visible loading between them, Ueda and his team had the ambitious goal of an open, streaming world that you traverse on horseback with no loading at all for Shadow of the Colossus. On the PS2 this of course led to far away (and sometimes very close) assets "popping", in some cases changing from a low detail to high detail texture as you approached, while in others entire mountains or objects would appear out of thin air. We overlooked those issues at the time, partially due to the majesty of the game and also because it was an acceptable technical limitation of the age. Unfortunately, the LoD and object streaming is still there- extremely prevalent at every turn and very jarring. Having been almost completely eliminated in this generation of consoles, it leaps out at you every time it happens because our brains aren't used to seeing that mess anymore.
Earlier, I mentioned the elegant change made to Ico's wall textures which make it more palatable without creating new art, yet nothing of the sort seems to have done with its successor. I'm sure that's partially due to the art being organic in nature, since large rock or grass textures can't simply be repeated more often like the bricks in Ico, but I would have been fine with some new art assets in a few places to eliminate some of the muddier textures .
Shadow is a victim of its own ambition in other areas as well, such as the cloth, horse reigns and small items dangling from Wander's clothes that clip through him and his horse Agro in every cutscene, odd and sudden changes in the lighting where the screen will get very dark or tinted green briefly before getting bright again and a fog effect that washes out the entire image in certain areas- all acceptable and common issues of last generation's hardware, but sadly left intact for this re-release. Considering the gargantuan leap in memory and rendering power, would it have been that hard to drop the low detail textures completely and simply load the high res art even at a distance? I'm no programmer and I assume it would require work, but the art design and visual appeal of this game are so impressive I was hugely disappointed to see these obvious blemishes not sorted when running on a system as powerful as the PS3.
Scrolling up and re-reading this I feel like I've been unnecessarily harsh on Shadow of the Colossus, and if it sounds that way to you too, please know that I'm not criticizing this game. My disappointment lies neither with the work of Ueda and his talented team or with Shadow of the Colossus itself, but rather at the fact that more wasn't done to polish the few blemishes on this masterpiece of a game. I suppose it's the same curse as when people got excited for the Star Wars Prequels, in that no one can ever do it as well as you hope.
If you've never played these games, I can't recommend them enough. These are the definitive versions of two all time greats, but just know in advance that the move to PS3 hasn't polished all the rough edges from the latter. Despite that however, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are literal giants of this industry in terms of gameplay, artistry, emotion and beauty. I would recommend this HD collection not only to anyone with even the faintest interest in gaming, but also as a showpiece of what games themselves can aspire to be.
