There are 79 of them, and they’re really all over the place but usually just out of the way or hard to reach. I’ve found about five, I think. Finding all of them unlocks a door in the temple which leads to a room with a sword with increased attack power and decreased health regeneration.
I am at the shrine outside the final colossus’ location and I’m probably going to stop for a moment and just go wandering and exploring because dang it is a pretty game and this time around we get to have the scale and the detail. Though I do agree something is lost by filling in all the detail but, like, the PS2 and PS3 versions still exist, so?
But yeah I am enjoying myself after an early stumble on colossus 3* and will probably do all the time attacks and attempt to get all the unlockable stuff for once.
*Took me too long to remember you have to be far enough away and stationary to get him to do the attack that lets you climb up his arm, then I had to remember to wait until he stops walking to jump from his mid section to his left arm. I missed that jump several times and was really aggravating myself and wondering if somehow the game was actually terrible this whole time and I only now was just realizing it.
I’m doing the time attacks now and colossus 3 is still just awful awful awful. It drags the rest of the game down, really. There are a couple others that aren’t very good but this one just takes the cake. There’s just no way to reliably get him to attack you the way you want him to when you want him to. In time attack you have over 6 minutes to defeat him and you’ll likely spend half of that just trying to get on him to where you can attack him.
They should have cut this one but instead they stuck it in the beginning part of the game and used it for all the marketing material. Whoever signed off on colossus 3 can burn in hell for eternity.
Eh? Its been a long time, but I’m pretty sure that in the PS2 version, if you stand on the metal circle, he pretty much automatically switches to trying to slam you with his club. I think that your position on the metal circle triggers his downward club slam. But maybe not?
Yeah I’m trying to do it without breaking his wrist armor because there’s a trophy associated with that and I just wanted to make it harder on myself.
Whichever he does is based on his proximity to you. If you’re within a certain range he’ll move in and do the downward slam when he gets close enough, if you’re further out he does the normal swing that lets you climb up the sword and onto the arm. I’ve worked out that you only need to move forward a little bit at the beginning of the fight and then stop and wait and 90% of the time he’ll stop and do the big swing attack. But it’s still iffy.
At least in this version they give you an extra 90 seconds on hard time attack. Originally it was just a flat five minutes, so technically if you’re doing the fight normally and breaking the wrist armor then this version is actually easier since you have more time overall.
I knew if I whined about it to someone I would start making progress, which I have. I haven’t accomplished my feat yet but I can consistently get onto the body and start attacking weak spots.
Is it wrong that I look at the SOTC remake, go “the people in charge of this thought that the thing the game needed was dozens of trinkets to find” and immediately lose interest? It feels like a small thing to bury a game over, but jeez that feels like a profound case of missing the point.
All of the changes to PS4 SotC mentioned in this thread so far sound pretty misguided, though I guess not deal-breakers. Then again, I always thought that “time attack” mode cheapened the experience of the original game.
Changes that I think they should have made:
Eliminate the useless icon that indicates the weapon that you are obviously holding. (Eliminating the HUD entirely would be too much to hope for.)
Add in one or two of the unused colossi from those old screenshots, in hidden places.
I’m still looking forward to playing this new version at some point. I have not revisited the game since the time of the PS2 version’s release.
The UI is much improved but still quite unnecessary, yeah.
I think the unused colossi may have been cut for a reason if my experience with #3 is anything to go by.
However at this point (6:56 record so far, need to get it below 6:30) I have moved past hating this fight. I learned its rhythms somewhat, like how close I need to be standing to get it to back up vs. step forward and try to stomp me. Whether I chose to break the armor or not it still takes me roughly over a minute and close to two just to get to the first weak spot on the torso.
I had started by moving straight to the head but there’s too much flailing around. I think I have a better chance taking out the torso and elbow first since those don’t take as long due to being in less precarious positions. Then the head is the only health left and if I can get to it with at least two minutes to spare I can probably do it in under the par time. How in the hell people accomplished this with the original par time of 5:00 is beyond my ken. I think they may have been relying on tricks like not breaking the armor and letting the sword fling them onto the torso and a glitch that keeps you from flopping around when the colossus is trying to shake you off. The sword fling move is still more or less possible in the PS4 version, but I don’t know about the glitch.
The game didn’t need time attack or new game+ or a bunch of unlockable items and stuff but it had them anyway because video games are kind of like a trash art medium I guess and they’re still there if you want them. They’re easy to ignore (time attack, new game+ and the unlockables are only available after you’ve finished the game once anyway) and the new collectible coins are actually really easy to miss. Of the five I’ve found so far two I just kind of stumbled on and the other three I had to go out of my way to find poking at the game world’s limits.
There’s probably a right way and a wrong way to do color versions of old movies. Like the people online that make colorized versions of really old photographs. It’s an art form unto itself and can be quite powerful.
Obviously this is a poor analogy since with the remake you’re not seeing some new detail that was there all along or a restoration of the original work, it’s literally a completely new version (like when Lucas kept editing and changing Star Wars).
But, eh, what’s one more excuse to revisit a classic.
I figured the UI in SotC was Sony telling Ueda “We are giving you more money this time, so you better make it more accessible to the mainstream”. Then again, it also had the TV static, film grain and papyrus font that all seemed weirdly out of place.
Is that SotC movie still supposedly in production? Can’t wait to see Jake Gyllenhaal or whoever as Wander and all the subtle hints setting up the Sony Pictures PlayStation Cinematic Universe.
i thought the world in SotC being big and empty was profound when it first came out and i guess i still kind of do, but i also don’t think adding extra optional stuff to do is that big of a deal anymore. It can have an artful narrative and still allow part of itself to be purely for gamey entertainment i think. Maybe it’s that we’re now in a world where it’s a unique elaboration of a really cool concept and not quite a singular work of brilliance. Like, we’re kind of spoiled for artsy narrative choice these days.
There’s also that ICO had wacky unlockable extras (annoyingly cut from the original US release) and yeah, SotC has the time attack which, tone-breaking as it might have been, was a fun gimmick to overlay on the world’s only game about climbing giants (despite being frustrating and feeling impossible half the time lol). Team ICO has always been sorta cheeky too, it’s not all lonely windswept vistas and heartbreak.
Seems like some people are finding cave paintings of goats around the place, which seems like a better addition than several dozen trinkets and a sword
