Shadow of the Colossus

If you've been paying attention to anything I've been writing, then you may remember that I like stories. All kinds of stories - deep and meaningful, or light and fun; fantasy, sci-fi, or realistic; stories from books, graphic novels, TV shows, movies, and yes, even video games.

Because sometimes, in my opinion, video games can have the best stories. Sure, there are your silly arcade games and pointless shooters or beat 'em ups, but for every handful of those, there's at least one game with a truly captivating story. One of the greatest gems of literary fiction that I've ever seen happens to be the video game Shadow of the Colossus.

Shadow of the Colossus is a minimalist action-adventure produced by Team Ico, a group of developers working for Sony, released in 2005. The story is told entirely from the perspective of a young, unnamed boy, who rides into a strange land carefully carrying the body of a dead girl on his horse. He brings the girl to an abandoned temple, where he makes a pact with the residing entity; if the boy can defeat the sixteen colossal beasts that inhabit the realm, the entity will bring the girl's soul back to her body.

I don't use the term 'colossal' lightly, and they didn't name the game "Shadow of the Colossus" just because it sounds cool. Of the sixteen colossi, only three are small enough to even compare to the unnamed protagonist, similar in size to an elephant. The rest of the colossi, on the other hand, truly are colossal, and defy any attempt to find a better word to describe them.

That moment when the player meets the first colossus is both breathtaking and terrifying. Pictures can't do it justice. As the player, you expected this thing to be huge, but you couldn't have expected it to be this huge. Compared to it, the boy protagonist looks like an ant, with a tiny sword as the only object to defeat the beast; unfortunately, as the player soon realizes, the boy doesn't actually know how to use it very well.

On top of that, the player is completely alone. At no point during the game will the player encounter another human outside of the temple, and the only being to speak to is the faceless entity. The girl's dead body lies on a pyre in the temple at the central point of the landscape, a constant reminder of why you're doing what you're doing.

For being so minimalist, the game is surprisingly vast. The entire explorable realm is huge, spanning deserts, mountains, rivers and lakes, and a dedicated player could spend hours exploring the whole thing. There are small animals all over the place, like birds and lizards, and traveling over the empty but beautifully rendered landscape gives the player plenty of time to grow attached to their sole companion, the horse Agro.

Agro wins my admiration on many levels. In a lonely game like this, having any companion would be comforting, even if they were just a completely useless pet. Agro, however, isn't useless; it would take hours navigating the world between colossi without her, and she's absolutely essential during a few of the fights. She doesn't hesitate to get close to the beasts, running between the legs of the enormous quadrupeds and up to the drooping wings of one of the flying colossi to let the player jump on it's back. After every battle, the player is transported back to the central temple to speak with the faceless entity, and, alone, Agro loyally returns back to where she know you're supposed to be.

This isn't because the programers designed her to be simple and easy to control; physically controlling Agro is actually difficult. She's given her own AI programming, and will only follow your directions awkwardly, jerking from one side to the other. If you let her run without trying to control her, however, she'll navigate obstacles and follow colossi on her own, allowing the player to focus on the battle at hand. Agro saves the unnamed boy's life on more than one occasion, and during the course of the game, the player learns to trust and depend on her just as much as she trusts and depends on the boy. As much as I love her, Epona from the Legend of Zelda series has nothing on Agro.

The only thing I regret when it comes to Shadow of the Colossus is the fact that I've never been able to play it for myself, as it came out solely for the PlayStation 2, a game system we never owned, and I didn't even know this game existed until last year.

While I haven't been able to play this game firsthand, I was able to see it by watching Let's Play Shadow of the Colossus, a video series on Youtube by user Lyrax. I've gotten through a few video games this way, but Lyrax's portrayal of Shadow of the Colossus was phenomenal. He doesn't talk through the cinematic scenes at all, leaving the viewer to soak it all in as if they were playing, and explains all the mechanics and small things that someone playing the game would have noticed.

Without intending to, I watched Lyrax's entire Shadow of the Colossus playlist in one sitting, because there wasn't any way I couldn't. The wonderful art and the amazing music drew me in, and the subtle plot captivated me. The story to Shadow of the Colossus is powerful and the ending emotional, and it's minimalist simplicity only intensifies that power and emotion.

This last September, Shadow of the Colossus and Ico, the other game designed by the same team, were digitally remastered and re-released together in HD for the PlayStation 3. This set is now pretty high up on my list of things to buy when I have the money, even if I still wont be able to play it right away (as I don't have a PS3 either).

If you're a gamer and you haven't played this yet, I highly recommend it; Shadow of the Colossus is probably the best example of art in video game form, and it has set a standard for quality gameplay and storytelling that will influence the medium for years to come. If you can't purchase and play the game for yourself, I also highly recommend Lyrax's 'Let's Play' series, which takes this deep, personal game and lets you experience it in a moving, cinematic way. Shadow of the Colossus is more powerful than the majority of the stories being churned out by producers today, and there are very few, in my opinion, that will ever manage to top it.