I’ve just completed the first title I’d enter in the ‘Games Are Art’ camp opposite film judge Roger Ebert’s arrogant stance to the opposite.  Shadow of the Colossus (SOTC) was also among the most arduous to complete, not due to it’s own difficulty or having to futz with controls or anything, it was the plot and the way the gamer is forced to deal with the issues at hand.  The same criteria I’m using to justify putting it on the aforementioned easel.

SOTC was developed largely by the same crew that brought us the delightful ICO back in 2001.  While in that game I played a young hero-in-development guiding a waifish girl through a dreamlike castle, puzzling my way part the architecture, in SOTC I was charged with taking a slightly older lad across vast, varied lands to slay mythical beasts in order to restore life to a girl already deceased. In ICO, occasional scraps with shadowy wraiths were simply needed to provide combat and a thorn in the side. In SOTC, the battles are the crux of the game.

The game begins with our protagonist carrying the lady down to the base of a huge cathedral-like and placing her on an altar.  He pleads with the powers in and surrounding the structure and the land to restore her to life - please, he’ll do anything.  A booming disembodied voice responds in a fictitious tongue that he must fell 16 creatures roaming the land, beasts corresponding with idols along the temple’s walls.

And that’s it.  On my trusty black stallion Agro (more on him later) I roamed the land en route to my next battle, won said battle, returned to the shrine for instructions on the next melee.  The back of the box even says, ‘Some mountains are scaled. Others are slain.’ That might read like criticism of some sort, but nothing could be further from the truth. You would also be forgiven for wondering why a game basically about 16 David vs. Goliath skirmishes deserves a place on Just Adventure.  After all, the site isn’t named Just Adventure and some fighting and shooting and rocket launchers for good measure, too!

Shadow of the Colossus, like ICO before it, is in a class unto itself.  Like that masterpiece, the color palette, whimsical sound effects and overall environmental design make you feel as if you’re playing in a dream.  I don’t know how else to describe it; it’s just a tangible feeling the two games share and a breath of fresh air.  I’m traveling in an undisturbed land, uninhabited save for the 16 colossi and the birds in the air and little lizards scurrying about.  It’s fun simply to roam about enjoying the breathtaking views of unpassable cliffs and waterfalls, or sunlight piercing the shadows of a tree canopy over a trickling stream.

Agro is the only companion in the game, and he’d better animate perfectly.  He did, running to catch up when I wandered away too far on foot (I never got tired of the way he brought himself to a stop after a full-on gallop), swung his head whimsically from side to side, whinnied and rose up onto his hind legs when a Colossus got too close, and trotted and ran beautifully when carrying me throughout the great, varied land. A minor sticking point is that the triangle button operates "jump" and "mount Agro," a discrepancy bound to cause frustration as you jump meaninglessly beside Agro with a skyscraper of a foe looming up behind you. Agro is only on screen during five of the sixteen fights (he's even required in one) so it's not a big deal. Most of the time you must leave him behind as you swim or climb to areas your trusty companion cannot reach.  So, onward to the first battle.

Clad in a nondescript uniform with not an inch of armor, armed only with a short sword and bow (with a bottomless quiver of arrows), I trot out of the temple on Agro to seek out my first quarry.  The map, accessible from the start menu, is appropriately vague and of no help. I raised my sword to catch the sun, and rotated its reflection off the blade until a focused, intense beam pointed the general direction.

I spur Agro and head out across the vast fields of green and come to a rocky outcropping. I hop off the horse, jump and catch the ledge, climb up with a few more leaps of faith and voila!  A cutscene showing my first foe begins.  He (She? It’s hard to tell) is enormous. It looks like an armor-clad bison, only on two feet.  Whatever it is, it’d need a bed the length of a football field.  The club it carries is the size of an average house. I have to defeat THAT?

Without spoiling much, each fight has two essential facets. The first entails discovering how to get atop the colossus.  While I simply jumped up onto this one’s left foot and climbed up from there, many require you to either manipulate the environment or have the colossus do it for you.  For instance, in the ninth battle, I needed one of the many geysers spewing up blasts of water to lift one side of the creature so I could attack the bottom of its feet.

The second aspect, now that you’re on its body, is obviously killing it.  Each has weak spots, light-blue hieroglyphic symbols beneath their fur you must locate and stab with your sword.  Once in battle mode there are three meters in a very unobtrusive HUD:  your health, your opponent’s health, and a grip meter which determines how long you can maintain your tentative clasp on the thrashing body before you are sent plummeting to the ground.

The only major quibbles I had with SOTC, and I do mean the only ones, is how wildly the camera flailed about as I tried to scale to a higher vantage point, my grip meter piddling away to a little blip and how slowly and feebly I was able to move around atop the creatures. I know I wasn't a superhero gifted with any particular strength or speed, but it did get face-reddingly trying. I had to turn the game off a few times because I thought I was going to throw my controller through the TV screen.

Anyway, it was indeed after I plunged my sword into my titan, bison-like foe and it fell gracefully, even in death, to the ground that I felt ambivalent at best and sickened at worst.  The catch in Shadow of the Colossus is that the voice at the altar let me know in no uncertain terms that completing my annihilation of the 16 could well be too high a price. I’m made to feel as if I’m not even supposed to be on this side of the impossible bridge that leads to this place. The moral compass swings full circle as I consider what he said before I had so much as ventured out of the temple to view the landscape.

Killing the beast made me realize that the voice was right, that I was on an ultimately selfish quest.  Although my first foe tried to pound me 10 feet into the earth with its club upon spotting me, some of the remaining 15 made hardly a gesture in my direction.  Not one came out of its sector in the game into the general landscape to ground me into dust. Most only defended themselves after I fired the first volley, whimpering in pain and trying to shake me off their bodies so they could just go back about their business in their place in this great land.

In fact, the thirteenth was a beautiful, orange flying dragon-like animal that did virtually nothing to antagonize me.  When I came upon it, it rose up like a snake out of the vast desert, shooting up about 200 feet into the air where it remained lazily floating around in the sky.  I literally had to shoot it with arrows to deflate it so it would sink lower to the ground where I could jump from my horse onto it, climb it, and stab it to death.

These issues comprise the difficulty I had in playing this.  Without killing the colossi, there is no game, save for traversing the gorgeous mountains, plains, waterfalls, temples and all flora and fauna.  I saw most of this in my travels from creature to creature anyway. When each beast fell crashing to the ground, despite how treacherous and frustrating a particular battle may have been, I simply loathed what I had done.

While store shelves are packed to the gills where shoot first, ask questions later and do it all with attitude is the order of the day, what Shadow of the Colossus can cause one to feel cannot be ignored.