Who doesn’t love a nice stroll down memory lane? TGR does, so we’re bringing you our Super Retroid feature, where our staff members wax nostalgic as they discuss some of the games that have most affected them throughout their gaming careers. From discovery to comradery to emotional impact, each of these games have been uniquely significant and hold a special place in our hearts.

Shadow of the Colossus was a life-changing game for me.  This isn’t hyperbole.  This is fact.  I probably wouldn’t be a games writer if it weren’t for Shadow of the Colossus (or at least it would have taken me much longer to go that route).   

You see, it was the first videogame that I ever took seriously as a work of art.  I’d been gaming for years prior to playing SotC, but only as a hobby.  A guilty pleasure, if you will.  I considered myself a writer, and games seemed a bit beneath me.  If lucky, they’d have some aesthetic appeal or clever dialogue, but nothing I couldn’t get reading a good book or seeing a great movie.  In essence, games were something I’d do, not something I’d think about meaningfully.  But SotC changed all that for me.  It was the first game that I played that told a compelling story that could only work as a game.  Here’s a short excerpt from my blog as to why that is:  

"SotC is at once a short story and a massive epic.  Its actual plot is very small and vague, but it feels epic because of the scope of the game.  You could write a SotC book or make a SotC movie, but it would be extremely boring as there’d be no talking, no other characters, nor any plot developments to speak of for most of the middle 90% of the story.  In order to make it at all interesting, you’d have to cut out most of the middle (by scaling it down to only a few colossi perhaps).  But if you did that, it would no longer feel like an epic and the ending would lose much of its resonance. Thus, the only way to truly experience this simple, yet epic tale is to play it."

The secret of SotC is in its minimalist design.  Everything in it compliments everything else wonderfully.  I love games like Zelda where you’ll spend countless hours fighting monsters, collecting items, chatting with NPCs, etc., but while all of that stuff may be fun to do, it offers nothing to the narrative.  These elements always feel artificial and tacked-on as a flimsy excuse for a game.  And while there’s nothing wrong with that, Fumito Ueda set out to prove that none of those things are necessary.     

For example, in most games you talk to people (or you’re silent, but you "pretend" talk to them anyway.  And they talk back to you), but this always comes off as feeling false, as there’s always a prescribed set of outcomes.  Sooner or later they’ll run out of things to say, so you’ll end up hearing the same line or two repeated over and over as they tell you to go on your merry way.  Thus, by trying to be more immersive, this ends up feeling all the more artificial.  SotC sidesteps this issue entirely by not having anyone around for you to talk to.

 

Better yet, is that the wee bit of dialogue that is in the game is spoken in a made up language.  A well acted made up language at that.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played a game with an interesting story, only for it to be almost completely undone by terrible voice acting.  By disconnecting the language to anything we can call our own, the game takes on a far more otherworldly vibe than something like Oblivion or Mass Effect where everyone speaks English (or whichever language version of the game you have).

And that’s the gobsmackingly brilliant thing about the game; nothing is ever explicitly spelled out for you.  Who you are, who the girl is, what kind of civilization you come from, who this disembodied voice guiding you is, why the land is so barren, how the colossi came about, whether this is a prequel to Ico or not...  We get hints as to the answers, but it’s all open to interpretation.  For example, I’m still not sure if the colossi are sentient or machines.  Both perhaps?  It’s these sorts of thoughts that keep me up at night.

 

But enough pretentious hodgepodge about innovations.  It is a game after all and a game is meant to be played.  Shadow of the Colossus was a fun game to play, but perhaps not for the reasons I was expecting.  Billed as being sort of an action game, I was expecting it to require a greater degree of manual dexterity, but much to my surprise (and eternal delight), those elements are mostly rather elementary.  The real challenge comes from the puzzles.  Each colossus is a puzzle, and a deceptively simple one at that.  You wouldn’t think there’d be much room for puzzles in a game where you only have two weapons for the entirety of the journey and environments are largely non-interactive.  But lo and behold, Ueda and company have found a way.  No two set pieces play alike and while there’s usually but one simple action you must do to gain access to a colossi’s body, figuring out what that is can really take awhile.  And I’m grateful for that.  As a puzzle fan, I was pleasantly surprised that SotC not only had more (and better) action than Ico, but tougher puzzles as well.   

Of course, the problem with puzzles in a game is that once you know the solution, carrying it out can be easy and redundant (even on hard mode).  As such, Shadow of the Colossus will never be quite as much fun as it was the first time through, but it becomes a different kind of fun.  It’s fun because you know what’s coming, and you gain a fuller appreciation for the project as a whole.  In essence, it’s a game you’ll come back to again and again.  Not just to beat your top score (though there is a time attack mode if you feel so inclined), but because you’ll want to relive this tale again and again.  There’s not many games I could say that about.