Finally got around to playing this, and I feel very conflicted about it. I first played Ico last year and it quickly became one of my favorite games, despite some shortcomings in its gameplay. Unfortunately, it seems like team ico didn't really learn anything from Ico's issues, and this game has just as awkward controls and movement. In fact, since Shadow of the Colossus has so much more of a focus on gameplay than Ico does, its awkwardness is much more prominent. My playthrough took seven hours, and I'd say that probably an hour or two was wasted on either the game's controls messing up, or on some questionable game design.
I’d say that for probably around half of the colossi, it took me multiple minutes to understand what I was supposed to do, or to figure out how to execute it. I’m kind of stupid, so I’ll take the blame for some of the issues I had in this game, but I doubt that at least a few of my problems weren’t shared by a lot of other players. In some cases, I just resorted to looking up the answer, which really sucked. I feel like this game does so much right to create a really good flow state when you’re battling a colossus, but it got halted in its tracks so often and pulled me out of the experience. It was really unfortunate that this also happened in the final battle.
Regardless, a lot of the battles went really well. When I was able to understand what I was supposed to do in a reasonable amount of time and the controls didn’t mess me up, I completely loved the game. At times, the flow state that I was put in was essentially perfect: when the gameplay, art design, and of course, the incredible music combine properly, I can’t really find the words to describe how great it is. It makes me understand why this game is so beloved by so many people. Especially if you originally played this back in 2005, (the year I was born) I imagine it was even more impressive and powerful.
To touch on the story a little, I don’t have too much to say besides it is just as quality as the story in Ico, a prime example of “less is more.” One huge flaw of current day games is that so many of them commit the awful storytelling flaw of explaining everything about their world and making everything boring. Games like Shadow of the Colossus and Ico have scripts the size of one of the dozens of lore entries in other games like Death Stranding, but do so much more with it. There is clearly so much history in the forgotten lands, but the player is expected to fill in the gaps by themself, making them just as important in crafting the story as the developers. I feel like that creativity on behalf of the consumer is something that an interactive experience especially makes sense to strive for.
Shadow of the Colossus isn’t perfect, but it does enough things perfectly to deserve its reputation.

Después de jugar ICO hace poco me dieron ganas de volver a Shadow of the colosus para así tener frescas ciertas ideas, fue una experiencia muy interesante y creo que tengo una pequeña conclusión que a lo mejor le interesa a alguien. Lo que hace especial a este juego son los pequeños detalles que hacen sentir vivos a los colosos, cosas como que sus ojos cambien de color cuando se sientan amenazados o que algunos no busquen atacarte directamente sino espantarte como el segundo coloso que no presenta mucha resistencia, se sienten como animales reales y hay muy pocos videojuegos que te hagan sentir eso , en un juego como Assassin's creed 3 por ejemplo matar a un animal es cosa de presionar un par de botones y siempre obtienes una recompensa por ello en forma de pieles que puedes vender o usar a tu conveniencia para crear bolsas por ejemplo, son simplemente objetos para usar a tu conveniencia sin prestar mucha atención a su comportamiento, no se sienten reales, aquí es diferente los colosos se mueven erraticamente cuando te montas en ellos tratando de zafarse de tí y algunos como el decimocuarto coloso se asustan cuando tienen poca vida, ese tipo de pequeños detalles y lo laborioso que es acabar con algunos de ellos les da importancia y los hace sentir como seres reales, ¿Es que otro juego sientes que estás matando animales reales?. Sin embargo el juego a veces puede ser un poco artificial arruinando el sentimiento de inmersión, el decimosegundo coloso por ejemplo, para derrotarlo debes hacer que se suba en unas plataformas altas para que así deje expuesto su punto débil, el problema es que tienes que hacer esto varias veces y se siente artificial que el coloso haga 4 veces un movimiento que a todas luces pone en peligro su supervivencia sin ningún motivo y no es algo exclusivo de este coloso, para con algunos otros y rompe por completo la inmersión , afortunadamente solo son un puñado de colosos los que se sienten artificiales y no es algo que destruya por completo al juego. Shadow of the colosus es un buen juego, dan ganas de perderse en su basto mundo vacío simplemente por el mero gusto de hacerlo, es un juego hermoso y al igual que ICO seguiré pensando en el en un futuro, no es un juego perfecto pero se quedará en mi memoria por un largo tiempo, es bueno estar devuelta

totally understand why this is put on such a pedestal and works for so many people but i really don't think it's for me. the bosses are pretty hit or miss to me, with many of them having solutions i could easily understand, but couldn't easily execute on. the prime example i'd say is the 15th colossus, where you can clearly tell you're supposed to climb up the sides of the arena, and you can clearly tell you're supposed to get it to dislodge rocks you can see in the ceiling, but the game is overly specific about where you need to be to do so, leading to the player kind of just trial and erroring the correct position. it's far from bad boss design, but it makes the limitations of the game very obvious, which is a feeling i had all over SOTC. i assume a lot of people probably played this on the PS3 remaster or on a non-hardware accurate emulator, because woo boy this game has very noticeable performance issues. i normally don't complain about this sort of thing, but drops are constant, sometimes just being the result of moving the camera around. i get the feeling that this wouldn't be considered shippable today. the lighting is also a great idea that gives a lot of emotional weight... but the implementation leads to the player being unable to see where they're going or what they're doing a lot of the time. the atmosphere is still gorgeous, but ico also had gorgeous atmosphere and felt far more complete and considered than this, to me.