Rant inc. For TL
R version skip to last paragraph.
I know not being head over heels in love with Shadow of the Colossus (let alone actually disliking it) is tantamount to treason, so I'm going to go ahead and skip over all of the story and character and atmospheric stuff that is arguably great about this game and jump straight to my primary beef, the gameplay. How in the world did this game get released, let alone get such rave reviews, with such awful and counter-intuitive game controls at every step of the way? In my short time playing it (I'm only on the fourth colossus) I've already encountered the following problems:
- The most useless camera in recent gaming memory. It's clunky and unresponsive. Turning around with your sword out will reveal Wander's bizarre foot fetish, as he keeps trying to look down at the ground no matter how I aim the bloody thing. The camera regularly decenters itself while you're on horseback, so that you're actually on the far right of the screen for example, which means something as trivial as knowing what's literally five feet to your right becomes needlessly complicated.
- Shooting with your bow. Moving the analog stick even slightly will routinely send your crosshair flying off the screen at the speed of sound. Good luck getting Wander to aim at the giant Colossus in front of him then. You can't even see where the crosshair is, and which direction to push the analog stick in to get it back where you need it.
- Unresponsive buttons. You get on your horse by pressing Triangle AND ONLY TRIANGLE. If you even think about holding down the directional button for moving yourself closer to the horse in the process, Wander begins jumping like a tool around his horse. Well enough once you figure it out, but the game never mentions it. For the first couple of hours I thought my success depended on star alignment and horoscope. On top of that, half of the time I try to jump up a ledge, Wander just shuffles left or right, or just grunts noncommittally. I've heard this is just a PS3 port glitch, not native to the original game, but even so that's pretty unforgiveable.
- The horse, of course. I'm all for the realism in this game (when the game's not making Wander try to tie his shoelaces with his bow while a Colossus is hurtling toward him, that is), I love the idea of a horse controlling like a horse and not like a car... but if you want me to have a horse-like horse, then you'd better make it smarter than a refrigerator. The animal insists on running up to edges or into walls even when there are obvious paths for it to go - paths toward which I am actively attempting to steer the stupid thing. Realism is a noble goal, but you need the tools to do it right. And where did this realism come from, anyway? Wasn't the camera just trying to be unreasonably scenic two seconds ago, when all I wanted was to be able to see what the freaking character is looking at?
- The useless map. I've spent more time running around the world in the hopes of finding the right crevice (that'll lead me to the right hill [that I'll look at from the right direction to notice another opening])... than I have anything else. I'm not saying I need Mass Effect or Dead Space level of guidance here, with an arrow that tells me precisely which way I should go every step of the way, but don't point me halfway across the universe when there's a mountain between me and there, and apparently five different ways of getting through that mountain (this isn't true; each path takes you in completely different directions).
- The lack of tutorials on basic game mechanics. The game never tells you that you have to move the left stick, not the right, to get the sword compass to work at all. In fact it doesn't tell you anything about your sword, other than that you've got one. Silly me for thinking that the square symbol in the distance represented the first Colossus I had to seek out, and not (magically) realizing that the prism converged into a beam if a Colossus was on the other end. That was about ten minutes down the drain.
- The boss puzzles. Yes, surprise surprise, this rant was inspired by a particular frustration. So I'm on Colossus #4, a giant giraffe with sickle legs and nothing to climb. All right, I passed a hill on my way here, maybe that has to do with it. I figure if I stand on top, it'll attack the hill and get its leg deep into the earth, and while it's all tangled up, I'll run up. Or something. Cue five minutes of failure. All right, there's bunker-like entrances inside. I figure if I run in, maybe it'll attack from above and get stuck that way. No dice. And of course getting it to try any of these things can take a ridiculous amount of time, because the Colossus turns around at the speed of continental drift. I finally look up a walkthrough on youtube: I'm supposed to get its attention so it pops its head in there and I can climb up its ass, or something. How in the world is that a more intuitive solution than the ones I spent 20 minutes trying? And haven't I already been down under? So I go back, keep trying this for five minutes, shooting it, calling my horse to make noise, whatever. Note that half of the times I go down a hole, the Colossus forgets about me and starts turning around. By the time I get it back facing me, that's another minute gone. Five minutes of this, nothing, it just stabs a few times and then gets distracted. I go back to my laptop and hit "play" on the paused video. The guy doing the walkthrough fails and after a minute the text "Sometimes it doesn't work right away" pops up on the screen.
Really, Team ICO? REALLY? I have to guess the single solution that you happened to think should work for this encounter, from a plethora of other equally valid solutions, then spend ten minutes aiming the crappy bow and getting the giraffe to look in the direction it's supposed to be looking in, and after that my success is still based on freaking luck? As of this writing, I still haven't figured it out. Another walkthrough suggested getting the giraffe's attention at one end of the bunker, running out on the other side, shooting from there, then running back and waiting two minutes before coming out to jump on its ass. I wasted five minutes doing that, and when I finally came out the giraffe wasn't even remotely interested in what I was trying to do. It was already walking away.
Do people forget all of this when they say this is the greatest game on the PS2, if not of the last decade, period? Or is the other stuff supposed to be so good that the gameplay doesn't even matter? I don't get it. From the moment I manage to latch on to a Colossus, until the thing goes down and the cinematic plays, the game's golden. Practically every single thing outside of that, however, is actively trying to make the game as frustrating as possible with its mechanics, in-game information, and user interface. All of these glitches and struggles with the interface have done so much to demolish my immersion in the game's world that I can't even see that world, I just see more empty space that I'll have to navigate with this idiotic horse in the BLIND HOPE of a Colossus being at the end of this mountain pass, and not some other one that I didn't notice.
R version skip to last paragraph. I know not being head over heels in love with Shadow of the Colossus (let alone actually disliking it) is tantamount to treason, so I'm going to go ahead and skip over all of the story and character and atmospheric stuff that is arguably great about this game and jump straight to my primary beef, the gameplay. How in the world did this game get released, let alone get such rave reviews, with such awful and counter-intuitive game controls at every step of the way? In my short time playing it (I'm only on the fourth colossus) I've already encountered the following problems:
- The most useless camera in recent gaming memory. It's clunky and unresponsive. Turning around with your sword out will reveal Wander's bizarre foot fetish, as he keeps trying to look down at the ground no matter how I aim the bloody thing. The camera regularly decenters itself while you're on horseback, so that you're actually on the far right of the screen for example, which means something as trivial as knowing what's literally five feet to your right becomes needlessly complicated.
- Shooting with your bow. Moving the analog stick even slightly will routinely send your crosshair flying off the screen at the speed of sound. Good luck getting Wander to aim at the giant Colossus in front of him then. You can't even see where the crosshair is, and which direction to push the analog stick in to get it back where you need it.
- Unresponsive buttons. You get on your horse by pressing Triangle AND ONLY TRIANGLE. If you even think about holding down the directional button for moving yourself closer to the horse in the process, Wander begins jumping like a tool around his horse. Well enough once you figure it out, but the game never mentions it. For the first couple of hours I thought my success depended on star alignment and horoscope. On top of that, half of the time I try to jump up a ledge, Wander just shuffles left or right, or just grunts noncommittally. I've heard this is just a PS3 port glitch, not native to the original game, but even so that's pretty unforgiveable.
- The horse, of course. I'm all for the realism in this game (when the game's not making Wander try to tie his shoelaces with his bow while a Colossus is hurtling toward him, that is), I love the idea of a horse controlling like a horse and not like a car... but if you want me to have a horse-like horse, then you'd better make it smarter than a refrigerator. The animal insists on running up to edges or into walls even when there are obvious paths for it to go - paths toward which I am actively attempting to steer the stupid thing. Realism is a noble goal, but you need the tools to do it right. And where did this realism come from, anyway? Wasn't the camera just trying to be unreasonably scenic two seconds ago, when all I wanted was to be able to see what the freaking character is looking at?
- The useless map. I've spent more time running around the world in the hopes of finding the right crevice (that'll lead me to the right hill [that I'll look at from the right direction to notice another opening])... than I have anything else. I'm not saying I need Mass Effect or Dead Space level of guidance here, with an arrow that tells me precisely which way I should go every step of the way, but don't point me halfway across the universe when there's a mountain between me and there, and apparently five different ways of getting through that mountain (this isn't true; each path takes you in completely different directions).
- The lack of tutorials on basic game mechanics. The game never tells you that you have to move the left stick, not the right, to get the sword compass to work at all. In fact it doesn't tell you anything about your sword, other than that you've got one. Silly me for thinking that the square symbol in the distance represented the first Colossus I had to seek out, and not (magically) realizing that the prism converged into a beam if a Colossus was on the other end. That was about ten minutes down the drain.
- The boss puzzles. Yes, surprise surprise, this rant was inspired by a particular frustration. So I'm on Colossus #4, a giant giraffe with sickle legs and nothing to climb. All right, I passed a hill on my way here, maybe that has to do with it. I figure if I stand on top, it'll attack the hill and get its leg deep into the earth, and while it's all tangled up, I'll run up. Or something. Cue five minutes of failure. All right, there's bunker-like entrances inside. I figure if I run in, maybe it'll attack from above and get stuck that way. No dice. And of course getting it to try any of these things can take a ridiculous amount of time, because the Colossus turns around at the speed of continental drift. I finally look up a walkthrough on youtube: I'm supposed to get its attention so it pops its head in there and I can climb up its ass, or something. How in the world is that a more intuitive solution than the ones I spent 20 minutes trying? And haven't I already been down under? So I go back, keep trying this for five minutes, shooting it, calling my horse to make noise, whatever. Note that half of the times I go down a hole, the Colossus forgets about me and starts turning around. By the time I get it back facing me, that's another minute gone. Five minutes of this, nothing, it just stabs a few times and then gets distracted. I go back to my laptop and hit "play" on the paused video. The guy doing the walkthrough fails and after a minute the text "Sometimes it doesn't work right away" pops up on the screen.
Really, Team ICO? REALLY? I have to guess the single solution that you happened to think should work for this encounter, from a plethora of other equally valid solutions, then spend ten minutes aiming the crappy bow and getting the giraffe to look in the direction it's supposed to be looking in, and after that my success is still based on freaking luck? As of this writing, I still haven't figured it out. Another walkthrough suggested getting the giraffe's attention at one end of the bunker, running out on the other side, shooting from there, then running back and waiting two minutes before coming out to jump on its ass. I wasted five minutes doing that, and when I finally came out the giraffe wasn't even remotely interested in what I was trying to do. It was already walking away.
Do people forget all of this when they say this is the greatest game on the PS2, if not of the last decade, period? Or is the other stuff supposed to be so good that the gameplay doesn't even matter? I don't get it. From the moment I manage to latch on to a Colossus, until the thing goes down and the cinematic plays, the game's golden. Practically every single thing outside of that, however, is actively trying to make the game as frustrating as possible with its mechanics, in-game information, and user interface. All of these glitches and struggles with the interface have done so much to demolish my immersion in the game's world that I can't even see that world, I just see more empty space that I'll have to navigate with this idiotic horse in the BLIND HOPE of a Colossus being at the end of this mountain pass, and not some other one that I didn't notice.
