 Review By: Cameron Morris |
Developer: | SCEI |
| Publisher: | SCEA | |
| Genre: | Action Adventure | |
| ESRB: | Teen | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Memory Card | |
| Buy Now: |   |
Go buy this game. Don't read this review. I don't care if you're my editor, my fellow writers, my grandmother, or that kid who menaced me with safety scissors when I was four. Every human being who owns a PlayStation 2 needs to get this game and play it, for good or ill. If you're reading this review, you must be at least curious about the game, so I will tell you right up front: go buy it. That's it. You don't have to read anymore. If you have to, skip down to the Bottom Line and see what I say there, but it's much the same.
There, that's out of the way. If you're still reading at this point, you either already own the game or are just really persistent. Either way, I'm going to explain why you need to get it in a way that, I hope, will illustrate my reasoning to anyone.
Shadow of the Colossus is a game in which you have to hunt down and kill sixteen of the largest monsters ever put in a videogame. The reason that you're doing this is because a big voice in the sky is telling you that this is the only way you can resurrect the girl who you are carrying with you - who was killed for reasons unbeknownst to the player. Your only weapons are a bow, and a magic sword that can reflect light to point out the direction of the next colossus. You also have a horse, which will assist you in traveling to and sometimes slaying the colossi. That's the entire premise, and in effect that's the entire game: you hunt down the colossi, you fight them, and you kill them. That's it.
Not to say that the game has no depth - nothing could be further from the truth. But the premise of the game perfectly exemplifies exactly how minimalist the approach the developers took with this game was. If you go into this game knowing nothing else, know that you should not expect constant action or puzzle-solving or even music from this game, because you're not going to get it. Hell, the main character is never even actually named.
Let's start with the first thing that everyone is going to notice about the game, whether they boot it up for themselves or are just watching someone else play: the graphics. Understand that the graphics in this game, more than in any other, are equal part technical feat and art direction. Let me warn you ahead of time of the single most common complaint people have with this game: the frame rate is inconsistent, ranging from solid to choppy. Considering that the frame rate only really drops when the game is displaying either the most massive colossi or the widest expanses of land ever witnessed on the PS2 (maybe on any system out right now), coupled with the fact that the frame rate never really hurts the gameplay, it's not that bad a problem and certainly not a detriment to the total look of the game.
The environments in the game are uniformly beautiful - in that all of them are beautiful, not that all of them look alike. The game gives the impression of being barren to a point that's literally tragic without actually being so, with details like ruined pieces of architecture and shattered bridges and long-abandoned fortresses giving the impression of a shattered world. Water trickle down winding streams before cascading over the edge of a literally breath-taking fall, feeding a massive river that, if one were to follow it, would go all the way out to the sea. Canyons, deserts, vast plains, forests...all of them possess a quality that gives one the feeling of going through a fairy tale world instead of a videogame.
One of the most amazing things about the game on the whole is probably the sense of scale - everything in the game is utterly gigantic. The land itself is so huge that you could probably fit the entire world of any console RPG inside of it, dungeons and all, and it can take many minutes to cross even part of the landscape on your trust horse. Everything in the game, including lakes, major waterfalls, rivers, the ocean, battle arenas, caves, and pieces of architecture all dwarf you to the point that sometimes you just have to sit back and marvel. Outside of the small lizards, doves, and hawks that are sprinkled across the game's world, I don't think there's a single thing in the entire game that's the same size as or smaller than the main character himself. The wonderful thing about this is that while some games simulate a sense of scale in a way that seems cheesy, almost like the artists' collective idea of a joke, everything in this game is painstakingly wrought to make the experience seem genuine and, at times, terrifyingly real. Nothing in the entire game, of course, makes the sense of scale seem more relevant than the colossi themselves.
Let's talk about the colossi, and how they look, and how they play. Actually describing any specific colossus in any capacity would be one of the most brutal spoilers about a videogame I could ever throw at you, so I won't go into that much detail. I will say, though, that each colossus is designed in a way that makes sense, and each one presents a significantly different impression of menace or curiosity from every other. Some are so big that they can't fit on your screen unless they're half a mile away, while others are considerably smaller - about the size of a large truck. Each of them is designed in a very different way, or at least for very different situations; almost everyone has seen the pictures of the first colossus, whose appearance is so distinctive that one could easily pick him out of a crowd of similarly designed giant monsters, and whose massive size is reflected by the speed of his movements, suggesting a power that affects one on an almost primal level. Each design finds its inspiration in something different, different animals or mythical beasts or even machines (I said it), and at their best the colossi range from awe-inspiring to literally fear-inducing. Once you have seen these monsters, it is almost impossible to be impressed with the boss designs from any other game.
The colossi are, in another way, exemplary of one of the only problems in the game in that they are so huge and detailed that the power of the system simply can't support them; the framerate can and does suffer. However, the team has done their best to work around this, and one of the ways they've done this is an extremely well-implemented blur effect, which not only simulates a sense of intense speed but actually makes the framerate less noticeable. I dunno, it kind of tricks the eye into filling in the empty spaces, or something, but I know that it makes the problem far less noticeable, and even impressive.
Posted: 2005-11-02 20:19:30 PST