What’s Wrong With ‘Shadow of the Colossus’
A Mystery Is a Powerful Storytelling Device, But Not a Story Itself.
The story Shadow of the Colossus tells uses a simple plot: Wander wants to revive Mono, and is instructed how to do this by Dormin. To the player, the game’s plot is made clear through the beginning dialogue and subsequent character actions. With these tasks given by Dormin, Wander unflinchingly completes the game’s puzzles.
That’s a pretty straightforward plot. Along with this, there is little to no character development in Shadow of the Colossus. Characters change in appearance–Wander and Dormin for example–but if personalities are present, they are static. Wander never hesitates or changes his attitude about completing Dormin’s request. We see Wander change into a darker and less recognizable form, but this doesn’t translate into a personality change. When he returns after killing the sixteenth Colossus, his focus is still on Mono’s well being. His appearance has become evil, but his steadfast personality hasn’t changed. He remains a static character, expressing determination towards healing Mono–even as Eamon’s men cut him down. Mono barely exists in the story. Dormin is revealed to be a massive, shadowy figure, but then is dispatched quickly into a mysterious pond. These characters don’t portray many missing pieces to help fill out who or what they are. We are left to infer those pieces from their ambiguous actions and how they are animated.
If we stop only looking at the plot and characters and begin zooming out to the wider context of why Wander revives Mono, then deeper questions begin to surface: what is Dormin’s role is in the world, why Wander must be sacrificed, where is this land, why is the land littered with ruins, etc. As players, we start generating a few facts about the story. We’re forced to rely on interpreting and inferring about character actions, visual metaphors, music, shapes of the colossi, etc. to make sense of a mysterious world. But all that inferring and interpreting never comes to fruition in the game.
What these explanations create is a patchwork understanding that the player applies to the world about what is happening in Shadow of the Colossus. If the player is manufacturing their understanding of the world with inferences and interpretations, then it is the player who outlines a story from visuals, metaphors, music, and game mechanics in the game, not the game itself. The player does this by combining the disparate elements into a sort of cohesive, interpreted whole that the player believes says something about the world that Wander lives in. Yet, none of these interpretations and inferences are confirmed by Dormin, Wander, Mono, Lord Eamon, the colossi or any possible lore in the world. Instead, the player is the one saying something about how the world works and what the world is, rather than the world and the game itself.
The story doesn’t reveal the required confirmations that the players’ inferences and interpretations need to become actual storytelling devices in the game. The game simply present mysteries to wander through, look at, climb up, and defeat. The plot doesn’t reveal these mysteries either as they unfold. This ambiguity leaves the collections of player interpretations and inferences how the player may feel as though they can point to something hidden in the world. But these interpretations only say something about limited player subjectivity: how players coinhabit an action, visual, song, or game mechanic. The story never confirms the players’ thoughts. The story remains silent about the interpretations and inferences. This, of course, leaves the player with a mystery about the world. It compels a player to seek answers about Shadow of the Colossus, but there are no concrete mysteries, just other interpretations, or inferences backed by more visuals, metaphors, and songs. At the end of the game, the player composes a puzzle from pieces that came from different, disparate puzzles, all in an attempt to construct a story.
The mystery about Shadow of the Colossus is heard in how people theorize that this game and its predecessor, Ico, are connected as prequels or spiritual successors. They connect the shadowy enemies in Shadow to Ico because they share similar physical attributes, but this connection is never made explicit in either game. The connection remains, yet again, the player’s interpretation to make: Both games contain horned characters. Wander sprouts horns near the end. This connection is again left to the player to decide how they are connected. Even when Fumito Ueda said there was a connection between the two games, he left a vagueness as to how they were connected.
Mysteries are compelling storytelling devices, but mysteries don’t function as stories themselves. Shadow of the Colossus shrouds itself well in mysteries. It keeps the larger world away from the player, focusing on Wander’s interactions with Dormin. It uses visuals, metaphors, music, and game mechanics in an appealing and minimalistic way so that connections can easily be made, even if their only purpose is to sate the incorrigible curiosity of a player. The game’s world takes a simple plot and strengthens it with unresolved mysteries that can only be answered by a player’s own inferences and interpretations from that world.
Did Shadow of the Colossus tell a good story? I think it created a fantastic mystery but told a mediocre story. The game’s mystery never answers a player’s echoing questions of how, why, what, and where. Furthermore, the game also never addresses the unconfirmed mysteries that capture the player’s imagination and interest via inference and implication. With all the interest in the mystery, the story seems set to the side–besides the point. So, I conclude, it is the mysteries in Shadow of the Colossus and how they seemingly convey (yet don’t convey) something about a world that is complex, but fail to convey the truth of the story.
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