A young girl is dead and it's up to one brave young man to save her. He takes her to a temple and makes a deal with a god. If he can kill the twelve colossi that roam the land, the god will resurrect the girl.
This is going to be a monumental challenge.
1. Gameplay
Shadow of the Colossus is one of the greatest games I have ever played. It is a perfect example of how a game can take simple rules and simple mechanics and make something powerful. It shows that a game doesn’t need a $100 million budget and A-list actors to create something that is not only exciting and fun but leaves a lasting impression. This is the kind of game every aspiring game developer should play.
There are only twelve enemies in the entire game, each one a gigantic creature that wanders around a specific area of the map. You are tasked with hunting down these colossi and killing them so that you can revive a dead girl. Each enemy has a few weak points that need to be stabbed with a sword. It’s a fairly simple task but the execution is much more complicated. The colossi aren’t just going to let you walk up and stab them. They’ll fight for their lives, trying to shake you off, crush you, drown you, or drop you from insane heights.
Each battle is a puzzle. Sometimes the answer is fairly obvious, sometimes it’s a little more obscure. The hints that the game gives can sometimes be helpful, but at other times the words come out a bit too obscure to make sense. But despite its frustrations, this game is awesome. Every battle felt like something totally different, and every victory gave a rush of satisfaction.
There is one caveat to all of this. While I have no problem letting a younger audience play this game, the frustration I felt from the later monsters (especially the final boss) cannot be understated. The last battle was over an hour long, tense, usually frustrating experience. It may be too difficult for a younger gamer to figure out. In terms of content, it’s appropriate for almost all ages, but the puzzles might be too difficult for anyone younger than a teen or preteen to overcome.
Considering this game consists of only twelve boss battles and the travel time to said bosses, this feels like a satisfactory game. The easiest bosses took around 30 minutes, the hardest an hour or more. Altogether the game takes around twelve to fifteen hours to complete relatively easily. I’m not sure that the game has any choices at the end (it seems like it might), but there are no choices during the actual campaign. Despite this, the simplicity of the game and the fun of some of the boss battles gives it a definite replay value.
Some of the bosses were far more difficult to figure out than others, but for the most part it just took a bit of patience. However, some of the bosses either required a walkthrough to figure out how to attack or, even worse, were relatively easy to figure out but took an insanely long time to actually accomplish. Often times the bosses that took the longest were also the easiest to mess up and required the player to repeat the entire process to get up to the weak spots.
This was especially problematic with the final boss battle, who was literally a ten-story platforming tower with weak spots at the very top. It took me hours to beat him. Seriously, a single boss battle taking me hours to complete. It was a horrible dark mark on an otherwise amazing game.
2. Parental Notices
There are only two weapons in the game and both have different effects. The sword is the only weapon with any significant effect on the enemies. The player will stab the bosses into the furry weak spots, causing a fountain of what is presumably blood to steam from the wound. Eventually, the fountain stems.
If the player acts efficiently, he can take down all but the hardest bosses with less than a dozen stabs.
The only other weapon is the bow. However, the bow does essentially no damage to the boss. The tiny pin pricks, even when they connect with fur, just seem to annoy the boss. The only time when they seem to cause any significant reaction is when they connect with a special weak point (such as the bottom of the feet of one boss).
The colossi will also fight back, but for the most part this just involves trying to crush the player. There is no blood or gore from this happening. The only time violence increases at all is on one particular colossi that has electrified spines. If the player gets too close to the spines, he gets zapped.
Sexuality is not a factor in this game.
Substances are not a factor in this game.
Gambling is not a factor in this game.
3. Other Factors
There are no modding tools available for this game.
The colossi in the game are all projections of a particular god (or something to that effect). Each god has an idol inside a giant temple. The player begs what he believes is a god (but is evidently some sort of demon) to revive a dead girl. The entire story is deeply interwoven with mysticism and spirituality, but I wasn’t able to determine if they were attached to any major religion.
Anti-law is not a factor in this game.
There are no multiplayer modes for this game.
There are platforming elements of this game where the player will climb extremely tall cliffs, pillars, and ruins. These are almost always included either when the player is getting to a boss or during the fight in order to jump on the boss.
The only other potentially extreme activity comes when the player grabs onto the boss and climbs up the fur. The bosses are all extremely large, so sometimes this can involve climbing dozens of feet up while the boss tries to fling you off.
This is especially prominent when the boss flies in the air or swims under water.
While magic plays an extremely important part in the story, it is almost completely absent from the gameplay itself. In the story, the player goes to a god in order to revive a dead girl. Since the disembodied voice doesn’t give any explanation as to how he will revive the girl, it’s safe to assume that it will be done through magical means.
There are only a few times when magic comes up during actual gameplay. The player can use light reflected off / through his sword in order to pinpoint the exact position of the next colossus. This doesn’t actually hurt the boss or have any other effect, it’s just used as a directional tool.
Once the player defeats the boss, strange presumably magical tendrils come out and enter the main character. This causes the main character to pass up and he is eventually teleported back to the temple, where a few black souls are waiting for him.
At the end of the game the god turns the player into a giant demon.
There are no additional factors in this game.
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