Best PS3 Themes

Shadow of the Colossus
European cover art
Developer(s)	Japan Studio (Team Ico)
Publisher(s)	Sony Computer Entertainment
Director(s)	Fumito Ueda
Producer(s)	Kenji Kaido
Writer(s)	Junichi Hosono Masashi Kudo Takashi Izutani
Composer(s)	Kow Otani
Platform(s)	PlayStation 2 PlayStation 3 PlayStation 4
Release	NA: October 18, 2005[1] JP: October 27, 2005 AU: February 16, 2006 EU: February 17, 2006
Genre(s)	Action-adventure, puzzle
Mode(s)	Single-player

Shadow of the Colossus^[a] is a 2005 action-adventure game developed by Japan Studio and Team Ico, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 2. It takes place in a fantasy setting and follows Wander, a young man who enters an isolated and abandoned region of the realm seeking the power to revive a girl named Mono. The player assumes the role of Wander as he embarks on a mission that might entail Mono's resurrection: to locate and destroy the colossi, sixteen massive beings spread across the forbidden land, which the protagonist traverses by horseback and on foot.

The game was directed by Fumito Ueda and developed at Sony Computer Entertainment's International Production Studio 1, also known as Team Ico, the same development team responsible for the acclaimed PlayStation 2 title Ico, to which the game is considered a spiritual successor. Сonceived as an online multiplayer game titled NICO directly after Ico's completion, Shadow of the Colossus underwent a lengthy production cycle during which it was redeveloped as a single-player title. The team sought to create an outstanding interactive experience by including a distinct visual design, an unorthodox gameplay template, and non-player characters with sophisticated artificial intelligence such as the colossi and Wander's horse, Agro.

Cited as an influential title in the video game industry and one of the best video games ever made, Shadow of the Colossus is often regarded as an important example of video games as art due to its minimalist landscape designs, immersive gameplay, and emotional weight of the player character's journey. It received wide critical acclaim by the media and was met with strong sales compared to Ico, due in part to a larger marketing campaign. The game won several awards for its audio, design, and overall quality. A remastered version for the PlayStation 3 was released alongside Ico as The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection in September 2011, developed by Bluepoint Games, who later produced a high definition remake of the game for the PlayStation 4 in 2018.

Gameplay[edit]

Described by several commentators as an action-adventure game,^[2][3] Shadow of the Colossus takes place from a third-person perspective in a three-dimensional (3D) graphic environment and involves combat-based gameplay sequences, as well as platforming and puzzle game elements.^[4] The game's environment is largely presented as a seamless open world.^[5] Progression through Shadow of the Colossus occurs in cycles. Beginning at a central point in an expansive landscape, the player seeks out and defeats a colossus, and is then returned to the central point to repeat the process.^[2] To find each colossus, Wander may raise his sword while in a sunlit area to reflect beams of light, which will converge when the sword is pointed in the right direction of the next encounter.^[6] The player's journey to a colossus seldom follows a direct route: stretches of varied terrain often require that a detour be taken along the way. Most colossi are situated in remote areas, such as atop cliffs or within ancient structures.^[2][7]

Once a colossus is found, the player must discover its weaknesses to defeat it. Each colossus dwells in a unique lair, and in most encounters the player must use some aspects of the current battlefield to advantage, a necessity that becomes more pronounced as the game progresses.^[9] The first two battles take place on simple, vast, flat areas of land, wherein the player's only goal is to discover how to scale the colossi and attack their weak points.^[6][9] However, the majority of the following fourteen battles require that the player make use of the surrounding environment.^[10][11]

Every colossus has at least one weak point, symbolized by a glowing sigil^[12] that can be illuminated and identified by the sword's reflected light.^[6][13] Each colossus has areas covered with fur or protruding ledges, which Wander may use to grip and scale the colossus while it thrashes about in an attempt to dislodge him.^[2] Wander has a limited stamina gauge that decreases as he hangs onto the colossus; the player thus must act quickly when they scale the creature.^[4] Aside from the colossi, who are the only enemies of the game, the environment is inhabited by natural animals. Only one species, however, has an effect on gameplay: eating the tail of a certain kind of lizard increases Wander's stamina gauge. Likewise, the player may find fruit that increases Wander's maximum health.^[14]

Wander's horse, Agro,^[15] plays a large role in the game. Aside from her capacity as a means of transportation, Agro enables the player to fight from horseback, a critical avenue to defeating some of the colossi.^[16] However, the game contains many environments that players cannot traverse by horse, and colossi are often found in areas within deep water or beyond large obstacles that must be scaled. Agro cannot travel beyond these, and when separated from Wander by such obstacles, cannot participate in the following battle.^[6] While throughout the game, Wander's equipment consists of only a sword and a bow with arrows,^[17] in subsequent playthroughs players may access bonus weapons and in-game features after finishing optional Time Attack trials, which allow the battles with the colossi to be replayed with a restricted time limit.^[14]

Synopsis[edit]

Setting[edit]

Presented through a minimalistic narrative,^[18] Shadow of the Colossus eschews disclosure of detailed information about the backstories and interrelationships of its characters to the player.^[2] The game takes place in a fantasy world,^[19][20] wherein a vast and unpopulated peninsula, known as the Forbidden Land, serves as the main setting for the game's events. Separated from the outside realm by a distant mountain range to its north and sea to the south and east, the area contains ruins and remnants of ancient structures, an indication that it had formerly been a settlement.^[21][22][23]

The only point of entry to the region is a small cleft in the mountains to the north that leads to a massive stone bridge. This bridge spans half the distance of the landscape and terminates at a large temple called the "Shrine of Worship" located at its center. It is, however, forbidden to enter the land,^[24] which includes diverse geographical features, such as lakes, plateaus, canyons, caves, and deserts in addition to human-made structures.^[2][11]

Characters[edit]

The protagonist of the game is Wander (ワンダ, Wanda, voiced by Kenji Nojima), a young man whose goal is to resurrect a girl named Mono (モノ, voiced by Hitomi Nabatame). The only established fact regarding Mono is that she was a maiden who was sacrificed because she was believed to have a cursed destiny.^[26] Assisting Wander in his quest to revive her is his loyal horse, Agro (アグロ, Aguro), who serves as his sole ally in defeating the colossi;^[27] the English-language version of the game refers to Agro as a male steed,^[28] although director Fumito Ueda said that he saw Wander's horse as female.^[29] Wander also receives aid from an entity called Dormin (ドルミン, Dorumin, voiced by Kazuhiro Nakata and Kyōko Hikami). The story revolves around these characters but features a small supporting cast, represented by Lord Emon (エモン, voiced by Naoki Bandō) and his men.

Speaking with two voices at once (one male and one female), Dormin is a mysterious, disembodied entity. According to legends of the game's world, Dormin has the power to revive the dead;^[24][27] this premise serves as the driving cause for Wander's entrance upon the forbidden land, as he seeks the being's assistance in reviving Mono. Dormin offers to revive her in exchange for Wander destroying the sixteen colossi.^[26] One of the commentators of the game's plot speculated that the name "Dormin", which spells "Nimrod" backwards, serves as a reference to the body of the biblical King Nimrod which was cut up and scattered.^[30]

Lord Emon is a shaman who narrates a vision in the game's introduction that vaguely explains the origin of the land to which Wander has come and establishes that entry to this place is forbidden.^[24] As portrayed by the game, he possesses vast knowledge about the nature and containment of Dormin, and wields the ability to use powerful magic. He has a small group of warriors at his command, and is pursuing Wander to prevent the use of "the forbidden spell", the rite that involves the destruction of the sixteen colossi and the restoration of Dormin's power.^[31]

The colossi are armored, most often enormous creatures with forms ranging from various humanoids to predatory animals, and live in all manner of surroundings and environments, including underwater and flying through the air.^[18][32] Their bodies are a fusion of organic and inorganic parts such as rock, earth, and architectural elements,^[4] some of which are weathered or fractured. Some colossi are peaceful and will only attack when provoked, whereas others are aggressive and will attack on sight.^[2] Inhabiting specific locations in the forbidden land, they do not venture outside their own territory. Once slain they will remain where fallen, as a mound of earth and rock vaguely resembling the original colossus.^[33][34] A pillar of light marks the location of each colossus after they are defeated.^[35] The Latin names of the colossi, though spread throughout fan related media, are not official and are never referred to within the game.^[36][37]

Plot[edit]

As the game begins, Wander enters the forbidden land and travels across a long bridge on his horse, Agro. After they reach the entrance to the Shrine of Worship, Wander, who has carried with him the body of Mono, brings her to an altar in the temple. A moment later, several humanoid shadow creatures appear and approach Wander before he easily dismisses them with a wave of the ancient sword in his possession.

After the shadow creatures are vanquished, the disembodied voice of Dormin manifests within the shrine and expresses surprise at the fact that Wander possesses the weapon. Wander explains the plight that led him to seek the forbidden land and asks that Dormin return Mono's soul to her body. Dormin offers to grant Wander's request under the condition that he completes a rite designed to destroy the sixteen idols lining the temple's hall. To that end, Wander must use his sword to slay each of the idol's physical incarnations–the colossi, whose presence ranges across the vast expanse outside the temple. Although warned by Dormin that he may have to pay a great price to revive Mono, Wander sets out to search the land for the colossi and destroy them.^[38]

An aspect of Wander's mission that is unknown to him is that the colossi contain portions of Dormin's own essence, scattered long ago to render the entity powerless.^[26][39] As Wander kills each colossus, a released fragment of Dormin enters his body. Over time, the signs of Wander's deterioration from the gathered essence start to appear: his skin becomes paler, his hair darker, and his face is increasingly covered by dark veins. The outcome of the battle with the twelfth colossus leads to a reveal of a group of warriors that has been pursuing Wander, led by Emon. Urged to hurry with his task by Dormin, Wander soon heads off to defeat the sixteenth and final colossus. On the way to this confrontation, he rides horseback across a long bridge which begins to collapse as he is halfway across, but Agro manages to throw Wander over to the other side before falling into the distant river below.

Soon after, Wander goes on to defeat the final colossus as Emon's company arrives in the Shrine of Worship to witness the last temple idol crumble. Wander appears back in the temple soon after, the signs of his corruption readily apparent: his skin is pallid, his eyes glow silver, and a pair of tiny horns have sprouted from his head. Emon recognizes him as a transgressor who, in an event that occurred before Wander's journey to the forbidden land, stole the ancient sword with which he killed the colossi.^[31] Emon orders his warriors to kill the "possessed" man as he approaches Mono and finally falls once stabbed through the heart by one of Emon's men.^[40] However, a newly whole Dormin takes control of Wander's body and transforms into a shadowy giant.^[39][41] While his men flee, Lord Emon casts the ancient sword into a small pool at the back of the temple's hall to evoke a whirlwind of light. The supernatural vortex consumes Dormin and Wander, which seals Dormin within the temple once again. As Emon and his warriors escape, the bridge that leads to the temple collapses behind them, and its destruction forever isolates the forbidden land from the rest of the world. Although he has condemned Wander for his actions prior to their encounter, Emon expresses hope that Wander may be able to atone for his crimes one day should he have survived.^[42]

Back in the temple, Mono awakens and finds Agro limping into the temple with an injured hind leg. Mono follows Agro to the pool into which Wander and Dormin were pulled by Emon's spell, where she finds a male infant with tiny horns on his head. Mono takes the child with her, following the horse to higher levels of the Shrine of Worship, and arrives at a secret garden within the shrine as the game ends.

Development[edit]

Origin[edit]

Shadow of the Colossus is the second project of Team Ico, a group of staff members within Sony Computer Entertainment's (SCEI) International Production Studio 1 that was led by director Fumito Ueda and producer Kenji Kaido.^[32][43][44] The game originated from one of Ueda's concepts that he developed directly after the team submitted their debut title Ico, released in late 2001 for Sony's PlayStation 2 video game console, for publication.^[45][46][47] As the basis of Team Ico's subsequent game had not been decided, Ueda examined "a number of old ideas kicking around in my head ... that couldn't be realized under previous circumstances".^[48] After a brief review of those avenues, Ueda chose to explore one that aligned with his own preferences as a game player.^[47][48] Ueda cited The Legend of Zelda series as an influence, as he grew up wanting to make a game like Zelda and designed the Colossi bosses like "inverted Zelda dungeons."^[49][50]

Ueda envisioned a work with an underlying motif of "cruelty as a means of expression".^[48] He felt that this theme was widely featured in contemporary titles such as Grand Theft Auto III and wanted to use it in a game that he designed.^[48] In a discussion with Kaido, Ueda observed that he had played a variety of video games containing battles with large bosses that the player must shoot from a distance to defeat.^[51] Ueda believed that the boss sequences of those games could be streamlined if the player character was able to approach and climb the oversized opponents to kill them with a close range weapon.^[51] Accordingly, he chose to base the game around the player character's encounters with enormous fictional creatures,^[16] a premise that stemmed from Ueda's childhood fascination with monster movies.^[46] This led to an emphasis on the inclusion of a large-scale adventure in the title, an element which Ueda regarded as influential in the shaping of the game's stylistic identity.^[48]

Originally, the team considered Ueda's idea alongside another concurrently-developed game.^[45][46] According to Ueda, the game was unrelated to his former concept, and the team did not give it a working title or outline its design while it was in development.^[45][46] Ueda recognized the finished iteration of Team Ico's second title as, "in many ways, a game for boys and men"; conversely, the separately produced game was fashioned to appeal more to a female audience.^[46] Its contents, interface and thematic focus differed significantly from those that would ultimately manifest in the team's next game after Ico.^[46] The untitled game did not employ 3D graphics, whereas Team Ico applied them to their published game.^[46] The team eventually scrapped their plans for a counterpart title to Ueda's intended game,^[46] which was advanced into further development.^[45]

Prior to the start of the project, Team Ico assessed the opportunity to establish it as a sequel to their first game.^[16] This suggestion was opposed by certain staff members who argued that the story and gameplay of their preceding title were largely self-contained, and that the existence of consumer demand for a new Ico game was questionable.^[52] According to Ueda, Team Ico assumed that the creation of levels for a single-player game akin to Ico necessitated the construction of elaborate puzzles, a practice that the staff wanted to eschew.^[51] Following lengthy deliberations, they decided not to pursue a sequel to Ico and to produce a standalone game provisionally dubbed NICO (a portmanteau of ni, 2 in Japanese, and "Ico").^[16][32] The team initially agreed to develop NICO as an online multiplayer game that, unlike Ico, "wouldn't require complex level design".^[51] Their foundational goal, according to Kaido, was to create a technology demo that represented a tentative rendition of the game's fictional world and features.^[16] Development commenced immediately after the December 2001 release of Ico's Japanese version.^[16][53]

Early prototypes[edit]

To develop the concept video for NICO, Team Ico formed a small internal group, which was composed of Ueda, one of Ico's designers and a roughly 10-person animation team.^[48] Their objective was to deliver "[a] movie with an extremely final form" that could serve as a visual template for the finalized game.^[16] The first storyboard that outlined the video was drafted in January 2002, and the actual short film was completed that May.^[54] It depicted a group of three masked, horned boys who rode horseback across a vast landscape and attacked a towering being reminiscent of the second boss in Shadow of the Colossus.^[35][55][56] The video was visualized in the Ico game engine and was rendered in real-time on the PlayStation 2 hardware.^[16] With those techniques, the team aimed to estimate the extent to which the platform's capabilities allowed the realization of their vision.^[16]

According to Kaido, the team deemed the resulting video to have attained a very high level of completion, and thus was able to use it as a reference point throughout the game's production.^[16] Although they subsequently modified the game's visuals from those of the demonstration reel, its themes of "fighting a giant enemy" and "[exploring] a giant field" carried over into the final game design.^[16] The demo indicated elements that were excluded from the released game.^[57] Among these was a showcased gameplay mechanism wherein one of the colossus' attackers who had scaled and killed it proceeded to mount his approaching horse by leaping onto its back from the entity's corpse.^[57] The video was later exhibited at many trade shows,^[43] such as the 2006 D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas where Kaido and Ueda retrospectively discussed the game's development with Lorne Lanning.^[55]

In June 2002, a small group of staff at Team Ico started to build a prototype of NICO for testing purposes.^[54] In his role as producer, Kaido tasked the team with the inclusion of technological features that he recognized as important milestones of the development.^[55] One of the challenges issued by Kaido involved the creation of "organic collision deformation", a term that alluded to his concept of realistic character physics in relation to the movement of the colossi.^[55] For instance, if a colossus' limb was currently horizontal, Kaido expected the player to be able to run across the limb as though it were any other flat surface.^[55] Ueda and Team Ico programmers spent over six months to produce a working version of this functionality.^[54] They began by adding a character to a virtual environment where the figure was enabled to climb a pole-like object.^[51] One of the team's priorities at the time was to code a physics-based simulation of scenarios where characters were "being shaken off or narrowly avoided being stomped on".^[58]

In May 2003, Team Ico assembled a demonstrational build of NICO and presented it at a production meeting.^[54] Full development of the game was sanctioned directly after it was pitched, and commenced in the same month.^[54] That year, the NICO technology demo was shown across Sony's foreign offices among a lineup of prospective PlayStation 2 titles, and its exposure excited the spectators.^[57] Although the team attempted to work on the game in secrecy, at a certain point images of NICO's horseriding characters were leaked onto the Internet.^[32] Their circulation led enthusiasts to speculate about what they perceived as a sequel to Ico.^[32] According to Ueda, the team reused elements of Ico's character designs for NICO to expedite the production of the concept video and minimize its costs.^[58] He asserted that NICO was not related to Ico despite their stylistic similarities,^[58] and that his colleagues did not identify the former game as a sequel.^[4] However, contemporary and retrospective sources described Team Ico's second game as both a spiritual successor^[32][47][59] and prequel to Ico.^[60]

The staff used player feedback to advance the testing of the "organic collision deformation" system by inputting simple objects to experiment its capabilities.^[58] Although Team Ico had conducted an elaborate research of the game's technological framework, they did not finish its validation when they entered the production phase.^[51] After evaluating the limited number of personnel that was involved with NICO as well as their professional profiles, Team Ico concluded that they were not qualified to deliver an online-only game.^[51] They then resolved to abandon that direction and to reformulate NICO into a single-player title.^[51] The team discarded Ico's development tools that they had used at the outset of the project and moved to write new programming utilities.