The PlayStation 2 was home to an incredible range of hits over more genres than I could list. There really was something for everyone, and if you wanted an artistic, thought-provoking, giant killer, was there anything that fit the bill better than Shadow of the Colossus?
Taking on the role of Wander, you'll traverse lands empty of life but full of colossi, huge (like, really, really big) beasts of all shapes and sizes. Colossi that need dealing with. Are you up to the task?
Frustrations
I have never played Shadow of the Colossus. When the remaster was announced for the PlayStation 3, I thought "that'll be nice, I've heard that game's good" and proceeded to completely ignore it all over again. When the remake came for the PlayStation 4, I thought "wow, I really need to get around to seeing what that is, don't I?" and - you guessed it - never did. I only own that remake because it was 'free' on PS Plus.
Luckily, I do. In a charity shop in Edinburgh, I spotted a copy of Shadow of the Colossus for the PS2, it's cardboard box a little squished but it's art postcards still inside. This really is an arty game, isn't it? Style is everything, and you pay for quality. £20. Well, it's going to charity, I guess...
But my poor PS2 is showing it's age and is struggling with reading discs. I just couldn't get it to run on the original hardware. I wanted to see how those graphics looked back in the day before they were lovingly recreated for screen resolutions that would blow our minds in 2005, but alas, that's not to be. Let's see how well it emulates.
Ooh, that's a lot of bloom. I don't quite think it was meant to be that bright back in the day. Good job we can fiddle with some settings to rip that out and see Shadow of the Colossus in most of its glory.
Fun Times
This looks great, doesn't it? It probably looked better, and certainly looked different on the PS2, but this is a look I can get behind. It's bright, but it's not hopeful, and yet the circumstances don't look dire, either. This is a muted affair and with no speech or voice over, we're exploring this world through whatever we're carefully shown.
Oh, uhm, well, that came outta nowhere... Weird voices in an otherworldly language, and subtitles that don't make the most sense. I've seen a lot about Shadow of the Colossus, but this is unexpected.
Thankfully, it doesn't last long, and we get back to something we can actually follow. Wander has been carrying a woman all this way. She doesn't look very responsive. She is probably dead. But Wander still has hope.
Striking up a conversation with Dormin, some kind of deity perhaps, I'm not sure, we learn that there may be a chance of Wander getting the help he's after.
Well? Are we ready? We've come all this way and sat through all these cutscenes. Shall we finally find out what Shadow of the Colossus is all about?
Come on, Agro. We've got some colossi to bring down.
16 idols lining the walls need to be destroyed, and they'll only crumble to the floor when their colossi incarnations fall to the floor themselves. Outside, in the barren but somewhat lovely looking lands (once you tinker with the settings to actually see through the bloom), Wander can use his sword to home in on his target.
It's a wide, open environment to get used to the controls, and get used to them you'll need to do. They are... unconventional, to say the least. Agro is a little funky to ride, but the biggest stumbling block to you might be the default layout of Triangle to jump and R1 to grab onto stuff. I bet anyone familiar with a PS2 controller can just imagine how long that'll feel comfortable for.
You have a grip gauge that ensures you can't cling indefinitely to ledges or vines, but a spritely - albeit wild-looking - jump allows you to cover large distances in and clamber up all sorts of surfaces. Not every surface, though. There aren't any glowing pointers or splashes of Uncharted yellow to point you in the right direction, but the environmental design seems to make sense to navigate.
Once we're at the top, the scale of our quest reveals itself. Well, through all the dirt and dust and obscuring trees.
The L1 button does indeed lock onto the colossus that looms large before you, but fitting them onto the screen just won't be happening. These guys are huge, and you've got to find their weak spot and stab it with your sword. It's usually on their head...
I may have landed on my head, but I have also brought this colossus down to his knee, temporarily. It's time to jump and grab and scramble up his leg and back, up to his head, all while he lumbers around trying to shake us off.
This is tense for two reasons. Firstly, you've no idea how a colossus will move when you're on it. It's probably going to be a rough ride, but will it be side to side, will they jump, will they spin? Can you quickly run up its spine or do you have to grab hold and inch your way into position? If you do decide to let go, can you grab on quick enough should it start shaking you off? If you go slow and grab on for dear life, how long will your grip last? Enough to get you where you need to be?
With sword in hand, one press of Square raises it high, and a second press, once you've powered it up, stabs it back down into the weak spot, black ooze squirting into your face, howls of pain and desperate shakes to get rid of you forcing you to think about what you're doing. You are thinking about what you're doing, right? This guy wasn't a threat to you, was he? This is murder, isn't it?
Further Frustrations
"This is murder" wasn't going through my head when I fell off before dealing the killing blow. It was probably a swear word, knowing I'd have to do all that climbing again. But that's can't be a bad thing, can it? I did it once before, I can do it again, surely?
Nope. I just couldn't. The lobster-like grip the jump and grab buttons forced me to hold was getting to me, as were the instances of Wander not following my inputs, or me expecting him to climb like Nathan Drake or Ezio Auditore. He'd jump in the wrong direction, he'd have no choice but to hold on as the colossus wailed around, causing him to run out of grip strength and hit the deck again and again. I just wasn't having fun.
I quit out of frustration, my fingers confused at what they were being asked to do. I should have remapped the controls. There was some slowdown in the emulation too, along with that issue of excessive bloom, but it was playable. It just wasn't perfect. It needed some polish, and more importantly, I needed to play this game.
Further Fun Times
Shadow of the Colossus on the PS4 looks awesome. All shades of awesome. Customisable shades of awesome, even, should you want that. I don't want that, not right now, anyway. I just want to play Shadow of the Colossus with a comfortable control set up, accurate lighting levels, and a stable framerate.
And boy, did I.
It's very easy to get swayed by pretty graphics, but when they look this good, I'll almost gladly ignore the control issues. They're still present, in that Wander and Agro don't quite move as you'd expect them to, but jump now defaults to X and grab to R2, and a difficulty option means I can breeze through one of most visually appealing PlayStation 2 games.
Am I experiencing the same kind of things that I would have been 15 years ago? Perhaps not. Shadow of the Colossus looked good, but it definitely didn't look this good. It didn't stand out this much, visually. It's gameplay certainly did, though, and with each colossi providing a different challenge, your skills will be put to the test.
Some vague hints are given if it looks like you're not quite sure on how to progress, but they certainly don't hold your hand. Navigating up and over these colossi looks like it'd be simple enough, with one clear route, but I don't think that's the case at all. There may be an obvious route to your goal, but there were equally times where I literally made leaps of faith from backs to arms, from wings to necks, praying there was enough strength in my arms to grab hold of anything to save me from falling to the floor.
I got through a quarter of the hitlist in short order, and expect the scale and difficulty to ramp up over time - though how the scale can ramp up is anyone's guess. I've seen a lot of Shadow of the Colossus, and know what's coming, but I don't know enough to know when any given colossus is making its appearance, so everything is new to me, especially with these graphics.
Final Word
I'm still hopeful of playing the PS2 original on an actual PS2, just to get a feel for it as it was. The emulation doesn't do it justice, not with my setup, and the remake is its own beast, really. If you Google what people thought of the controls, you'll see that Shadow of the Colossus is as much about mastering them as it is about mastering the gameplay.
So it's not without its faults, even the remake, but what game isn't? Yes, it's got weird controls and doesn't do what you think it does, but just look at it. Just look at the ambition. A character clambering on a moving platformer game. A player solving a puzzle while the puzzle actively tries to get rid of their presence. A story that makes you wonder whether the price you pay for something is really worth it.
As I keep saying, I've seen a lot of Shadow of the Colossus, but I'm glad I've forgotten its story so that I can play it for myself. Remakes and remasters aren't necessarily a great way of preserving history, but their availability and ease of entry allow more players to discover that history. I knew of this game but had never directly explored it. Now I have, and I need to explore more.
Will it be long? Difficult? Satisfying? A game worthy of not just a remaster, but a remake too? I'm dying to find out. Well, some colossi will be...
FILLING YOU IN
Well, some three hours or so later, I can confirm that it won't be long. I've not completed it yet, but I am the last colossi. More accurately, I'm at the bridge to get to the last colossi. Even more accurately, I'm stuck in frustration at the bridge to get to the last colossi.
From the central spawn point, I hoof it aaaaalll the way to where I need to be, down at the bottom of the map. We ride through forests and deserts to get there, opening a sealed doorway with our shiny sword. Stairs up the cliff lead to a bridge, which itself leads to the bottom of what looks like a colossal arena. End boss stuff, I bet.
I jump. I miss. I fall. A very long way. I respawn, back in the middle of the map. I hoof it, many minutes, through forest and desert and through sealed doorways and try again. I jump. I miss again. I fall again. Why is Wander not grabbing this bridge?
I look it up online. You need Agro to jump that gap? Ok. I respawn, back in the middle of the map, hoof it through the desert, line up Agro for a jump. The bastard doesn't want to get up to speed. He finally kicks into high gear and leaps for the bridge. It's collapsing! So that's why we need to use Agro: to sprint away before it takes us with it.
The camera turns. Agro turns. Agro slides to a stop. The bridge disappears beneath us. We fall. A very long way. I respawn, back in the middle of the map.
Nope. Not gonna be trying that again today. What I'd do for a save state. Or a checkpoint. Or a manual save that saves anywhere other than the middle of the map. Where is the nearest shrine? How do you even use them?
Shadow of the Colossus doesn't make anything obvious. You've got to work for your progress. Even when Dormin takes pity on you and offers up hints to defeat the colossi in the middle of the fight, they are both so vague and cryptic that they just don't help.
Get to higher ground? Yeah, no shit, I'm fighting a colossus. How do you want me to get to high ground, exactly, or shall I just luck into a solution?
So the fun vs frustration graph swayed too and fro, but at the end of the day, it looks damn good, whether you're taunting a dog-like thing, clambering up a giant ape, or hanging on for dear life as the biggest thing you've ever seen defies gravity and drifts across the desert sky. It's well worth experiencing, this game, even with the awful controls. Hopefully, I'll find what I need to be able to cross the last obstacle in my way.
FORGET ABOUT THAT
Fuck this game, fuck its control scheme. I'm not spending two hours falling off the final boss over and over again. I'm on Easy mode for fuck's sake. Turn the fucking wiggle factor down. Let me clamber up this bastard and stab it in its fucking head.
I'm going for a walk. Walks calm me down.
Fun Facts
Your horse, Agro, can sometimes be a bitch to control, and this seems to be by design. He doesn't always obey your commands because real horses don't always obey commands either. Thankfully, the balance is shifted more towards playability than realism.
Shadow of the Colossus, developed by SCE Japan Studio, Team Ico, first released in 2005.
Versions played: PlayStation 2, 2006, via emulation.
PlayStation 4, 2018.