guess I’ll go play Ico on PCSX2!
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i like how yorda moves so delicately and yet is also obviously taller and probably heavier than ico
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Shadow of the Colossus holds no appeal for me anymore, but I love Ico.
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the part i remember most is late into the game when you fall to the bottom of the castle and have to climb back up from the foundations. it impressed on me how well-realised and monolithic the architecture was. so there’s that to look forward to
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I do remember that being a weakness of The Last Guardian. The space was cool to move around but it made no sense as a contiguous place. A sort of monster-aviary-cum-castle with impossible buildings no human could easily traverse despite there being human-sized stuff everywhere.
Goddang, am I gonna have to actually add Ico to the list now?
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up to you. it’s true that i don’t really feel a need to replay any of these games
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The Ico Disliker has logged on
Yeah I played that game for like an hour, and that was enough for me. I guess I appreciate what it was doing in theory, but playing it just made me feel impatient.
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fwiw stay clear of the NA version, it’s incomplete/rushed for release and there are issues with yorda’s AI and some of the puzzles. the pal version is finished and has a 60hz option on boot that will run at full speed. the ps3 remaster is also really good if you have one of those.
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I had no idea!
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this is really good, better than my post which was just about ueda and miyazaki’s shared foot fetish
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…oh!
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i think it’s really important to contextualize SotC as a thing that came out during the height 3D Zelda games and every other 3D action rpg that attempted to ape its style. SotC offers nothing to me now as game experience, but at the time it was such a breath of fresh air. it was the Zelda game i wanted; mysterious with hints at something deeper (to like, college-aged me, at least).
idk; maybe games are like comedy in that they don’t really age all that well
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yeah i like contextualizing ico similarly: it’s sexist as hell and far from perfect but in 2002 a game that just shut up and delivered itself thru lonely wordless ambiance and strangely affecting character animation was a real breath of fresh air to baby josie trawling the wal-mart $10 bin
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like i get it but as an easily distracted frail ditz with magical powers i kin yorda
also it’s t4t
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I thought I liked the Ico save point music before but spontaneously crying at it rocks
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re: the ICO/SotC discussion i guess i’m reacting to them being positioned in these rapturous tones as Some Of The Most Important Games Of All Time in online game discussion/critique when i had played ICO earlier and it was sorta like “oh yeah that exploration game i played and beat awhile ago that was sorta cool i guess” to me. i never felt this rapturous acclaim a lot of people seem to feel. maybe it’s being around the indie space where everyone seems to hold up those games and make shit like Journey and i just get tired of that mode of game. esp in the day and age in indie where everything in the universe is about art direction and seemingly about nothing else. (though i’ll give both games credit… i like them both way more than Journey, lol). you have to admit that at some level these games are more about the style than anything else.
Shadow of the Colossus in particular, just so many years of people talking about that game i got tired of it. in its time and place i guess i get it (when there weren’t other games like that out there widely available), but i get it less now. i dunno what else to say about it other than it’s like the definition of White Elephant Art to me. anything that screams “i am important art!” and doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about it is something i get suspicious of i guess. i get tired of people talking about the Souls games too but i guess i can at least see how they’re mechanically deep/unique enough to where i can get how they’re games that reward a lot of time/effort. though to be fair a lot of Souls fans are way more vehemently amped up and get angry when you say you don’t really wanna engage with that stuff from my experience than Ueda fans are.
also re: the Yorda relationship in ICO, i guess i find it less overtly sexist and more just like… boring. again i feel like the profundity of that relationship or whatever gets kind of overstated for what is basically a long escort mission (i know it’s less annoying than most escort missions, but that’s really it for me). i guess the cool/kinda weird art direction masks that it’s still kind of “oh no evil goblins want to steal my girlfriend away” though, and that’s part of it. at least be honest about what you are i guess lol. it’s like a pretty lie, and i’m not really someone who is fascinated by that sort of surface. like Kojima has a weird relationship with women but at least many female MGS characters are way more complex and not just a pure archetype.
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I like SotC for the same reason pretty much as hellojed, having actual open space to traverse and then simple, stark places to wander around and gawk at was something that I’d felt few games had done very well before or since – games feel compelled to be as dense as possible in terms of space, probably out of a sense that it’s respecting the time of the player; I remember watching a friend play AC: Black Flag and just being appalled by the concept that you’re out on a ship in the ocean and there’s always like, minimum 2-3 things happening basically right on top of you, it was like this hyper-concentrated delivery system for semiotic pirate content that wound up being completely orthogonal to the seagoing experience and stuff like that just makes me cold.
Comparatively, there’s a ton of stuff in SotC that doesn’t need to be there from a mechanical interaction sense, yet it is subtly there. You can see a tiny copse of trees off in the distance and spend a minute or so riding to it, and then there’s just…some trees, maybe a little creek, and it’s eerily quiet. I could take or leave 99% of what you have to do to advance the game, it’s rare that you get a game that has the restraint to develop that kind of atmosphere and tone and allow it to breathe the way SotC does.
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I think it’s every bit as annoying as most escort missions tbh
(I’m saying this less as a response to you and more as a general observation about the game)
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to be fair, both games (Ico and SotC) are archetypical to the bone (not so sure about LG, have only played that once until now) and it has to be noted that both did not try to be clever with wacky plottwists or other gimmicky gameplay tricks, but are ‘classic’ games in that there is a simple, single goal and not much else. Of course, both can get boring fast, yes.
Also seconding opinion already shared earlier hat Ico is best experienced in 2P coop mode.
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