I feel like every ounce of goodwill I once had for these games was the result of stockholm syndrome and peer pressure.

Every attempted playthrough—including subsequent playthroughs—takes multiple false starts to actually get going. And by the time I'm used to the fiddly-ass control schemes—acceptable in a stealth context—the games arbitrarily decide they want to be regular action games. And I just have to grit my teeth and think of England.

That's actually selling it short. From the first Metal Gear solid through the second part of the fourth, where I gave up, there is a near constant bait-and-switch with regard to which mechanics are present, which are relevant, which moves are acceptable and which are discouraged, in a way that seemingly follows no diegetic or non-diegetic logic, nothing other than sheer caprice.

MGS3 is the best one by default because it has the most maps that are actually designed around the one gameplay style the best mechanics are sort of good for. There's even a good boss fight—the one you can, you know, sneak up on—unless of course you know to cheese it or skip it entirely.

Because I last played the HD remasters, I almost forgot about the awful top-down camera present in the original games. This was likely enforced by technical limitations of the PS1, but I should not have to explain why this camera, so low the ground, is suboptimal at best in these maps and for a gameplay style that is highly sensitive to situational awareness (granted the radar is something of a sop for that), especially egregious by the third game when the maps are even bigger and more open. I—regrettably—played through the original version of MG3, and later found the over-the-shoulder camera present in new versions to be a vast improvement, that is until the inevitable parts where you have to awkwardly switch to first-person mode. The solution is clearly to make the whole game first-person and really just make a Thief game instead, but then people would complain they can't see stuff behind Snake's back (despite that being a more sane and interesting limitation) or his sexy, sexy 3D model.

I hate the plots, the characters, and the narrative conventions of these games. I'm not a complete snob, I'll happily watch dumb action movies with the droogs, but when I'm sitting on my own ass, by myself, with no one beside me with whom to laugh quite likely AT not WITH the proceedings, I'm more inclined to smash that start button. It seems that the majority of "serious" videogame stories (by which I suppose I mean games with "themes" people like to write essays about) are pitched at teenagers at best, and Kojima's games are no exception. It doesn't help that when he tries to articulate something that isn't a sex or power fantasy or simply a goof, he does it in the most patronizing manner imaginable, or that a nontrivial number of people think that because they heard about a concept in a Kojima game, Kojima must have pioneered it. I have to wonder, are we really holding one of our "greatest" videogame "auteurs" to such low standards? Are we really holding OURSELVES to such low standards? Fuck it, I'll let you nerds figure it out and stick with ludogames myself.

The one thing about these games I respect in the abstract is the wealth of easter eggs, even if they are a sort of harmless emanation of the aforementioned caprice, and of course the personality of the auteur.

Putting aside my distaste for this personality, suffice it to say that at a basic, formal level, I'm just not buying what he's selling. I came across a quote from Kojima once—I'm not bothering to find it again so I'll just paraphrase—that he sees videogames as akin to art galleries. The contents of a gallery are not necessarily governed by a single unifying principle, and even if they are they have room for a great level of disjunction, and they're probably better for it. I couldn't disagree more with this comparison, but I'm happy that it works for you.

It's a great game, but I wouldn't bother to write the nth review of it if I didn't want to dispute some of the reasons people cite for its greatness.

Minimalism, or "design by subtraction"? This is pure ad copy. Sure, the game is "minimal" in some sense compared to certain action games, but it is far more complex than many others. The central concepts of the game impose unique problems on the designers and programmers that most simply do not have to deal with. No "minimalist" is putting this much effort into friendly AI systems and procedural animation.

The "perfect marriage of narrative and gameplay"? Is this particular marriage more perfect than Doom? Please.

What compels me is the game's balance. Vast open spaces that invite lingering and sightseeing, but that ultimately funnel you into a linear sequence of set-piece battles. The former is apparently empty, but actually contains tiny and often trivial details that many will miss (again, "minimalist"?), and at every level strives for a sense of naturalism; the latter, the bosses, despite being rendered in the same style as the monumental architecture found elsewhere, are certainly gamey, outfitted with stone platforms that seemingly have no other purpose than to invite climbing—many of them even look like balconies. The basic forms of movement open to the player are at play in both halves. They are distributed unevenly—exploring tends to involve riding the horse while fighting tends to involve climbing—but this is sometimes reversed, to memorable effect. And as the game progresses, these halves increasingly merge as the colossi become overgrown ruins and their arenas become new areas to visit: an optional but worthwhile ritual.

I have no quibble with any praise of the horse, Argo. When the player rides Argo, they are not controlling a horse, they are controlling a character who is riding a horse. The sense of companionship the game fosters here is more subtle and more effective than what Ico achieves with Yorda. She and Argo are both characters the player must guide and "use" in some sense, but while Yorda is essentially a damsel in distress the player must jerk around by the wrist and occasionally position in order to solve one of the game's rote puzzles, Argo is a creature the player must implicitly rely upon in order to overcome several of the game's challenges. And Argo can be relied upon. Coming back to the game after many years, I was impressed with how well this worked, especially in comparison to the player character's animation which sometimes unintentionally plays havoc with control (here I don't mean the player's grip, which is fine), and especially the game's abysmal camera, which always seems to want to pan to the "perfect" cinematic angle.

If I have problems with the design of Shadow of the Colossus, it's that I am increasingly suspicious of the impulse to immerse oneself in naturalistic digital landscapes when there are, uh, analog landscapes to be immersed in and, moreover, to be responsible for—and which are increasingly degraded. I'm also not terribly impressed with the ending's bait-and-switch: surely, if the quest turned out to be this great sin, perhaps making the process of fulfilling it so exciting creates a problematic system of intrinsic rewards? Maybe it's because the fantastical setting makes this situation feel less exploitive than, say, Spec Ops: The Line, or maybe it's because the overall package is so effective and apparently unique, but I'm willing to forgive.

Or maybe it's simply that this theme is so unobtusive: explicit in only one of the two 30 minute cutscenes that bookend the game, which in itself "says" almost nothing so much as it invites the player to certain kinds of experience, which they can accept, or not.