Shadow of the Colossal European......s

Gonna give a real thought about this, and do a proper reply/continuation.
Just feel like pixeling right now.

Also… do you have any idea how to… transfer this conversation to the proper topic?
Copy the posts (keeping the order of our actual posts, as AXE was a notepad)? Just continuing there like nothing ever happened?

asking a mod is probably the least overall effort

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for hat matter, how cool would it be if there were some thread or form submit for Appeals to Mod

@Felix, @eska, thank you to you both.
It was lovely from your part.

Hey, thanks, didn’t consider that modern tech™ can do this easily. BBSes surely improved the last decade?+…

Anyway, remark i am obliged to make:
Thread should be called Shadows of the Colossal Europeans… so that everyone can, secretly, stretch that topic title to read as
Shadows of the Colossal European( cunt) s
… done!

I think you can do it. In fact even the splitting of a topic is available to the creator of the topic, I think (a mod explained to me that once, would have to check my messages).

But the name at least, the creator of the topic absolutely can…
Since you are the first poster, I’m assuming you are Oo?

I’m now betting that you already tried and because of the splitting, someone else has those privileges.

Aggro is slang for aggressive in English, too. I always thought it was weird that they named the horse that and I never heard anyone say anything about it. Dumb name for a horse that doesn’t do dressage and isn’t owned by a foppish yet belligerent prince.

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Wanted to follow up on what you said @Decinoge about your professor that mentioned that you should never stop, i.e. keep on moving:

That’s actually kinda what i did in aforementioned replay that i shared on SB1.0 - someone mentioned the idea of what if the game had more urgency to its overarching mission, that is saving the princ… girl, and iirc, even floated a number, which was 5h.

Well, that was as good a reason as any to tackle this game in a new way, and so i set out to do this in less than five hours. I had an old digital camera to my disposal, as well as my cellphone cam which was… not the highend model, ayup, and thus i set out to do this, setting myself the goal to resurrect her in less than five hours, or i’d have wasted the only chance to do so.

The game did show a whole new complexion when playing it this way, i.e. I got lost en route to the third colossi, and instead of being all come onnnn, this felt more like i was screwing up right then and there, and wouldn’t make it in less than five hours.
Needless to say, agro went everywhere flying, and i am running for dear life… her life.
Fighting the colossi, i also had to stop sticking to my routine of slowly but steadily checking the weakspots one by one, but move quickly - accordingly, falling down when climbing was a catastrophe, so i got way more aggressive than i ever had been before, and experienced some dense battles with some (some of the strats lerned back then have stuck around, and to this day i still use to defeat them like that) colossi.

When all was said and done, i made it in 4 hours and 52 minutes, and it took me a while to get down from this crazy run, since there was quite some Adrenalin involved.

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So I am back to this, to the forum actually.
I do feel a bit the need to justify myself so… here goes.

JUSTIFICAAAAAAAATION

For two days I became obsessed with animating Excalibur dancing (SIG, Soul Eater char, first anime character in my life for which I have a “cute” madness going). Tuesday I had a surgery to take out my last wisdom tooth. It grew forcing the jaw bone, but it was fine until some food got between the tooth and the gum that was partially covering the top… resulting in a terrible gum/mouth infection. The surgery was simple, quick, but very hard because the tooth didn’t wanted to come out, and supporting itself on the bone… Well… it was messy and bloody. Yesterday I was still too much in pain, and the painkillers prescribed were not suited for a guy over 100kg. I understand that an adult male is around 75kg, but even if it weighs 80kg I still have 1/4 of it on top.


Today I can function to some level, so here we go.

First don’t ask for forgiveness over over-typing. I’m loving it, and I can only see for your actions that you feel the same. Let’s ban excuses.

Second, the girl was pretty much revived after everyone was gone. Everything got quiet for a few moments and she simply wakes up. I have difficulty believing that she was alive before because no one would be able to sleep through that caos… but that’s very subjective. Still under this assumption, she was revived after, but could perhaps just be unconscious???

Right to the point now, I’ll go around what you wrote and pick up points as I’ve done previously.



You previous stated that Dormin was, at the very least ambiguous to you. I can’t personally say that I saw it that way (Dormin is an it, perior >_<… let me make my life easier).
For me he was from the start just there. I was ready for fantasy and the a higher entity was there. Common, expected, even a bit boring.
For the very least Dormin had shown some level of empathy for the protag’s lost. I guess I focused on that, good or bad didn’t matter, Dormin was helping me achieve the protag’s objective (to which I empathised, even admired).


Wonderful that you mentioned those last moments of interaction of “fighting against being sealed”. Again I forgot to mention it (thought of, forgot, because I’m not too good going for the details, which most readers “about video games” value more than general “opinions”).
That moment reinforced even further the idea that the “beast” was at least half the protag.

At that moment the character doesn’t have movements to which you haven’t given any input. You are just fighting “game physics” (I might be wrong but I remember that on the beast part I laid down the pad and the beast kept making movements). In retrospective, seems that with his last action of extending the hand to the girl that the “hate” from Dormin spirit was mostly gone. He focused again sonely on what he wanted. Her alive and well.

I find it understandable, at least empathic, that Dormin was full of hate. Being in “jail” and forgotten for an undetermined period of time… I can see that developing to less noble feelings…


And here I can follow this trail pretty easily to the next point, the “scary unconditional love”.
I will probably be doing this point along with the “colossi alive” questioning, and the “enjoyment of the game”.

I can see your point… but not with such clarity in this game. The game, and the world itself, doesn’t push or allow you to provoke much pain beyond the destruction of the colossi.
You can mention the lizards… which I can justify as food. You can mention the clerics or whatever… to which I tend to see that was half Dormin.

Again mentioning the protag’s last interactive moments, he is focusing on life.
Her life. As you said it yourself, his hand was pointing to the girl (to hold her?!?!?), and not to one of the clerics throats.
I see that his love focus on life, and not death. In pleasure, and not pain. Specially taking into account the possible “Dormin’s possession of the protag”.

The discussion of the dangers of love, I think, is too dependant of judging how much the colossi are alive. Apart from that… he was pretty benigne.
But focusing on that point, and as a reaction to what you said, I see cats as “state machine with finite transitions”, but not dogs. That is because of the social relations dogs create over their biological capacity for empathy.

It is a hard defined line that I created for myself to define “intelligent life”, and I don’t wish to impose it to anyone (but I am more than willing, even excited over the perspective of discussing it). However both are ALIVE in my book.
The colossi are an interesting subject in regards to “defining life”, and we can proceed with a discussion of that alone for a very long time. I think that raising those questions was the purpose of the colossi in game. Seeing the general opinion just went straight to “they were alive” makes me sad. A discussion lost over “easy deep thinking”… which is an oxymoron.
Maybe it’s just a result from “gamers lingo” in saying “you killed that box”.

I personally tend to be resistant to humanising pets, animals of any sort, or whatever just because it has a face. I dehumanise humans in my mind many times, which most of the times leads to other’s pain. But also allows me to see humans as a part of a hole shades of grey beyond the tiny definition of humanity that our minds created (which I believe are ultimately flawed and prone to create dogmas… also known as stupidity).

A question to push this discussion forward popped in my mind.
We have no idea to what extent the colossi were actually holding memories. I have seen no proof beyond them following a set of simple pre ordained instructions.
The storing of memories and experiences plays a huge part on my definition of life, being the my focal point on discussions like abortion (the life part of the discussion at least).

So we end up with 2 points, capacity for empathy, and capacity for storing memories/experiences.

Funny that you mention that episode with toups. I guess I would be more surprised at him not be willing to deactivate automatons to save someone the protag (he) loved. I said in a previous post I also don’t agree with destruction of property. For me it wouldn’t be lives vs life, but destruction of buildings over life.

For my personal experience, my judgement was mostly motivated by love.
Love plays a huge role in who I am as a person, and admit to the huge number of stupidities I did over such “justification”. It is dangerous, and it might have been what colored all my judgement of the entire game, being all the rest just good justifications.
That would make my analysis of the game, itself, a good point of discussion of the dangers of love.

But keeping this train of thought over moral judgements, I agree very much with you as to that judgement was forced upon the player because… yeah… you couldn’t kill them by accident. Maybe what toups was uncomfortable with was that the judgement was forced on him, to which I can also empathise.
Questioning said judgement… I think that it is not as much questionable (if at all, the player decides and that’s that) as it is interesting.

Why?
Well… look at this topic.
I believe all this questions were raised from that judgement alone, but very few are about the judgement itself. That is fantastic. All these questions do eventually lead to a moral opinion on the judgement. But why focus on that singular objective that is so… finite, while all those other questions still remain to be discussed over. They go so far beyond the game itself and we can learn so much from each other.

Seems a bit like guilty tripping, or the search of the guilty, which again takes me again to christianity and related social “psicosis”… LIKE WITH SEX


Finally I’m lead to the “enjoyment of the game” (which I meant to put on the previous part, but now I think it should be by itself).
Even “joy” seems to me as… “lack of words”. I don’t really understand this need to put all the eggs in one basket, all the weight into one word.

It was way more than enjoyment or fun. I had them both, and yet together they were about a third of the emotions I felt through the game (if as much). Emotions that ultimately were a pleasure to have experienced, even pain itself (again good and evil, pleasure and pain, and the grey lines… any quick description falls short).

If I go a bit into “troll mode”, it is as insulting to reduce a creation of that size to such simplistic emotions, as to evaluate a painting (of at least moderate execution) as “pretty” and put it in the wall of your living room as decoration. Seriously, how far is that game from the latest “screen toucher” you installed on your mobile?

That was not how I was educated to understand art. I probably should be sorry for calling it art but years of study of various fields of philosophy around art, art history, and whatnot that goes way before the periods of ancient Greece… just checks all the boxes on this game (even the non physical presence of the work, and thank you Duchamp for that one).

Mind you… a very classical work, totally inside a profoundly outlined genre of “epic tragedy” that existed before the roman empire, also a bit boring for that fact. Just the medium is different of other more acceptable works. Inside video games the execution was quite different from previously created works as well. I think those two factors were the point of rupture… which again was a big word on defining “art” after the first world war era.

Yeah… this game really doesn’t make it easy for you to come with a simplistic definition, which is “thumbs up”. But I don’t think that a “simplistic look” should be applied even to “simplest” of the arcade games.



That’s pretty much it. Your analisis was very interesting, and I ate it up like good pasta (simple, healthy, and fulfilling).

I will risk to pinpoint the differences in our perspectives to the colossi were alive or not.
The girl’s death being natural or not, the possibility of religious/authoritarian implications or not, the righteousness of the protag’s actions, and the moral ambiguity of Dormin, can probably “stream” out of that discussion alone.

Again, if we take a train that way, I would like to focus on giving proof of stored experiences/memories from the colossi, and the important of such to define life beyond a simple mechanism as a cell (which is life… but I don’t think many people have problem killing germs).

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re Dormin:
interesting that you point out that i used “he” for Dormin, and tbh … i don’t even know why!

Considering that the dub of Dormin consists of at least two (feminine+masculine), if not more, dub actors, I have to check whether the introduction of the game singles out the gender, if it is derived from the gender of the word for boss (which is masculine) or if it is derived from the name itself, dormin (to which i would add a masculine ‘the’, considering the phonetics).



re dormin’s interaction with the (game) world:
Have to admit that I have to pay attention next time I play/finish this game, to whether the creature moves by itself, because i cannot remember if it does/doesn’t. Interesting, I take that with me!

I like how you mentioned that you felt that Dormin helped you achieve your goal, because to me his/its ultimate goal felt very ambiguous, so i never really felt like Dormin helps you as the protagonist. I think that may be one of the crucial points that drives (or rather: influences) our different experiences?

Also, i find it interesting that you touch on Dormin being full of hate - iirc, his “personality” - have to check the exact wording in the game later - has been split into 16 parts/colossi.
The player’s part in this journey is collecting the lost parts, and our hero’s body is - literally - the vessel that holds all parts during that errand … leading up to the moment at the finale, where the assassination (attempt?) of our hero is the trigger for the resurrection of the being that we call Dormin.
It’s interesting that we as an audience do not know how long Dormin’s been split/left without a body, and iirc, the game does not touch upon this and leaves it open to interpretation. It surely must have been quite a while, and this surely didn’t help with making Dormin chill out, as we experience in the end …


Interlude #1: While typing this, a question suddenly popped up* that I've never considered before, and I think it is the right point to address it here: So, if Dormin has been split into 16 parts, why are they so hell-bent to attack you?

Since Dormin’s (quite powerful, as we find out) personality has been split into numerous parts, why aren’t they able to … “feel” that, after you have amassed a few colossi, their brethren are “coming” to reunite them, so accordingly they should rather be interested to be reunited instead of showing open hostility towards our hero (i.e. the should get less aggressive the further you progress)? This would, of course, be a totally different gameplay …

Now, I do think that this question is related to your thoughts whether we can consider the colossi being alive, i.e. the question you posed: do the colossi hold any memories?

Thinking about it since yesterday morning, right now I would say:

  • on the one hand - definitely no, they do not hold any memories in terms of them being 1/16th of a higher being, because they would be more than willing to be reunited instead of trying to defend themselves (prevent being reunited, if you want to think of it like this).
  • otoh, if you think of the open hostility shown by ~80% of the colossi towards our hero, you could argue that the anger of Dormin being split into 16 pieces has been lingering on inside the vessels that we call colossi.

I’ll skip the two interesting points you mention - capacity for empathy, capacity for storing memories/experiences - for a minute, to continue the train of thought for a moment:
When our hero “kills” a colossus, we do see that black … tentacles(?) leave the bodies of colossi, only to be striking our hero - let’s, for the moment, call that switching bodies. That may explain why the colossi collapse as soon as the sentinent shard of Dormin have switched bodies. When you return later to the places where you’ve fought a colossus, you find remains of them, showing a state of decay that is in line with the remnants of buildings and infrastructure you encounter in the landscape, I’d call them inanimate.

Alas, it is now time to address the elephant in the room:
If they are inanimate after our hero has released (absorbed) those black tentacles - what are they, or what do they stand for?


I do have a four letter word in mind, which’s pretty much influenced by my religious upbringing - you could go ahead and just call these black tentacles a shard of Dormin’s “soul”. If you’d call it that, a whole new batch of questions arises, and I think I do have to replay the game under this premise, just to see how the finale pans out with that notion in mind, or to what extent this (bold claim) would work. Never thought of that before!


Now, coming back to the two points you mentioned:

  • capacity for empathy:
    imho, none of the colossi do show signs of empathy, period. We could argue that the PS2 was driven to the brink of what’s possible in terms of AI, so they did not consider adding personality traits, but I doubt that the capability of showing empathy would have worked in the context of the game as we do know it …
  • capacity for storing memories/experiences:
    again, technical limitations, re PS2. At the very least, the colossi do show signs of short term memory, in that they can register that you’ve attacked them, and do remember that for a short period of time. The fact that this is indicated to the player by using different colors for the “eyes” of the colossi surely is due to gameplay- and aesthetic reasons, and imho, that works pretty well. However, if you leave the arena where the battle takes place, and you return, any notion of you already having been there is gone, I would say.
    I’ll fire up the PS4 later to find out whether dealt damage persists beyond a visit/reload, because that’d at least hint at some kind of persisting state change, even if it is just a physical damage/gameplay related one.

Still, trying to bring my train of thought back on track, considering those two points, it is highly debatable whether the colossi are alive, and I agree that it is as valid a reasoning to state “no, they aren’t” as it is to belive “they are, because they have eyes, they move, they react to me being there”.

I still have to touch upon the other points you’ve mentioned, but for now, I will think a bit more about those new aspects I’ve touched upon on the surface for now.




*n.b.:
kudos for giving me a canvas to consider a totally new aspect for me - that alone has been worth


so, last weekend, I finally found the time to follow up on this, booted the PS3&PS4, and noted down the subbed intro. Biggest change here is that the usage of the em dash was fxxked up, so we get two en dashes instead... but hey, at least they did some improvements to the letterspacing.

So, for now, the intro text dumped here:

Narrator:
====================================================
That place...began from the 
resonance of intersecting points...
---
They are memories replaced by ens and naught
and etched into stone.
---
Blood, young sprouts, sky-- <ps3::->
---
and the one with the ability to 
control beings created from light...
---
In that world, it is said that if one should wish it 
one can bring back the souls of the dead...
---
...But to trespass upon that land
is strictly forbidden.
====================================================


====================================================
Dormin:
Hmm?
Thou possess the Ancient Sword?
---
So thou art mortal...
====================================================
Wander:
Are you Dormin?
---
I was told that in this place 
at the ends of the world-- <ps3::->
---
there exists a being who can 
control the souls of the dead.
====================================================
D:
Thou art correct... 
we are the one known as Dormin...
====================================================
W:
She was sacrificed for
she had a cursed fate.
---
Please... 
I need you to bring back her soul...
====================================================
D:
That maiden's soul?
---
Souls that are once lost cannot be reclaimed... 
Is that not the law of mortals?
---
With that sword, however... 
it may not be impossible.
====================================================
W:
Really?!
====================================================
D:
That is, of course, if thou manage 
to accomplish what we asketh.
====================================================
W: 
What do I have to do?
====================================================
D:
Behold the idols that stand along the wall... 
Thou art to destroy all of them.
---
But those idols cannot be destroyed-- <ps3::->
by the mere hands of a mortal...
====================================================
W:
Then what am I to do?
====================================================
D:
In this land, there exist colossi 
that are the incarnations of those idols.
---
If thou defeat 
those colossi-- <ps3::->
---
the idols shall fall.
====================================================
W:
I understand.
====================================================
D:
But heed this, the price you pay
may be heavy indeed.
====================================================
W:
It doesn't matter.
====================================================
D:
Very well...
---
Raise thy sword by the light...
---
and head to the place where
the sword's light gathers...
---
There, thou shalt find the
colossi thou art to defeat.
====================================================

(OK, that is some funny markup … but I’ll leave that here for now.)

some quick thoughts:

  • Dormin itself uses the pluralis majestatis when talking about them, so it is them, after all …
  • Wander straight up asks Dormin whether he’s Dormin, so he must have known at least a few things about him.
  • the german translation sticks close to the english version, but i feel like there are two/three places where i feel that a less literal translation would’ve been closer to the english one.
  • the voice-mix of Dormin sounds better on the PS3, not sure whether this was a deliberate choice in the PS4 port, or an issue with the audio pipeline in the port?
  • new TV has no SCART connector, so i couldn’t check my PS2 version, fffffffff…
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