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SoTC + Ico analysis :MASSIVE ENDING SPOILERS !!!
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Ketch
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 5:10 pm    Post subject: SoTC + Ico analysis :MASSIVE ENDING SPOILERS !!! Reply with quote

This thread is for people who have COMPLETED Shadow of the Colossus.

I.e COLOSSAL Spoilers in this thread

Okay, now a lot of people are interested in games which have greater thematic depth than here are bad guys KILL THEM ! So I reckon it could be interesting to discuss the themes of a game, in a thread. For starters I'd like to propose Shadow of the Colossus (although I'd prefer Shadow of Destiny which I found more interesting but was less of a 'game' due to being an adventure game). Shadow of the Colossus manages to tie its themes in with the gameplay construction.

Anyone want to talk about SOTC or is it done-and-dusted?
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 5:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The fruit in the garden is poisoned! The girl and the horse and the baby are doomed! I have no idea what this means however.

The ending scene of the game is completely desolate if you think about it; the three of them completely alone in the valley, no way to escape with the bridge destroyed. Maybe the woman will be reduced to hunting doves and geckos to survive.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 10:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

So we know that the horned baby born from the Wander-Dormin amalgam is the progenitor of Ico's cursed bloodline. This is the conclusion I'd come to, anyhow, and I'm pretty sure that Ueda came out and confirmed this theory at some point. It was the "grave consequence" Wander accepted ("It doesn't matter") in order to save Mono.

Basically, love is noble but leads to condemnation — and remains noble and true, nevertheless. I think this is what Ico and (especially) SotC are about.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 12:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's pleasingly concise and probably accurate.

I guess I want to ask, what do you guys make of the end of Ico?

Can we say that Ico spoilers are fair game also?

SPOILERS:
That last moment of Ico is pretty ambiguous. How has Yorda survived? Less concrete, there's a weird tension there... Ico doesn't run to her, he pauses. His look is not joyful, but kind of distant and hesitant. To me, this sustains the theme of attraction/connetion/bonding and estrangement which permeates the game. But what does it mean?

(Sorry, Nana Komatsu.)
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 12:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, certain scenes in the game, such as Ico's dream, seem to indicate that she herself is related to or even made out of the evil shadow goo, which is plausible considering whom her mother is and what she controls. And that makes her a pretty unusually ambiguous character!
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 1:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

david wrote:
Can we say that Ico spoilers are fair game also?


If you're going to do this, please edit the topic title to reflect Ico spoilers. It's too late for me ;_;
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 2:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Note the cutscenes- you can skip many of them ie. the colossus intro scenes, the introduction movie. But you cannot skip the death scenes (try pressing start it does nothing), As Steerpike @Fourfatchicks says you must watch them die. This is self-evidently intentional. Likewise, I'd like to know if it is possible on the huge colossus in the castle/colosseum to escape the tentacles by jumping off the cliff to your doom. I really doubt it.

The ending: I feel as if the horse surviving was not meant to be, in fact the ending seems to pull its punches a little. However, if so the 'intended' ending must be really, really bleak. Wander has inadvertantly doomed Mono, Agro, and the horned child to live/die in this valley. Mono probably won't know why she is stuck there, she's just come to life in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they can eat the deer?


Ico Spoilers
I wonder if Mono is perhaps the Queen from Ico? It could be so, because we don't know exactly what side-effects being resurrected has. Perhaps long life and the ability to feed off the lifeforce of others?
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 2:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

as far as i'm concerned agro is the true hero of the story.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 2:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tragic hero, right.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 11:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ketch wrote:
I wonder if Mono is perhaps the Queen from Ico? It could be so, because we don't know exactly what side-effects being resurrected has. Perhaps long life and the ability to feed off the lifeforce of others?

This is a really intriguing idea, and something that hadn't occurred to me before. It seems quite possible, and if it's true it might be the saddest thing of all. So it would be that Mono's curse was to become the nearly undying Queen of the shadow-beings: the reaper of the souls of Wander-Dormin's/Ico's bloodline. And it's as if Ico and Yorda are largely unaware of their own tragic fate, looking not just for a way out of the castle, but for redemption.

david wrote:
That last moment of Ico is pretty ambiguous. How has Yorda survived? Less concrete, there's a weird tension there... Ico doesn't run to her, he pauses. His look is not joyful, but kind of distant and hesitant. To me, this sustains the theme of attraction/connetion/bonding and estrangement which permeates the game. But what does it mean?

I read something a while ago suggesting that the final scene on the beach is only Ico's dream — a representation of his forlorn longing — and that she remains trapped in the <strike>system</strike> castle... I tend to agree with this.

There are a lot of interesting things going on in Ico's ending. We see Yorda absorb the life force of the horned shadow creatures from their tombs after the Queen is killed, and then she looks at her own blackened hand as if she's finally realizing that she's condemned to her fate — the same fate as her mother (so perhaps the Queen is not Mono herself, but another in a line of women living with this curse; perhaps she, too, once sought redemption). All she can do, then, is help Ico to escape by sending him off in the boat and bidding him "Farewell."

Man, I'm gonna have to play Ico again now.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 3:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
as far as i'm concerned agro is the true hero of the story.

Very true, in fact "A Horse and his Boy" would be a great alternative title, shame that C.S.Lewis used it in his Narnia series first! Wink
Agro shows real bravery and loyalty to his 'master'.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 3:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i wept when agro died. wept.

also i like and have always liked the queen / mono parallel.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 3:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ketch wrote:
Agro shows real bravery and loyalty to his 'master'.


in contrast to wander, whose actions are totally selfish! agro, in contrast, is totally selfless.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dessgeega wrote:
Ketch wrote:
Agro shows real bravery and loyalty to his 'master'.

in contrast to wander, whose actions are totally selfish! agro, in contrast, is totally selfless.

Well, I wouldn't say totally selfish — or even if I would, I certainly wouldn't say it like his selfishness is in any way "in contrast to" Agro's bravery and loyalty. Wander may be acting out of love, and sure, love can be a very selfish emotion, but he proves his selflessness with the words "It doesn't matter," when warned of the consequences he may face in order to save Mono. Ultimately the consequences may have damned them all, but, well, his intentions were pure enough: he just wanted to girl to live at any cost, and was willing to destroy many lives — those of the colossi and, he must have presumed, very likely his own — so that the girl would live again. It was an act of ridiculously true love; equally selfish and selfless.

Agro, though, yeah. He was naturally the more selfless one of the pair.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 12:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

antitype wrote:
Wander may be acting out of love, and sure, love can be a very selfish emotion, but he proves his selflessness with the words "It doesn't matter," when warned of the consequences he may face in order to save Mono.


but when he said "it doesn't matter" he wasn't merely dismissing the consequences for himself but also those for his people, though in his youthful bravado he may not have fully understood what those were.

this is a person who defied the myths and ways of his own people for his own, selfish, possessive definition of love. i'm willing to bet mono would have asked him not to do as he did.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 1:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

True enough that he was dismissing the consequences his people would face — and perhaps he was aware of the myths (I'd imagine he must have been, to have known to go to that place to begin with) and what his actions would bring upon everyone including himself — but I think the very important point is that he did it all for her. I somehow knew that you'd construe his love as possessive, and I'm sure you have your own feelings about this (and I do, too; possessiveness in love can easily slide from the supportive and protective into the unhealthy and abusive), but the nature of Wander's love was not some petty, "I-can't-live-without-you," adolescent need. I would say he knew well enough that he might never see her alive again, even if he succeeded — he might never have her again, no matter how badly he wanted her back — and that he was only doing this because he felt her life was more important than anything else. I don't think that's such a terribly selfish or possessive notion.

Of course Mono would have asked him not to do as he did, but, well, this couldn't be helped — her role was an absolutely passive one. The story as a whole is a tragedy, of course, and I'm not saying Wander wasn't a bit (OK, extremely) foolish/reckless in his actions, but I think that looking at it with such cynicism undermines the beauty to be found here. It's a portrayal of doomed (and yet noble) love from a male perspective. There's no need to paint this as some ugly thing in itself; the game does a fine enough job of illustrating the folly of Wander's love on its own.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 1:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I liked to think of the girl as either his sister or just someone else in his village who he isn't necessarily involved with at all. I took the "it doesn't matter" to mean that he thought he wouldn't survive the ordeal. Basically, I thought of it as his trading his life for hers out of a sense of injustice at however she died, not his trying to bring her back to be with him.

i also like that it's possible to interpret things in different ways like this. I kind of miss the way that many older games were vague enough so that you could overlay your own story.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 09, 2006 3:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, it's certainly possible to interpret this in different ways. It's entirely possible that Wander and Mono were never actually lovers at all, and I'm just inferring this. If anything, this only further supports my view that he was not acting out of pure selfishness. In fact, when one thinks of how most people — speaking for myself, at least — responded to the slaying of each colossus with very mixed feelings (triumph muted by remorse and anxiety, followed by a faint hope (and at times, like Wander's dream in which we seem to hear Mono's voice, a strangely tangible sense of foreboding)), it's not so difficult that Wander felt the same way. And yet he kept on. Devotion, I think, is what it was about.
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 26, 2006 6:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

antitype wrote:
If anything, this only further supports my view that he was not acting out of pure selfishness. In fact, when one thinks of how most people — speaking for myself, at least — responded to the slaying of each colossus with very mixed feelings (triumph muted by remorse and anxiety, followed by a faint hope(...)


The thirteenth colosssus, the flying serpent-something, might be something to be remembered in history of videogames.
I don't want to oversize the importance of this, especially because i doubt it was the first time such thing was done in videogames, but the fact that that creature didn't feature any form of attack whatsoever (that i remember anyway) struck me as a poerful statemente ingame.

In that moment, you are basically murdering a beauty of nature.

Seeing a friend of mine who is quite the belligerent type actually saying that what he was doing was kind of sad spoke more to me than any review might ever do.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 12:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

hey guys,

i'm never going to finish shadow (i just don't have the patience, time or inclination to power through the parts that i'm not good at immediately, etc) but i've been seeing references to it lately all over the place (this morning at a libertoid board, etc) regarding the protagonist being posessive and selfish or whatever. i figured that the ending was some kind of life for a life sacrifice arc (right?) since that's how these sorts of things for this sort of audience would end normally, etc.

anyway, can someone fill me on the selfishness angle? thanks.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 12:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

well some people have kind of hit on the more selfish aspects of Wander, but basically it's in reference to his decision to try to revive Mono in spite of potentially terrible consequences (that he may or may not have been fully aware of). add to this that he may not actually even really know the girl that well.

the last playable moments of the game consist of you playing as Wander who is trying to get back to the altar where Mono is (while being sucked into a big pool of light/vortex). you can actually put up a decent struggle, too.

i think the game should end right after that, but it doesn't.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 2:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

that doesn't seem particularly selfish in the context of video games, but i'm sure i'm missing out on some nuance.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 2:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I always viewed it as selfish because he's going against "fate" and societal rules (which may be the same thing, etc. etc.).

That is, the girl was fated to die. Her death was something that Had to Happen and his actions are selfish in that he has motivations for her coming back to life that he views as more important than the fact that She Had to Die (I'm sure you could tie this into the Greek notion of Fate; however, my head is way too full of mucus to attempt it at this point). As part of bringing her back to life, he takes her to the forbidden End of the World area in order to revive her (thus the societal rules).
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 2:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

dhex wrote:
that doesn't seem particularly selfish in the context of video games, but i'm sure i'm missing out on some nuance.

Well, "in the context of videogames" is pretty much key, here. So much of the game subtly manipulates your feelings as the player, forcing you to wonder why you're doing what you're doing. This is why a lot of people feel SotC is a huge commentary on videogames and gamist motivations.

Beyond all that, though — beyond the videogame context — everyone responds a little bit differently to Wander's motivations. They're not entirely clear, anyway, since we don't know precisely what his relationship to Mono was. The only clear thing is that he's determined to save her at any cost: his own life, and even the lives of the colossi and his own people. There are at least a few ways of looking at his selfishness here. I think that while he may have been a reckless fool, he was also acting out of a pure, self-sacrificing love (or some sort of devotion to this girl).
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, he's undoubtedly determined, and single minded. He's prepared to make any sacrifice -- you could say he's self-less.

I think what people are mainly responding to is how the colossi aren't really antagonists, and every "victory" over one is mingled with the distaste of watching a majestic creature die.

Some people don't like Wander's manner of kicking his horse when he's riding. He just sounds kind of mean, and the horse is so loyal and gentle.

I think of Wander as a brash and single-minded youth. He does what he feels is necessary and isn't aware of much else. Yet he's noble because of his lengths of self-sacrifice for the girl.

The game is full of ambiguities.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Some people obviously have never ridden horses.

The moot antagonism issue sounds like another dubious point. Is a player character any less "heroic" because his adversaries are humanised/anthropomorphised? Is selfishness a primary motivation whenever a hero fights the forces of "fate", or goes against some form of tradition that, for all we may know, could be far more sinister in essence than is let on?
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm on board with Dracko. Not literally, though. It's not like either of us owns a boat or anything. But in the context of this discussion, his point was good and boat-like.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
Is selfishness a primary motivation whenever a hero fights the forces of "fate", or goes against some form of tradition that, for all we may know, could be far more sinister in essence than is let on?


Sure! I don't exactly see how selfish = wrong. Or unselfish != wrong, if you prefer.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Neither do I, but many others tend to think so. I'd rather not see Wander (How about "The Wanderer"?) villified, if you will. This doesn't sound like a case of (moral) role reversal, if you will.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

david wrote:
Some people don't like Wander's manner of kicking his horse when he's riding. He just sounds kind of mean, and the horse is so loyal and gentle.


Huh? Link does the same thing to Epona. It's how you ride a horse!
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

yea, i think it's important that no value judgement be placed on selfish as opposed to selfless in this case. i think the selfishness derives from his desire to be with this girl regardless of any potential consequences. in terms of consequences for himself, it could be selfless; in terms of consequences for that world, it's selfish. but i think his reaction is probably not too far fetched for most "people" that might be in his position.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 7:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Isfet wrote:
i think the selfishness derives from his desire to be with this girl regardless of any potential consequences.


I dunno if he even really has the drive to "be with" the girl. It's entirely possible that he believes that it is a "life for a life" situation. It's part and parcel of the general moral ambiguity of SotC.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 8:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

spoilers

i think he was aware that he could die, though he seemed to want to be with her. at the end, he reaches out, just before being "killed." and after the transformation, he continues to fight against his "fate."

i love how it could go either way, and in the end, it is more or less up to the player to decide wander's motivations.
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 8:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Not to discourage the ongoing discussion or anything, but dessgeega and I already argued about a lot of this earlier in the thread.

I guess it illustrates how there is no one way of interpreting the game, though, which is great. We can talk about it until the cows come home, but some things about it will always remain ambiguous.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 10:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
Some people obviously have never ridden horses.


That's true.

Seriously, it was just something about the way that action was characterized that seemed a little mean or distasteful. I know that's not very descriptive. I just felt different about it than about how Link kicks Epona, or how riders in movies kick their steeds. I'm not the only one to say that, so. Anyway I do think it fits the theme, and certain late plot events. Agro is Wander's loyal ally, really his only companion, and even he suffers and sacrifices for the boy's single-mindedness.

Dracko wrote:
The moot antagonism issue sounds like another dubious point. Is a player character any less "heroic" because his adversaries are humanised/anthropomorphised?


Look, it's just that when you kill a colossus, there's this really sad music while you watch it fall in slow motion. Also, some people feel sort of weird about stabbing these things, making them thrash about in pain. They're no threat to Wander until he decides to start something. These are some of the things in the game that make you go, "gee, I dunno if I feel all good about this." But there's nothing to do but carry on with the mission. Hence the tragic downward spiral.

Dracko wrote:
Is selfishness a primary motivation whenever a hero fights the forces of "fate", or goes against some form of tradition that, for all we may know, could be far more sinister in essence than is let on?


I didn't say he was selfish. In fact, I suggested he might be selfless. Still, you can read it either way. SotC is not like Zelda, where everyone is telling you how good you are, everything you do is lavishly benevolent, and all your foes are evil. The weird uncomfortable beauty of the game is how kind of depressing your actions are. You're in this empty world without NPCs, monsters or even a musical score to push you onward. It's totally desolate, which is perfect because that's how Wander must feel without the girl. His world is empty without her, and all that's left to him is this path of destruction. The colossi aren't Contra or R-Type bosses, so hideous you want to destroy them just to erase them from the screen. Instead they're awesome and majestic. You marvel at them -- and then you kill them.

I'm surprised my comments were so controversial. Isn't this what everyone likes about the game?
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 11:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

antitype wrote:
Not to discourage the ongoing discussion or anything, but dessgeega and I already argued about a lot of this earlier in the thread.

I guess it illustrates how there is no one way of interpreting the game, though, which is great. We can talk about it until the cows come home, but some things about it will always remain ambiguous.


Yeah, there's no point arguing the motives of a character who doesn't have a single line of dialogue and only does what you tell him to do. He's you. The important thing is how you feel when you're playing it, not how he feels.

Here is something I find interesting about this game. I asked this question in this same forum earlier this year, in fact, and the question is this:

Why can't the player fight the colossi out of order?

You have this whole land to explore but no reason to explore it. The only thing that garners reward is following the point of light.

Someone said it's so you have to fight the colossi in order of difficulty, but the more difficult ones are further away from the start point, so you'd think that would be enough. Why do you think the developer choose to let you go wherever you like, but not to let you do whatever you like?
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 11:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Those were honest questions with no outrage behind them. These ideas are worth exploring.

So you feel uncomfortable killing things. Why here and not in any other game, regardless of character motive? That the game would show that, yes, you are in fact, stabbing, killing, hurting things, is all to its credit. That you start the hostilities, well, for all one knows, you could be in the right. Most games aren't about self-defense either, in the end.

I like what you say about its emptiness them. Is this an elaborate form of self-destruction? Does the Wanderer kill out of frustration, and then is the girl just an excuse to vent his angst and hatred of his reality?

On the whole, I'm satisfied at the very least that the game is in no way morally forcing itself upon the player. You play a single-minded, uncompromosing force against towering icons of a sinister, though beatific, power. This is the stuff great tales are made of, and I'm glad that neither of the central protagonists, that is to say the Wanderer and whatever mystic force at work in the form of the Colossi, are shown as being in the right, or in the wrong, really. I mean, what kind of deity reacts with such Biblical rage?
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 12:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You know, to be honest I've sort of found that speculating about plot details in games like these to be contrary to what I enjoy about them. The world of SotC is dark and mysterious, and the ending is bleak and inconclusive. It feels like things were meant to be that way. I'd rather not have my questions answered. The game will always be more exciting while there are more unknowns.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 12:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
So you feel uncomfortable killing things. Why here and not in any other game, regardless of character motive?

In SotC every boss is uniq, after you killed it, he is dead. In basically every other game you have a bunch of of ever respawning or at least same looking guys. Killing doesn't matter in those other games, since its the normal thing to do, you kill hundreds or thousands of the same looking guys all over the place, in SotC on the other side you kill once and that opponent is gone forever. Killing also takes time and work, the colossi won't die after a first hit.

Another aspect is the realistic environment, you kill the colossi on the same ground as you stand on, they are not in a separate dungeon or boss room that isn't a part of the main world. They are in the same world as you are and when you kill them their dead bodies will stay to lay around and not just fade away.
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Dracko
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 12:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Alien Soldier does the same thing, though, yes, under different circumstances. Arguably, so do certain RPGs, or even adventure games.

But the point remains, yes, that respawning clones takes away from the importance of murder. Some games have managed to make combat feel more important and life-threatening, though. It'd be great to see an action game of some kind where you take on smaller skirmishes instead of large armies, that would manage to offer such import to the enemy.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 2:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dracko wrote:
T
So you feel uncomfortable killing things. Why here and not in any other game, regardless of character motive? That the game would show that, yes, you are in fact, stabbing, killing, hurting things, is all to its credit. That you start the hostilities, well, for all one knows, you could be in the right. Most games aren't about self-defense either, in the end.


Well, the colossii bellow / shriek with pain when you stab them. Great clouds of gruesome ichor come out of their wounds, and their weakspots are usually in undefended places, they aren't trying to kill you while you stab them. Merely trying to shake you off. They are relatively defenceless. vulnerable even. They generally look kind of like animals too.

Some other games have had a similar element of distate to their killing. Super Mario Sunshine's Squid boss. You go up to it, and to win you need to pull each of its legs off, (and have them slap it in the face). This feels like unpleasant cruelty. Likewise, the Caterpillar Boss in SMS, it is so 'cheerful' looking and is only an insect so why are you torturing it? Furthermore, the Gladiator battle in Prince of Persia: the Two Thrones. You have to blind this (gigantic sands of time infected former human).

Actually a lot of games are about Self-Defence. For example Space-Invaders, and many similar shoot 'em ups. Where you are Earth's last hope against the invading Xenomorphs. The games try to contextualise the violence as a desperate last push into enemy territory.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 3:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Okay, that's a fair point.

Do you people suppose it may be worthwhile then that games explore less apologetic reasons for violence and murder, like SotC may be?
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

buh buh bioshock! (man, this better not let me down, for i will be most sorrowful)

i didn't feel very sad for the colossi when i wasn't being frustrated in my attempts to kill them, but i may just be an asshole on this point. it's not like they don't fight back, or are huge and have giant weapons, etc.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 3:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yeah, some of them are positively aggressive. One shoots lazers out of his eyes. I didn't feel sad for that fucker.

No-one's had a crack at that question I asked yet. Forget questioning the main character's motives, he's just a cipher. Questioning the developer's intentions is the key to Shadow of the Colossus!
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 4:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I imagine that it was probably to create a sense of progression, to force the player to deal with the simpler colossi before taking on the more complex ones. In some cases this makes sense, such as teaching the player mechanics and strategy or more obviously in the case of the final colossus, which couldn't really be experienced as anything except as an endpiece.

It would be oddly anticlimactic to fight something like the first colossi after even the third one, there's a definite sense of scale that gradually builds up as you destroy each of them. It's not perfect; I felt that the smaller buffalo-type colossi were out-of-place in the sense that they felt like fillers and also had the most transparently game-y mechanics of the lot.

Thinking about this earlier, I was wondering if it was to avoid overtaxing the system by only having it load one colossi at a time; that doesn't really make sense as an explanation because it would seem fairly easy to just judge where the player is on the map and do a streaming load when they get close to the colossus.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Harveyjames wrote:
Questioning the developer's intentions is the key to Shadow of the Colossus!

your enthusiasm is refreshing, Harvey.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Someone said it's so you have to fight the colossi in order of difficulty, but the more difficult ones are further away from the start point, so you'd think that would be enough.


I was thinking maybe the reason you're allowed to attempt to stray from your set task is just so you can experience the crushing disappointment of finding out that you're unable to stray from your set task, if that makes sense.

chompers po pable wrote:
Harveyjames wrote:
Questioning the developer's intentions is the key to Shadow of the Colossus!

your enthusiasm is refreshing, Harvey.


Pursue your dreams with a fiery gusto!
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Harveyjames wrote:
Quote:
Someone said it's so you have to fight the colossi in order of difficulty, but the more difficult ones are further away from the start point, so you'd think that would be enough.


I was thinking maybe the reason you're allowed to attempt to stray from your set task is just so you can experience the crushing disappointment of finding out that you're unable to stray from your set task, if that makes sense.


Kinda! It's also that since they're in a set progression, the developer probably wanted to force that progression no matter what to avoid having the player have a "bad experience" because of their own choices.
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There's got to be more to it than that. This game is a homage to the Zelda overworlds, and Zelda 1 lets you find dungeons out of sequence, right?

Why intentionally cripple the exploration mechanic if it's just for something as boring as fixing the difficulty curve?
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 5:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Because I think it's greater than just a difficulty curve. That is, experiencing the colossi in a certain order can be a tool related to narrative as well as mechanics. We might disagree with the decisions to do so; I don't really see any other reason as to why the sequence would be set in stone by the developers.
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