Idle Forums Game Club 2 - Shadow of the Colossus edition

[The Claw]

Been reading this thread and thought I'd chime in with a couple of tips for the frustrated. It's been a while since I played the game so these points are vague, but here goes.

As people have found you can jump onto the horse by holding the grip button. You can stand up on the horse, and hang from its side. You can also use the bow from the standing position, which is bad-ass.

Don't obsess over steering the horse around, it's generally much better to just let him take care of it, he will avoid obstacles and colossi automatically for the most part so you keep moving and fall off less. This is really useful when you're scoping out a colossus for the first time because you can focus on locking on and firing arrows or shining your sword beam on him.

Pull back on the left stick and hit X from a stand-still to make your horse dash. This looks cool and gets you the fuck out of a bad situation. Once he's saved your sorry butt, put your weapon away and pet him with circle.

Mashing triangle makes you recover consciousness faster if you get knocked out.

You can charge and direct your jumps while gripping. Jump-charging is generally a much faster way to get around a colossus than just climbing, and uses less stamina.

Put your sword away when climbing around a colossus. If you have your sword in your hand you find yourself dangling by the other hand, unable to move.

Be super patient and don't go on a collectathon unless you have completed the game on normal.

[elmuerte]

Finished the 4th one. 50% of my time was spend on fighting the camera.

[tegan]

Fourth Colossus (Phaedra) thoughts:

THIS IS PHAEDRUS PHAEDRA

Phaedra is the first colossus that I remember finding annoying. I usually have a difficult time with at least one point in this fight. Usually it's a trigger issue; getting the thing to actually kneel down and look in the tomb. Sometimes it's just hanging onto its head while it spends way too long trying to shake me off. This time it was a really weird one: it was entirely too dark to see inside the tomb. At first I thought it was just the lighting in the apartment or something, but even after shutting the curtains, all I could see was pure black. The good news is that everything else went off without a hitch. I got it to kneel almost immediately, had little trouble climbing to its head, and somehow landed on that sweet spot on its sigil where no matter how much Phaedra moves around it couldn't even budge me. I just kept charging up and stabbing over and over, and it went down within a minute of me climbing onto it. Probably the fastest finish I've had yet. ...Makes me wish I had have been playing in Time Attack mode.

Next time: saddest colossus!

[syntheticgerbil]

I finished colossus 4. Not sure if I really have anything to say, I didn't seem to have any hang ups or confusion whatsoever besides getting on in the first place. After jumping to the giant's legs from my horse multiple times and missing, a hint thingy popped up and told me to get underground. It all worked out from there. No frustration.

Put your sword away when climbing around a colossus. If you have your sword in your hand you find yourself dangling by the other hand, unable to move.

Shit! I wish I had known that earlier!

Be super patient and don't go on a collectathon unless you have completed the game on normal.

Too late, collectathon's over.

[Thrik]

Did you find the secret snails that aren't listed anywhere?

[syntheticgerbil]

Is it not enough for you that I found some turtles?!

[elmuerte]

Wait... you can do something with those turtles?

[Sno]

If you collect enough turtles, you can fashion them into a shield.

[syntheticgerbil]

Did I actually see turtles? I'm beginning to think that was a dream.

[elmuerte]

It's Tuesday, so we can hunt for the 5th...

I don't really feel like it yet.

[Erkki]

I did it a couple of days ago, and the 5th -- sorry, I don't know their names -- was the most enjoyable for me so far. Finding it seemed to go even a bit too quickly, although I did stop to collect a stamina lizard. At first I was a bit unsure how to get close enough to it to shine my sword on it, or even how to approach it, but then the hint played. It would have been perfect if the hint did not play so soon in this case.

With this one you also have the mild annoyance of slowly swimming once you fall, but you can at least choose from a few places to swim to, and what I liked most about it -- getting onto the damned thing was straightforward. I don't like the parts where you try to puzzle out what kind of position you need the colossus to be in to get on, so it was good that with this one you could predictably get back on it when you fell, even if it took a bit of swimming.

I didn't actually find the main weak point before I was on it, so that was a bit of a challenge to do without slipping off, but holding on and attacking that one was quite simple. The difficult part came with the other weak points

which were on the tips of the wings in Normal. Fell off several times when trying to get those, but as I said it wasn't at all frustrating to get back on.

Of course, it could have also been that why I didn't get frustrated with this one was just because I was in a better mood while playing it, or something.

[syntheticgerbil]

How are we supposed to know their names anyway? Am I missing a little introduction subtitle?

[tegan]

Most characters' names only ever appear in peripheral material like the manual. I have no idea why. I'm guessing because it wasn't considered important enough, considering how conservatively applied the dialogue is.

For anyone who wants to know all of them:

The protagonist: Wander (obvious)

The girl: Mono (also pretty obvious)

The horse: Agro (most plausible root is Latin for "acre")

The voice: Dormin (Reverse of "Nimrod," Biblical king of Shinar; means "hunter")

The chief: Lord Emon (possibly named for 9th-century Japanese religious pilgrim Emon Saburo)

The first Colossus: Valus (Estonian for "painful")

The second Colossus: Quadratus (Latin root "square." Refers to approximately square muscles and also means quarry. Can mean "magic" in Spanish)

The third Colossus: Gaius ( "Rejoice" in Latin, probably comes from "Gaia" for earth. Also Julis Caesar's first name)

The fourth Colossus: Phaedra (derived from "phaedros," Greek for "bright." Also the name of a character from Greek myth)

The fifth Colossus: Avion (from "avis," Latin for "bird." "Avion" is French for "airplane")

The sixth Colossus: Barba ("beard" in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian)

The seventh Colossus: Hydrus (Constellation in the southern sky whose name literally means "male water snake." Pretty straightforward)

The eighth Colossus: Kuromori ("Black forest" in Japanese. I think that it's named after a beta area that it was supposed to originally appear in, because otherwise it makes no sense)

The ninth Colossus: Basaran (Basque for "darkness")

The tenth Colossus: Dirge (mournful or eulogistic song, pulled from a Latin quote)

The eleventh Colossus: Celosia (scientific name for the edible plants known as "woolflowers." Comes from the Latin "kelos," meaning "burned."

The twelfth Colossus: Pelagia (A whole bunch of crap, but probably named after either the saint or the jellyfish)

The thirteenth Colossus: Phalanx (a close-together group of people. Also the singular of "phalanges," as in the bones of a finger or toe)

The fourteenth Colossus: Cenobia (Spanish variant of "Zenobia," meaning "life of Zeus." A girl's name)

The fifteenth Colossus: Argus (Latinized version of Greek "Argos," could mean one of a million things)

The sixteenth Colossus: Malus (Latin for "evil")

[Sno]

It was my understanding that the names of the colossi were first revealed in a Japanese art book that was produced to detail the game's development.

On the topic, is Wander's name ever actually said in the game? Is Mono's? Is Dormin's? (I feel like i heard Dormin's name mentioned somewhere, but i don't think anybody ever says Wander's or Mono's name aloud.)

Agro's is obvious, you hear Wander yell it every time you call for Agro. (I love how conditional those barks are, the tone of the call is constantly shifting to suit the situation.)

[tegan]

Dormin and Lord Emon are named in-game and Agro's name is called out loud, but no other names are given.

[Luftmensch]

Am I the only one thinking that the plot of the buddy-cop movie Shadow and Colossus will feature the third colossus as an anonymous insider informant?

Eddie Murphy as Colossus the wise-cracking cop horse has a dark past in the Colossus syndicate. When they get an anonymous tip, and Colossus gets sent in on the job, it turns out it was his brother Phaedrus who made the calls and it was all a setup to get revenge for betraying the family

[syntheticgerbil]

I checked the manual scans of the PS2 version of Shadow of the Colossus, since my HD collection one is pretty bare, but it doesn't say the bosses names. It would have been pretty neat for those to appear at the bottom when they are introduced.

Also, the original manual does detail the horse controls, so they aren't that secret.

[The Claw]

Shit! I wish I had known that earlier!

I should have made clear that putting your sword away doesn't completely eliminate the chance that you'll lose grip on one hand when the colossus shakes around like a crazy man, but it does make it harder for him to shake you loose and gets you re-attached quicker if you do lose grip. It makes those situations where you're just constantly getting detached over and over less common.

[youmeyou]

Finished the third fourth and fifth in a row to get caught up. Took me a little over an hour.

Third:

Yep, fuck this guy. Everything about this entire encounter is counter intuitive. I've already played this one before the games club and still had to do the jump something like 5 times before nailing it. You basically have to be on he very last pixel of the platform before hitting jump otherwise you don't catch the weird scripting that pushes your character to the right spot to catch the ledge. The actual colossus fight took much longer than any before or after. Mainly because everything took forever: getting him to strike at you from a distance, getting him to break his shield, hitting his head, getting to his midsection. I fell off many, many times and was extremely glad when it was over.

Fourth:

An easy one once you figure out the ducking thing. When I first played this guy it took me quite a while to figure out what to do. Ultimately my friends watching me told me the hint, so I can't really speak to how solvable it is.

Fifth:

My favorite colossus yet! Beautiful design for one thing, really love how it works as an animal as well as it does as a platform. As was mentioned, accessing the colossus makes great intuitive sense. Running around on the wings is exhilarating and challenging and you don't get penalized very heavily for falling off. I hope this model is a precedent for upcoming colossi.

[tegan]

Fifth Colossus (Avion) Thoughts:

If Gaius is the first time I feel bad for killing a colossus, Avion is probably the worst I've ever felt for killing one. Everything about it is peaceful and majestic. It does absolutely nothing to bother you until you start threatening it, and the serene music that accompanies it before you clamber onto it is my favourite in the game. Watching such a beautiful creature come crashing down to the earth just breaks my heart every time.

...On the other hand, this is another one of those times when I wish I had been playing in Time Attack, because I absolutely wrecked shop. I don't think I've ever killed it without falling off even once before.

Some interesting tutorialization stuff for this one: Note that a player is required to dive to enter this area. I presume that this is to teach the player that diving is faster than swimming so that they don't get as frustrated when they fall off of Avion's body and have to swim back to a platform. I also noticed that this is the first time that the most direct route to a colossus will yield a fruit tree (and one with an unusually high crop at that), so maybe that was supposed to introduce the player to the upgrade system as well.

I grabbed my first fruit for this playthrough this time. I think I'll only grab upgrades like this if they're within eyeshot of the path I'm taking.

Next time: most endearingly goofy colossus!

[tegan]

It's Tuesday and I'm in the mood for killing beautiful things!

Sixth Colossus (Barba) Thoughts:

I love Barba's beard and the way it crouches down to peek at you. It makes the fight feel like kind of a goofy cartoon thing to me. That being said, I forgot how much of a shaker Barba is. It took me three tries to get on there and stay there. Maybe it's to compensate for how easy it is to actually get onto it. Also, I tried something new this time. Instead of climbing down the big panel that Barba hides behind, I just ran out to one of the ledges in front of it and jumped down instead. It didn't give me as much of a head start as I would have hoped. Also, this is the first time that the camera actively worked against me, since it likes to cut and pan back to the colossus while you're running to the shelter area, but also leaves you in control of your character at the same time.

Next time: most stamina-draining colossus!

[elmuerte]

yeah... I'm running behind, still haven't finished off the 5th

[syntheticgerbil]

I might have to drag until the next one and do two in a day. My idiotic boss doesn't know how to count days in my original scheduling so I have a lot of work to do to catch up to his changed times.

[youmeyou]

I did 3-5 in an hour so it's pretty easy to catch up if you ever fall behind.

[miffy495]

Yeah, I still need to do 4 and 5. School kicked in and devastated my playin' time, as predicted.

EDIT: An hour later, 4 and 5 are done! Decided to man up, sit on my couch, and kill something majestic. After how frustrated I was with colossus number 3, I'm glad that this thread guilted me back into the game. I probably would have called it at 3 otherwise, saying "wow, that game was once amazing but aged really poorly" and left it at that. After offing colossus 5, I'm now completely back in. I'd forgotten how exhilarating that one was. I'll probably have a chance to kill number 6 on Sunday afternoon, so that's the current plan. Feelin' good.