Ico
The game that people point to as art,
as proof that video games can be art,
and speak not a single word of criticism against that I've seen.
The following is my
impression from seeing the game in action. Here be spoilers.
If you are a fan of
the game... you might want to turn around and leave.
This
is one of the worst
games I have ever had the displeasure of being exposed to.
It spawns
enemies with obnoxious timing, the building you're adventuring
within makes no sense as a place human beings would live in and makes
even less sense as a place constructed by the shadow creatures you
have to fight constantly, which stands out given how the game is
trying really hard to not look like a game and yet the environment
makes no sense except as a video game obstacle course, for a game
praised for its graphics I am shocked
at how lazy some of the graphical effects are (You cause water to
stop flowing? The water just sort of... fades away), and it has the
single most offensive depiction of a woman in any game I have ever
seen.
People routinely describe
“objectification” of women in games and other media, but normally
when people use the word they refer to women being used as sexy eye
candy -Yorda, of Ico, is objectified in the most literal
meaning of the word. You drag her around and use her to keep pressure
switches held down in the same way you use stone blocks, by virtue of
physically dragging her there and then leaving her, as if she were
literally an inanimate object, incapable of volition.
I
initially expected the cooperative behavior with Yorda to be the
usual NPC crap from games, where there's a solid pretension that
they're a real human being even though they're really so simple
describing their behavior as “artificial intelligence” is too
much credit. I was expecting the player character to be required to
ask Yorda to hold levers in position, to help push open doors, or
other things one might conceivably do with a fellow human being -but
no. Yorda is a block on wheels that comes when called. This is
literally her gameplay
utility, no exaggeration.
I cannot believe
that I have never seen one word of criticism for this game. What the
hell is wrong with
gamers and indeed with feminists
and even feminazis
that Ico has drawn no criticism whatsoever for its
depiction of women.
And
the game sucks on every other level, too. The combat is tedious and almost completely
pointless. The puzzles are boring and I'd argue they don't even qualify as
puzzles, or to be more precise I'd argue that they aren't anything
that engages the player, they're just something to waste the player's
time. The environment's hugeness means that playing through the game
is a slog, where you are spending much more time traveling than
there's any game design need to do and much less time spent actually
playing the game. Said hugeness
is, as far as I can see, utterly purposeless, just a way to waste the
player's time. (The observant may detect a pattern here)
Eventually you pick up a sword, and for no reason your
character drops the stick he's been carrying around, said stick being necessary to light torches, itself necessary to "solve puzzles." A sane game that doesn't hate the player would've
either had the kid carry the stick around on his back while the sword is held in his hands, or would have made the
sword a magic sword that could be lit on fire just like the stick,
but no, Ico hates fun, it hates you, and it hates immersion: dropping
the sword is necessary to pick up sticks lying around in the
environment so you can “solve the puzzles” that involve
lighting things on fire. Why is this a mechanic.
Why does anyone think this makes any sense on any
level.
And
the game ends with a load bearing boss
without anything resembling an attempt to justify or explain why
killing the boss causes the entire island to sink.
It doesn't just collapse the room or the castle, it sinks
the island. What. WHY?
The
game, which is so beloved for its immersion, is full of
suspension-of-disbelief-shattering nonsense like our hero being able
to survive a bomb detonating in his face, apparently without any
meaningful harm, the fact that Yorda's default approach to jumping a
long gap would, in any vaguely realistic universe, result in her
dragging our hero to their mutual untimely demise, a scenario that
would occur a minimum of a half dozen times over the course of the
game, assuming perfect play,
and of course our hero will die if at any point he falls from a
sufficient height -except for the one time the plot demands he fall
farther than it is ever possible to fall in normal gameplay, at which
point he survives completely unharmed.
Realism? Who needs that? Consistency?
Why spoil the player's immersion with silly things like “making
sense”?
On top of all that, the
game presents itself as a story of young love -while being an
extremely thin metaphor for a boy who is a social outcast attempting
to marry his way into a better social class, including that in
defeating the mother of the girl he supposedly cares for he loses the
horns that were what made him an outcast in the first place. My issue
with this being: the presentation of the game suggests Ico cares for
Yorda and wants what's best for her out of selfless concern, while
the metaphor places him as someone who doesn't care for Yorda
romantically, and isn't even interested in her sexually,
let alone as a real human being -just as a way to get himself into
high society. Put another way? The game is trying to present an act of social climbing as twue wuv.
No.
Speaking
non-metaphorically, it also stands out to me that Yorda was given
fairly extensive AI... for the purpose of coming when called. The
player can't ask Yorda to hold a lever down, or ask her
to catch him or
otherwise assist Ico's attempts to move forward through the world,
but boy is she good at navigating the world to reach you. The overall
effect is somewhere between dragging a block on wheels around and
interacting with a dog that is untrained and untrainable. “Stay -I
said stay goddammit
stay you -I SAID
STAY.”
The following is
from me watching developer interviews. They can be found here, here, and here, if you're interested in watching the interviews yourself. I can't in good faith recommend you do so, mind...
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The game supposedly
started from the idea of a boy and a taller girl. Okay?
The main guy then
went with “hey let's have the player actually touch the AI girl.” To be fair to him, that's one of the stronger bits of the game.
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The game was
supposedly trying to escape the whole “telling the story through
cutscenes” thing that was so common, with the developers make an
effort to tell the story through the gameplay instead.
They failed.
You
can't argue that Ico paved the way for future games to do this
properly by virtue of being a great idea no game had ever done
before. Super Metroid did it earlier and better, is
not some cult classic
known to all of ten people, and is far
from the only pre-Ico game to do so nor even the only one to do so
competently.
Not that Ico does this competently.
Not that Ico does this competently.
Furthermore, every time the plot progresses at all, you know what happens? Cutscenes. No exceptions.
So, no: they failed. End line.
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Ico was supposedly
trying to be something you don't interpret as a game. It only
succeeded to the extent that it is terrible as a game. It still reads
like a game, just a terrible game. Congratulations. You made a game so
bad I don't want to acknowledge it as being a game. You win by
technicality.
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For both Ico and
Shadow of the Colossus they put in more graphical detail than the PS2
was actually able to display. That's insane, that's so amazingly demented I'm struggling to find words, it should never have
happened. This is obviously nonsensical behavior, wasted
time, wasted effort, serving no purpose whatsoever. How did this
happen?
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The developers
talk about how they could've made the game more “traditional”,
more of a “game-y” game, but ultimately decided against it. They feel this
is part of Ico's strength -it's not. I don't mean they should
have had visible gauges and typical video game feedback mechanisms, I
mean that what they did make isn't good at being what it's
supposed to be, while also being bad at being a game in
general.
It seems to me, in watching these videos, that the developers notion of a game-y game is not one that calls attention to its nature as a game through obvious artificial-ness (Such as by being a blatant obstacle course ie what Ico does, rather than a living environment dictated by its own internal logic), but rather is one that has basic feedback mechanisms, like a health bar and so on.
So basically they think good design is bad design.
Again, why? And why do people praise this nonsense? You don't go through life with literally no idea what's going on with your body: a game having things like a health bar is a way of getting around the inability to outright plug the console into your brain and provide “realistic” feedback that way. Removing basic feedback mechanisms for the sake of being less “game-like” is absurd.
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Odd comment: “We
could've made it easier to understand, added in lots more dialogue”.
Is this why Japanese video games are so heavy on dialogue? Japan thinks endless piles of words add clarity? Why?
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They decided to play Yorda's audio backwards to make her sound “more
French.”
What??
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The
developers are of the opinion that they couldn't depict particularly
forceful interactions with Yorda, because she's a girl. Leaving aside the blatant sexism,
this is delusional.
Ico practically rips Yorda's arm out its socket when he pulls her
along behind him at full speed. It looks agonizing.
Short of taking a stick, declaring it a baseball bat and her head
the ball, and then taking this to its obvious conclusion, it would be difficult
to get more forceful than what they went with as an interaction.
To
be more explicit: the game is as forceful as you can get without
depicting deliberate assault that results in sprays of blood. I am
baffled
by the developers' thought process, that they can say such flagrantly untrue things that they seem to earnestly believe are truth.
In
summary: no, seriously. Why does anyone
like this game, let alone seemingly everyone? Why do people say it's "art", and not games like Super Metroid that can produce substantial emotion and don't suck?
I just.
What?
I just.
What?
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