Shadow of the Colossus

Adam, Austin, and Jeff revisit 2005’s towering art-house adventure Shadow of the Colossus… or more specifically, its 2018 remake. Join them as they climb, cling, and complain through a game that puts the "cult" in cult classic.

Warning: May contain content unsuitable for fans of Shadow of the Colossus

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:02 Overview and Background
• 2:50 Story... I guess?
• 6:28 Scope and Scale
• 13:16 Big Sword Bro (Third Colossus)
• 22:06 Oh Yeah, this is how the game works
• 23:14 Swimming Sucks - But the Eel is Fun (Seventh Colossus)
• 27:30 Platform Panther (Fourteenth Colossus)
• 32:55 Where It All Began (First Colossus)
• 35:29 Navigational Woes
• 40:22 Sand Dragon (Thirteenth Colossus)
• 43:39 Bird on the Lake (Fifth Colossus)
• 48:43 Hidey Horse (Fourth Colossus)
• 51:38 Tower of Suck (Sixteenth Colossus)
• 58:55 Torch Tiger (Tenth Colossus)
• 1:04:15 Fire Turtle (Ninth Colossus)
• 1:07:46 Fire Salamander (Eighth Colossus)
• 1:13:53 What is the Legacy of Shadow?
• 1:19:13 The Finale
• 1:29:08 Final Thoughts
• 1:32:21 Outro!

Transcript

The hardest thing to program in the game wasn't the Colossus.
It was the horse, according to the creator.
I mean, I fucking believe that.
Yeah, it seems pretty hard.
It seemed like you didn't accomplish it.
But it's the same. It sure came up a little short.
Welcome back to another episode of the Games Gone By podcast.
It is Saturday, July 5th at the time of this recording.
I'm your host, Adam, and joining me as always, Jeff and Austin.
How are you guys feeling about discussing
what is one of the worst gaming experiences I've ever had?
I cannot wait to complain about another PS2 classic.
That's all I'm going to say.
I just this is this is a cult classic like you guys.
People actually like this game, right?
Like, can I meet them? Do they exist?
Yeah. An emphasis on the word cult.
It is very much beloved is all I'm saying.
It is very much beloved.
I just like I just came back from the pool myself,
and I am a better swimmer than the character.
God, don't worry.
I will complain about the swimming at some point today.
We are discussing the 2005 game Shadow of the Colossus.
Of course, we played the 2018 remake.
So a seven year old remake to a 20 year old game.
You know, Wikipedia describes this as it often being regarded
as an important example of video games as art due to its minimalist landscapes,
immersive gameplay and the emotional weight on the player characters journey.
We'll get into it, but I just thought, what a load of shit.
So so what that is, is that is like the most charitable
interpretation of a developer who I feel like ran out of time
trying to make a game he really wanted to make and made a good decision,
which is just cut everything.
All right, we'll have a world that you could move around in.
There will be bosses and all of the mechanics will technically work,
but everything else out the window.
We don't have time for it, boys ship.
I do think a game designed around like entirely large scale,
massive boss fights where it's like each fight is a puzzle
that you have to kind of solve the the rhythm to defeat this boss
is like a cool idea.
I just don't think Shadow of the Colossus executes that
the way I would have wanted it executed.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Like this game endlessly reminds me of the Wind Temple
in Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.
And it's like, oh, actually, that's what I want to go play.
This game just reminds me that I should be playing Tears of the Kingdom
and not Shadow of the Colossus.
I was reading that there were apparently 48 colossi originally.
Yes, later trimmed to 24, which was then even later
trimmed down to 16 due to time and hardware limitations.
So the idea that they couldn't do everything they wanted to do,
I think is definitely true.
But we'll get into some of that at its core.
This is a game about a boy and his horse and a woman and monsters.
And if there's anything else going on, I don't know it.
Are we sure it's about a woman?
It's more about a corpse than.
I was convinced she was never going to wake up.
But yeah, spoilers for the entire ending here,
which honestly is kind of major spoilers because all of the plot
happens while the credits are rolling.
She does.
When they say this game is minimalist, they mean virtually non-existent
as far as any sort of story or character development.
And I can understand the approach, right?
Like, that's an interesting idea.
But it just kind of leaves you wondering, like, what am I doing
for 95 percent of the game?
The fact that there was like the first cut scene
after like the title intro in the entire game
is after you defeat your 12 colossus.
And it shows the little like horse party following you.
It's just it's so funny to me.
It's like you've sunk hours into this game and then they're finally like,
oh, wait, there is a plot.
I promise. Don't go anywhere.
The plot being minimal.
It's like fine. The characterization.
No, it's not minimal. It is absent.
It is. It is not in the game.
Yes. At no point.
Like one of my biggest complaints with the opening,
because, you know, there's like before you actually start from the menu,
there's like a big cinematic and then you can start.
And there's like another one that leads in.
It tells us nothing about anything about these two characters, right?
Like you don't even really get a sense of like,
you know, is he looking at like a pocket watch or something?
Like he's in a hurry. Is he like sad?
What's his connection to this girl?
Nothing. I mean, truly nothing.
All of this opening is just like, look at the pretty graphics.
Here's a demon. Now go kill the colossi.
And like I'll admit, I'm not always the most observant
or paying attention to these kind of things.
But I got I just got nothing out of the storytelling in this game.
But you know what? I will give them props for again,
with the whole of them cutting down to twelve colossus.
Obviously, this game was like scaled way down from whatever the writer's ambition was.
I feel like he could have left more tidbits of plot in the game
that just wouldn't have made any sense or would have just been repeatedly unsatisfying.
So whatever they did to just cut out all of it
and kind of wrap it up during the credits roll, I approve of that.
I like that. Like, get out of your own way.
Admit that you have failed and just know that there's a corpse you're trying to revive.
Yeah, I think I definitely agree with that in that the way a lot of people online
tend to describe this is it's like, oh, it works so well because it's minimal.
And I think it works so well because it stays out of the way.
Like you said, I think that's part of why it works well enough
is because there isn't actually that much time to get bogged down in nonsense.
It's just colossus to colossus to colossus.
And I think that it is probably better for that, for sure.
Well, the story is more is more minimal than like any Zelda game or anything like that.
But it kind of has the same idea, I think, of just like a very simple story.
Boy saves girl, you know, boy goes on journey type
energy to it, which I think works, except there's just so little there
that it's like you don't get invested in anything.
And I think the the morals and kind of the things that the game is trying to teach
or, you know, express just gets bogged down in a lot of the mechanics being bad.
Yeah, like somewhere in my notes, I described it was like after the opening
cutscene, we know much about this game story as we do like Donkey Kong.
There's there's like a beast up high that we have to climb to to save a girl.
That's it. That's what we know.
But, you know, as much as people will praise those sort of minimal aspects,
I guess like the real reason this game is remembered
ultimately is because of the gameplay and not even so much like
the minute to minute gameplay as just the sort of overarching
experience of like the vast, huge open world that's really detailed
and just the scale of everything, the scale of the mountains, the scale of the colossi,
the scale of the path you take to get to each boss fight.
Just just everything is really big, I would say.
I don't think I've ever played a game where like the main character
feels just utterly puny next to the only enemies in the game,
which are these colossal colossi, these boss fights.
It was interesting throughout the game to see the varying sizes
of the different colossi.
I was expecting all of them to be enormous, but they did vary a good bit,
which I think works for the game.
But yeah, I have never played anything else that
that has such a what's the word I'm looking for?
Gulf between like your character and the creatures that you're supposed to be fighting.
Yeah, I think it works to like
there's definitely a very singular vision with this game.
And it's like, boy kills big colossi.
And a lot of the time it executes that really well.
And I think you're right.
It's just because of the scope and the scale of all this.
And I imagine on the PS2, like that was something that hadn't been done
before at that level.
You know, like we see it later with like God of War and things like that.
But I think this probably predates like God of War two or three,
which I think is when it starts to really scale up those boss fights.
So you've got to see them going for something bigger and more ambitious.
And in the PS2, I can imagine that would be like revolutionary for a lot of people.
Yeah, you have to really take yourself back in time to 2005
and try to remember the sort of experiences that were available at the time.
And I have to imagine that like rearing back
and driving your sword into like the head of one of these gigantic
colossi just much felt much more satisfying in the PS2 era
than it does in 2025.
Austin, do you remember like Microsoft had this game under development
for a while called Scalebound that eventually got canceled?
Yes, I want to say that that was something that they were definitely
trying to play off a similar idea as this, because it was going to be about
fighting these enormous creatures.
I think it was going to be like a multiplayer game, though, right?
Yeah, I man, I thought they never got like deep enough into development
to even know what that game was going to be like.
But I remember the early trailers being like big dragons.
And like your dude had like headphones on.
He was like, listen to rock music as you were like scaling these big dragon creatures.
I can't remember if it was multiplayer or not,
but it sounds like this started out as multiplayer, too.
So yeah, that was interesting to read as apparently this was conceived
as a multiplayer follow up to eco.
But it just got like reworked over and over in production.
Eventually, they decided that like it would work best as a standalone
single player experience, which is probably for the best,
because like unless they figured out a way to make the minute
to minute mechanics way more engaging, I don't know that playing this
with someone else would actually been any more fun.
It may have even just made it feel like even cheaper as you utterly destroy
these colossi, because for the most part, like they go down
in both a quick and unsatisfying manner, not all of the time.
But I think half of them, I was just like, OK, next, like, you know, on
on to the next one, it gets a little I don't want to call it repetitive
because like so you can see where they intentionally tried to make
every colossus feel unique, right?
And I'm afraid in like an effort to do that,
they kind of just like made up some some random bullshit
that you have to figure out for each colossus while you ultimately
still do the same repetitive thing, which is like
rear back and yell hiya and then stab your sword into its
into its ass or whatever it may be.
Or wings or head or, you know, any any random part of the colossus.
What was that weird bulbous thing on the on the bridge boss,
the one on the lake that you had to get on top of?
He like rears up and then it's just like it's something on his belly.
I guess it was on his belly. That's what I should call it.
I think it's just like a stomach.
You're just like hanging in a weird spot and just stabbing his stomach over.
It was a weird looking protrusion.
I was like, what the fuck?
I guess a couple of them have that, like the flying dragon has the sex.
Right. I mean, a lot of these designs are really cool.
Like a lot of them, I think, are maybe cool as being generous,
but they're at least like unique and they're going for something different.
I think it works that all of them look animalistic
because they it kind of makes you feel empathy for them a little bit.
Right. Because this whole game is supposed to be like,
you're not supposed to feel good about killing the colossi.
And it's like, yeah, I don't.
But now for the reasons you want me to, it doesn't feel good to kill them.
Gameplay wise, it just doesn't feel good.
But but but they definitely want you to feel like you are,
you know, doing something bad or doing something wrong
by killing these innocent creatures.
And I I think by making them look animalistic,
like they remind you of an animal and that's like, oh,
I don't want to kill random animals.
So you kind of do feel a little bit bad about it,
but never enough to actually get the point of the story across.
In my opinion.
Oh, I wanted to murder every fucking one of these bastards.
Like, I don't think a single
you're right about how cool they look, though.
Like if you just showed me a series of screenshots of even the original game,
right, doesn't even have to be the remaster with the super nice graphics.
If you just showed me screenshots of all the colossi,
I would have been ready to play this game.
It looks cool as hell.
And you're telling me that I have to scale giant monsters
and bring them down with just my sword.
That sounds like a great idea.
But like you're talking about Austin, when you actually do it,
like you don't get satisfaction.
It's like you're chasing this high.
And that just never, never comes about.
Like I didn't rate a single one of these colossi five out of five stars.
The some of the concept art that you unlock actually looks really cool.
You know, I'm not super into concept art usually,
because it either kind of looks like either really under detailed
or nothing like the finished product.
But these look really cool and they look a lot like the colossi
actually come out in the end.
So it's clear they had and maybe that was concept art for the remake
is probably what it was.
I don't know exactly. It doesn't distinguish that in the menu, right?
But still, it looks like they had a very strong artistic vision,
even if the gameplay vision feels like it kind of meandered a little bit here
and there. We may as well just start talking about some of these fights in detail.
We're not going to go over every single one, but I figured we'll go over
some of our favorites, followed by some of our least favorite.
Why don't we start with the third one, which I'm calling Big Sword Bro.
These things have these names that were apparently like
leaked from some like Japanese guide in 2005 on some forums.
Turns out someone totally made it up, but it has it has stuck around.
And so forgive me for not using those because they don't mean anything to me.
And I just didn't bother to make a list of them.
We're going to be calling them by the numbers.
I think that's the most telling thing anyway.
That's how I kind of memorize them.
So we're going to start with number three.
This is a very tall humanoid with a giant sword.
Now, Jeff, I just kind of put this aside.
I know you had a little trouble getting there.
Oh, oh, my God.
I forgot I've blocked out all of the
all of the like getting to the different colossi.
But yes, I didn't mind this fight too much.
But that fucking this is like the first jump in the game
that you have to think about at all.
And the game, the game just isn't programmed well enough for this jump.
I must have leaped
and fallen into the water at least 15 times and done the circle.
I almost I almost quit the game before the third colossus.
So comparatively, I had a great time fighting this dude.
You just got to run up a sword. It's fine.
No, that that job, that job is terrible.
I did it. I had to also do it like five times.
It's just the angle of it is bad.
And I had to look it up because I'm like, am I doing something wrong?
Like all it was was a jump.
So I was like, surely I can't be doing this incorrectly.
I tried. I looked it up.
I'm like, no, I'm just not hitting the jump right.
I guess I tried so many different strategies.
I was like, oh, you have to jump this way or that way.
And it's just it's just poorly programmed.
You have to jump straight.
And then this is where you realize that link.
Sorry. What? Never mind.
I'm calling him link can like float through the air when you push the stick
and you can direct him that way.
And you kind of have just to like push him in the air onto the thing.
And then you can do a normal climb and jump.
But it's it's total ass that he's also very bad at swimming.
So, yeah, it's it's funny because I climbing up.
There was the most fun I had in this game until the fifth fight.
And I must have just stumbled into making this jump work because I never fell off.
But it's weird because you have to like while holding R2 to stay held on,
you then have to move the stick toward the direction you want to jump
while holding X and he kinds of spins around and reaches his hand out
in the direction he's going to jump.
And then if you let go of X or R2, he then makes the jump in that direction.
Oh, are you talking about the leap from the cube onto the platform?
Yeah. Yeah, that's easy.
That I did the first time I'm talking about getting onto the fucking cube
from from the ramp onto the cube from the ramp.
Yes. What do you that's even easier.
You jump and hit R2 when he runs into it.
No, no, it never grabbed.
Yeah, it never grabbed.
I did that like eight times and it never grabbed.
That's a horrible.
Actually, like at a total loss of what you guys are talking about now,
because I figured you meant the last jumps.
No, that's that's true.
I did that the first time.
It's the stupid lock on mechanism.
I think both me and Austin got caught up with like trying to angle our character
towards the cube before jumping.
And the game can't do that.
He can only jump in a like
what's the word I'm looking for a perpendicular line
from the edge you're leaping off of.
So you have to jump off to the left and then in the air kind of float
into grabbing onto it.
If you don't do that, you might end up jumping more towards the big gap and fall.
Or it's like a whole thing. I promise you it's not.
It was like auto aiming you toward the plateau instead of the block.
Yes. Yes, it would do that a lot.
Yeah, it was horrible.
Or you would you wouldn't get close enough to the face you had to grab on to.
You would get too close to the other side.
And so he wouldn't like lock on grab.
It's so fucking stupid.
That's very strange.
I literally was just wrong about what you guys struggled with,
because I couldn't imagine that having been it.
Oh, no, it was terrible.
Maybe we were playing two different games because I fucking hated this next fight.
At various points, it felt that way.
I actually really like this next fight.
I like I like big sword, bro.
Why don't you take us through how he works?
Yeah, so basically he, you know, giant like one of the probably tallest,
like straight up tallest colossi, and he has this big sword in his hand
and he'll like randomly smash it into the ground, like straight down.
He'll just like thrust it into the ground if you're close to him.
Or if you're kind of far away, he'll swing it down and you have to run up that.
But to do that, you have to knock his armor off first.
So there's like a little spot on the ground, a little like metal area
that he has to swing and hit to knock his armor off,
which I know, Adam, I know you love when the voice is like, knock his armor off,
but gives you absolutely zero context of how or what you're supposed to do with that.
I think my issue with this one is so there's a button you can hold L2
that makes you kind of angle your camera toward the colossus.
And I figured that would be useful for this guy.
No, because it wants you to look at the ground and it wants you to find a spot
on the ground that's metal for him to slam the sword into.
And once I realized that, it's like, OK, I got this.
But I kept angling the camera in a way where I would never see this thing on the ground.
And then beyond that, I swear, I actually fought him again on normal.
I got back up to like the sixth boss on normal last night,
and he kept doing the right swing the entire time.
And I don't understand what happened.
The first time I played through maybe is because it was on hard.
He just only wanted to stomp and do the vertical thing like he literally
didn't do the horizontal one once in my first attempt.
And I was so confused how you're supposed to get this guy,
which sort of leads into some of my other complaints is just like,
it seems to be so much inconsistency to their behavior that I wasn't sure
how to trigger the things that I knew I was supposed to be doing half the time.
But this guy really isn't so bad once he slams the ground and the armor falls off.
Like you run up the sword and that's kind of cool.
Then you climb his arm. He has a couple of weak spots.
It definitely has a cool sense of scale to it because he's he's upright,
a little taller than the second one, and he's much just taller upright than the first one.
So I can definitely see why you like this one.
The sequence of these like first three colossi, I think, does work really well
because they're all pretty different.
Like maybe the first and the third are both kind of like tall, upright humanoids.
But this guy looked really weird.
So I like really lanky and strange.
I was actually he has just notice he has like orbs like his feet are like rounded.
He's like like walking on little peg leg looking.
So I was convinced for a minute that I had to like do something with his legs
to like make him trip and fall over.
And that would break the armor.
But then I got lucky and he just hit the metal spot.
So I also I do think this is one of the few that like uses the weapon
in an interesting way, because like a couple of them have weapons,
but most of them don't really use them like I think.
I guess the 15th one does a little bit.
But like most of them just kind of walk around with things in their hands.
This one's like actually trying to swing at you and hit you.
He's like, why are you on my platform?
Get off.
So I kind of like that.
So I would assume the first one does, but you just don't really get like
you have to go out of your way to give him a chance to use his club
because it's set up to where you just immediately get on his foot and kill him.
Right.
Which is, I think, kind of the point, right?
The emphasis of this game being that you're, you know, killing them
in a way that feels wrong, right?
The they're just kind of lazing around in their pasture
and you're like climbing up and murdering them.
Like that's the emphasis.
So I guess it makes sense that most of them don't attack back, really.
A couple of them do, of course, but a lot of them are just like wandering around
and then you go up and stab them repeatedly for some reason.
So I think this one is interesting because it doesn't do that.
Like it is fighting back.
He's like, why are you on my land?
Go away.
I mean, I will say that having started out on the hard difficulty,
it feels like they're fighting back on hard.
I the very first Colossus stepped on me and killed me
before I murdered him on my first playthrough of this game.
And that is not the vibe on normal where like you can get stepped on
and Link just doesn't care.
I guess that is worth mentioning what we all played on before we get too deep
in this, because I played it on normal through the whole thing.
Yeah, I so I played the first two on normal and I was so bored
that I thought I needed to start over on hard.
I think if I just got to the third guy on normal,
I wouldn't have bothered to put it on hard
because I would have been so frustrated with this thing.
But so it went and I ended up playing through the whole thing on hard.
The hard is a huge mistake.
Don't don't play on hard.
I think I might have liked this game more if I had just played on normal.
My final playtime was six hours on hard that got me to the 11th Colossus
and then five hours and 45 minutes on normal where I beat the entire game.
I think I think mine was around seven and a half total playtime.
And, you know, part of that would have been you knew how some of them worked.
But the other part of that is just that you have to.
So maybe it's a good point.
Just go ahead and point out how this how these mechanics kind of work real quick.
So as you're climbing the Colossus, there's these weak points that you have to stab.
And you can only hit each one a couple of times before it disappears.
And you have to go to the next weak point to finish it off on hard.
Not only are there more weak points on the Colossus,
but you have to hit them more times.
And there's a stamina meter that you have that slowly drains
and it drains more when they're shaking and whatnot.
So like that just means that on hard, you have to do the thing that many more times.
And sometimes getting back on the Colossus was an enormous pain in the ass,
like depending on the fight.
And that can make your that can be the difference between a five minute
and a twenty five minute fight like easily.
Yeah, definitely. Because like so many of these fights, it feels really cool
to get onto the Colossus's first like weak point and start stabbing him.
The problem is that you just have to do that too many times.
Like on hard, the fights just last way too long.
You have to remember this is an older game.
Just don't don't play on hard, play normal.
And then if you really like it, you can challenge yourself.
Yeah, I think normal was probably a much more in line with the difficulty
I like to play things on. I just thought it wouldn't be.
But like you said, since it's a 20 year old game, normal is actually
like a reasonable challenge. I feel like we can move on to the next one
now that we really liked, or I should say that we kind of liked.
I think there was only two that we all gave full ratings to. Right.
But this one was the seventh one and it is an electric eel in this lake.
And I really liked this one, other than the fact that swimming in this game
just sucks. Yeah.
Swimming is really bad.
It's just so slow.
Like, it's just no matter what you do, it's just very slow.
And and there's only three lakes in this game and they're all huge.
They're all the biggest lakes you've ever seen in a video game before.
It's crazy.
And it's like you have to swim through the entire thing.
Come on. Yeah, this one was cool.
I thought you had to maybe go through the process like one or two too many times.
And it was kind of frustrating to get him at first,
because I didn't realize at first what you were supposed to do.
I was just like swimming around in circles trying to figure out
how to get him to attack me.
And it wasn't until I like was right over him that he would finally come after me.
I was like, oh, OK, I'm supposed to go towards the thing
that's trying to kill me. Got it.
But once I got him to like do the thing, it's a cool like scale.
And you have to climb on his back and stab him.
And then he goes underwater and you get thrown off again.
And it was cool. I liked it.
Yeah. Surfing the Yield was a lot of fun.
I what I struggled with on this one was like the first couple of times.
It's like I was I could only get so close that I kept dying into the lightning
or so far away that I couldn't get on his tail by the end.
And it took me a few attempts to really find that like sweet spot of where to be
when he comes out of the water so that neither of those two things happens to you.
But yeah, that's this one was fun.
I think on hard, I fell off a couple of times just because there would be
these really long extended sections underwater.
And I'm just waiting for him to come back up so I can let go
and get my stamina back. And it never happens.
And you fall off. Luckily, you cannot drown.
You will just very slowly because you're in water in this game.
So, of course, it's happening very slowly to the surface.
And you'll get all your stamina back.
And then you can just like do the process again.
Yeah. Yeah, that's very much intentional.
Like you basically and you see this later with like the flying sandworm and stuff, too.
There are segments where like, oh, you've run out of time.
You now you now are forced off of the colossus and you have to repeat
the whole cycle of of getting back onto him, which just happens much more frequently
on hardware as normal is closer to like a reasonable amount of times doing these sequences.
Yeah, and I think this is one of the first ones that has some type of attack
that's like so deadly, I feel like, other than being stomped on.
The ones up to this point, like they don't really shoot anything at you.
They don't really throw anything at you, anything like that.
But these, like if you miss time, the lightning, especially on hard, you're just done.
Like it's you're starting to fight over.
Yeah. Yeah. Game over.
But it becomes like once once you get the first one down and you see that, oh, OK,
that actually stopped the lightning for this one spike, then you know that you just
need to time it for the next couple.
And it's I mean, it's really cool.
It's cool to go under the water.
There's there's this feeling when you're looking down and it's coming straight at you,
that even though like you like, you know, this is what you're doing.
It's terrifying. Right.
I mean, there's a sea creature coming up to eat you and you have to get out of the way
just in time. Like it's really this is one that really invoked a lot of like dread
in the process. I think I thought this one was pretty cool.
This is also one that really benefits a lot from the remade graphics.
Like the the sleekness of like the water reflections as like part of his body emerges
and you like get up out of the water and it's all like running off of him.
It just looks really cool with the updated water effects.
I'm sure the original 2005 doesn't look quite as good as this.
This one looks pretty beautiful.
Yeah. And one thing I complained a lot as we complain or as we played this was that
there's only three colors in this game.
And that's like a little bit of a problem for me with some of the palettes.
But overall, I mean, the actual art direction is pretty cool.
Like the creature design is awesome.
So I really have even though they're not super colorful, there's no there's no complaints
about the colossi themselves.
I mean, they look really cool.
I think the eel is one of the cooler looking ones for sure.
Yeah. It's one of the fights with color.
Yeah. The the electricity definitely helps give a spark of color and like a difference
than all the other ones for sure.
It's like, oh, hey, yeah, hey, yeah.
Well done. Well done.
Austin, do you want to tell us about number 14?
Yeah, I love the platform panther as as we're going to affectionately call it.
So there's a couple colossi in this game that are a bit smaller scale.
They're not giant creatures.
They're little like smaller bulls or panthers or something of that sort.
And this is one of those.
And you're kind of in this abandoned city, this like ruined ancient city.
And you have to run across these, like dilapidated towers and get him to run into
these pillars to knock them down.
And eventually he'll crash through part of the city.
And that's when you can finally knock off his armor and attack him.
And I really like this one because I think the platforming in this game is actually
pretty good. Like for the most part, other than like one or two really terrible jumps,
like we talked about earlier, I think a lot of the platforming is fun.
You actually have to think about it.
You have to grab on.
It's not just automatic and you have to worry about stamina and, you know, your
movement and all that stuff.
So this one was really cool to kind of integrate all the platforming elements
into a boss fight.
So I really liked doing this one.
I absolutely felt fucking cool leaping from collapsing tower to collapsing tower
to, like, try and get to the right position to crush the crush this boss.
But like with everything in this game, it's just not quite polished or refined
enough. It took, well, of course, forever for him to actually like try and bulldoze
the towers of my playthrough.
So I would kind of like I would sometimes I'd pick up my phone and just like wait
for the controller to vibrate and my other hand, which would let me know I could
get ready to jump.
But this fight also has like is one of the examples of actually like good
environmental design.
If you look at these towers, you're supposed to be standing on.
You can see how they've like got chunks taken out of the bottom or like they look
like they should be fallen over.
And there are other collapsed ones in the battle arena.
So for once, there's a lot of clues to tell you like go do something about like
the walkways that are just like a little out of reach in these towers that look
clearly scalable or actually scalable.
So I know this is colossus like 14, but I finally felt like the environment like
clued me into the right direction for once.
Well, yeah, and that's I mean, I know we'll complain about it later for sure when
we talk about some of the worst colossi, but so much of the visual communication
in this game is like bad, like just downright actually bad.
So for it to have to have what you're supposed to do so clearly visually
communicated by the environment was refreshing by colossus.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
This one was weird because some of you guys experienced this was kind of what
you're talking about, Jeff.
So you got on the tower and it seemed like the first time he charged it pretty
quick, great, awesome.
And then he just like dicked around in a circle until you shot him with the bow.
And then he decided to charge it again.
And I don't know why, because he's full of armor and these arrows are just
bonking off of him.
And I don't know why that enrages him so much to come charge the tower, but I
figured that it was like the quickest way to get him to charge it the second time.
And again, it's not, it's not something that's super obvious, especially because
he's right underneath you and looking down over these tiny edges frequently just
made him lose his balance.
And I had to like, I wouldn't fall off, fall off because you can just grab it and
climb back on.
But like when you get too close to an edge in this game, it's like you start
stumbling before any human approaching an edge would actually start to stumble.
And it's so dumb.
But this one overall, I agree.
I did like, it's really cool when the towers are collapsing and you jump to the
next one.
It's one of the few times in this game that you actually have to like time your
jumps.
It's surprising in a game about running across a bunch of giant creatures.
It's very rare that you have to time your actual jumps.
There's a handful for sure.
But yeah, the only reason I really didn't like this one is because at the end, I
got obsessed with wanting to get the achievement for killing one with a fall
stab.
And so I tried this about seven times, kept bonking off his armor, and then he
killed me.
And I was like, God damn it.
I have to do all of this again.
But no, this one was cool.
I mean, like you said, this one has the best like visual communication.
You can actually see it's like the ruins of some city, which by this point, all
you have seen is mountains and rivers.
So it was cool to see like something a little more developed.
This one's great.
I think there's a reason this one's in our top five, like all three of us.
It also helps that you literally fought one of these Panthers before.
So you do know where the weak spot is.
And so you're relatively confident you're not just following a red herring for
half an hour, which I did more than a few times.
It's also despite your your frustrations with landing the jumpstab, Adam, it's
also one of the like only two times in the game that you actually could, even if
you wanted to.
So I, I appreciated that.
I was like, Oh, I can finally jumpstab.
Like, let's go.
I don't even know what you guys mean by jumpstab, but we'll just roll with it.
You can like down thrust whenever you, if you press the attack button while you're
in the air, you can like down thrust.
Sure.
If stab it, if you say so.
Yeah, you have to fall from like quite a ways for it to actually, yeah, but I'm
like, and like it's inconsistent, like everything else in this game.
So, you know, it's not surprising that you don't know.
If you look at like the videos of the speed runners doing like the time attack
mode, they find a lot of creative uses for the jumpstab for sure, but it's not
something that one, I mean, like most of the things in this game, it never tells
you about it.
So you definitely have to figure it out on your own.
And then even once I figured it out, I found very little use for it.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Moving on to our next favorite one here.
Uh, it's actually the intro colossus, the one with the club, the very first one.
Uh, I, I'm going to let you guys talk about this one.
Cause I just felt like this was seriously so boring.
I stopped playing the game the first two times I tried to play this game.
So I'm going to, I'm going to let you guys explain why you find this one so compelling.
I really like the first colossus cause I think it really sets the scene for what
you're in for, like every other time I've played this game, I've always gotten
through, cause I've probably tried this game like 10 times and always gotten
through like the first two or three colossi and then dropped off of it.
Uh, but one of the things that always kept me coming back is like this
opening experience with the scale and the music and like, you see this giant
towering bear thing and you have to like climb up its legs and get to its head
and stab it in the head.
And then like, after you do kill it, at least in this run through the, this
time of me playing it, I did legitimately feel bad after like hearing its death
cry and it like laying on the ground.
And I was like, man, I did just like murder this thing for absolutely no reason.
And I know I'm trying to save the girl, but it's like, it's just hanging out here.
And I like climbed up and stabbed in the head a bunch of times.
And I think it just really sets the tone and sets the kind of atmosphere for the
rest of the game.
And while I don't think the rest of the game necessarily lives up to that, I do
really like the tone setting that the first one does.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You feared for your life, standing ground.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Different podcast, Adam.
Different podcast.
Uh, I, uh, I very much echo, uh, Austin's opinion here.
Um, it felt like a decent setup and opening for the game and like it was
telling me what I could expect.
I just anticipated the other colossi to like build upon that.
And the first one is more of a warning of like, yeah, this is the game.
It's just this and some other random arbitrary bullshit you have to figure
out in each fight.
Um, so yes, yes.
Uh, we'll talk about that there, but, um, I think I liked the first one just
because it was it, it didn't feel pretentious or overly involved, um, and
playing it on a heart, it felt deadly.
He stepped on me and fucking killed me.
And I was like, all right, let's go.
Well, there's also, you have nothing, you have no precedent to set
against it at this point.
It's just like, what is, like, what is this game?
And it's like, oh, you're climbing all these crazy beasts and stabbing them.
And it's like it, your mind starts to envision what could happen in the future.
And again, I don't necessarily think the game blows up to that, but to start here,
I think it's really cool.
Yeah.
And even, you know, getting there is one of the, what, three, four
jumping puzzles in the game.
Um, so I enjoyed that.
Yeah, that's when I went back on normal and play the first few, that's something
again, you know, also you kind of mentioned this earlier, the platforming
segments in this game can actually be kind of interesting sometimes.
And it's like, they just forget that every time they make one for six more
colossi and then you're like, oh, there's another one.
And then they forget again.
It's like, oh, we have to jump again.
Oh wait, nevermind.
A good time to say this is any, I hated navigating to the next colossi in this
game, like so much to the point where I think the eighth one was the last one I
did, I was trying to get to the ninth and I was just like, I fucking hate this.
And I put my controller down and I come back and my wife has navigated to the
next one for me and I was like, great, that's your job now.
So I did not get to any of the rest of them on my own.
I tried to get my wife to take over for me and she got so frustrated that she
just went to go do something else instead.
Understandable.
And it's worth noting it's because a controlling the horse feels very weird,
very unintuitive.
They say it's because you're not controlling the horse, you're controlling
the guy on the horse and like, sure.
I mean, that's an interesting idea.
I don't think it really comes across in a way that's like interesting or engaging
though to just, it's just frustrating the way he randomly stops or won't turn
or won't start.
And then the second part of the navigation is just, there's no mini map.
There's no compass.
It's all about you reflect the sunlight off your sword and it kind of makes this
this laser that points in a direction, but it's truly just a straight line to
your destination.
So like you'll frequently come up against just mountain walls or canyons and you
have to kind of find a way around and just like taking one wrong turn will put
you so far away.
And then it's just the idea of getting back on the horse to go back through these
like narrow passageways through a forest that you did to get here.
I just, I couldn't stand it.
Um, and the map is like utterly useless for 95% of the game.
Like it just shows you dead colossi and nothing useful.
Yeah.
Like, and the parts of the map aren't even explored until you get there.
So it doesn't help you getting there.
Right, right.
I had a decently good time riding across the open landscapes on multiple
occasions, but like the failing point here is that like the third colossus is
you have to weave your way through these narrow mountain passes.
And it's like, you haven't spent enough time navigating the world for them to
embed these next several colossi, like in these like weird places, like if they
had just changed up the order of some of these arenas or just how they interact
with the landscape, it would have worked better.
Um, but yes, because you don't really know where stuff is, like having to
navigate through Canyon passes for a colossi, like three, four, and five is
one of the lowest moments of the game.
And I do think a lot of the open areas are fun to navigate.
Absolutely agree with that.
Like when you're, when you're just in the open world and like looking at the,
looking at all the landscape and the atmosphere is kind of the, there's not
really a lot of music, but it's like that just kind of somber running through
these empty fields, like that can feel cool.
But like you said, anytime you have to do any like fine tune navigating, it's
like just miserable to me.
And it's like, you know, you could be moving faster if you were on the horse
because he can run fast, right?
But you got to get off the horse because he keeps like stumbling over stuff.
And I don't know, I think I was on hour eight of my gameplay before I figured
out he could jump over things when he decides to write, write some things he
could jump over if he wants to that day.
You know, if he's feeling, if he's feeling jumpy, I think another problem
with always being on the horse, too, is you move so fast that you cannot see
the lizards on the ground that you can kill to get their tails, to get more
stamina, because I did not see a single one of these until my way to the last
colossal.
I mean, I never saw one once.
Oh, I saw a ton, but like what part of this game made you want to deal with
collectibles?
Like I was not going to touch collectibles in this fucking game.
Honestly, the only collectible I ever found was the little golden coins that
apparently do absolutely nothing until you get like 80 of them.
I didn't, you know, I didn't realize that you had to press R2 to actually pick
them up.
So I just like walked through half a dozen of them and failed to actually like
pick them up.
So I only figured it out after struggling to figure out how to pray at the temples
for the longest time, the shrines.
Oh, I didn't know how to do that.
That was R2.
I was like, OK, R2 must just do everything, holding your hands, right?
Um, but yeah, the worst part with the little coins is like, there's not, there's
not a thing saying like one of 79.
There's not even a, there's literally nothing happens, but the little golden
thing disappears.
And so I was like, is that a glitch?
Is that a bug?
It's so dumb, dude.
Don't forget, this is, this is us talking about the stuff we liked about the
games.
Yeah, I almost got a sidetrack there.
Let's, let's move on and get through the last two that I think, uh, we're all of
our favorite two anyway, so this, this should be good.
Um, we'll start with 13, which was the flying dragon in the desert.
I loved this one, man.
And a large part of why I loved this one is because everything I hated about the
other ones was kind of gone, right?
So even though you're on the horse, which can be a pain in the ass sometimes, it's
a really wide open area.
So you're not as, uh, I think it's like, it's like way easier to avoid brushing
up against a tree root that brings them to a complete halt or, you know, uh, not
getting him to stop or accelerate when you want him to.
And you can, you can hold L2 to keep your vision on the dragon in the sky.
And it's just, the horse was not a big problem here.
Uh, by this point I had figured out that I was never holding the bow long enough.
So now that I had, I knew to charge the bow fully up.
I had no problem hitting the little sacks.
Uh, there was visual clarity immediately.
The sacks start to deflate.
Um, so like great visual feedback and then you get on them and you go into the
sky, uh, and he eventually like, we'll dive down into the dirt again to the,
the sand to kick you off.
So it's like, you might have to do it a couple of times, but I really liked this
one, this was by far, I think my favorite.
I think this is the best fight in the game by a wide margin for exactly the
reasons you're talking about.
It's in a wide open area that's brightly lit, not the fog from the geyser
fight or whatever, right?
So you can see everything, um, the immediate visual feedback on popping
the sacks and the sacks are very prominent and obvious, you know, despite
the fact that they don't glow blue or green or whatever, they're clearly
look like weak points.
And then you actually get to use, uh, agro in a fun way where it, it feels
like you're pulling a train robbery, right?
Like you're running up alongside the flying wings and leaping from him.
So fucking cool.
Like this is the first time I was completely fine with repeating a cycle
on a monster because it was so much fun leaping from my horse's back onto the
wings, climbing my way up the little junction, going from the wing to the
dragon's back actually required a little bit of thought.
It wasn't just getting lucky that you didn't get stuck in a weird ankle joint
or whatever, and it wouldn't let you climb.
Um, it was clearly a jump you had to make.
Uh, it was a lot of fun.
Yeah.
Like this is a legitimately good boss fight in any video game, not just
for shadow of the Colossus, right?
Like so much of this has been like, this has been fun for shadow of the Colossus,
but like this is, you can throw this in any game and I'm like having a blast
with this fight, like climbing up the wings, you know, scaling, stabbing him in
the back, like just the grand epicness of it as it's flying through the sky and
you're just like chasing it on aggro.
It's so cool.
Um, yeah, this fight is awesome.
I don't have much to add outside of like what you guys have already talked about,
but for all those reasons, like this one is just awesome.
It just comes so late in the game.
Yeah, this is the fight that made me like, feel like I want to play a
sequel to this game because they know how to do it.
This is, this is correct.
This is good gameplay.
I want to do that 15 times.
That would be great.
Um, right.
Like if every fight was like this, this game would be awesome.
Five out of five stars instead.
Way more of the fights are like the stupid fire bar, fireball turtle or
whatever the fuck it was anyway.
Austin, I'll let you talk about what I think is your favorite fight.
Yeah, my, my favorite fight as much as I love dragon in the desert, right.
As much as I love 13, I think number five is my favorite, the bird on the lake,
right?
This is the first time you fight a flying creature in the game.
And I think there's just this really cool sense of epicness to this because
you're, you're in a lake, so you have to swim, which is unfortunate, but you
can get around it because you only have to swim to like one section and then
you can just kind of stay in that area and not really go anywhere else, which
is like, okay, perfect.
Um, because this bird will come flying at you after you kind of shoot arrows
at it to get its attention, it'll come soaring down at you and you're like
standing on a piece of like wooden platform in the middle of this lake.
And as he's flying at you, you have to jump and grab onto his wing as he's
like flying straight at you and then climb down to the edges of his wings.
So you can stab him and then like climb down to the edge of his tail.
So you can stab his weak point there.
And I think this is the first fight that gives you the sense of scale and
epicness that the game is going for.
That it only achieves at a couple other moments that we've talked about, but
like this one is the first time where I felt a rush of like, whoa, this is really
cool and I think it stuck with me and that's why it sticks as my favorite.
It was like, it's the first time that I felt that feeling of like, I get the
vision of this game.
Yeah.
He like flaps his wings and does like a barrel roll while you're riding on the
back of him and it just feels like gripping on for dear life.
Like, oh my God, don't let go.
Yeah.
The, um, as you stand on his back, the wind whipping by physically pushes like
your character down, down the Colossus model.
So it just, it's very convincing that you are clinging to the back of a
bird trying to take it down.
I like this one a lot.
My, my only issue with this one.
And I, and when I went back and played it on normal, I beat him in one go.
So it like wasn't a problem, but when I was playing it on hard.
So unlike say that turtle in the lake where if you fall in the water, he's
right near you anyway, you're trying to climb on him all good.
The eel in the lake, you know, you fall off.
Well, he'll come back to you.
All good.
This fucking bird dude.
So he flings me off like the edge of the lake somewhere there's only in
order to get his attention again, you have to stand on this little platform
and shoot them with a bow.
So you have to go to this one plot.
Well, there's like three, but they're right next to each other.
In the center of the lake.
And it took me 90 seconds of just straight swimming to get back to the
platform and then you have to shoot them with the bow and then he comes again.
And like, I fell off a couple of times and that just made this one so arduous,
but I do think like on normal it's, it's, it's pretty fun.
And once you figure out like, even on hard, like when you should let go to
get your stamina back, which is just not always clear because he never really
stops like flailing around, but eventually he starts feeling around
enough to where you can stand up.
Um, it's not too bad.
And I think running all the way down the length of the tail of the final one was
really cool and seeing him like plunge into the lake in the death cinematic.
Um, yeah, all in all, this one's pretty great.
Yeah.
When I, when I started off on a hard, when he leaps at you, I had the audacity
to think that you were supposed to jump like onto the wing tips, like not, not
his center of mass, uh, and he one-shotted me repeatedly, which meant I spawned
back at the beginning and had to swim back out to the center of the lake.
So I empathize.
I was, I feel like I didn't have that experience because like when I got thrown
off, it happened to usually be near the platforms or like I wasn't too far away
that it, it didn't feel, and I got thrown off a couple of times, but probably not
as many times as you guys did on hard.
So it didn't, I didn't have the same frustrations with this particular fight.
So I think, unfortunately we have now come to the point in the podcast where
everything good to say has been said.
Oh, wait, wait, I have one more thing.
I think the soundtrack is great.
It's good soundtrack, epic music.
When you're clawing, clawing onto the back of a Colossus and stabbing
it, um, good soundtrack.
That's interesting.
All I noticed is that there's no music when you're running around.
That's, that was my opinion of the soundtrack.
Good songs while fighting, I guess good music.
I think there, yeah, I think some of the ambient sound like when you're
fighting, some of the like high intensity, orchestral stuff is cool.
Uh, none of it like left a huge impression on me.
I know a lot of people praise this game soundtrack, like, oh, one of the great
PS2 soundtracks, and I'm like, yeah, okay, sure.
I'm just saying if you played like the boss soundtrack out in the world and I
heard it, I would be like, what do I need to climb?
Where am I?
I'm ready to go.
That's, that's, that's fair.
That's fair.
It's like, it gets you in the mood to climb.
Yeah, I get it.
Yeah.
I mean, the game's gorgeous for sure.
Um, just, just, uh, make sure we covered all the good things before we move into
30 minutes of trash in this game.
This game has a lot of great ideas.
Um, I think with some, with some subpar execution at times and some downright
awful execution, like the next five boxes that we're about to talk about.
Let's talk about the Heidi horse.
So the, the first one on our list of bottom five here, uh, and the way we did
this is I just made a little Excel list and we all ranked one to three of our
favorites and then like, or gave them a three star rating, right?
And then I just took the best and the worst at the bottom.
Oh, it was only supposed to be a three star rating.
To be clear.
All of my ratings are out of five.
Okay.
Oh, the highest score I gave was a three star.
So, oh, okay.
Well, that's fine.
So, so it works out.
It works out enough anyway.
The first one that we're going to talk to, we're calling them the Heidi horse.
This is the fourth Colossus.
It looks like a giant horse.
Uh, all in all, I don't think this one's that bad.
It was just a problem for me on a lot of these colossi was that the thing you're
supposed to do and like, you know, the thing that you're supposed to do, it
just won't do like, it just won't work.
Uh, with this one, you're supposed to run under these little tunnels and he kind
of like pokes his head in and while he does that, he lowers his butt and then
you can come out one of the other tunnels and hop on his butt.
I don't know what you're supposed to do to actually make him do that though,
because there'd be so many times where I would, I would like hide and I'm using
L2 so I can kind of look through the wall and see where he is.
And I'm like, okay, he's coming closer.
That must mean he's dipping his head.
And I run out the other one and he's not, he's just walking away.
Um, and I don't know, I just can never get this to consistently work.
Once you get on him, it's like fine.
Right.
But getting on him was just a total pain in the ass for me.
I think this one's just really boring, right?
Like not only is it hard to get it to trigger cause I also have the same problem.
Right.
It's just like, it doesn't have the same sense of scale to me as like the first
one or the second or even the third, like those, those first three have like a cool
sense of scale for me, this one doesn't have that sense of scale because like
the arena is kind of small, the horse isn't that big, like it's big, but I guess
the way it's like structured, it doesn't look as big or as like imposing as the
other ones and it's just like really not that fun for me and it's hard to get it
to trigger.
So it's just like, this one leaves me with like negative emotions because
it's just so nothing.
Once I switched to normal, I had completely forgotten about this fight
because it was just so like quick and fast for me.
I think this was the Colossus that I was like, okay, I can keep playing on hard.
Cause after the first three, like from the temple to killing him, it only took me 10
minutes for whatever reason.
And then I just completely forgot about the fight.
So whatever.
Yeah, that's, it's, it's just very forgettable.
It's very like, I don't know.
It's like to call it bad would maybe be dramatic, but it's to me, it's bad
because it just is such a nothing.
It again, like it's just, it like illustrates the inconsistency of some of
this, like boss scripting.
It triggered fine every time for me, but it clearly didn't for y'all.
Oh, interesting.
No, I had a lot of trouble getting it to like do it stupid head thing.
Uh, the next one was the final Colossus and we're calling, I'm calling this the
tower of suck because like that's more or less what it felt like was climbing a
giant tower of things that weren't super fun.
Although I gotta say, I thought this one was pretty decent up until the top part
because I thought it combined a lot of elements from the other ones, right?
You have to run in some tunnels on your ground.
You have to take cover behind these fireballs.
You got to deal with the shakes as you climb.
Like for the most part, things we had seen before all good.
And then you get to the very top and Austin, why don't I, it's just like, I
can't even speak straight right now.
This enrages me so badly.
Why don't you describe what happens at the top?
You know, I love this one getting there, right?
Getting to it feels so cool.
Like hiding under the tunnels, dodging the fireballs, everything super great.
Once you get to the top, he first, like you have to climb up his, I
guess it's his left arm.
I don't know if it's his left or right, whatever.
You have to climb up one arm and like stab it in the shoulder.
And when he does that, he'll like reach over to grab you.
And then you have to lead to his other hand.
And this one, things start to go bad.
Like so far, so start to talk about that.
Okay, go ahead.
Well, once you get to his other hand, you, there's no weak point.
And at no point in this game from, from Colossus one through 15, does it ever
indicate that you should stab a Colossus where there's no weak point, except for
this one, it makes him stable.
That's never what happens.
They go berserk when you stab them.
Never, never at any point in this game has stabbing a Colossus, not in a weak
point, done anything to help you.
But this time it stabilizes his hand so that you can then shoot the weak point
that's on his like upper shoulder, which again, at no point in time in this game
has shooting a weak point ever done anything for you zero times, except for
this time on the final Colossus.
Even, even from there, like getting to his head felt annoying, like everything
about this fight.
Once you get to the actual part where you're climbing the Colossus, like once
you can actually grab onto his like fur is just miserable to me.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
I have I fell from those hands 15 goddamn times.
Go ahead, Adam.
It's awful.
So it's possible, you know, there's like the two different weak points.
There's like the main one and then there's like the bloody one that kind of
will open up another weak spot.
It's possible shooting those on other Colossus does something I don't really
know, because there's maybe three.
Yeah, game.
Yeah, Colossus 15, the one right before this, I shot his elbow to get him to
drop his sword.
This is the only reason why, why I was like, OK, and now you shoot the shoulder.
OK, but that hand, the hand is ridiculous.
It violates all of the rules of the game so far.
And it's like one of the last three weak points in the whole game.
It's like one of the last things you do.
And it's just like, hey, get fucked, which is how I felt the developers
approach this entire boss was like, hey, you know how you, you know, you've been
doing things for this whole game.
How about just fuck you?
Oh my God.
And then the last weak spot, like I really was expecting to be really epic, or
maybe he would like reach his hands up there and try to slam you.
It's just the boring shake from all the other ones.
You just wait.
Yeah, this one was both frustrating and anticlimactic.
Yeah, it's almost impossible to get thrown off of that last one.
It's like tricky to get there, though, because of like the the platforming of
this point just feels frustrating.
Like it's like hard to land exactly where you want to while he's moving.
So it's like, OK, let's just like figure it out over here.
This one, this one almost got me to quit.
But if if I didn't know it was the last one, I might not have finished this game.
Yeah, if you all it was infuriating for me for sure.
If you all hadn't already beaten it, I might I might have given up on this point
to never before in the game have you ever had to complete like such a long sequence
of events in order to get the payoff.
Otherwise, it's been relatively forgiving.
And this is like you have to do 15 different climbs and stab four different
weak points to finally get to the part where you can make progress on the boss.
If you die at any point, you have to do it all over.
Yes. Thank God I was doing this.
Yeah, it's a journey back up.
It's it's it is it is not not a fun time.
I hate this. Thank God I was playing it on normal.
This is actually the only colossus on normal that killed me was this boss.
And even dodging his fireballs were hilarious.
He blasted me clean off of the mountain at least twice.
I didn't know he could do that.
But it's it's like it's like instant death.
If he sees you, you're just your time.
Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know what?
They do a good job creating a boss that feels like you are trying to fight
something impossibly more powerful than you.
Like how in the world are you ever going to win this fight?
But then actually, like getting through it was not like satisfying or rewarding enough.
It felt so bad that I started laughing at it because, of course, he one
shot at me clean off the mountain into the abyss.
And then it's very funny when your controller rumbles as you finally hit the bottom.
It's definitely another one where the visuals are awesome and they just don't.
It's like the sense and the feeling you get looking at it is not
congruent with the one you get actually trying to beat it.
I really wish I had gotten some clips, because like when you first see him,
you like run up, you kind of like walk up a ramp and then you see him.
And the the time between me seeing the Colossus
and the first fireball connecting with my face is like one and a half seconds.
And then Wander just sort of like pathetically slides back down
the ramp and lays there for his full 20 seconds.
Yeah. This is another one where the I don't know if I've mentioned this yet,
but there seems to be like so when you're climbing these Colossus, right,
there's obviously the huge movements they do to try to shake you off
and you hold R2 to grab and that stops you from being thrown off. Right.
But there's these other times where it's almost like these little micro stutter
or like micro shakes that they'll do where Wander just randomly
loses control of one hand and like stops.
And I never found a way to deal with that and make it any less frustrating.
Like eventually I got used to it, but I wasn't sure if I was doing something
wrong or it's just meant to be like a random interruption
to what you're trying to do constantly.
I mean, there seems to be a relatively sophisticated system
to how he like clings on to monsters.
And this part actually makes it believable to me that they did something like
technically interesting with how that like physics mesh or whatever works.
But it just doesn't play well, because there are a lot of times
where he'll be stuck with barely clinging on with one hand.
But the colossus isn't moving all that much, but he's like physically oriented
in the wrong way or something.
It just doesn't it doesn't work well.
Yeah, the worst instance of this to me, it was on the salamander
who we'll get to in a second, but he's like he's flipped over.
He's immobile.
And I'm just letting go of R2 to reposition myself.
And he stumbles and falls off.
And I literally turned it off
because I was losing my fucking mind.
But I'll ask you guys this.
Was this tower worse than the next one?
Number 10, the torch tiger.
Yeah, I think I hated the final boss the most.
But go ahead, awesome.
Well, I just wanted to point out that, like, I guess,
spoilers for our bottom five here.
But the next three are like literally consecutive eight, nine, ten.
And we're going to go in the first order.
But like the middle chunk of this game is so bad.
I like I was getting so frustrated in the middle chunk of this game.
Number 10 is frustrating
for reasons that I think are different than the final boss.
Like I hated the final boss a lot.
But 10 is really irritating because he just for me,
he just kept hitting me and Wander takes forever to stand up.
So while this fight wasn't particularly hard because I was on normal,
it was just so infuriating because he's kind of he's a smaller colossus.
So his method of preventing you from hurting him
is to just constantly run into you.
And every time he did, it takes Wander like 20 seconds to stand up.
And then he just hits you again.
So until you figure out what to do, you're just constantly stuck
in a cycle of getting hit in the face by the stupid tiger
and then standing up for 20 seconds and then repeating
until you figure out what to do.
And I hated that on the hard difficulty.
He can like to shot you with the Rams and you have to start all over.
This is the colossus that may be quit.
It just restart the game on normal, which was way better.
Like such a good idea.
Thank you, Torch Tiger.
It it really does take so damn long to stand up.
And I don't understand that.
And that's a problem in every fight.
But it's like usually they're not going to attack you again.
And the eight seconds it take you to stand up.
But this guy will.
Yeah, I feel like I had only been like laid out on my ass,
like maybe half a dozen times before this fight.
And then in this fight, I spent most of it on the ground,
just laying there, watching, wondering, yes, yes, literally.
Like my my one note at this fight when I was playing it is like,
why does it take so long to stand up and like all caps?
So what you'll have to do to this one is kind of cool, right?
It's like, but but again, it's the process of making it happen.
That's infuriating.
So in between getting, you know, kicked around like a kickball, it's it's
you have to like get on top of these brassiere things and have him charge
into it and then a torch drops and you pick it up.
And this like, you know, you have to do something with the fire
because the little voice that always comes in with its halfway useless hints
are like, oh, you should try something with fire.
So I'm like standing in front of them, waiting for him to charge,
dodging out the way at the last second, trying to get him to ram into these things.
And I think I'm just doing it wrong over and over and over.
And part of this is because one time he hit me into the corner
next to one of them and my camera just lost its mind.
So I was like, OK, you don't want to get on the side of these things.
The camera fucks up.
No, no, you do, because that's how you climb them.
And then that's how you get on top of them.
This one took me like nearly an hour in total, just because I couldn't figure out
how to actually get the torch to work.
Turns out once he hits it, torch gets on the ground, you pick it up
and then he's scared of you and you can back him off of this cliff
where he falls off and his armor breaks.
And now he's vulnerable.
And I was like, hey, that whole thing is actually really, really cool.
But the part where, you know, you can't get off the fucking ground.
And two, you have to hit the torch thing in the exact specific spot.
I think just really brought this one down for me.
Yes. Driving him off the cliff with the fire.
One of one of the like coolest moments while fighting a colossus.
Everything else about this fight sucks, though.
Also, when have I ever picked something up before?
I couldn't even figure out how to drop the torch for a minute
because I was like, I don't pick things up.
Like, what do I do with this? Yeah.
I think this is the first and last time you have to pick something up.
It's the only time again.
It's some random bullshit.
It is it is baffling where it's like it reminds you of something like
like it takes to your split fiction, where like it throws a random mechanic in.
But I like those games where that random mechanic is like cool
and thought out and used for like 20 or 30 minutes.
This game is like random mechanic is used for five seconds
and then never seen or looked at again.
It's it's just, man, it gets really frustrating.
And I think if this fight didn't have the constant
like ragdolling that Wander ends up becoming, it's just like this constant ragdoll.
This would be less frustrating.
But the fact that I spent most of the time like on my back was just
it made it so bad for me.
It's it's really funny to see how well the panther
like colossus tracks you when you move.
Like the trick is to do the jump out of the way
without ever like actually moving your feet.
You can't take a step one or direction or the other.
You have to jump and then push your stick to the side.
And that's how you can dodge him pretty consistently.
But it was very frustrating to like I would repeatedly
like lean into where I was going to jump.
And then he's like a goddamn homing missile and then would like, all right,
fling you across the arena.
Yeah, if you try to dodge to the sides, like I was able to kind of get it
to work by rolling almost into him, but just like slightly to the either side
of him as he's charging.
But if you dodge like you think that you would like straight to the side,
he just turns like, I mean, he just turns with you midair and slams you.
Like, it's really obnoxious.
Not as obnoxious as number nine, though.
This one sucked. Holy cow.
I think this is my personal least favorite.
The the quote fireball turtle.
I hate this guy.
This this one is the I guess the first one
and like a really open area where you have to
ride around with Agro and like a big open space.
And it's just Agro doesn't control well.
The environment is foggy and hard to see.
The Colossus itself like moves so slow.
I mean, he's a turtle. I get it.
But he moves so, so slow.
And he can just shoot these fireballs from like an incredible distance
that will do a ton of damage to you and like fling you around.
And I just I hated this one because the ultimate thing
you're supposed to do with it is walk it under a geyser
that's like shooting out in this like vast open field.
And it's like shooting out this air and it like kind of knocks him over the water
and it kind of knocks him over.
And those are inconsistent.
They don't always trigger.
He has to be like right under it for it to work.
It's it's so inconsistent.
It's so slow. It's so painful.
I hate it. It's it's my least favorite one.
I think the the fireballs were killing me because I mean,
they were literally killing me, but they were really annoying to me
because, like you said, when you're far away from it, it's shooting them constantly.
So I was thinking, OK, let me get close.
But if you if you get close, like at the wrong time, like as he's starting to,
you are now so close to him that he can't miss you with the fireballs.
So that was annoying as hell for me.
And then I just couldn't figure out how to really get him to move consistently.
I feel like if I'm too close, he just wants to stomp or I get killed by the fireballs.
If I'm too far, he just shoots the fireballs.
Like it just I couldn't figure out how to actually get him to move where I wanted.
But I feel like if you just run around in circles far away from him,
he eventually starts moving toward you.
But then, like you said, he walks over these geysers and like most of the time,
nothing happens.
Sometimes he goes up on two legs and you can shoot the bottom of the other two
and he flips over.
Other times he just flips over the whole way on his own.
But most of the time, nothing happens.
And yeah, it's just, oh, God, this one, I did not like this one.
The inconsistency in this game is just infuriating.
This is where I learned that Aro just like doesn't know how to how to sprint quickly.
It's like there are fireballs incoming at us right now.
I need you to move.
And she just doesn't know how to move quick.
Oh, well, that's just how a horse works.
When you die and have to.
Yeah, it's just that's just that's just how a horse works.
When you die and have to start over, you're like right next to the horse.
But sometimes like the getting on it is not always the easiest thing.
And there were definitely times I died like instantly,
but before I could even get the horse to move on my retry.
It is funny.
It's really funny to see Wander just like try and jump on the horse and like fail.
And he's just like slapped.
He's just like splayed across the horse and like scrambling up the side.
And I'm like, I thought you were just climbing a giant rock monster.
How can you not mount a horse?
Like, what do you think?
You can get on it from behind and he does it in the dumbest way possible.
Which I guess is kind of a cool detail because it's like, well,
you didn't get on it from the side.
It's like, yeah, but that's partly because the horse has a seizure
every time you approach it.
So like just just have him climb up like a normal person.
It's fine.
Yeah. Well, now we'll talk about what I think is probably my least favorite.
I think it's Jeff's least favorite, too.
And this is number eight, because like we said, eight, nine, ten.
The gauntlet of suck.
But eight is a we call it the salamander and more or less looks like one.
And you're in kind of this this like ruined cylinder almost.
And so he climbs these walls and you can kind of run around
the outside of the cylinder and there's like stairs.
There's there's different levels going up.
And the idea is that when he's climbing up, you shoot him in the legs.
And after you hit two of his feet, he loses his grip.
He falls over on the ground.
And then you can run down there, climb on his belly and stab him.
One of the problems I was having with this is, a, he shoots like
are they balls of like poison gas?
I'm not even sure.
They're like this yellow mist that just fucks you up.
Like nothing in this game at any point killed me as quickly as these gas balls.
And then two, I wasn't getting like I kept trying to shoot the feet.
And I think this was before I realized I wasn't holding the bow down long enough
because I thought my arrows were hitting his feet and nothing was happening.
So I just thought, well, that must not be what you have to do.
And I spent 20 minutes looking for something else to do.
And the worst part is when he's on the ground and you shoot his feet,
nothing happens.
Like what I thought would be a good touch is that they turn colors
like they do when you shoot him on the wall.
But obviously he doesn't flip over because he's not falling.
But that might clue you in like, oh, OK, like you're supposed to shoot the feet
when he's on the wall.
But again, complete failure in visual communication for boss eight.
I I played this guy on hard.
And like Adam was talking about, the gas balls will just silently kill you
while you're trying to aim your bow like on hard in seconds.
Like you can't even tell.
I didn't understand the whistle would get colossal attention
until you all mentioned it.
So this is the time when I kept trying to like peer over the edge
and shoot arrows at him to get him to like climb up the walls.
And half the time that would result in me like clinging on to the edge.
One time I had almost killed him and then stepped out too far,
started to fall, caught myself and I was like, oh, thank God.
And then his flame breath connects and then I fall to my death.
It's just like, oh, oh, my God.
So I repeated this fight three or four times.
And on top of that, every fight requires like five or six cycles
to stab him to death enough.
It's no no part of this is fun.
No part of it felt like I was really testing my skill.
I figured out what I was supposed to do really early
and just had to flawlessly execute it five times.
But I guess this was supposed to prepare me for the final colossus,
which is just a long string of jumps that you have to execute
flawlessly right in a row.
Whatever. Yeah, this one for me, like,
I think conceptually, this one has some cool ideas.
But the execution, like much of this game, is just so bad.
And see, I didn't even I wasn't even shooting his feet.
I just shot him in the stomach and I shot him in the stomach like three times.
And that would also cause him to fall over.
He's just cool, I guess. Are you serious? What?
Yeah. Well, at least a normal, maybe not in hard.
Who's to say?
You can shoot him in the stomach.
But OK, yeah.
So if you shoot him in the stomach three times, he'll fall over as well.
This was one where I was trying to get the jump stab,
could never get the jump stab to connect right.
Because like the angle is never right.
And actually, like climbing on him and stabbing him felt like it took
forever to like get the right angle to climb on him, actually stab him,
even on normal.
And like maybe I didn't have the same trouble with that on normal.
Or Jeff, maybe you didn't.
But even on normal, like I feel like I had to repeat this one so many times.
And it's it was just such a long process to get him to get the attention
because I didn't know about the whistle either.
So he's just like scaling the wall.
And I'm like, come over here so I can shoot you.
Like just such a painful fight for me.
It at least had a cool idea.
Unlike, I think, Fireball Turtle that has zero cool ideas.
But but it is insufferable.
Like it was the first point in the game where I was really like, God,
this is miserable.
The number of times I ran up and down those stairs because like at heart
I couldn't figure out if it was better to shoot him from cover
so that he didn't like one shot you with that gas ball
or if it was better to go down to the bottom so that he would fall farther.
And I was trying to figure out if how high he fell from related
to how long he would stay on his back.
It was just so many variables that took so long to test.
Everyone is on the bright side.
Repeating it on normal took me all of like three minutes.
So fuck that, Salomon.
I guess once you understand the whole process of it,
like it's probably a lot easier.
Yeah, once you've ruled out all the other bullshit and know what to do,
it's not that bad of a fight, but it's the getting there,
the experimentation that this game just isn't good at.
But it's like it's cool that it wants you to experiment,
but so often that experimentation is so frustrating that it's like, OK,
this is an enjoyable experimentation.
I'm just annoyed.
So I do what I always do, right?
I beat this game and I was like, what nonsense are people going to defend
this game with on the Internet over the last 20 years, right?
So I'm reading all these old forum posts and stuff.
And one thing people keep talking about is, oh, every boss is like a puzzle.
But I just don't know if I agree with that.
What it feels like is a puzzle where there's two buttons
and it says to solve the puzzle, push the red button.
But then you go to push the red button
and some like greasy child has gotten chocolate in it or something.
And so you press it nine or 10 times before it finally fucking works.
Like, that's what all of these bosses felt like to me.
So it was like, no, no, I get the thing, but the thing won't work.
It just won't do the thing.
I agree.
I feel like any of the things you're actually supposed to do
like this game never wants you to do anything that is all that complicated.
It's jumping. It's stabbing.
It's hitting the blue glowy portion of the Colossus.
But like, I don't know, figuring out how to get there is just so difficult.
And it seems like you have to stumble
across what is ultimately a relatively simple solution.
Yeah. Stumble being the key word.
Yeah. Yeah.
Just because you're always doing so.
This should just be called Shadow of the Stumbles or something
or Stumble of the Colossus that would work.
This game, the reception of this game
in a lot of ways kind of reminds me of the way people talk about Spec Ops, the line
where like they talk about Spec Ops as this like cool, conceptual artsy game.
And that like it's supposed to be boring and it's supposed to be bad
because you're like supposed to hate the way that it plays
because you're supposed to feel bad about it.
And I feel like people kind of treat this in a similar way of like,
oh, like the struggles are supposed to be because you're you're being a monster
and you're not supposed to kill these things and you're being the bad guy.
And you're working for the bad guy and killing these innocent creatures.
But like, I think for games, something that is just so often right,
like we talked about it, games are supposed to be entertaining.
And there's just so little entertainment value in struggling
to interact with the game that you're that you're playing.
That it's like, I don't think that works.
And I'm not saying that's intentional.
I'm not saying that like the developers tried to create a bad game
or anything like that.
But when people defend it that way, I'm like, OK, but it's still not fun.
Like, there's still no part of me that wants to play through the game.
I'm not getting that that artistic expression because I'm just annoyed.
Like, I never feel bad about killing these colossi
because I'm just relieved to be done with it,
because the process of doing it is so infuriating.
At least with Spec Ops, like there's enough going on with
that, like the narrative and the dialogue and the couple of choices
you get to make in the game and the different endings where you can see
like there's some evidence of that being there.
And even though the game itself, yeah, it's like a lot of just like rote
cover shooter combat, it's still competent.
It works like it does, even if it's kind of more in combat.
Right. So I think when people talk about that with Spec Ops,
they're at least not pulling stuff out of their ass, which is like
with Shadow of the Colossus, that's how I feel.
Because, like, rather until we talk about this, until that final cut scene,
this game is not doing anything to play into any of these themes at all.
Like, I'm sorry. I just don't believe it.
I think people are like making things up to justify why they don't feel
the same way about a game they played 20 years ago as they do today.
Yeah, I could definitely agree with that, because I do feel like
knowing kind of some of the Internet's reaction to this game,
I can see that perspective of like, OK,
when I killed the first Colossus, there was a sense of like
seeing the shadows like attack wander and like hearing the Colossus
like kind of cry out as it falls.
And it's like, OK, that was kind of sad.
Like, I can kind of get the somberness there.
But so little of that is actually evidenced that without having that
external viewpoint and perspective,
I probably wouldn't feel that way while playing throughout.
I mean, so this is a show about reviewing old video games, right?
And so there's always that chance that we talk about
titles with, you know, rose colored glasses from our perspectives,
like essential nostalgia that other people playing them today wouldn't get.
I'm still completely convinced, though, that the only way you can be excited
about this game is if you played it in 2005 and it was like an early
gaming experience for you.
I firmly believe this might have been an interesting game when it came out in 2005.
I don't know if it was good when it came out, though, and it's certainly
not something that is impressive outside of its era at all.
Whereas I feel like we've talked about other games that are still impressive
today, like I would recommend go play Halo Combat Evolved to someone.
I would never say that about Shadow of the Colossus.
I definitely think there's a lot of interesting ideas here.
And I can imagine back in 2005, those ideas carrying a lot more weight
than they do in 2025.
And it still might be one of the few games I can think of where you
fight things this big.
And like, that's a cool feeling, the whole David versus Goliath thing, right?
But ultimately, like I said, often this game just isn't often fun.
And I don't I don't even expect games to be like fun, fun, fun for every second.
You know, there's other there's other emotions you can you can trigger, right?
Like I was just playing Resident Evil 7 last night and as frustrating as it was
sometimes, like it's it's scary sometimes, like it's uncomfortable.
There's like dread of rounding corners.
Nothing in this game was really engaging in that way.
It was just like, oh, it finally worked onto the next one,
you know, with the exception of like a couple of glosses, right?
It was just I never felt like people talk about this game being immersive.
I never, ever could get immersed in this game because every 10 seconds
something is happening to where I'm like, good God, just do the thing
I'm trying to get you to do, please.
Whether that's climbing, steering the horse, navigating,
just whatever it might be.
I was just I feel like I was constantly ripped out of like having an immersive
experience just from the frustration of like the controls and the mechanics.
Yeah, I was really immersed that this game was built for the PS2, right?
Like that's what I remembered all the time is that this was built
for a console generation that is long gone.
Yeah, maybe that's that's that's our final thoughts here.
Do we just want to I guess, Jeff, you've already said that you don't recommend
anybody. Sorry, I got I got to it early.
I mean, we have to talk about the end credits, but I guess I guess we do.
Let's do that.
So regarding the end credits and plot on this game, it's probably worth nerding
that like, Jeff, you said way earlier, is it classes 12 where you finally get
a little scene that has to do with the story?
It is the opening title screen and then one cutscene after Colossus 12. Yes.
So actually, by this point, I was skipping all of those things
because what normally happens is you see a statue crumble,
then you get a poor hint where your next classes is and then you get control
of your character again.
And I was just no patience for this.
But yes, OK, there's there's the one cutscene after 12 and then nothing
until the end, right? Yep.
That's it. You go defeat the final boss and then the
the party of guys pursuing you.
And you have no idea who these people are.
They are wearing the same mask as the corpse you brought in at the very beginning.
You probably wouldn't remember that because that was probably like five hours ago.
But yes, these pursuers that you saw after Colossus 12
finally show up and confront you and see the see the consequences of your actions.
Yeah, the the main guy is immediately just like, do you know what you've done?
And I'm like, no, don't.
Well, I have a good guess, but.
And I guess the idea is, you know, that that thing that was talking to me
this whole time was Dorman and it's some sort of imprisoned being, right?
Its essence was horcruxed into these 16 Colossus Colossi.
And you end up transforming into this big demon thing.
And you kind of get this last little gameplay segment
where you can kind of slam your fist and try to hit them,
which I think was a little cool because it kind of gives you like, man,
is this how frustrated the Colossus were trying to hit me the whole time?
Yeah, I can't hit these little fuckers at all.
Yeah. But the whole thing is like you stole a sacred sword.
And that and that was the way that you were able to kill all these things.
And it's and it's like you shouldn't have.
You're getting the impression you definitely should have
should not have, because all of these
this guy's like a shaman who comes and he kind of
gives a couple of lines of dialogue about why it was bad.
And then as they're escaping, they just seal the temple behind them.
And I guess you're like trapped there. Trapping Dorman forever.
Yeah. But then you happen to be Dorman now.
But then you get resurrected.
He like his corpse fades away.
But then out of the pool of water gets resurrected, like the little horn demon child.
All right. So this is this is fucking wild.
OK, so again, remember, the only thing you've done in this game is kill
giant rock monsters or whatever,
ostensibly to bring back this corpse that you carried in at the very beginning,
who is your sister, wife, cousin, I don't know, someone
who died unfairly to you.
And like after you defeat the last colossus, you get teleported back in again.
Except this time, you're like a zombie with like these ice blue eyes.
And you look like Darkling from the water temple or something.
You have this dramatic standoff.
They kill you.
And then the evil demon Dorman takes over your body,
which is definitely a way to make you empathize,
sympathize with the creatures you've been killing the entire time.
I'm really sad that you can't kill any of the NPCs confronting you
in this segment, because I was having so much fun being like,
yeah, I am the colossus now. Like, let's go.
But you get defeated.
They run off with the sword and the shaman like tries to trap you at the last second.
And there's this good sequence where like this giant blue light opens up
and it's a big vortex and it's trying to suck you in to the shrine,
to this pool or whatever.
And it tears away parts of Dorman, leaving only like your shadowy body behind.
And you can cling on to like the stairs and try and like fight against
being sucked into the same demon portal that, you know,
Lucifer was just sucked into or whatever.
So you can hold on and then your stamina eventually gives out
and you finally get like sucked into the into the portal.
And that is the last time you get to control your character.
At the end of this whole sequence sequence.
Yeah, yeah, I thought that was all pretty cool overall.
And it kind of made me wish like there was a little like take out four of the colossus
and put a few more sequences similar to this in the game that like
explains some of the story and whatnot.
Like I think that could have been a better choice.
Yeah, the big plot twist, right, is the fact that you've actually been working
for a demon the whole time and no, he's not going to hold up his end of the bargain.
He told you it was going to be a high cost and the high cost is that like
you are now the demon.
He has inhabited your body and he's being brought back to life.
All these colossi were actually like ways that he was kept in seal,
like kept his power broken across the land.
It's such a good twist.
It's just so funny that it happens at the very end.
And there is no saving of the hero, right?
Like you basically die and get sealed into the vortex.
But then after everything calms down and the guys who came to correct your mistakes,
like get away, the girl you were trying to save finally wakes up.
Austin, what does she do when she wakes up?
I don't remember doing anything other than like just standing there
and and just like looking around.
And then Agro shows up somehow magically with with a full on broken leg.
By the way, y'all, if a horse's leg that horse is so that horse is dead.
So she like finally wakes up right, which at this point,
I had been rooting for like her to stay dead.
Like I want this to have like a full bad guy ending or whatever.
But she doesn't.
She wakes up.
She crawls over to this little pool that you've been sealed into.
And what does she find there?
None other than a demon baby with horns.
And that's the point where I was just like, what the fuck is this game?
The credits are actively rolling right now.
Like like like art directors names are scrolling by and you're.
Yeah, I think I turned it off before then.
I don't think I saw her find the demon.
Oh, it's it's because I think I think credits are rolling by that point.
Yeah, I think I was just so done.
I was like, yeah, I'm done with this.
I think the credits start when agro first gets back, right?
Yeah, there's a lot of like slow moving stuff happening there,
which we may have forgotten to mention on air.
There's just right before the last boss.
There's this like never ending story moment where the horse
sacrifices itself so the boy can keep going and you see it fall off this cliff in the water.
And it's I mean, it's actually kind of like an emotionally resonant
scene in a game that has very few of them.
But then, of course, like the horse is fine.
It's not fine.
It's supposed to.
It's supposed to be emotionally resonant, except I fucking hate writing.
I was just mad.
It was still a lot of honestly.
I was so annoyed when I came strolling back in.
I'm like, there's no way that this horse would live.
I agree with you also.
I was also annoyed.
I was like, what is this lovely like little reunion moment?
But then she went and picked up the demon baby and I was like, what the fuck is going on?
So the rest of the credits is like her cradling this baby with
Aro like limping around next to her.
They like go to a different part of the temple and like the land is kind of regrowing.
They see some wildlife come out and then they all kind of like injured Aro and like a deer
and some hawks and birds all kind of like lovingly look on as your saved girlfriend
like cradles this demon baby that may or may not be you.
I don't fucking know.
The point is, Aro is definitely going to die.
They're going to eat him.
Like, what is she going to live off of?
Yeah, this is the moment where my wife was like, oh, so it was a Disney princess the whole time.
Apparently animals come out.
Yes, yes.
But the implication, man, all the animals come out and then you're like,
how are they going to live?
Yeah, this is definitely one of those things where like the this is why people are saying
this game is so artsy, right?
Like this whole like you sacrifice yourself for the maiden even though you don't know
you're doing that.
But like you've that's why I think it would have been a bit more emotionally resonant
if she didn't come back, right?
Dorman was never going to uphold his end.
She was never going to come back.
You just did all this to free him.
And he's like, ha ha ha.
But instead, you know, she does come back and then Agra is there.
And I was like, why is this happening?
I did not like the I did not like Agra coming back.
I did not see Demon Baby.
I think I just skipped that because I was like, I'm done with this game.
Credits are rolling.
I'm moving on.
I mean, when the horse slims back in, that is the correct take, Austin.
Like I was I was like, why?
But then Demon Baby shows up and it changes.
Right.
So again, it's just it's so fucking ridiculous.
Anyway, before that, I spent six hours fighting colossi.
But by the end of it, it was all to feed a Demon Baby.
The animals coming out at the end really bothered me because I was thinking
for a lot of this game, like where where is everything in this world?
Right.
And I'm not expecting Ubisoft side quests or anything.
Like I'm not saying they should have filled it up with crap.
But it's like there's a couple birds near the girl that will fly away each time you
go to a colossus.
And that's it.
Like I kept looking for like squirrels or other birds or like any sign of life in
this thing, which then makes me lead like, OK, so did we actually bring life back to
this valley by killing all the colossi?
Yeah.
Like, did we actually do good and fuck the shaman?
Like, I don't know.
Maybe the demon god was right the whole time, Adam.
Have you considered that?
Maybe that's the point of this game.
Maybe you're not supposed to know what is right and wrong.
Maybe you're just supposed to reflect on your actions or something.
Well, I'll tell you this.
I don't feel bad about them at all.
I do.
I'm not sure I should have spent so much time playing this game.
It is a very silly plot all rolled into the end credits scroll, which is just like the
cherry on top of a very mid experience.
So like final thoughts here.
I think if this is a game you played in 2005 and you liked it, I see no reason you wouldn't
like this remake.
I think that if you missed if you kind of missed the train, you don't want to chase
it and try to board it because I just don't think you're going to end up going where you
think you're going.
I mean, I really just experienced it.
The way people describe it is simply not the way I would describe it.
It is not the way I experienced it.
There's a lot of things about it that I think just haven't really kept their impact over
the years.
Like, Jeff, you're talking about Halo earlier.
I will die on the hill that combat evolves level design is still some of the best in
an FPS.
Like, I just still think that part of it is so strong.
I don't think the aspects of this game that were strong back then have remained strong.
I don't think that part of it is so strong.
The aspects of this game that were strong back then have remained strong, at least not
gameplay wise.
You can still say the art is really cool and all of this and I wouldn't even necessarily
disagree, but anything that could remotely be described as gameplay, I just don't think
is engaging.
I think that's my main the main word I would use is that it is not engaging.
I think so much of the highs of this game come in the scale and the scope and the atmosphere
and like this kind of grand sense of scale of you climbing and slaying these majestic
beasts, right?
Like that's that's kind of the tone that Shadow of the Colossus wants to set.
And when it does that a couple, you know, one or two times throughout the game, there's
some like cool, exciting moments where it's like, yeah, like this is exactly what I thought
this game would be.
But so often I feel like it falls short of that.
The mechanics themselves are frustrating more than they are engaging, like 90 percent of
the time.
And I think at its peak, there's some cool ideas and interesting concepts that it fails
to execute, at least looking at it in 2025.
Did it maybe hit a different way back in 2005 when a lot of these ideas were maybe more
fresh, more innovative, more like unknown?
Possibly.
But I don't think it necessarily holds up the way that some of the other classics of
that era would hold up like Final Fantasy X or something.
Just saying.
Yeah, it just didn't age well.
I can imagine a world where I would have called this a good game in 2005, but it didn't age
well.
All right.
Final question for Austin.
Gun to your head.
You have to play this or Okami 10 times through.
You should standardize the time, actually.
You have to play Okami for as long as it would take you to beat this game 10 times.
Can I just play the middle of Okami?
Nope.
You're stuck in the middle of Okami versus the middle of Colossus.
That's an easy win.
Ah, man.
You know, I think Shadow of the Colossus has some interesting ideas that maybe Okami
doesn't have as many of.
Like, Okami is just like, let's try and do Zelda, but like worse.
But I do think the highs of Okami are better than the highs of Colossus.
I'll say that.
Shadow of the Colossus is like if Okami was nothing but the paintbrush that doesn't
register when you want it to.
10 fucking hours of that paintbrush.
That's what it felt like.
There you have it, folks.
And so ends our discussion on the 2005 open world epic Shadow of the Colossus.
You can find this episode as well as all of our other episodes on Spotify,
Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcasting platform.
And you can find us on YouTube and Blue Sky at the Games Gone By podcast.
Signing off for Games Gone By, I'm Adam.
Austin.
And that's just how a horse works.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
We'll see you next time.