A larger than life game that takes more brains than brawn.
The Bad: erratic framerate; short game; plot is a little underdeveloped; wild camera control
I'm going to start out by saying this was my hands-down favorite game of 2005. Over God of War, Devil May Cry 3, Dragon Quest, even Resident Evil 4. This game will suck you in and never let you out, that is unless you don't have the patience and creativity to deal with the massive puzzles that are the colossi.
Story: A nameless hero travels to a forbidden land, along with his horse Agro (who is your main form of transportation) in hopes of reviving a dead woman who is most likely his lover. Upon arrival in a temple, the hero places the dead woman on a pedestal and is greeted by a voice that claims it can bring back the souls of the dead. But it requires the hero to prove himself by defeating 16 colossi that roam the surrounding land. Only then would the spirit bring the woman back to life. I'm no storyteller so I hope you can get the gist of the plot. The story is simple, but so many questions are left unanswered, even after the last name in the credits rolls offscreen.
Gameplay: Even though this game basically consists of 16 boss fights, they are very long and epic boss fights. The colossi battles are simple in objective, but complex in execution. It's not like in games like Final Fantasy where if you hit it from the ground with your sword enough times, it will die. No, you actually have to scale the damned things. That is the hardest part of the fight, just figuring out how to get on it. The hero climbs the fur of the colossi to get to the top, but sometimes you can't, actually almost never, reach the fur by just jumping up its legs. It's hard to explain what I mean without spoiling the method, because the fun comes from simply trying out things to see if they will work and when they do it's like, "oh my gosh! that was so cool!" Basically you must do something to make it lower its guard or fall down or whatever to get to the climbable regions of its body. Once you get to the top or wherever you need to get to, there will be a vital point marked by a luminescent tatoo on its body. Once you locate the tatoo, grab a hold of something and stab away! You must old the R1 button to hold on to fur or ledges. As you hold on to something, your stamina meter slowly decreases. Colossi shaking (which happens when you stab them obviously) and vertical or horizontal jumping will decrease your stamina meter even faster. When the meter drains to nothing, you, well, fall..... To regain stamina, just don't hold on to anything and it will steadily refill itself. The same goes for your health but at a much slower rate. After you stab a colossus a certain amounts of times, for most of the later colossi, the tatoo will disappear and you must find its second or even a third vital point to attack. Once the battle is over, you will see a cutscene of the colossus dying and falling to the ground and you absorb some kind of black......thing and you pass out and awaken back at the temple. You may think that all of those battles might get repetitive, but believe me, they don't. There are such a variety of colossi its keeps the experience fresh. Have I even mentioned the stuff you do inbetween battles? Your horse Agro is your means of travelling because by foot will get you no where. Aside from being great fun to ride a horse, the land you traverse is both huge and beautiful and you will want to explore every nook and cranny of it.
Graphics: This is the most artistically astounding games you will ever play, at least in this generation. Like I just finished mentioning, the land in which this game takes place is one of the most beautiful environments in any video game. The scenery is astounding and is the only game I have ever played where I just sat and looked at all of the amazing views the game supplies you with. There is a little bit of slowdown when riding your horse but this game is pushing the PlayStation 2 to its limits and the entire land, which is about the size of San Andreas, is loaded all at once so you will never see a loading screen except when a cutscene occurs. The colossi are some of the largest, most complex moving polygons ever created. They move with believable, if a bit slow, animations. Some of the smaller colossi move with the grace of leopards. All of the fur tufts stick out of the colossus, they're not just textures. It's hard to describe the colossi, you just have to see them with your own eyes.
Sound: The soundtrack of Shadow of the Colossus is by far one of the best musical scores ever to be composed (yes composed by an orchestra) for a video game. Every song is memorable, from the mysterious 30 second songs that play when you enter the colossus's area to the epic battle compositions that play while engaging the colossus. The transitions between songs during colossus engagements are flawless. For example, when you're fighting one of the flying colossi, a slow, somewhat mysterious song plays as you watch it fly above your head, but as soon as you mount the airborne beast, the song changes and ais replaced by a more epic and dramatic score. The game contains no voice acting per se. The voice acting that is played during cutscenes is as far as I know a nonexistent language. It could be Japanese, but if it was, why didn't they translate it? Well whatever. The absence of English voice acting is definitely undermined by an unbelievable soundtrack.
Replay Value: This is where the game falls short, literally. The game lasted me around 13 hours but I spent quite a bit of time exploring the scenery. After you complete the game you can replay the game on hard mode and fight all of the colossi in time trial mode to unlock goodies. After completion of hard mode (which isn't that much harder than normal) you can play time trial on hard to unlock even more goodies. Not much lasting appeal for the average gamer, but if you loved the game as much as me, you will expect to play this game multiple times. I figure if you can get one hour of play time for every dollar you spend, the game was worth it. At a $40 retail price, I think most people can get their money's worth.
Closing Comments: I'm going to be straightforward with this next statement: If you are not good at problem solving and/or don't have much patience, you may want to rent this game before you buy it to see if it's for you. This game definitely isn't for many of my friends. If you are not one of those people, you will find an experience that is far from generic and closer to genre-defining. There is NO game out there like this and I don't think many games will dare experiment with this groundbreaking formula.
Your friend in gaming,
Brett "Kahn Artist" Kahn