Shadow of the Colossus is the ultimate style over substance videogame. Enjoy the giant wonderful open world that doesn't have shit all in it other than esoteric collectibles and healing shrines in a videogame where damage heals over time. Enjoy grandiose, epic battles with hulking monstrosities that never become as complex as they maybe should. And then on top of awkward controls, enjoy a camera and a horse whose main function is to wrestle control away from you. While these gripes permeate the game's 7 hour runtime, it's never bad enough to drastically spoil the gameplay experience. Except for the final boss though, that shit blows.

Crash games are basically 2D platformers in a 3D enviornment so it's no surprise that this fairly derivative, fairly competent game manages to come off as a decent enough facsimile of a Crash game. There's some minor control issues and questionable design decisions that make the game play worse (keeping the limited double jump of crash 3 while removing mid air slide jump cancelling) but it's an acceptable portable distraction. Also zoom the camera out ffs uh oh you jump too high now everything's a leap of faith!!!!!!! Wieners.

The game is pretty much every bit of the classic it's made out to be. Aesthetically the game hits on all fronts and it plays well too. Only real issues is it's a tad too short and it tries to make up for it with the inverted castle gimmick and I couldn't be arsed to will my way through it. I also found that by the end of the game it's too easy to be overpowered if you bother to do any exploring and you can fart through most areas with relative ease. I killed the fake final boss in four attacks which is probably the point but also felt like the culmination of my experience with the last couple of areas of the game. None of this matters though because you get to hit giant ghost books with nunchaku.

Pretty neat srpg with an amogus gimmick. The gameplay largely centers around sharing action economy between your characters and chaining attacks so that when one character attack one enemy, all allies in range also attack.

The amogus stuff is also neat, during each chapter you're tasked with snuffing out the random traitor amongst your ranks and every chapter ends with you killing one of your characters you believe to be the traitor. Whenever you kill a character, their skills can be transferred and another character can use them.

The game mainly falters with really weird writing which made me never give a shit about the plot and the actual process of snuffing the traitor out being kind of a crapshoot really. Other than that, game kind of neat!