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.

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?