Shadow of the Colossus

Gameplay

Described by several commentators as an action-adventure game, Shadow of the Colossus takes place from a third-person perspective in a three-dimensional (3D) graphic environment and involves combat-based gameplay sequences, as well as platforming and puzzle video game elements. The game's environment is largely presented as a seamless open world. Progression through Shadow of the Colossus occurs in cycles. Beginning at a central point in an expansive landscape, the player seeks out and defeats a colossus, and is then returned to the central point to repeat the process. To find each colossus, Wander may raise his sword while in a sunlit area to reflect beams of light, which will converge when the sword is pointed in the right direction of the next encounter. The player's journey to a colossus seldom follows a direct route: stretches of varied terrain often require that a detour be taken along the way. Most colossi are situated in remote areas, such as atop cliffs or within ancient structures.

Once a colossus is found, the player must discover its weaknesses to defeat it. Each colossus dwells in a unique lair, and in most encounters the player must use some aspects of the current battlefield to their advantage, a necessity that becomes more pronounced as the game progresses. The first two battles take place on simple, vast, flat areas of land, wherein the player's only goal is to discover how to scale the colossi and attack their weak points. However, the majority of the following fourteen battles require that the player make use of the surrounding environment.

Every colossus has at least one weak point, symbolized by a glowing sigil that can be illuminated and identified by the sword's reflected light. Each colossus has areas covered with fur or protruding ledges, which Wander may use to grip and scale the colossus while it thrashes about in an attempt to dislodge him. Wander has a limited stamina gauge that decreases as he hangs onto the colossus; the player thus must act quickly when they scale the creature. Aside from the colossi, who are the only enemies of the game, the environment is inhabited by natural animals. Only one species, however, has an effect on gameplay: eating the tail of a certain kind of lizard increases Wander's stamina gauge. Likewise, the player may find fruit that increases Wander's maximum health.

Wander's horse, Agro, plays a large role in the game. Aside from her capacity as a means of transportation, Agro enables the player to fight from horseback, a critical avenue to defeating some of the colossi. However, the game contains many environments that players cannot traverse by horse, and colossi are often found in areas within deep water or beyond large obstacles that must be scaled. Agro cannot travel beyond these, and when separated from Wander by such obstacles, cannot participate in the following battle. While throughout the game, Wander's equipment consists of only a sword and a bow with arrows, in subsequent playthroughs players may access bonus weapons and in-game features after finishing optional Time Attack trials, which allow the battles with the colossi to be replayed with a restricted time limit.

Synopsis

Setting

Presented through a minimalistic narrative, Shadow of the Colossus eschews disclosure of detailed information about the backstories and interrelationships of its characters to the player. The game takes place in a fantasy world, wherein a vast and unpopulated peninsula, known as the Forbidden Land, serves as the main setting for the game's events. Separated from the outside realm by a distant mountain range to its north and sea to the south and east, the area contains ruins and remnants of ancient structures, an indication that it had formerly been a settlement.

The only point of entry to the region is a small cleft in the mountains to the north that leads to a massive stone bridge. This bridge spans half the distance of the landscape and terminates at a large temple called the "Shrine of Worship" located at its center. It is, however, forbidden to enter the land, which includes diverse geographical features, such as lakes, plateaus, canyons, caves, and deserts in addition to human-made structures.

Characters

The protagonist of the game is Wander (ワンダ, Wanda; voiced by Kenji Nojima), a young man whose goal is to resurrect a girl named Mono (モノ; voiced by Hitomi Nabatame). The only established fact regarding Mono is that she was a maiden who was sacrificed because she was believed to have a cursed destiny. Assisting Wander in his quest to revive her is his loyal horse, Agro (アグロ, Aguro), who serves as his sole ally in defeating the colossi; the English-language version of the game refers to Agro as a male steed, although director Fumito Ueda said that he saw Wander's horse as female. Wander also receives aid from an entity called Dormin (ドルミン, Dorumin; voiced by Kazuhiro Nakata and Kyōko Hikami). The story revolves around these characters but features a small supporting cast, represented by Lord Emon (エモン; voiced by Naoki Bandō) and his men.

Speaking with two voices at once (one male and one female), Dormin is a mysterious, disembodied entity. According to legends of the game's world, Dormin has the power to revive the dead; this premise serves as the driving cause for Wander's entrance upon the forbidden land, as he seeks the being's assistance in reviving Mono. Dormin offers to revive her in exchange for Wander destroying the sixteen colossi. One of the commentators of the game's plot speculated that the name "Dormin", which spells "Nimrod" backwards, serves as a reference to the body of the biblical King Nimrod which was cut up and scattered.

Lord Emon is a shaman who narrates a vision in the game's introduction that vaguely explains the origin of the land to which Wander has come and establishes that entry to this place is forbidden. As portrayed by the game, he possesses vast knowledge about the nature and containment of Dormin, and wields the ability to use powerful magic. He has a small group of warriors at his command, and is pursuing Wander to prevent the use of "the forbidden spell", the rite that involves the destruction of the sixteen colossi and the restoration of Dormin's power.

The colossi are armored, most often enormous creatures with forms ranging from various humanoids to predatory animals, and live in all manner of surroundings and environments, including underwater and flying through the air. Their bodies are a fusion of organic and inorganic parts such as rock, earth, and architectural elements, some of which are weathered or fractured. Some colossi are peaceful and will only attack when provoked, whereas others are aggressive and will attack on sight. Inhabiting specific locations in the forbidden land, they do not venture outside their own territory. Once slain they will remain where fallen, as a mound of earth and rock vaguely resembling the original colossus. A pillar of light marks the location of each colossus after they are defeated. The Latin names of the colossi, though spread throughout fan related media, are not official and are never referred to within the game.

Plot

Wander enters the Forbidden Lands and travels across a long bridge on his horse, Agro. After they reach the entrance to the Shrine of Worship, Wander, who has carried with him the body of Mono, brings her to an altar in the temple. A moment later, several humanoid shadow creatures appear and approach Wander before he easily dismisses them with a wave of the Ancient Sword in his possession.

After the shadow creatures are vanquished, the disembodied voice of Dormin manifests within the shrine and expresses surprise at the fact that Wander possesses the weapon. Wander explains the plight that led him to seek the forbidden land and asks that Dormin return Mono's soul to her body. Dormin offers to grant Wander's request under the condition that he complete a rite designed to destroy the sixteen idols lining the temple's hall. To that end, Wander must use his sword to slay each of the idol's physical incarnations — the colossi — whose presence ranges across the vast expanse outside the temple. Although warned by Dormin that he may have to pay a great price to revive Mono, Wander sets out to search the land for the colossi and destroy them.

An aspect of Wander's mission that is unknown to him is that the colossi contain portions of Dormin's own essence, scattered long ago to render the entity powerless. As Wander kills each colossus, a released fragment of Dormin enters his body. Over time, the signs of Wander's deterioration from the gathered essence start to appear: his skin becomes paler, his hair darker, and his face is increasingly covered by dark veins. The outcome of the battle with the twelfth colossus leads to a reveal of a group of warriors that has been pursuing Wander, led by Emon. Urged to hurry with his task by Dormin, Wander soon heads off to defeat the sixteenth and final colossus, the largest upright colossus. On the way to this confrontation, he rides horseback across a long bridge which begins to collapse as he is halfway across, but Agro manages to throw Wander over to the other side before falling into the distant river below.

Soon after, Wander goes on to defeat the final colossus as Emon's company arrives in the Shrine of Worship to witness the last temple idol crumble. Wander appears back in the temple soon after, the signs of his corruption readily apparent: his skin is pallid, his eyes glow silver, and a pair of short horns have sprouted from his head. Emon condemns Wander for stealing the Ancient Sword and trespassing into the Forbidden Lands and for using the "forbidden" spell (likely referring to his killing of the colossi). Emon orders his warriors to kill the "possessed" man as he approaches Mono and finally falls once stabbed through the heart by one of Emon's men. However, a newly whole Dormin takes control of Wander's body and transforms into a shadowy giant. While his men flee, Lord Emon casts the Ancient Sword into a pool at the back of the temple's hall to evoke a whirlwind of light. The supernatural vortex consumes Dormin and Wander, which seals Dormin within the temple once again. As Emon and his warriors escape, the bridge that leads to the temple collapses behind them, and its destruction forever isolates the forbidden land from the rest of the world. Although he has condemned Wander for his actions prior to their encounter, Emon expresses hope that Wander may be able to atone for his crimes one day should he have survived.

Development

Origin

Shadow of the Colossus was developed by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan. Director Fumito Ueda and producer Kenji Kaido return alongside the rest of the team from the development of Ico. The game originated from one of Ueda's concepts that he developed directly after the team submitted Ico, released in late 2001 for the PlayStation 2, for publication. As the basis of their subsequent game had not been decided, Ueda examined "a number of old ideas kicking around in my head ... that couldn't be realized under previous circumstances". After a brief review of those avenues, Ueda chose to explore one that aligned with his own preferences as a game player. Ueda cited The Legend of Zelda series as an influence, as he grew up wanting to make a game like Zelda and designed the Colossi bosses like "inverted Zelda dungeons."

Ueda envisioned a work with an underlying motif of "cruelty as a means of expression". He felt that this theme was widely featured in contemporary titles such as Grand Theft Auto III and wanted to use it in a game that he designed. In a discussion with Kaido, Ueda observed that he had played a variety of video games containing battles with large bosses that the player must shoot from a distance to defeat. Ueda believed that the boss sequences of those games could be streamlined if the player character was able to approach and climb the oversized opponents to kill them with a close range weapon. Accordingly, he chose to base the game around the player character's encounters with enormous fictional creatures, a premise that stemmed from Ueda's childhood fascination with monster movies. This led to an emphasis on the inclusion of a large-scale adventure in the title, an element which Ueda regarded as influential in the shaping of the game's stylistic identity.

Originally, the team considered Ueda's idea alongside another concurrently-developed game. According to Ueda, the game was unrelated to his former concept, and the team did not give it a working title or outline its design while it was in development. Ueda recognized the finished iteration of their second title as, "in many ways, a game for boys and men"; conversely, the separately produced game was fashioned to appeal more to a female audience. Its contents, interface and thematic focus differed significantly from those that would ultimately manifest in the team's next game after Ico. The untitled game did not employ 3D graphics, whereas Team Ico applied them to their published game. The team eventually scrapped their plans for a counterpart title to Ueda's intended game, which was advanced into further development.

Early prototypes

To develop the concept video for NICO, Team Ico formed a small internal group, which was composed of Ueda, one of Ico's designers and a roughly 10-person animation team. Their objective was to deliver "[a] movie with an extremely final form" that could serve as a visual template for the finalized game. The first storyboard that outlined the video was drafted in January 2002, and the actual short film was completed that May. It depicted a group of three masked, horned boys who rode horseback across a vast landscape and attacked a towering being reminiscent of the second boss in Shadow of the Colossus. The video was visualized in the Ico game engine and was rendered in real-time on the PlayStation 2 hardware. With those techniques, the team aimed to estimate the extent to which the platform's capabilities allowed the realization of their vision.

According to Kaido, the team deemed the resulting video to have attained a very high level of completion, and thus was able to use it as a reference point throughout the game's production. Although they subsequently modified the game's visuals from those of the demonstration reel, its themes of "fighting a giant enemy" and "[exploring] a giant field" carried over into the final game design. The demo indicated elements that were excluded from the released game. Among these was a showcased gameplay mechanism wherein one of the colossus' attackers who had scaled and killed it proceeded to mount his approaching horse by leaping onto its back from the entity's corpse. The video was later exhibited at many trade shows, such as the 2006 D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas where Kaido and Ueda retrospectively discussed the game's development with Lorne Lanning.

In June 2002, a small group of staff at Team Ico started to build a prototype of NICO for testing purposes. In his role as producer, Kaido tasked the team with the inclusion of technological features that he recognized as important milestones of the development. One of the challenges issued by Kaido involved the creation of "organic collision deformation", a term that alluded to his concept of realistic character physics in relation to the movement of the colossi. For instance, if a colossus' limb was currently horizontal, Kaido expected the player to be able to run across the limb as though it were any other flat surface. Ueda and Team Ico programmers spent over six months to produce a working version of this functionality. They began by adding a character to a virtual environment where the figure was enabled to climb a pole-like object. One of the team's priorities at the time was to code a physics-based simulation of scenarios where characters were "being shaken off or narrowly avoided being stomped on".

Production

After a lengthy preparatory phase, the game's production began in September 2003. Publisher SCEI gave the project a greater amount of development time, funding and creative freedom in comparison to the resources of the Ico team, measures that arose from the company's recognition of that game's critical success. Kaido also noted that he and Ueda endeavored to expand the production with newly recruited staff. They sought out prospective collaborators, particularly artistic specialists, through job advertisements they had distributed across the Japanese trade media and via word of mouth publicity. From a pool of five hundred applicants, ten were subsequently enlisted to work on the game; however, Ueda felt that only one or two satisfied his criteria, as he expected every facet of the title to be as well-crafted as possible. Kaido's concern during production was to guarantee Team Ico's ability to meet their schedule and budget commitments while ensuring that they had the opportunity "to create everything Ueda was aiming for within the amount of time we had".

Kaido remarked that his colleagues needed to "start transitioning into full production", as they had devoted extensive efforts to the preparation of the game's technology. Initially, the team was unable to ascertain the level of sophistication with which they could materialize their ideas in the game. Character designer Shinpei Suzuki recalled that they started to develop the game in an experimental fashion and made progress through trial and error. As the team began, the designers issued instructions that outlined the programmable properties of the colossi enemies–along with the means of their defeat–and that were meant to be gradually implemented into the title. The process in which the staff attempted to introduce those concepts typically led them to encounter problems with their realization, which entailed a revision of previously submitted work. According to Kaido, during the development of the colossi the team struggled to choreograph certain motions of the enemies in line with the expectations of the personnel. To remedy this defect, Team Ico reworked their original programming solution that animated the movements of the colossi in the game. Suzuki described the team's early accomplishments as empirical; in the aforementioned period, the staff would routinely test and adjust the game's anticipated components until confirming them to function properly.

To plan out the design of the game's visual elements, Ueda used 3D computer graphics software instead of sketching them on paper. His rationale was that the necessity to transform the hand-drawn artwork into polygonal shapes in the latter case would cause the reproduced assets' level of detail to be vastly reduced from that of the source images. In defining the inclusion of the game's environments, Ueda outlined his suggestions to the team's scenery designers who then worked to apply them to the title. After the locations of the individual colossi were visualized in the game's engine, the group began to compose the game's setting by adding intermediary areas between the enemies' lairs. During development, the size of the game world frequently changed as the team reorganized the connective material. Environmental designer Kouji Hasegawa noted that the scenery graphics were drastically reworked on several occasions because Ueda urged him and his colleagues to reinforce the light tones in the coloring of the areas and to accentuate "the brightness and the saturation of the textures". Like Ico, the game displays a distinct style of lighting. The game engine utilizes elements such as desaturated colors, motion blur and partial high dynamic range rendering; and it places heavy emphasis on bloom lighting.

Design

For Shadow of the Colossus, Team Ico adopted a more sophisticated template for their creative process than Ico's principal idea of "design by subtraction"; under the latter approach, they removed the title's integrated elements that detracted players from its reality. Ueda felt that Ico's analogous structure to an adventure game resulted in its limited interactivity, and he wanted Shadow of the Colossus to be more player-driven by comparison. To that end, he sought to ensure that the game provided players with agency both sporadically–in that they would be able to trigger in-game scenarios by their own efforts–and on an overarching scale–by the creation of emergent solutions to the gameplay. Furthermore, the player can manipulate the camera during cutscenes, a functionality designed to maintain the impression of controllability–and therefore, the consumers' interest–in those otherwise self-directed segments of the game. At the same time, Ueda strove to make the title accessible to people who did not play video games by simplifying its controls and other components.

Kaido and Ueda aimed to challenge the contemporary trends of the video game industry, and they thus fashioned the battles with the boss-like colossi characters as an unconventional rendition of video game levels. The quality of the battles with the colossi was of critical importance to Ueda, who saw them as an outgrowth of his appreciation for boss fights in video games as a player. During development, the team considered including fights with smaller enemies beyond the colossi and with "optional Colossi you wouldn't need to defeat" in the game. Those suggestions were rejected due to Ueda's belief that the title's play value would not benefit from those confrontations. Relatedly, Shadow of the Colossus was made exclusive of human non-playable characters (NPCs), although the team placed discoverable small-sized animals in the game per Ueda's specifications. The creation of the colossi, as the focus of the game's separate segments, required Team Ico to provide input across disciplines. The ensuing distribution of duties between the title's artists, animators, programmers and designers meant that they needed to make their contributions to the game intercompatible so as not to engender design issues.

Ueda wanted the game's presentation to be outstanding and to exhibit "the density of a painting". He visited geographical landmarks of the Southwestern United States such as the Grand Canyon and Death Valley to seek inspiration for the game's setting. The modeling of the game's environments, whose arrangement stemmed from independently constructed battlegrounds tied to each of the colossi, followed a pattern that Kouji Hasegawa described as "a repeating cycle of creating, testing and tuning". The team initially struggled to carry out Ueda's instructions for the shaping of the scenery and altered the game's locations frequently so as to find a satisfactory design for the setting. After researching several visual arts genres, Team Ico crafted a distinct graphical style that utilized both grayish and light color tones to underscore the game's ambiance, identified by Ueda as "firm-feeling". This aesthetic was exemplified by the game mechanics of searching the setting for the colossi, which came from Ueda's desire to determine a straightforward and visually defined reference for the player. He remarked that the game's completed graphics–as well as its gameplay principles–were produced similarly to those of Ico, as an invocation of stylistic parallels between the two titles.

Music

The development of Shadow of the Colossus' music started alongside that of the game itself. Ueda's core idea was to use a "dynamic and gallant" score in the game, akin to traditional Hollywood film music. The team's goal with the soundtrack of Shadow of the Colossus, as with Ico, was to differentiate it from conventional video game music, and to "express restraint with regards to emotional expression as much as possible". Inspired by the opening theme from Silent Hill, Ueda also intended the soundtrack to reflect a melancholic ambiance as well as the history of the game's setting, based on the narrative's elements of death and resurrection. His other objective was to provide the game with compositions that adopted an elevated and dignified tone to underline the grandiose nature of the colossi.

The soundtrack was composed by Kow Otani, who had been previously responsible for the music to the 1990s-era Gamera films and a number of anime titles. Within the video game medium, his past work consisted of the soundtracks to the PlayStation 2 flight simulator Sky Odyssey and the PlayStation scrolling shooter Philosoma. In selecting the composer of the game, Ueda sought to deviate from the conceptual perspective of the score for Ico, written by Michiru Oshima. Unlike Ico, which Ueda saw as a game that equally attracted male and female audiences, he saw Shadow of the Colossus as a work that appealed more to male players. This led Ueda to hire a male composer for the game. The versatility of Otani's musical output and his understanding of folk instruments were further factors in his recruitment by Ueda.

Otani began work on Shadow of the Colossus at the time of its inception as NICO, and Ueda characterized the soundtrack's development as difficult due to the protracted creation of its associated game. The development staff's enthusiasm in bringing the game to completion motivated Otani to deliver tracks with which he meant to convey a sense of wonder, and he drew inspiration from the portrayal of Wander's determination to revive Mono in the game. The team worked with Otani through many meetings to develop satisfactory musical themes for the game's individual colossi. According to Ueda, one of the challenges of the music's production was to incorporate compositions whose melody and structure would adapt in response to the changing circumstances of gameplay events. Although the game has an extensive orchestral soundtrack, the music is mostly heard during colossus encounters, beyond which the game's setting is underscored by more subtle sounds of water and wind. The open nature of Shadow of the Colossus' locations and their lack of life, coupled with the restrained use of music in the game, reinforces its atmosphere of solitude, analogous to that of Ico.

Release

Following a July 15, 2005 news release where SCEI confirmed the publication date for the Japanese version of Shadow of the Colossus, the company divulged details about the limited first run edition of the game, which players could only acquire by pre-ordering, on August 19 of that year. On September 12, 2005, SCEI revealed that it had secured an arrangement to distribute the game through 7-Eleven's Japanese сhain of convenience stores. The companies launched a promotional campaign: consumers who pre-ordered the game at one of the 7-Eleven's retail outlets would receive stylized bookmarks whose designs incorporated artwork from Shadow of the Colossus. On October 7, 2005, several weeks before the game was demonstrated at the 2005 Akihabara Entertainment Festival in Tokyo, Dengeki PlayStation's online news service reported that custom copies of the game bundled with thematic memorabilia would be available for purchase at the event. Branded merchandise, such as calendars, posters and T-shirts, was also sold in the Akihabara district on the occasion, and a promotional image featuring a colossus was placed on a billboard in the area. "Giantology", a viral marketing campaign which purported to show real-world evidence for collosi, was released.

Unlike Ico, Shadow of the Colossus received far more exposure, in part because of Sony's willingness to leverage its resources for a massive advertising campaign. It was advertised in game magazines, on television and via online resources such as SCEI's affiliated websites: for instance, in November 2004 the game's soundtrack was partially made available for listening on the game's official webpage. Shadow of the Colossus was released in Japan on October 27, 2005 at a list price of 7,140 yen, which is a little over 60 USD for 2005 values. The limited edition of Shadow of the Colossus distributed through pre-ordering contained a different packaging from the standard edition, promotional videos that had been screened at the game's initial September 2004 unveiling, E3 2005 and the 2005 Tokyo Game Show, and production footage of NICO. The edition's content also consisted of unpublished screenhots, storyboards and video materials from various periods of the game's development.

Prior to its domestic launch, Shadow of the Colossus had been released in North America on October 18, 2005, accompanied by a nationwide advertising campaign that ran across multiple mediums. The PAL version of the game was released in February 2006. Much like the PAL release for Ico, the game came in cardboard packaging displaying various pieces of artwork from the game, and contained four art cards. The game also came with a "making of" documentary, a trailer for Ico and a gallery of concept art, accessible from the game's main menu. Sony Computer Entertainment also re-released Ico in PAL territories at the time of Shadow of the Colossus's release, both to promote the game through Ico's reputation, and to allow players who did not buy Ico during its original limited release to "complete their collections".

Reception

Shadow of the Colossus received universal acclaim, with an average critic score of 91% at GameRankings, making it the 11th-highest rated game of 2005. The game received strong reviews from publications such as the Japanese magazine Famitsu, who rated the game 37/40, the UK-based Edge, who awarded an 8/10, and Electronic Gaming Monthly, who granted 8.8/10. GameSpot's review gave it an 8.7, commenting that "the game's aesthetic presentation is unparalleled, by any standard", while multimedia website IGN hailed the game as "an amazing experience" and "an absolute must-have title", rating it 9.7/10. GameSpy described it as "possibly the most innovative and visually arresting game of the year for the PS2". A retrospective Edge article described the game as "a fiction of unquestionable thematic richness, of riveting emotional power, whose fundamental artistic qualities are completely fused with its interactivity." Dave Ciccoricco, a literature lecturer at the University of Otago, praised the game for its use of long cutscenes and stretches of riding to make the player engage in self-reflection and feel immersed in the game world.

Many reviewers consider the game's soundtrack to be one of its greatest aspects. In addition to Electronic Gaming Monthly's award of "Soundtrack of the Year", GameSpot commented that the musical score conveyed, and often intensified, the mood of any given situation, while it was described as "one of the finest game soundtracks ever" by a reviewer from Eurogamer.

However, the game has been criticised for its erratic frame rate, which is usually smooth while traversing the landscape, but often slows down in fast-paced situations, such as colossus battles. Concern was also expressed about the game's camera, which was described by GameSpy as being "as much of an opponent as the Colossi", "manag[ing] to re-center itself at the worst and most inopportune times". Reviewers are often mixed about Agro's AI and controls; Edge commented that the controls were "clumsy, crude, and unpredictable". Other critics like Game Revolution and GameSpot felt the game was too short (average playthrough time estimated 6 to 8 hours), with little replay value given the puzzle elements to each colossus battle.

Sales

Shadow of the Colossus sold 140,000 copies in its first week at retail in Japan, reaching number one in the charts. Almost 80% of the initial Japanese shipment was sold within two days. These figures compare favorably with Ico. The game was placed on Sony's list of Greatest Hits titles on August 6, 2006.

Awards

Shadow of the Colossus has received several awards, including recognition for "Best Character Design", "Best Game Design", "Best Visual Arts" and "Game of the Year", as well as one of three "Innovation Awards" at the 2006 Game Developers Choice Awards. At the 2006 DICE Summit, Shadow of the Colossus won the awards for "Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction" and "Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering" during the AIAS' 9th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards; it also received nominations for "Overall Game of the Year", "Console Game of the Year", "Action/Adventure Game of the Year", "Outstanding Achievement in Animation", and "Outstanding Innovation in Gaming". It received one of two "Special Rookie Awards" at the Famitsu Awards 2005. It was nominated for "Best Original Music", "Best Artistic Graphics" and "Best PS2 Game", yet also "Most Aggravating Frame Rate" in GameSpot's awards for 2005, while it won "Best Adventure Game" and "Best Artistic Design" in IGN's Best of 2005 awards, who cited Agro as the best sidekick in the history of video games. Two years after its release IGN listed Shadow as the fourth greatest PlayStation 2 game of all time. GamesRadar awarded it Best Game of the Year 2006 (being released in the UK in early 2006, later than the US), and appears in the site's "The 100 best games ever" list at number ten. The game's ending was selected as the fourth greatest moment in gaming by the editors of GamePro in July 2006. The readers of PlayStation Official Magazine voted it the 8th greatest PlayStation title ever released in the magazine's 50th issue, and it placed 43rd in a later poll presented in the journal's 100th issue. Destructoid named the game #1 in their list of the top 50 video games of the decade. IGN named Shadow of the Colossus the best game of 2005, and the second best game of the decade, behind Half-Life 2. In 2012, Complex magazine named Shadow of the Colossus the second-best PlayStation 2 game of all time, behind God of War II. In 2015, the game placed 4th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2022, the game placed third on IGN's "Best PS2 Games Of All Time" list.

Legacy

Shadow of the Colossus has been cited as an influence on various video games, including God of War II (2007), God of War III (2010), Titan Souls (2015), The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017), Death's Gambit (2018), Praey for the Gods (2019), and Elden Ring (2022). Film director Guillermo del Toro considers both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus as "masterpieces" and part of his directorial influence. Shadow of the Colossus is also cited numerous times in debates regarding the art quality and emotional perspectives of video games.

The game plays a significant role in the 2007 Mike Binder film Reign Over Me as one of the ways Adam Sandler's character copes with his primary struggle – with aspects of the game mirroring the tragedy that befell Sandler's character; Shadow of the Colossus falling giants mirroring the crashing towers of the September 11 attacks in which his wife and children died, and the game's lead character trying to resurrect his deceased love are two of the main themes which strike a similarity. Sandler is said to have ad libbed a detailed description of the control scheme in a scene with Don Cheadle, who plays his old friend. Both actors are said to have become experts at the game during the filming.

"Last Big Secret"

After the release of the game, a group of devoted fans known as the "Secret seekers" became convinced that the game was hiding a final secret, with many of them believing that secret to be a 17th colossus. While they ultimately did not discover a final secret over the course of their decade-long search, they would uncover numerous pieces of cut content in the game, such as a fully rendered dam outside of the game world. One of these fans, Nomad Colossus, would eventually be given special thanks in the credits of the game's remake.

Remastered version

A PlayStation 3 remastered version of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus was announced at Tokyo Game Show 2010 and released in September 2011 under the title The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection. Developed by Bluepoint Games, both were improved graphically to take advantage of the PlayStation 3's hardware and HDTVs, with numerous other improvements implemented. The updated re-release of Shadow of the Colossus features high-definition (HD) graphics, content previously missing from the North American release, PlayStation Network Trophies, and 3D support. The HD version was released separately in Japan.

Remake

Sony announced a remake of Shadow of the Colossus for the PlayStation 4 during their Electronic Entertainment Expo 2017 press conference. It was released on February 6, 2018. The remake is led by Bluepoint, who developed the earlier PlayStation 3 remaster. The developers remade all the game's assets from the ground up, but the game retains the same gameplay from the original title along with the introduction of a new control scheme. Ueda had since left Sony, but provided a list of recommended changes to Bluepoint for the remake; he stated that he does not believe many of them will be implemented, nor would they add any of the colossi that had been cut from the original game.

Film adaptation

In April 2009, it was reported that Sony Pictures would adapt Shadow of the Colossus into a film. Kevin Misher, producer of The Scorpion King, The Interpreter and the recent attempted remake of Dune, negotiated to produce. It was announced that Fumito Ueda would be involved in the film's production. On May 23, 2012, it was reported that Chronicle director Josh Trank would be directing the film adaptation. Seth Lochhead was due to write the film. In September 2014, Variety reported that Mama director Andrés Muschietti would direct the film after Trank dropped out due to scheduling conflicts with other projects.

In January 2025, while chatting on Radio TU, Muschietti confirmed that the film was still in development, and that there was a script that he likes a lot. However, he acknowledged that there are difficulties securing his desired budget for the project.