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Why Everyone Hates It: I have yet to encounter anyone who has disliked Shadow of the Colossus. It is however a game a great many people have ignored on the believe that it consists of nothing more than a handful of boss battles scattered around a big empty field.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: It is, in fact, true that Shadow of the Colossus consists of nothing but equal parts fighting the game's 16 bosses, and traveling to the next boss across a sprawling field devoid of any other monsters.
Why I Like It Anyway: First and foremost, it needs to be said that Shadow of the Colossus is absolutely gorgeous. The entire game features this unique, moody visual style which is just absolutely jaw-droppingly amazing, and really makes one wonder why the only other game on the PS2 to achieve such astounding visuals is Ico, the game to which this is a prequel. The use of lighting in particular, and realistic fur effects for such low polygon count models really stand out. So while it is true that a rather significant portion of the game is spent riding your horse through open wilderness looking for the next boss to be fought, the terrain is such wonderful eye candy that it's worth taking in for its own sake. The variety and detail is particularly impressive when one realizes just how much effort is put into the huge portions of the world which one really has no reason to ever explore for anything other than exploration's sake.
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The way the game presents its story is also deserving of mention here. Generally, when one declares that a game has an excellent story, they refer to the various plot twists and witty lines of dialog which might exist in a game, likely an RPG with an excessively long script. Shadow of the Colossus however is one of those rare games at the opposite end of the spectrum, portraying a fairly simple story, but in a very subtextual, immersive, wordless fashion. Ico of course uses a similar approach, as does Super Metroid, and to a lesser extent the Silent Hill series. Without going into too much detail, the nameless main character travels to a huge ruined tower in the middle of a stark, empty valley to strike a bargain with a god to bring a girl back to life, in exchange for slaying the various colossi spread throughout the area. As you do so, it becomes increasingly apparent that this isn't the wisest course of action, as not only does it seems to be having an increasingly negative effect on the protagonist's health, but a fair number of the colossi come off as decidedly gentle and peaceful.
This of course brings us to the real meat of the game. The amazing set piece battles. In order to reach each boss, one generally covers the bulk of the distance by riding a horse with fairly impressive animation and a strong sense of self-preservation. Upon getting closer, in a fair number of cases, one must dismount, and set about climbing around on cliffs and through ruins, with the same sort of platforming adventure controls found in games like Ico, the Prince of Persia games, Oddworld, Flashback, and so forth. Upon finally reaching a colossus and attracting its attention, the bulk of the battle involves, surprisingly enough, continuing to use those same puzzle-platformer skills.
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Each colossus, or at least the majority, is a huge lumbering beast, covered in stony ridges and mangey patches of fur, often so large that the protagonist can't even reach their ankles. Defeating them requires the player to find some way up onto them, to leap and crawl about searching for particular weak points than need to be stabbed several times with a magic sword. Getting started frequently involves using the environment against them to crack their armor or trick them into bending down, leaving a patch of hair within reach.
The actual climb up from there is where the game really becomes impressive. Obviously, the various huge creatures encountered throughout the game are not particularly keen on having some kid climbing up their back and stabbing them in the shoulder, and thus will try their best to shake you off. A surface on which one is trying to walk might suddenly become a sheer wall as a colossus lifts an arm, or even invert completely. The controls and physics of the game react to all of this quite realistically, with momentum causing you to constantly slip and stagger, periodically having to grab a clump of hair and hang on for dear life as the shaking sends the protagonist's legs flailing through the air. The meat of the game's challenges comes from conserving a grip meter by finding places to stand and rest that don't involve clutching at handholds, and trying to keep one's footing steady enough to pull the sword back for a proper stab.
Particularly given the age of the game and seamless consistency of the graphics, a number of battles require strategies which, while perfectly reasonable, at first seem outside the scope of the engine. One battle for instance involves goading a colossus into smashing a wall to pieces which looks too solid to be anything more than part of the terrain. Another involves snatching a small item up to use as a tool, despite this being the only point in the game where picking up an item even exists as a concept. If done poorly, these puzzles would be profoundly frustrating, but the game is actually very good at planting the idea of what must be done, even while maintaining the illusion that the engine won't allow it to work.
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One of the more interesting aspects of the game, beyond the inherent novelty of the core gameplay, is the connection between it and Ico. While they at first appear to be connected only by their visual style and clambering gameplay, Observant players of both games will realize, particularly looking at the beginning and ending of each game, that the two share a setting, just at very different points in time. After the events of Shadow of the Colossus, the valley floods, creating the ocean surrounding the castle in which Ico is set, with said castle being built up around the central tower that dominates the landscape of Shadow of the Colossus. A connection or two can also be made between the games' stories but, like everything else, it's fairly subtle.
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Ico itself is another game worth tracking down for those who have never played it. Aside from sharing the wonderful aesthetics of Shadow of the Colossus, it was the game that proved the puzzle platformer genre could really be made to work in 3D, paving the way for the new Prince of Persia games. In and of itself, it has some rather interesting qualities as well, most notably the gimmick of having to escort a frail princess about, whose climbing abilities are decidedly weaker than your own. It also features a number of extremely vast and detailed rooms, often making it difficult to work out a clear path to the next area just by virtue of how many potential paths can be presented as red herrings. A third game by the same team, The Last Guardian, is in the works as of the writing of this article, again maintaining the setting, art style, and general emotional tone, and again giving the player a companion with which to explore. In this case, a criminally cute looking but devastatingly large baby gryphon. It is a reasonably safe assumption at this point that this will also be very much a game worth playing.
While there are a number of games featured in these articles which I am compelled to recommend as an essential experience to any fan of the medium, most have become extremely difficult to find, being released many years ago, in small numbers, and/or on less popular platforms. Shadow of the Colossus on the other hand was produced in large quantities for the PlayStation 2, a system which it is fairly rare for anyone not to own at this point in time. If you have never had the opportunity to play it, you have precious little excuse not to hunt down a used copy now and see what you've been missing out on.
