Moonbase

I got my copy of Shadow of the Colossus yesterday (see my earlier post), and stayed up entirely too late last night playing it.

Here are some of my initial impressions. Not a review, but just the things that popped into my head while playing, in no particular order:

General

• Absolutely an excellent game. I’m not sure it beats Ico, but then they are different enough that one could argue that they are not in direct competition.

• The most impressive thing, visually and technically, is the fact that the game is set in a single, continuous, uninterrupted level which is literally miles wide. Your horse is not just a convenience, but a requirement.

• While SotC blends fairy tale and horror elements just as Ico did, it leans more towards horror. There is a definite sense that the main character may be making a sort of Faustian bargain.

• Aesthetically, the game feels like a blend of Ico and Final Fantasy X. The central plain on the SotC map feels a lot like the Calm Lands, but the resemblance to FFX is particularly strong in the various ruins and in the design of a few of the Colossi which feel a bit like FFX aeons. However, unlike the ruins in FFX, you aren’t confined to a narrow pre-defined pathway; you can clamber over whatever physically accessible bits of masonry you feel like.

Controls

• The controls for navigating on foot don’t have the same finesse as Ico’s did, but they turn out to be perfectly suited to this game. There aren’t many situations where you don’t want to run at full tilt: when you’re not running from/after a Colossus, you’ve got to deal with covering long distances on foot.

• The camera control with the right analog stick is much freer than in Ico; you can set an arbitrary camera angle and it will mostly stay there until it needs to change (and it usually manages to anticipate that need rather than switching annoyingly at the last moment). However, Colossus battles can be annoying until you develop the habit of using L1 to lock the camera onto your foe.

• Mounting your horse is harder than it should be, but the remainder of the horse-related controls work pretty well. It feels a great deal like riding the real thing.

• Otherwise, the controls work pretty darn well.

Your Character

• Your unnamed character is most likely not an adult Ico, as this guy is a redhead, although his costume suggests he is a member of the same culture.

• On foot, he has two movement animations: sneaking around on tip-toe, and running frantically (see earlier comment about lack of finesse). I think I would have appreciated a more ordinary walking animation, as I haven’t seen any situations that require sneaking around on tip-toe. Well, at least not yet…

• Speaking of running, he runs like Legolas. I have to wonder how many times the development team watched a certain scene in Return of the King...

Your Horse

• Your horse, named Agro (not Argo, despite how it sounds), is a pretty handy asset on the wide plains; you can point him in a direction, spur him into a gallop and pretty much take your hands off the controls until you need to make a major course change. He’s not dumb vehicle, so he won’t go charging blindly over a cliff or get stuck against walls.

• Agro is, however, a neurotic sumbitch of a horse. This becomes extra clear when you aren’t riding him to give him direction.

• While most horses can swim, Agro is afraid of deep water (i.e. anything more than ankle deep). Mounted or dismounted, you are not going to be able to convince him to get in the *^($# water.

• Agro is insecure and clingy. If you run more than maybe twenty yards from him on foot, he will charge after you like a codependent sheepdog and stick his fat equine butt directly in your path. “Don’t leave me!”

• Occasionally, if you do manage to sneak away and leave him unattended, he’ll randomly spook and flip out, at which point he often goes crashing straight into a wall.

• Of course, if this were real, I’m not sure how much of this could be legitimately attributed to Agro’s psychological problems, and how much of it could be safely chalked up to the fact that you’re wandering alone through a forbidden haunted wasteland at the edge of the world. Horses tend to sense things you don’t.

• Update: I think I’m voting for “Agro knows something I don’t”; only some bodies of water seem to freak him out; he seems fine with wading out into others. Creepy.

Colossi

• Hint for newbies: you can jump and grab onto the fur of a Colossus. Until I thought to try that, I was stuck at the first Colossus for a long time, alternately trying to attack it from the ground and clinging uselessly to its wristband while it shook me around like a rag doll.

• Generally, if something would make sense to do, try it, because it is likely to work if you time it right.

• The size of the Colossi will screw with your sense of distance, particularly with the more anthropomorphic ones. You may have to keep reminding yourself that they are both a little larger and a little further away than they appear. They are also a little faster.

• The Colossi are essentially golems. They are made of earth and stone, and are defeated by obliterating the symbols placed on their heads (occasionally other places too, but mostly on their heads).

Miscellany

• You have limited health, but recover it automatically and fairly quickly —the process can be accelerated by crouching. Damage from e.g. long falls is also surprisingly low. Given that the game also makes mention of recovering health at save points when it’s obviously easier to simply crouch for 15-30 seconds, I have to wonder whether the damage and regeneration rates were adjusted at the last minute to make the game easier, or whether there is a “hard mode” available after you beat the game the first time.

• You can kill and eat (O button) the lizards. It’s not clear what the advantage to doing this is, but you can do it. The ones with the white tails are extra nutritious and make your status meter flash briefly when you eat them. It’s possible that they are another vestigal way of regenerating health.

• Update: Aha! The white-tailed lizards increase your max strength/stamina. The other lizards, so far as I can tell, do nothing.
• Shooting lizards from horseback is fun and challenging.
• There is apparently at least one climbable tree with fruit, though so so far I have failed in my attempts to collect them. I haven’t tried shooting them down with my bow, though… I wonder if they’re also edible?

• Update: You can indeed shoot the fruit down and eat it. It refills your health.
• There are Ico-style “shadow men” (spirits), although so far only in cutscenes. I don’t know whether this is a connection with Ico, or simply a continued re-use of the notion from Japanese culture (you see similar depictions in other unrelated Japanese works— for example, the spirits on the train in Spirited Away).

Graphics/Technical

• Leafy trees and water surfaces are, generally speaking, a step down from Ico’s, where they were arguably two of that game’s most impressive visual features. To me, absolutely the most impressive thing in Ico were the sunny groves of trees, shimmering in the breeze.

• However, rendering of underwater things is much better in SotC. One really annoying thing in Ico was that you generally couldn’t tell where the waterline fell on your character’s body; they’ve fixed that here. Also, now you can dive underwater, and the underwater view is incredible.

• Rendering of trees (ignoring leaves) is also significantly better than in Ico. They do something clever with using bitmapped textures for the tree branches in order to keep the poly count down, but I’ve not been able to figure it out quite yet.

• Overall, the best graphics are as good or significantly better than Ico’s (and some are outright jaw-dropping), but the quality is less consistent. This is probably forgivable given the sheer size of the level they had to populate.

• The display of the massive level is driven by a LOD engine which streams from the disc as you go. The streaming is very evident in the game’s demo sequence (where Agro gallops alone through a section of the map), but it’s not very noticable during actual gameplay.

• Overall, the results of their efforts are very impressive; it’s plain that they’re wringing every last drop they can out of the PS2 hardware, yet very seldom is there a significant drop in framerate.