Eighteen years on and Shadow of the Colossus remains my platonic ideal of triple-A gaming: it's spectacle-driven but not cinematic, it's broadly appealing but not dumbed down, and, most importantly, it uses its budget not to simply refine or increase the scope of an existing experience, but to deliver an entirely new one. My PS2 audibly groans while running this game, the framerate slows to a crawl if I move the camera around too quickly, and the environmental pop-in is too frequent to ignore, but I don't see these things as technical faults, instead as the signatory of hardware being pushed to its absolute limits in trying to accommodating a game that, on a conceptual level, was unimaginable a single console generation prior. But a great concept means nothing without great execution, so it works out nicely that taking down a colossus is still one of the most satisfying feelings in video games as a whole. Utilizing your rigid movement to maneuver across the back of a creature a thousand times your size, risking letting go for just a moment to preserve your stamina, narrowly avoiding getting shaken off, and then plunging your sword deep into its Achilles heel while that magnificent orchestra plays in the background... unmatched. And yet, at times, what's most impressive to me about Shadow of the Colossus is its restraint. Considering Ico was pretty much restraint incarnate, that statement sounds ironic, but the connotation of your controller's rumble shifting from clinging onto another's hand to clinging onto a gargantuan monster for dear life should tell you that the two have almost nothing in common besides their developer. Ico was a puzzle game where nothing felt like a puzzle, and Shadow of the Colossus is an action game where every encounter feels like it has a clean-cut solution, which is the point. I can imagine that, during development, it was tempting to give every colossus an epic-sounding name and have it appear in big, bold lettering before each fight, to paint them as ultra-powerful gods, to make them capable of arena-clearing attacks. Considering nearly every boss in video game history is crafted with one singular goal in mind- to be intimidating- it's incredibly bold for a game solely composed of boss fights to go in the complete opposite direction. Despite the size advantage it never feels like you're the underdog, but, rather, the inverse- that the colossi don't have the necessary tools to deal with you. Aside from the very last one, they're characterized less like ancient, mythical beings, and more like livestock unaware they're in line to be slaughtered. You could argue that tracking down the colossi in the overworld should be more involved, but I'd contend that having a magical sword point all of them out for you is a good capstone of the unfair advantage you have over them as a whole. Every fight has least one major revelation that's a joy to figure out (who could forget your first time jumping onto number five's wings directly instead of avoiding its swoop, seeing the red eyes of number ten emerge from the sand, or goading number twelve into revealing its underbelly?) but that also reinforces that you're simply above these creatures, that the only shadow they cast over you is in the most literal sense possible. It's a beautiful theme, and it often even makes you question why you're doing what you're doing... which just makes the ending that much more disappointing. Dormin's dialog was already a problem just considering the indefensible mid-battle hints, but he takes it to another level following number sixteen's defeat, and I blame Shadow of the Colossus's (comparatively) high amount of exposition for the fact that Ico better captures my imagination. What's frustrating is that Wander potentially being in the moral wrong is communicated entirely through gameplay, but we're still given a concrete reason as to why he should regret slaying the colossi. Maybe I'm being harsh, but I feel like this was the starting point for the modern trend of chastising the player for their in game actions, of games employing talking skeletons and men in chicken masks to tell you that you should feel bad instead of actually making you feel bad. But to focus on the ending is to take away from a landmark experience, from one of the most evidently great games out there. In a just world we'd see consistent, high-budget releases from game designers with a even a fraction of Ueda's visionary talent, but in our cold reality, gaming can only live in his shadow.