OK my thoughts on the game.
It's exactly like Ico so all my complaints and the things I liked from ico are the same here.
These guys are masters of story telling. The game is a fairy tale. A story by its self instead of a story with in a game. Where I feel like my actions are really part of the story instead of a means to a cut scene. Its also beautiful. The way it looks on the ps2 is amazing and the techniques to make it look so good, such as the filters they use are genus. I think in terms of story and art these guys are the best in the industry.
They have no idea how to make a fun game though. First lets talk about the camera. The offset it far to much which makes working the camera really hard, because it swings to hard going one way and too soft the other way, just because of the distance the character is offset to the side. Now I'm sure they did this to make the game cinematic, but its makes times in the game very frustrating. Also the controls are sloppy. The button configuration is perfect but they feel sloppy. Things like the up jump when climbing are sometimes hard to pull off, a lot harder than they should be. If the camera isn't perfectly behind you when you try to do this, it gets really hard and that shouldn't be. Ico had sloppy controls too. Also that getting up animation takes far to long, same goes with the animation where you try to do the up jump climb and fail, the slipping one. The first hour is learning how to work sloppy controls and camera.
Another frustrating thing would be falling on the end boss and having to climb all that again. He should catch you in mid air, take a large part of your health and place you in the mid part of the climb. I mean there is a life gage for a reason. This is just an example but there are lots of things like this. Thats my biggest problem, I got frustrated so many times playing, not because I didn't know what to do, just because some times things were hard to execute and I could see what was wrong and they were always such easy ways to fix the problems in the game.
Now game concepts. I love the environmental puzzles, i loved them in Ico too, its just a shame that they can't make a fully fleshed out game from this concept. I mean the whole thing is boss battles, which isn't very fulfilling. I get so numb to the idea after a while, I mean its ride the horse, look at some nice seanery to where you need to go - or if your lucky maybe getting there might involve a little bit of climbing instead of just riding straight there - then you see this really cool looking boss, scale it, defeat it; repeat 16 times. It would have been so much better if there were variety in it. I mean go do some quest or just something else and by the time I'm getting bored of that, bam, an epic boss battle. The pacing is off Now I'm not saying they need filler. Ico tried to use filler with the shadow fights. It sucked. They just need more to the game than environmental puzzles. Could you imagine a zelda game with ico/sotc environmental puzzles and bosses? That would be an amazing fulfilling experience. But as it is now its weak. Sure there are fruit and lizard quests but that grows boring once you realize there is a lizard moving in the exact same pattern at every watch tower, and every big tree has fruit on it. It gets boring.
Now the only reason I';m so hard on it is because its excellent game and they are a great team, I just wish they would do more and the game would be more.
6.5/10
