This review contains spoilers
I cannot believe how long it took me to play this. The world, the music, the visuals; it's all stunningly beautiful. The sense of scale is amazing, you never feel big in this forbidden land of giants.
The story - while a lot of it happens in the closing chapter, is fairly easy to follow. Boy brings his lover and/or sister to be resurrected, the Powers that Be are like "hmmm okay, but if you kill these Colossi first." So you do that, but oh no! It was all a trick! Or was it? Because while it turns out you were helping a Satanic force, the girl was resurrected in the end. Pretty interesting stuff, though!
The gameplay itself is ALMOST perfect. The horse controls like glue, and sometimes jumping is a pain in the ass (it feels like a LOT of the difficulty comes from the poor camera and controls rather than actual boss fight difficulty) but other than that, nearly every fight against these Colossi feels rewarding and a constant uphill David vs Goliath battle that's pretty great.
My only real complaint other than the controls and Agro being a pain in my ass at points, is that it felt like the quality of the boss fights went down after a certain point and the methods to beat a lot of the Colossi started to become the same. There were one or two underwhelming boss designs in general (one being a near exact copy of another). It felt like there was some fat needing trimmed in the middle, because it did get repetitive at times.
But yeah! It's great, other than those complaints. Glad I finally decided to give it a whirl, and the ending makes me want to potentially give Ico a shot, since it seems like I became Ico or something at the end of the game, lmao.
The story - while a lot of it happens in the closing chapter, is fairly easy to follow. Boy brings his lover and/or sister to be resurrected, the Powers that Be are like "hmmm okay, but if you kill these Colossi first." So you do that, but oh no! It was all a trick! Or was it? Because while it turns out you were helping a Satanic force, the girl was resurrected in the end. Pretty interesting stuff, though!
The gameplay itself is ALMOST perfect. The horse controls like glue, and sometimes jumping is a pain in the ass (it feels like a LOT of the difficulty comes from the poor camera and controls rather than actual boss fight difficulty) but other than that, nearly every fight against these Colossi feels rewarding and a constant uphill David vs Goliath battle that's pretty great.
My only real complaint other than the controls and Agro being a pain in my ass at points, is that it felt like the quality of the boss fights went down after a certain point and the methods to beat a lot of the Colossi started to become the same. There were one or two underwhelming boss designs in general (one being a near exact copy of another). It felt like there was some fat needing trimmed in the middle, because it did get repetitive at times.
But yeah! It's great, other than those complaints. Glad I finally decided to give it a whirl, and the ending makes me want to potentially give Ico a shot, since it seems like I became Ico or something at the end of the game, lmao.