The Morality of Shadow of the Colossus

I love that they left the 'call your horse' button on while you were being sucked back into the light. My Wander spent his last minutes screaming for his dead horse. Talk about some effing pathos.

I remember SotC being discussed on Reddit and one Redditor said he killed a couple of the Colossi but then felt so bad about waking up these majestic creatures only to slaughter them that he spent the rest of his time in the game just exploring the beautiful world, careful not to enter an area where he would wake the next one. Someone said to him/her "You probably don't understand why, but you pretty much won at the game with your actions". Not sure why but that interaction was very poignant to me.

Another fun bit about Gaius: his eyes are blue until you deliver the stab to the head. And when a Colossus has blue eyes, it means that they're calm, docile. The entire time you've been trying to slay him, he's been playing. There was never once any malice on his part.

Malus has aggressive eyes until he sees Wander's full form (instead of just a speck on the ground) and realizes that WANDER is human ;A; he humanizes his enemy just as we humanize the colossi

Shadow of the Colossus is a game about letting go. You spend the whole game keeping your finger on the hold button and the very last thing you do is let go of it.

Just as food for thought, I've always noticed one more dimension to the moral complexity of the story: the land itself. Throughout the game, it is shown to be barren, devoid of life except for a few hardy lizards and the colossi themselves. In the end scene and the credits, however, you see it start to come back to life. Grass starts growing again, and animals start returning. I've always interpreted this to mean that the imprisonment of Dormin actively caused the land to die, and that freeing him let it return to life.

The first kill was such a strange feeling "Yes!... wait... did I do something wrong?"

Some food for thought: Dormin is Nirmrod spelled backwards. Nimrod is a character from the bible known for wearing a bulls horns on his crown, building a great tower in a forbidden land abhorred for polytheism, and most importantly being split into several pieces when he died, which makes this more than just a coincidence. After he died, his wife allegedly had a virgin birth and claimed the child was Nimrod reborn. At the end of the game, a baby with horns similar to Dormin's appears without any apparent mother. You were really thorough in this video. All of people just mindlessly praise it and call it art without giving any reason as to why (probably because they just want to use it as ammo in the one sided "video games are art" debate). It almost never gets discussed or analyzed like this I'm glad the some people are actually talking about what makes this game special.

I love the struggle to avoid the pool of light at the end. The whole rest of the game it's been training the player to feel desperation and panic as their grip runs out, and it puts you into Wander's desperate, panicked mindset as he's drawn into the light. It plays off the emotion it's taught you to feel to make the ending that much more tangible and personal.

DORMIN I'VE COME TO BARGAIN.

Worth noting that out of all the colossal, that the cat and dog are at the end is also telling. For me, and I'm sure many others, it took the playfulness of the kitten behaviour (as seen as he tries to swat you through gaps) and the silliness of a puppy (as you goad the dog through walls like a puppy on a slippery kitchen floor) to really realize the overall innocence of the colossi; this is not how a monster/predator neither hunts or defend itself. Like a young animal learn new things through play and fighting, so does the colossus when it encounters Wander. Hell, the "wolf" emerges from a doghouse during his presentation. Basically, you're almost literally throwing a kitten off a cliff and kicking a puppy. Not hunting tigers.

Fun fact! Ico is the game that inspired hidetaki miyazaki to go into game development. Basically you have Ico to thank for souls, bloodborne, and now sekiro.

This game did a great job of quietly yet confidently articulating one feeling, at least for me: "This is all wrong. Why does this feel this way? This is all wrong."

In the beginning of your closing statement you said that Dormin manipulated Wander, but I don't agree at all. From the moment Wander spoke with them, they told him that there would be dire consequences to himself if he were to revive them. Wander then cuts them off and says that this doesn't matter. Wander was not manipulated, he made a conscious choice, even if it was a grief stricken one. In fact, as you made it seem in the end, Dormin has shown no evidence of being a negative force in the world at all despite using Wander as a vessel, which was again, a conscious choice.

Shadow of the Colossus's narrative strikes the perfect balance of telling you just enough to make you want to know more. Ripe for fan speculation, as much as I long to fill in the gaps, I think it's much better without that knowledge. The morality of this game leaves a lot to think about. Most games make clear the justification of why to kill your enemies. They're the "bad guys". It's kill or be killed. Shadow doesn't do this. Many of the Colossi aren't aggressive at all. Are the Colossi individual beings that deserve their strange existence? Are they merely automatons that only simulate the behavior of the animals or things their bodies represent? Are they just parts of Dormin that wishes to reassemble them back into itself? The conclusion that I draw, is that Wander doesn't care. His passions override any sense of empathy he could feel for these curious and majestic creatures. His path only leads to his own destruction, and he sprints down it as fast as he can. Where Hercules labored to atone for his sins, Wander instead chases his goal like Ahab chased the great white whale.

I got to my third Colossus before I just got this idea in my brain that I was the bad guy. I couldn't keep playing because I felt like I was doing something terrible. Lo and behold, I watched a play through online that confirmed my suspicions. To this day, I have still not been able to bring myself to finish it. 11/10

This video is fantastic. This is embarrassing to admit, but I've played this game once a year since 2006, and I never once realized I was sad after I killed each Colossus until now. Towards the beginning of the game, I always try to run Wander away from the tendrils. Somewhere around 8 or 10 I just stop, and let Wander meet his fate. I think at some point I start mourning them. I will never play this game the same way again. Thank you for making this.

Is the fact that Dormin loses the female half of his voice at the end implicating that the girl half goes into the girl and acts as the catalyst of her resurrection, while also freeing Dormin from what ever that element was?(Was she possibly helping seal him?)

"Aftshadowing" is a word I didn't know I needed until today.

I'm a simple man. I see Shadow of the Colossus and I click.