This article contains spoilers for the entire game. If you haven't I suggest you go and play Shadow of the Colossus before coming back to read the rest.
A few days after beating Ico, it was time to move on to Shadow of the Colossus. Before starting this run I had played the game about halfway through on the PS2, so I knew roughly what to expect…
Much like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus starts with a long introductory cutscene, giving you Wander's (our main character) goal: to revive Mono. I would usually complain about a cutscene of this length, but even more so than Ico, Shadow of the Colossus avoids cutscenes by having a mere two of significance. This, as well as the cinematography and overall quality of the intro makes it completely forgivable in terms of length. It’s a fantastic way to start a game; it gives the player a clear goal of killing 16 colossi to essentially rescue the princess. As with Ico, we aren’t actually given the names of our characters, with the exception of Dormin and Agro. It isn’t necessary for the story and Team Ico appear to prefer writing in a way that makes sense, meaning characters don’t all introduce themselves and the plot just happens without any unnecessary baggage.
As soon as this is over with, the player is thrown into a huge, open world to find and kill the first colossus. The world might be large, but you know exactly where to go thanks to a nifty feature in which light reflects off your sword, bouncing in a line to the next colossus. Instead of using a conventional map objective marker, this suits the world of the game far better than anything else I could think of. From the mechanic you can gather that this is a particularly special sword with magical properties. This suspicion is confirmed at the end of the game when it is revealed that Wander stole this sacred sword. Small hints at plot points like this are what Team Ico does well, and they do so by making an interesting form of a waypoint that no doubt took more time to create than a typical one. Light reflecting realistically (in terms of this world) is proven with the fact that when you are in darker places, the light being reflected will dim and getting a direction is impossible in caves where there is no sunlight.
Presentation in Shadow of the Colossus is less understated than Ico, but it is even better in my opinion. For example, despite the light beam acting as a waypoint, a map still exists within the pause screen. The map looks hand-drawn and the colour-scheme fits in with the rest of the game, as it reinforces the scale of the world, as well as lending a sense of progression through segments of the map being uncovered as you travel to, and defeat, each colossus. Furthermore, beams of light pierce the skies from the location of each of the fallen colossi, a superb effect that drives home the slow depopulation of this land. One of the elements I love the most about the map function is the way the camera quickly zooms out from you upwards, transitioning smoothly into the map screen, an effect that looks slicker than the pause or map features in most modern games. Motion blur is used here to improve the transition, as it is throughout the game, giving it a cinematic look that definitely makes it feel less dated. The symbol of a defeated colossus is marked on the map, and with this I felt incredibly satisfied when I began to see the map fill up with colossi towards the end of the game. However, it was also met with depression…
This sense of depression comes from what I would argue is the game’s strongest plot aspect: are Wander's actions just? Are the colossi actually malicious? Should I feel regret for killing some of the only other inhabitants of this land? With a game about killing bosses, it would have been easy to paint them all as awful beings who must be destroyed, ridding the world of evil in order to save the girl! But this isn’t the approach Shadow of the Colossus takes. Instead we are treated to a much more ambiguous story, with the protagonist seemingly wanting to do something heroic (revive Mono), but needing to kill what appear to be neutral creatures, for the most part at least. I love that someone could go through the entire game, and not consider the fact that many of the colossi don’t attack you until provoked. These players could be completely oblivious to the questionable morality of Wander and still have a great time defeating these truly epic bosses.
These feelings of conflict and depression may come after defeating a colossus, but while engaged in battle all you feel is almost constant thrills and tension. This comes from the aforementioned motion blur which not only adds to the cinematic element, but also the feel of speed and being carelessly flung around while on top one of the giants. Speed comes into play primarily with the flying colossi, of which there are two (as well as an underwater one); Wander holding on to a huge beast soaring through the air is the most exhilarating experience to be found in Shadow of the Colossus (not that the other 14 aren’t exciting as well, of course). Because of the stamina bar (technically circle) you are under constant pressure to manage your time atop these beasts, using some of it to get in those vital blows to the head (and other body parts), then to cling on for dear life, then to regain stamina lost from performing both of those actions. Although, when I say dear life I actually mean ‘dear time’, since you don’t really die when you fall from a great height. This is likely to keep the pacing of the game up, due to decreased deaths from falling and the experience smooth, a priority in Ico as well. The design philosophy behind these games is definitely to keep the player immersed and enveloped in the world, and seeing ‘game over’ screens acts as an obstacle in achieving this.
While you don’t take much fall damage even from the greatest heights, that doesn’t mean Shadow of the Colossus is void of challenge. Instead of worrying about health, you are likely to be concerned with how to take down the colossi, as each one is essentially a puzzle. I would therefore consider Shadow of the Colossus an action/adventure/puzzle game, a combination of genres fitting for the uniqueness of the experience. Most of these bosses have interesting gimmicks: one must be flipped over with torrents of water, another requires you to shatter its armour, and it all ends in a long battle comprised of dodging heavy attacks and scaling a tower surrounding the final colossus like a skirt. With a game consisting only of bosses, you’d expect them to all be incredible, and for the most part Shadow of the Colossus delivers. One of the exceptions is a tiger-styled colossus which you must lead around a ruined city, having it knock over pillars to help you progress through what is more like a level than a boss fight. While this is an interesting idea, and a nice change of pace, the main problem comes with the beast being fast and agile, so much so that it is able to stun-lock you until you’re dead. Upon death, no matter how far you have progressed in the fight, you are put back at the beginning to do what I find to be the easy part of the boss: leading him around to the final section of the puzzle. Doing so becomes monotonous, as you’d expect.
In most games you’d have an entire level to continue being annoyed at the previous boss, but in Shadow of the Colossus it’s right onto the next one you go! A boss that is likely to make up for whatever pain you felt from the previous. The structure of the game is probably the most uncommon thing there is; having a game only composed of boss fights changes how players experience it. You don’t gain any new equipment while regularly playing the campaign, so starting with a bow and a sword means the mechanics are fairly basic and never change. What does change are the boss designs and how you go about beating them, the base mechanics staying the same aids this so that the player knows exactly what they are able to do.
Knowing what to do starts off at the basic: I gotta climb this giant thing. From there you work out how to instigate the climb, soon realising that the fur lining the colossi is crucial to this, which makes logical sense and doesn’t need to be communicated in any way other than being a part of the colossi design. The climbing system itself works reasonably well, although in terms of the overall controlling of Wander it’s the shakiest part of the game. Problems arise when there are meshing issues in a colossus and you get caught in the middle of two sections; Wander will be unable to move, becoming stuck in the climbing animation. At first this is annoying, but you soon learn to let go and grab on elsewhere, however it becomes a frustration when letting go means falling off and potentially losing quite a bit of progress on defeating the current colossus. From a mechanical standpoint this is my only complaint; the rest of the game is stunning when you take into account that it was made for the PS2 - so using bloom effects, dynamic shadows and the perception of light adjusting realistically like an eye are all astonishingly impressive.
Something unique to my playthrough on stream was how, as I was taking down some colossi, people in chat were pointing out that I wasn’t doing it the conventional way. For example, instead of breaking the third colossi’s armour by having it hit a stone plate in the centre of its arena, I ran up the beast’s sword and managed to hop across to its exposed torso, climbing up to the weak point and skipping what was thought to be a required action. This happened again with the 12th colossus (Pelagia), when instead of manoeuvring behind it, I leapt onto its face and got Wander to leap up to the head, skipping an entire section of the fight. This is a perfect display of the versatility of the climbing system, as while it may not work perfectly, it’s fairly consistent. While some may argue that the game is broken if I can do this unknowingly and never find the ‘right’ way to beat a boss, I would say that it adds a lot of fun; I’d rather be able to ‘cheat’ a boss than have an arbitrary, invisible wall blocking me just because I didn’t needlessly shatter the armour of a colossus. The fact that the climbing isn’t restricted and therefore works mostly how you’d expect (i.e. if it’s a ledge or fur, Wander can hold on to it) benefits Shadow of the Colossus greatly in my eyes, even if not everyone will experience the lengths it can go to.
Now we come to the end of the game. All of the colossi have been defeated, Agro has sacrificed himself for Wander's sake in one of the most heart wrenching moments in the game, it’s sad and you should feel sad. If you’ve been paying attention to Wander throughout your time in the game you may have noticed that he has become paler after every ‘victory’ over the various colossi, as well as generally becoming more scruffy and battered. The assumption can be made here that the black substance piercing into him after each colossi has fallen is likely what is causing this to happen. The black shadows which appear around Wander after being teleported back to the shrine, serving as a hub (the only thing close to a loading screen in the game) reinforce this despair, although the more observant may have also noticed the doves growing in number around Mono, suggesting some hope still remains.
The eventful final scene has Dormin keeping his word about Wander paying a price for reviving Mono, by using him as a vessel for his own return. This leads up to you essentially playing from the standpoint of a colossus, although you haven’t really changed characters since it is Wanders body being used for Dormins revival. As this drastic change occurs, you attempt to kill the apparent and sudden antagonists and begin to realise how much of an advantage you had over the colossi; with them lumbering slowly, and unable to keep up with humans despite the amount of power the colossi control. This means attempts at killing these adversaries are futile, as they manage to easily escape and cast the sword which Wander wielded into a small pit, at which point they cast a seal over the shrine to seal away Dormin once more. The thing is: I don’t want or need an explanation for how this works; it’s magic and it’s about what happened, not about explaining how it did. This ending is a huge story dump in the best way possible; there are so many things worth analysing and talking about, from who Wander actually is to why Dormin was sealed away in the first place. With the latter we can assume that Dormin is a sort of malevolent demon, yet we never see him do anything truly deserving of this description, because he does warn Wander of the consequence that robs him of his life (one that he is not interested in hearing the specifics of), and actually keeps his own end of the sacrificial bargin by reviving Mono. Sure he is trying kill the pursuers of Wander, but they are attempting to defeat him, just as you have in 16 amazing battles. The idea that Dormin was sealed in all these colossi implies to me that each one represents a different aspect of him, meaning he isn’t completely aggressive or docile. Another interesting aspect of him are his horns which link back to Ico thematically, but are likely to make you judge him as an evil being, something Ico certainly wasn’t. Ironic, isn’t it?
We are left with Mono being revived, the reveal of Agro’s survival (I can’t begin to tell you how happy I was to see him) and Wander… changed into a baby with horns, this being most obvious link to Ico by implying he either is Ico, which after much thought and evidence, has been deemed impossible (although after your first playthrough you wouldn’t know this), or at least started the bloodline of the horned people. There are plenty of theories out there of what the many details of the story could mean, and that’s what I love; ambiguity in something this high quality leads to speculation and huge discussions obsessing over minor elements; so much so that people are still exploring this largely empty world to this day in search for hints and answers.
That is the mark of something truly special, which is exactly what Shadow of the Colossus is.
- Ben Lucas (@TheYouthfuls)
(Thanks to Ben Ballingall for helping with proofreading!)
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