Friday, March 23, 2007
Wanderer kills colossi
I finally finished Shadow of the Colossus a few days ago. I spent the last year and a half grappling with this game. Every few months I would put this in my PS2, take down another towering gigantes, and then lose my motivation. I just could not find a reason why I should finish this game. But because I play almost all my games through to the very end, I kept coming back to it. Something was causing people to go wonky with love. I wanted to find it for myself. Now that I have seen all that this game has to offer I am even more confused. The concept behind this game, of traveling around a barren land defeating dormant colossus after dormant colossus, is one of the most interesting premises I have ever encountered in more than 20 years of playing video games. However, it was not a particularly fun experience. Shadow of the Colossus is the video game equivalent of Philip Glass. You can turn art on its head and get people to notice you, but that doesn't mean it's actually good. SotC is a game that everyone should experience, but don't expect the most complete gaming experience out there.
Shadow of the Colossus takes the idea of minimalist story and strips away just about every aspect related to story. There are only three story sequences in the entire game and a few scattered symbols if you're really paying attention. I will talk about the story in more detail later on, but first I want to describe how far Fumita Ueda, the artist behind this game, takes the idea that less is more. Every aspect of this game further emphasizes the creative need for less. The story, as I mentioned, is infrequent and lacks details. There are two main characters. One of which is presumably dead throughout the entirety of the game. The other is a quieter version of The Legend of Zelda's Link. It was hard for me to care about this journey when these characters are a virtual blank slate.
The gameplay is just as sparse as the story. You can climb, swing a sword and shoot a bow. You'll use these tools during battle. Half of the game is spent atop a horse looking for the next colossus to unceremonious kill. The world is certainly beautiful, but traveling from place to place across this barren land only dulled my enjoyment as the journey dragged onward. Ueda may have dove into his minimalist approach to excess, but you have to at least admire his steadfast nature. As you travel through forests and into sand covered plateaus, you will be traveling by the soothing sounds of your horse's trusty hooves and nothing more. The music comes when it pleases, and that seems to only be during the tense battles with the colossi or when a cut scene needs little life. The graphics and music are certainly quite impressive, but their sparse nature only weighed me down more. The game lacks energy. It lacks passion. Like an old man telling a long story after downing some horse tranquilizers, SotC requires determination just to stay awake.
Unfortunately, while the artistic vision, the backbone of this game, is solid and daring, the technical aspects are anything but. In the hands of a more adept development team, this game could have mustered the quiet awe it is striving for while providing a compelling video game experience as well. But the gameplay, the controls and camera, feel sloppy and unpredictable. The motions of your main character are built upon his relationship with the ground. When you push left to move, you do not simply move left like other games out there. Rather, you begin to lean to that side, slowly picking your foot off the ground as you begin to move in earnest. All the moves behave like this. So if you are balancing on the wrist of a giant colossus later in the game and would like to jump across to his other hand, you cannot simply hold in the appropriate direction and jump. Your body needs to be positioned at the optimal angle for this maneuver to take place. This would not be a game breaking mechanism if the camera allowed you to see how your character was positioned. Sadly, it does not. The camera has a mind of its own and does not place a particularly high priority on gameplay visibility. While it strives to give you a picturesque view of the action, it is often hidden behind a rock or giant body part. Trying to swing the camera and move your character while trying balancing on a giant, swaying body all at the same time is tedious at best.
The gameplay may be frustrating, but is the story good enough to make this journey worth completing? Sadly, the story is just as amateurish as the gameplay. Throughout the entire game, as I found reasons to keep playing that the game never offered, I kept thinking about the minimalist approach. It was unavoidable and I needed something to think about during those lonely walks to my next victim. As a person who has studied literature for four years in college, I have some grasp of the value of a minimalist story. I also understand when it goes too far, offers too few details, and ends up falling on its own ass. The idea of subtlety in writing is a very difficult thing to properly implement. First of all, you need to have a strong feeling on where you want the story to end up. There has to be a defined goal at the end that you are constantly striving towards. Furthermore, you have to provide enough information for your audience to be able to logically happen upon that idea. A story told with a subtle hand can have many plausible explanations, but there is a very real conclusion as well.
SotC lacks any real point. Instead of being subtle, the story simply lacks detail. This is a very big distinction. There are various questions that can never be answered. An expert storyteller would lace subtle hints throughout the game to offer an explanation as to why this journey is taking place at all, who the main characters are, and what is their relationship to their foes. You would also have some idea what the relationship between the two main characters is. At the end of SotC, you could guess that they are lovers or siblings or maybe they never even met, but there isn't a concrete nudge in any direction. In essence, you are forced to create the whole story yourself. This is lazy storytelling. I read poetry because I love figuring out what the intention of an artist was. I enjoy dissecting the structure and words used to create a hypothesis why a poem was written in the first place. After scratching my head over SotC for the past two days, I can only come to the conclusion that there is no reason for this story to be told. Ueda merely wanted people to scratch their heads for awhile. Instead of enlighten he wanted to baffle. Because he had no concrete vision in mind, he left the storytelling up the gamer in the hopes that he would be immortalized in whatever direction they took the story.
Shadow of the Colossus is really a beautiful game. Anyone who thinks gaming has stagnated should play this game just to see how much more this medium can grow. But I do not consider this a fine example of gaming art. I look forward to the next adventure on the PlayStation 3. The industry needs people willing to take risks. I applaud Fumita Ueda for trying something different, but I don't feel SotC is anything more than a pretty picture lacking real depth.
Shadow of the Colossus takes the idea of minimalist story and strips away just about every aspect related to story. There are only three story sequences in the entire game and a few scattered symbols if you're really paying attention. I will talk about the story in more detail later on, but first I want to describe how far Fumita Ueda, the artist behind this game, takes the idea that less is more. Every aspect of this game further emphasizes the creative need for less. The story, as I mentioned, is infrequent and lacks details. There are two main characters. One of which is presumably dead throughout the entirety of the game. The other is a quieter version of The Legend of Zelda's Link. It was hard for me to care about this journey when these characters are a virtual blank slate.
The gameplay is just as sparse as the story. You can climb, swing a sword and shoot a bow. You'll use these tools during battle. Half of the game is spent atop a horse looking for the next colossus to unceremonious kill. The world is certainly beautiful, but traveling from place to place across this barren land only dulled my enjoyment as the journey dragged onward. Ueda may have dove into his minimalist approach to excess, but you have to at least admire his steadfast nature. As you travel through forests and into sand covered plateaus, you will be traveling by the soothing sounds of your horse's trusty hooves and nothing more. The music comes when it pleases, and that seems to only be during the tense battles with the colossi or when a cut scene needs little life. The graphics and music are certainly quite impressive, but their sparse nature only weighed me down more. The game lacks energy. It lacks passion. Like an old man telling a long story after downing some horse tranquilizers, SotC requires determination just to stay awake.
Unfortunately, while the artistic vision, the backbone of this game, is solid and daring, the technical aspects are anything but. In the hands of a more adept development team, this game could have mustered the quiet awe it is striving for while providing a compelling video game experience as well. But the gameplay, the controls and camera, feel sloppy and unpredictable. The motions of your main character are built upon his relationship with the ground. When you push left to move, you do not simply move left like other games out there. Rather, you begin to lean to that side, slowly picking your foot off the ground as you begin to move in earnest. All the moves behave like this. So if you are balancing on the wrist of a giant colossus later in the game and would like to jump across to his other hand, you cannot simply hold in the appropriate direction and jump. Your body needs to be positioned at the optimal angle for this maneuver to take place. This would not be a game breaking mechanism if the camera allowed you to see how your character was positioned. Sadly, it does not. The camera has a mind of its own and does not place a particularly high priority on gameplay visibility. While it strives to give you a picturesque view of the action, it is often hidden behind a rock or giant body part. Trying to swing the camera and move your character while trying balancing on a giant, swaying body all at the same time is tedious at best.
The gameplay may be frustrating, but is the story good enough to make this journey worth completing? Sadly, the story is just as amateurish as the gameplay. Throughout the entire game, as I found reasons to keep playing that the game never offered, I kept thinking about the minimalist approach. It was unavoidable and I needed something to think about during those lonely walks to my next victim. As a person who has studied literature for four years in college, I have some grasp of the value of a minimalist story. I also understand when it goes too far, offers too few details, and ends up falling on its own ass. The idea of subtlety in writing is a very difficult thing to properly implement. First of all, you need to have a strong feeling on where you want the story to end up. There has to be a defined goal at the end that you are constantly striving towards. Furthermore, you have to provide enough information for your audience to be able to logically happen upon that idea. A story told with a subtle hand can have many plausible explanations, but there is a very real conclusion as well.
SotC lacks any real point. Instead of being subtle, the story simply lacks detail. This is a very big distinction. There are various questions that can never be answered. An expert storyteller would lace subtle hints throughout the game to offer an explanation as to why this journey is taking place at all, who the main characters are, and what is their relationship to their foes. You would also have some idea what the relationship between the two main characters is. At the end of SotC, you could guess that they are lovers or siblings or maybe they never even met, but there isn't a concrete nudge in any direction. In essence, you are forced to create the whole story yourself. This is lazy storytelling. I read poetry because I love figuring out what the intention of an artist was. I enjoy dissecting the structure and words used to create a hypothesis why a poem was written in the first place. After scratching my head over SotC for the past two days, I can only come to the conclusion that there is no reason for this story to be told. Ueda merely wanted people to scratch their heads for awhile. Instead of enlighten he wanted to baffle. Because he had no concrete vision in mind, he left the storytelling up the gamer in the hopes that he would be immortalized in whatever direction they took the story.
Shadow of the Colossus is really a beautiful game. Anyone who thinks gaming has stagnated should play this game just to see how much more this medium can grow. But I do not consider this a fine example of gaming art. I look forward to the next adventure on the PlayStation 3. The industry needs people willing to take risks. I applaud Fumita Ueda for trying something different, but I don't feel SotC is anything more than a pretty picture lacking real depth.
// posted by Tom @ 10:00 AM 
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