GOTY: Shadow of the Colossus! I finished playing this game this afternoon and it’s probably the best game I’ve ever played on the PS2. Sure, it has its flaws, but the execution, and the feeling you get after you beat each colossus overwhelms any shortcomings this game has. If I could only have one game for the PS2, this would be it.

I would have thought that a game with just 16 boss battles and nothing else would feel repetitive and boring, but that’s far from the truth. Each battle feels epic and each subsequent colossus takes advantage of the experience gained after beating prior colossuses (colossi?).

When I first started playing the game, the controls were a bit clumsy. But now, I realize the controls are near perfect. Riding the horse, Agro, is realistic since instead of controlling the horse, you’re controlling the rider, so you have actually pull back the reins to steer. One colossus, which requires you to do an acrobatic leap off of Agro to beat, strengthened my opinion that the devs did a great job with the controls.

Unfortunately, the camera is far from perfect. My main gripe about any 3rd person game is that there’s always some sort of camera issue and SotC is no exception. The camera is player-controlled, but left on its own, it likes moving around on its own to ensure a ‘better’ cinematic experience at key parts of the game, which gets annoying, especially when the camera moves while you’re trying to time a jump. There were several instances where the camera decided that I didn’t need to look at The Wanderer (the player controlled character) at all and moved behind the Colossus instead.

The musical score for the game is Hollywood blockbuster quality. The first time I heard the “climbing music” (for lack of a better term) in the game, I actually felt like a hero facing a terrifying but epic task. No other game I’ve played so far even comes close to that. My favorite track is the one from the last colossus battle. It made me feel a mix between loneliness and despair, as if the world would end if I didn’t succeed.

I couldn’t help but think that the game was too grand for the poor little console that had to support it. I didn’t notice any significant FPS drop during most of the boss battles, but the last colossus really made my poor PS2 chug. The rain, thunder, and enormity of the colossus made the FPS drop drastically. Fortunately, it wasn’t bad enough to affect gameplay, but it makes me wonder how it would play if it were a PS3 game.

Aside from the FPS slowdown in the last battle, the visuals for SotC were some of the best I’ve seen on a PS2 game. Some of scenery, like waterfalls, were breathtaking. They did a stellar job with the lighting and made the world feel dynamic. When you wandered into a cave, everything went dim. When you walked into a patch of sunlight in an otherwise dark forest, your whole screen would fill with light. I would expect no less from the creators of Ico. Each colossus looked amazing and if you visit their death site after, their corpses blended in with their surroundings, which was a nice touch.

Unfortunately, it looks like the creators spent so much time on the environment and colossus that they didn’t have time to work on the player models. The Wanderer looked blocky and primitive and his sword often no-clipped into his own leg. Agro was slightly better. If you could overlook the ugly character models, the movements of both the horse and the Wanderer were incredibly realistic, especially when the Wanderer stumbled.

Coming from the creators of Ico, it should be no surprise that the story is told through sparse pieces of dialogue and cut scenes. Nothing was really explained in the entire game until the end, after the 16th colossus, kind of like a reward for completing the game. A lot of people have said that you don’t need to have played Ico to play SotC, and while it may be true, I think the ending makes morse sense after playing Ico. I’m a bit frustrated about the ending because I’d like to discuss it with someone, but all of my friends who have beat SotC have never played Ico, and my one friend who played Ico hasn’t played SotC yet.

So, yes, if you have a PS2, you must give this game a chance.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.