NOCLIP Pocket E79 - Marth Tiara - Shadow of the Colossus

Podcasts that are once lost cannot be reclaimed. Welcome to the
very first (kind of) NOCLIP Epilogue! On this series, that we’ll
come back to every once in a while, we’re going to be revising some
of our earliest episodes to rehash our discussions but with more
media literacy and higher quality audio. For our first formal entry
in the series (not counting Undertale, which we did as a primer to
the Deltarune series, which, you know, we’ll get back to at some
point), we’re going to be covering Shadow of the Colossus, which
was our second ever episode. Shadow, in case you’re somehow
unaware, is the second game from Team Ico, and is loosely set in
the same universe and has a similar visual and mood to Ico. There
is a dour atmosphere over the whole game, with a plot centering
around a character attempting to revive a dead woman, a mysterious
masked man and his cadre of knights and a Godlike figure named
Dormin who promises to help with the resurrection if we do a task
for him. There’s an air of mystery around the entire process, from
what you’re doing to the plot itself and even who the characters
are, and this lack of certainty cements the atmosphere of the game
as well as keeps the player on the hunt for clues, making the whole
experience more intellectually stimulating in addition to its
mechanical challenges. As for what you actually do, Shadow tasks
you with taking down 16 enormous boss creatures by physically
climbing all over them and attacking weak points. Your player
character controls in what feels like a very fragile and imprecise
way, making this task feel difficult and imposing. There’s a lot
more to say about how the game mixes its themes and its mechanics,
but that should be the gist if you aren’t already a fan, so listen
to us unpack the rest of it in today’s episode. We’re going to be
talking about the way everything from the world to your horse
contributes to the overall themes of the game, we talk about the
pacing of the game and its ambitions versus the game we really got,
and we speculate on what Mono’s last will and testament probably
had in it. Thank you for joining us again this week, and for
indulging us this nostalgic look back at one of our favorite games
we covered. Hopefully the epilogue series continues to do what we
intended, as I feel like even this shorter episode gets across what
makes the game good better than we were able to do seven, almost
eight, years ago. What did you think about this episode format? Do
you have suggestions for other games we covered in the long-long
ago for us to take another look at? Let us know over in our Discord
or in the comments! Next time, we’re doing our first Mystery May
pocket episode, which is a different style to previous years, and
through a series of events that are unfortunate, we ended up being
forced to do an immediate epilogue follow up on the worst game
we’ve ever covered (debatably) in Rascal for the Playstation, so if
you enjoy when we suffer, please join us then.