The Beautiful Mysteries of Shadow of the Colossus

you know i don't 100 games i find that 99 of the time it's just an arbitrary unrewarding grind which threatens to leave a sour taste in my mouth after an otherwise enjoyable experience japanese games in particular tend to be a real pain to 100 requiring you to see literally all the content even as that content was designed to sort of fly under the radar mostly existing for flavor not the whole meal shadow of the colossus is different full spoilers ahead over my recent break from youtube i replayed a bunch of my old favorites and shadow of the colossus was first amongst them i was expecting to sit back with this game for six or seven hours have a nice time and then move on to replaying eco but next thing i knew i had killed each of the 16 colossae at least six times i was on like my third new game plus having played through the game on both hard and normal so that i could get all of the time trial awards and i was well on my way to having every achievement unlocked my grip gauge and health bar were larger than i ever thought possible and i was draining each vital point and literally one sword blow i was routinely one-shotting the final boss this game had me utterly possessed in a way that few other games have for a few days i was the unchallenged master of the forbidden lands so what the hell was it about this game that had me so obsessed it's not the gameplay fun and exciting as it is once you're on your second playthrough of the last couple days this game plays little more than 16 puzzles that you already know the solutions to i don't need to be able to one shot the final boss for it to be easy i already know how to kill it and all of these unlocks just make the process a little quicker it wasn't the promise of bonus content either i knew full well that i wasn't going to unlock a secret cutscene or alternate ending regardless of what i did i knew that there wouldn't be a secret 17th colossus and i knew that there wouldn't be anything substantial waiting for me once i had enough grip strength to reach the secret garden no it was something that went a bit deeper than that something that defines the whole appeal of this game it was the mystery throughout every inch of this world there's this inescapable feeling that some great revelation is hidden just around the next corner only for the most observant players to find something happened here the forbidden lands have a very rich history and there just might be some way of looking at things that sums up most of that history part of why people still go crazy about this game is because we want to figure out what the significance of these rings are whether or not this beach really is the one from the end of eco whether or not this game takes place a thousand years after eco and the last guardian or a thousand years before them a thousand years in between or just a few hours prior on the other side of the globe we want to know what these carvings are all about we want to know if dorman is the same thing as the queen or yorda and nico or the master of the valley and the last guardian we want to know if rico was a colossus we want to know if this game's ending was the beginning of the horn boys we want to know if mano would ever be able to escape the forbidden lands or if we doomed the world in helping dorman or if wonder is cursed beyond redemption there are so so many questions i didn't expect to find many answers and i certainly didn't care about getting a platinum trophy on my scarcely used psn account no i 100 of this game so that i'd be about as close to solving these mysteries as anyone else i found out a couple of small interesting things about this world and its history but i'm not really here to get into the lore so we'll save that for later instead let's forget about all of these grand why am i here questions that were going through my mind as i played and replayed and zoom in a bit on the moment moment experience and try to see how this game kept my attention almost in spite of itself firstly the game is just jaw-droppingly beautiful i'm playing the absolutely amazing remaster made by blue point games but this applies to the original and the ps3 versions too every area has its own distinct atmosphere and feel different foliage subtle changes in the soundscape different sorts of obstacles to navigate your horse aggro around my first task that really required me to interact with this world more than you would on a normal playthrough was to find all of the fruit trees once i'd gotten the map of their locations and eat from them all it was a methodical process of clearing out one sector of the map at a time and bee-lining it to the next tree when i was done but this world was just so beautiful that exploring it and visiting the landmarks that i wouldn't otherwise was a real treat i was finding so many little touches made by the game's environmental artists that i wouldn't have seen in a dozen normal playthroughs everything from realizing that there are turtles and fish in this game to learning that there are all sorts of varieties of fruit to eat to discovering what the community has dubbed the eco beach by this point i had decided that if i could visit any fictional location from a game the forbidden lands would probably be my first choice at some point along my journey i heard a twinkling sound coming at me from somewhere in my room it wasn't my tv i checked my phone confused at the new sound dismissed it as dementia and kept playing the game when i turned the camera however the sound went away and that's when i realized that this sound was coming from my controller's speakers i looked around a little bit in the game trying to find the source of the sound and i eventually stumbled upon this gold coin on the ground that i was able to pick up i put it in the back of my head and resume my fruit hunt but this fine just reinforced the hell out of what i was already feeling a sense that some great revelation was just around the next corner if only i could find it this was the first of my 79 steps towards enlightenment so after i had visited all of the fruit trees and paraded all of the shrines as well as increasing my grip strength by eating a substantial amount of glowing gecko tails i went on to replay the game on normal difficulty so that i could complete the normal time trials and unlock the rest of the secret equipment but even as i had the queen sword the mask of strength the cloth of desperation all of these items that you don't normally get in a play through and was essentially just styling on the colossi there was something else that i needed to do for as long as i'd been playing the game i'd heard that you could climb up to the top of the shrine and reach the garden that you see in the credits and in all my time playing the original version the ps3 version and this ps4 version i've never even gotten close to being able to make this climb on this save file i was about two and a half playthroughs deep by this point but i still didn't have nearly enough grip strength to make the climb without using this one little x point i found to regain my strength halfway through regardless i made it to the secret garden i explored a bit and not to my surprise i found little of note beyond yet another stunning environment and i set off on the journey that motivated this climb in the first place i wanted to make it across the great bridge throughout the entirety of my journey the great bridge was just looming over me it was absolutely massive and intimidating a constant reminder of just how oppressively isolated the forbidden lands are from the rest of the world it may as well be the fabled 17th colossus for how massive and intimidating it is it took several minutes to follow it to its end on the ground where i still have the help of my horse up here though it was just me and my legs and even after that long grueling climb up to the top of the shrine i'd have to spend what felt like 20 minutes crossing the bridge making sure not to take my eyes off the screen for more than a few seconds at a time so that i could be sure that wander didn't well wander off the side of the bridge to his death by the time i made it across i really did feel like the master of the forbidden lands having just tackled its greatest challenge and i was surprised to find that the doors back to civilization were wide open it wouldn't be that easy though trying to leave you'll find that an unnatural wind probably the work of dorman or the shamans prevents you from leaving but way up here at the top of the world something else happened my controller started to make that twinkling sound again i found and grabbed a second coin but i still had no idea what this was all about a firm reminder that i wasn't even close to being the master of this land while i would like to claim that i solved this mystery all on my own anyone who knows about these coins knows that i couldn't possibly have no i looked it up in the credits to the ps4 version of this game you can find a special thanks to nomad colossus and the 79 steps to enlightenment nomad colossus is a fellow youtuber who is as wrapped up in the mysteries of this game as anyone else he's been making content dissecting and speculating on this game for years and it's pretty awesome that he got a shout out in this remaster but it goes deeper than a shout out these 79 steps to enlightenment are actually 79 of these golden coins i'd been playing for about 20 hours or so at this point and i'd only found two of them this is a secret so cryptic that there isn't even an achievement for finding all of the coins but that wasn't going to stop me clearly this game still had some things to show me that i'd never seen before these 79 steps to enlightenment weren't in the original two releases of this game this was something new for the ps4 remaster myself as an avid purist was kind of dismissive of these 79 steps to enlightenment at first whatever they led to they were not part of famito ueda's original vision but they were an opportunity to truly explore every inch of this world and so i loaded up a map of the coin locations marked off the two that i had already found and i got to work here's a map i made that almost accurately shows my route for some context of the scale i'll write aggro in a straight line from here to here and show how long it took this was rolling on top of following the map to track down the locations of each of the steps to enlightenment i had to actually find the coins some were obvious a couple were pretty well hidden and some were so covert that i absolutely had to read a more detailed guide on how to find them like this one you need to go up to colossus 14 have him lift you up onto this platform climb up the structure then jump down here you'll need to make sure that you've beaten 14 of the colossi in hard time attack mode to unlock the cloth of desperation then you'll need to spam deploy it over and over to make sure that you reach far enough to get to this platform then you need to do it again to get over this wall climb into this mysterious vent the technological implications of which add even more to the mystery of this world and you'll find the coin somewhere around here annoyingly you can't get this coin in time attack or reminiscence mode you'll game over if you get this far away from the colossus so you have to do it during the natural encounter over the main progression of the game since this is the 14th colossus and you need to have beaten 14 colossi in hard time attack mode to get the parachute this means that you can't possibly get this coin unless you play this game at least twice then of course you've got the coin by the door at the end of the bridge and this one which you'll have to cross half the bridge to get to in the first place meaning you'll need grip strength to be nearly maxed out just to climb up the shrine and get to these coins there's another one where you have to jump off of avion at the perfect moment to land on this structure and another where you need to get dirged to destroy this one rock to reveal a coin and another where you have to climb all of these nonchalant rocks and then up this way there's two on the eco beach and one in the extremely well hidden last guardian cave another addition that wasn't there in the original release of the game long story short you're going to have to figure out every single trick these devs could think of and explore every inch of this beautiful world do maternal on nightmare mgs3 foxhound rank with minimum tranqs the sans fights high rank cs go blood on extra crispy half-life with only a crowbar i've done some really hard things in games but i don't think anything i've done in any game has come close to the level of dedication and in a way obsession that this task required after all of that i was finally able to unlock the secret passage and acquire the sword of dorman literally nothing in this game is even remotely challenging anymore i can one shot every vital point with only a slightly charged stab or a quick jump stab if the conditions are right but let's be real having the queen sword unlocked from beating all of the time trials combined with max health and grip strength already made all of the actual colossus fights trivial i was master of the colossi long before i set off to follow the 79 steps to enlightenment so what did i really get from this journey as i said before there wasn't any achievement for doing this well when i first decided to replay the game i saw a shadow of the colossus as this really exciting puzzle action game where a brilliant combination of game mechanics narrative decisions world building music and some camera angle magic brought this really interesting series of emotions to what wouldn't otherwise just be an action game with a unique gimmick now at the end of my journey i'm never going to look at this game the same way again shadow of the colossus has become this expansive jaw-droppingly varied and at the same time desolate world it's this huge place where you're just one tiny blip and all around you are things that you can't quite understand these vents really bring into question what level of technology the past inhabitants of this land we're working with are the colossi just chimera half flesh half machine are they robots magical robots why were there 79 steps to enlightenment instead of 80 or 100 i just don't know however this huge mysterious world can be mastered what happens to wander over the course of this game is tragic he and mano are doomed to exist in this land until they die but just as wander submits to his fate and lets himself be consumed by dorman's darkness to save mano i had submitted to the mystery i submitted to the fact that i would never be able to fully piece together the puzzle and believe me i've tried on this very channel this journey taught me to lean into it and just let the mystery wash over me i learned to love the mystery rather than seek the answers in a way mano is a perfect analog for the forbidden lands wonder would give everything to save mono and i would give whatever time this journey took for me to find all of the puzzle pieces just as wonder wouldn't live long enough at least in his normal state to see mano breathe again i doubt i'll live long enough to put all of these puzzle pieces together and really know what happened in the forbidden lands but that's okay this story doesn't really have a happy ending per se it's one of those love the journey not the destination things sure it was grueling in the moment and at times a bit boring but looking back on it just a couple weeks later i think that combing through the forbidden lands and following the 79 steps to enlightenment is going to go down as one of my favorite gaming memories that excitement of seeing what was around the next corner never really ran out i wasn't just filling out a checklist i was exploring and i could have stopped at any point and not lost anything tangible but i just didn't want to this place even well before the ps4 remaster has always captivated me and i finally buckled down and decided to master it and you know what it didn't take me getting the sword of dorman to feel damn good about finishing this journey that beautiful mystery in and of itself was its own reward [Music] [Music] [Music] room [Music] before i close out this week's video and get to writing about get this clicker games i'd like to go ahead and verbally thank my patrons especially those who are donating ten dollars or more monthly such as ada avery almost dead again anatoly volnov andrew melman and juan de guette benny big time jim bobby blitz cj keane chompy oo-woo christopher pinar colin gaijin cosmo borsky darius fazier david kaiser denis voshakimer dominic johann duncan bristow fralem guiles backers idubbbz ijk jack eisenberg jano kale graybill crit laffy mellow mixer rules neurofilter pj raptor ryan webster robert scotty from marketing ceelo tanman vivian cox william t kinvo yemen she zoe nish zyroblee and sylvia stupidly i forgot to include this in the love letter to source engine video but i would also like to point out that i do actually have a team fortress 2 server now if anyone's interested in playing on that you can look for lead heads castle in the community server browser or you can find the ip in the description below thanks for watching

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 156,729

Keywords: Shadow, Colossus, PS4, remaster, remake, secret, sword, of, forming, analysis, dormin, ending, explained, essay, converging, points, intersecting

Id: tZ4M4briDQg

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021