@2501 lol I’m ready for the GOT rants again!
@JoJoestar I feel like there’s been a semi-large pushback in the last few years against SotC in game development/criticism circles, where it went from being an unassailable classic touted by everyone and their grandma to a game people have to apologize for liking. idk why that is - maybe disappointment with TLG, or with the PS4 remake, or just some other trend I’m not aware of. All I can say is at age 14, it really struck me as:
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- the first game I’d ever played that seemed to translate the majesty and menace of the best fantasy films and art into video game form on a level beyond the pastiche tackiness of most games based on the genre. I’d previously fallen in love with the Lord of the Rings movies and felt disappointed that the video games based on them were big chunky beat-em-ups that superficially reproduced the films’ imagery and music but none of their sense of mystery, awe, or bittersweet emotional heft; I distinctly remember thinking that SotC was the first time playing a game hit the same emotional chords as watching those movies.
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- the first game I’d played to illustrate that game design could do more with less, in this case taking the most evocative parts of Zelda, stripping them down to their most basic navigation and action mechanics, and deepening the execution of those mechanics.
On the other hand: I never finished it! I’m not sure I even got halfway through! I remember getting frustrated on several of the fights and feeling like there were simply more Colossi than the minimalist mechanics and delicately suggestive aesthetic appeal could actually support without diminishing the magic somewhat. So take from that what you will.
I’m pretty sure having it as that “unassailable classic touted by everyone” is the very reason people have collectively distanced from it. I mean, it’s not a great sign of a particular medium maturity to have such unanimous and incontrovertible holy cows, because that is a very dangerous slippery slope towards dogmatism and unified thinking. On the other hand, cultivating disension and putting things in perspective are symptoms of the opposite: people inside the medium having a healthy relationship with the media they are involved with. Of course, I’m sure there is a fair amount of cynicism too, people not liking it because it’s “too mainstream” and dumb reasons like that, and on that regard, sure, those people are probably a bit too shallow.
I don’t think I have to clarify that I still LOVE Shadow of the Colossus, specially in its PS3 HD remaster incarnation, as I still love Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill 2, Ocarina of Time or any of those untouchable classics, but what I was trying to convey in my message is that even though I love all those games, I sure love a whole lot of other lesser known + equally good stuff to the point I don’t feel like putting any particular game in a pedestal like that. Back then I used to think every videogame should be like Shadow of the Colossus, and I’m pretty sure a fair amount of the people that have bounced off from it did too, and what a relief that didn’t became a reality, because no matter how good SotC is, videogames as a medium would have withered and died into endogamic conservatism.
But yeah! Shadow of the Colossus is a fantastic videogame no question, it’s just not THE videogame, y’know? I think people and “development/criticism circles” have moved on from that, and that’s a good thing!
I‘ve said it a million times but I just can’t get behind shadow of the colossus because it relied on my desire to kill these creatures, which I just didn't have, in order for me to later feel bad about it or wonder why I was doing it. I wondered why I was doing it right from the start, which made the intentionally(!? I wonder now) floppy and flimsy controls very difficult to get past. I can understand objectively why people liked it but it is just something that was never ever going to work on/for me, and basically makes me feel distant from all of video game criticism in some way! Maybe I was too old when I played it! I dunno.
I think it's a valuable game in some ways because if someone really likes it I think "ah, you appreciate video games in a very different way than I do," and very few games can do that.
have to assume you professional nerds know about George R Binks
also had to lol @ tim lightning-fast pivoting that horse death question into talking about his jacket
oh also, George Railroad Martin called the game "The Elden Ring" in an interview so that's what I have been calling it since. good way to ID the True Fans
I should say that I actually like both Snow Crash and Duke Nukem, but they’re both kind of over-the-top pastiches of their respective genres.
@rainbowbattlekid that Binks bio took an unexpected turn
This article was released today that touches on the “are all C level executives monsters?” question. It mentions the anecdote @exodus told on a prior episode about rotating Bobby Kotick’s image slightly every time it was used. It asks what videogame journalists are supposed to do when reporting on an industry so rife with scandal and chronic abuse.
This was a lot of what bothered me as well.
It’s I think symptomatic of the same issue but it also didn’t help either that tracking down the colossi, even if that ends up being a secondary activity in terms of time spent (I’d be curious to know how much of an average playthrough is spent on the horse), quickly loses its charm. I can’t remember if I stopped playing in this moment or shortly after but my clearest memory of playing Shadow of the Colossus was on that dang hard to control horse either being in front of a cliffside or on the edge of one (barricaded by an invisible wall) and having the sword shine directly into it. Presumably I had taken a wrong turn somewhere, but the feeling of isolation and tension that I know those sections are supposed to invoke was completely dispelled and replaced only with frustration and the feeling that my time was being wasted. I bet if there was a button to teleport to the next colossus I would have started using it before the halfway point.
I’m speculating of course and I don’t know much about either Udea or Team Ico but the floppy, flimsy, controls seem very intentional to me. Well, rather, I feel that the controls are subservient to the animations/physics, which are primarily designed to suit the visuals and storytelling. They’re expressive and fluid and look great but at the cost of so much feeling of disconnect from how it feels to play. I know you and I, Brandon, disagree on, say, From Soft games when it comes to this, and I haven’t had the chance to play even a single Bayonetta game yet so I can’t extend this to talk about Platinum more generally, but this is exactly why I also don’t care for NieR: Automata… I know there’s cool stuff in NieR and expressive stuff in SotC happening on screen, but I don’t feel connected to or responsible for it when it’s feeling good, just frustration that an anime ass animation or John Shadow of the Colossus floppin around like he’s made out of Studio Ghibli keyframes takes precedence over the tactile feeling of playing the damn game.
Beyond that my major gripe with Shadow of the Colossus was that it was formative for me too, but not in a good way. I feel like it was the first time I felt strongly about how videogames seemed to be heavily reliant on responding to gameplay mistakes punitively with tasking the player with repetition. Or maybe, even worse, succeeding at the game means progress and not much more, which is not going to feel fulfilling if you don’t care for the story or the premise. The floppy controls and the camera didn’t help with that but I remember feeling, more than anything, just frustrated at the prospect of having to keep playing it to be able to keep playing it. Maybe I just need a different sort of motivation to keep playing games and a lot of it ends up being mechanical and gameplay developments, even if they’re cheap tricks. The idea of the sound of the sword swipe in The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past getting a deeper pitched sound and being a different color as you upgrade it is way more exciting to me than any sense of progression through Shadow of the Colossus. I have no idea why that example came to mind but I know I do definitely think the deeper sound makes the sword way cooler.
I imagine everyone has different tolerance levels for this sort of thing, and I think if one does really like Shadow of the Colossus, it probably has something to do with how well it keeps its spell cast on you, which I imagine would depend on how well you can tolerate the controls and the gameplay. I do remember thinking it was exciting and immersive… until it wasn’t. And once it wasn’t, it didn’t manage to feel exciting and immersive again after that. Surely, if you really like Team Ico games they must operate on a wavelength that you can get and stay immersed in and excited by.
I mean, to a certain degree a game being shallow and a game being minimalistic can often end up being completely a matter of taste.
@exodus I think the game worked well for me because the guilt trip aspect was something that was in context and related to other things that made it interesting as a whole package. To me what really did it was the borgesian quality of the world building and the presentation, that feeling encountering a world that felt truly strange and ethereal. To be honest at first I wasn’t even sure if the whole thing was a metaphor or something I had to take at face value, and I guess that sense of wonder and mystery is what pulled me in.
I felt compelled to imagine who used to live in that world, what kind of culture they had, what caused their downfall, stuff like that. I didn’t personally feel like the main point was to kill the colossi, the game felt strange and surreal enough that I didn’t register it as just killing innocent animals, but more like a strange ritual or involved process I didn’t completely understand, but wanted to.
Now I’m realizing this is more or less what I remember you telling me this is what Ys feels like to you, that pull to think beyond what’s literally being presented and trying to feel the gaps with your imagination, which honestly is a great feeling! I completely get why SotC didn’t make it for you, though, if I had been in a different headspace back then maybe it would have not worked for me either, but I’m glad it did!
I think sotc is pretty good, although it‘s the most sentimental of the loose trilogy: has some of that latter day dark souls overbearing boss music problem, and overall it’s kind of sappy. There are of course significant technical problems. But yeah the sense of mysterious and open space is wonderful, most especially the hazy ps2 version. I think for all it‘s flaws it’s way way more successful and engrossing than BoTW, which at least to me doesn't have any particular point or special virtues
I lost it reading this sentence, and then I lost it again when I saw “suicide” is a hyperlink leading to a Wookiepedia page entitled “Suicide (Star Wars Legends)”
I also think that it‘s perfectly acceptable to play a game like SOTC as a youngish teen and come away with it pretty blown away and moved in the right direction re: thinking more about what you’re asked to do, why cause harm, your personal motivation vs the larger world etc. It was a more complex and real world applicable experience than similar young adult games/literature/movies etc. At the time I was going into video games fully ready to just do whatever the game asked me because that‘s exactly what most games expect of you and was the norm of interacting with them(at least for me). I think it’s a good formative experience to have and one I feel lucky to have experienced at the right time. Stuff just hits differently depending on where you are.
@sabertoothalex 100% agree there! I neglected to say it because it sounds rude but I do think I might have been a little too old or a little too far down the path (I had just graduated college with a film degree, literally, in critical studies) to enjoy it when it came out.
Re: SotC and Ueda control schemes in general I sincerely think a lot of the weight, obsession with inertia and exaggerated physics is him trying to imitate/channel the whole cinematic platformer and French scene of Another World, Flashback, etc. which he has said are a main inspiration for him a couple of times. Those are games that definitely assume some compromises in comfort and immediacy in its control schemes in order to make the characters carry a certain weight and presence.
And as it happen with tank controls, none of this has to make anyone it hate it less if you're not into that lol
@JoJoestar I gotta say, having talked with him about it - and I admit this could be lost in translation since my japanese is only alright - I did get the impression that it was mostly that he didn’t have a good gameplay prototype team, and didn’t start with movement as the first thing to polish. He stars with environments, with vibe, but movement is just like “ah, he’s moving around, that works.” but I could be wrong about this! I just remember when I was talking about our process and trying to get movement to where we want it first, and prototyping around that, he was like “hmm that’s a good idea, but I don’t know anyone who can work like that”
@exodus Ahhh, if that’s the case then I probably read too far into it. It’s just that I always thought there was something to that particular feeling of unresponsiveness that reminded me of the super long winded animations of something like Prince of Persia and the rest of those games.
In a way though you could argue that all those also put comparatively a lot more care in their environments, atmosphere and presentation than in how they actually play, so even if there is not inspiration involved, maybe it’s one of those situations where completely different people end up producing similar results because of working in a particular way/motivated by similar concerns? Interesting to think about, even if not entirely true!
Nothing much to add as @JoJoestar has generously explained everything better than I would:
Though I would add that I don’t think it’s necessary to conceive of SotC as intending to trick the player. You might argue that video games aren’t an appropriate medium to do tragedy, as games depend upon player action to drive the narrative, and tragedy by design relies on dramatic irony and the reader/viewer’s complete helplessness to steer the course of the protagonist’s actions—but when I played SotC that’s how it came across, as a tragedy, as something I needed to participate in despite being aware that my participation was at the very least ethically dubious. I suppose exodus has talked with Ueda personally and might be able to shed light on what the intention was, but the idea that the player is supposed to be like, aaah, I was doing the wrong thing the whole time??? would seem to come from less than mature discussion of the thing. Anyway, none of that is to say that those who didn’t buy into it are wrong, that’s just my point of view (full disclosure: I did play it when I was 15, but have enjoyed it several times since then).
I wonder if they recognized this contradiction in Shadow’s design and decided on that basis to make the next game about being friends with the big animal. The big animal is so good! You get to pet them whenever you want.
What keeps the spell cast for me is a variety of things, not the least of which is the particular visual style the team developed in making their three games. For this reason the PS4 version of Shadow feels like this homuncular thing I can’t connect with at all, and which I will go out of my way to dissuade others from playing if given the chance (unfair as that may be; plenty of new players I’m sure fell in love with it just as I did the PS3 version and others the PS2 version). Of course it retains just about everything else which made the original worth playing, but the structure could not stand with such a crack in its keystone.
Another alchemically indispensable quality shared by all three is the movement—I love it! Perhaps hypocritically as I can’t stand the feeling of uncontrol I get from e.g. Grand Theft Auto, though I wouldn’t say the way the Ico games feel is the same. When playing Trico recently, I was walking down some rickety wooden stairs hammered into a rock face, and as I walked down the stairs I was smashed in the face by the way the boy waves his arms and the way his toga billows. It was an unexpectedly transportive experience—I felt like I was walking down those stairs, and that the wind was whipping me around. Of course this is down to my personal susceptibility to the utility of character animation, but all the same I wouldn’t write off the focus on animation as designed to no other end than the disguise of imprecise movement mechanics (if I am understanding the discussion correctly…). This is to say nothing of Trico’s own animations, upon which of course rests the conceit that Trico is alive at all.
(I am a BELIEVER)
i don’t think I’ve seen the answer here in the thread. does the dogbird die at the end of Last Guardian?
(spoiler tag it, please)
no and in fact it has puppies
“you‘re just a BOY, in a place you shouldn’t be IN, and it's constructed with a realistic sense of scale which is why you need the dog to HELP YOU!”
—family relation of mine (wise words)
I only played SotC properly for the first time not too long ago (on PS2), and I liked it a whole bunch. The controls are weird, but I don't think they are bad and I found once I got the hang of it I was really comfortable moving around in the game.
I totally disagree that the point of the game was you wanting to kill the monsters for a lategame gotcha. It seems to me like everything about the game is telling you that you _shouldn't_ be killing them. The way they are framed and introduced, the haunting music that plays every time one falls, some of them don't even attack you. I think what makes the game beautiful is the pervasive sense of melancholy, as you forge desperately down a path that you know is awful in pursuit of a singular goal, watching your character's become less and less human as the game progresses. He doesn't want to kill them, he _has_ to kill them. And you have to make him do it if you wanna actually play the game.
Whenever I met a new colossus I would generally try to like pause and soak it in, then regretfully go about the arduous task of wearing away at it and then steel myself for the final blow. The music kicks in, the majestic beast falls and some more horrible black _stuff_ seeps into your character as he gasps in anguish.
And man, it just looked so insane for a PS2 game. The colossi are so detailed, and the sense of scale in the world.. honestly I've never seen anything else like it in video games.