The Thirteenth Colossus

[Yacobg42]

Hey all!

I'm tossing around the idea of starting a gaming blog/series of essays about striking moments in games. The Cane and Rinse community is one that has always been incredibly thoughtful and I would love any feedback on this first entry.

Shadow of the Colossus is, in many ways, a game about moments. It is simply sixteen boss fights, sixteen desperate, lonely confrontations against beasts as big as mountains, and nothing but travel in between. The game has no busy work, no sidequests or minibosses, to muddy the experience of climbing atop and subsequently destroying the titular colossi. Your motivation is powerful, but sparse: told that this forbidden land has the power to bring back the dead, you strike a deal with an old god of the land to bring back a loved one. The god tells says that to do so, you must slay the giants that roam the land. That’s it. And then you’re off, with a bow and a sword and a horse far too big for you, tasked with somehow murdering a skyscraper-sized monster.

A universal feeling upon encountering one of the game’s colossi is “how the hell am I supposed to attack this thing?” One is a knight, hundreds of feet tall, with stone armor and a sword the length of a train car. Another, an eel that barely surfaces long enough to catch hold of its tail, let alone attack it. But even within that context, Phalanx, the thirteenth colossus, stands out. Only a brief tremor warns of its arrival, a rumble in a lonely desert, before it shoots out of the ground like a geyser. It’s a vast airborne snake, a winged ribbon, an alligator stretched and contorted and turned to stone. It twists and turns into the sky the way the Golden Gate bridge might, if it decided that it needed to escape into space.


A chart of the colossi puts Phalanx at just under 600 feet long, an unimaginable size. Whales aren’t this big. Dragons aren’t this big. It’s by far the largest creature you encounter in a game that bills itself on killing mountains. And yet…it doesn’t even notice you, let alone attack. It lazily circles in the sky, a creature older than time stretching its wings for the first time in a century. More than any other colossus, Phalanx makes you doubt yourself. You could just leave. Yes, there’s an ancient force that commanded you to take down the colossi, but surely this one, of all things, has earned the right to exist. Its wings are the same texture as the sandstone around you, its fur like the grass of the desert. Shadow’s soundtrack is called Roar of the Earth, an implication that the beasts in the game are maybe literally created from the rocks, plants, and dirt around them. Destroying Phalanx would be like killing the soul of this part of the world. But, as stated before: this is a game about killing mountains.

By the thirteenth colossus, you’ve learned most of what the game the game wants to teach you. Sometimes you have to grab the giants’ attention with a whistle, or an arrow. Usually the area you fight them in holds some sort of clue or key to taking them down. Your horse, Agro, will occasionally play a vital role. Shadow of the Colossus is exceptionally phalanxtemplatepatient however, and only reveals the promise of its various mechanics towards the very end of its story. As the great beast circles overhead, it seems to barely exert itself. Even still, you have to gallop on horseback just to keep up as it rises and falls with the wind. It breaths in and out slowly, drawing air into the giant sacs on its stomach. Maybe the air feels different than the last time it emerged. Civilizations could have risen and fell while it slumbered beneath the world, the earth gone through great atmospheric changes. You draw an arrow, and loose it into its belly..

In the story The Fog Horn, Ray Bradbury writes of an encounter with a dinosaur, the lone survivor of its species after millions of years living under the sea. Hearing a lighthouse’s fog horn as the call of one of its own, the creature travels for months each year to howl back at the sound. “I’ll make a sound that’s so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and to all who hear it in the distant towns,” McDunn, the keeper of the lighthouse says of the cry of the tower and the monster. “I’ll make me a sound and an apparatus and they’ll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.”

When the arrow hits Phalanx, maybe it doesn’t cry out. The noise of the creature may not be its roar, but the scream of air rushing through its punctured lungs. Yet it’s hard not to think of Bradbury’s dinosaur as the colossus smashes into the ground, wounded and unable to keep itself aloft. Already, a dozen of these beasts have fallen by your hand, a dozen times you’ve chosen to kill something eternal for a finite reward; the act of killing doesn’t get any easier. Thrust back into the forbidden land again and again, constantly reminded of the toll you’re taking on the world and the toll that it’s taking on you. The colossus’ great sandstone wings drag along the ground, just slowly enough that you’re able to grab hold of one and climb, hand over hand, to the creature’s back. Somehow it finds the strength to soar into the air again, but this time carrying you, the killer of this world’s titans. You stab, again and again, into the soft underside of its ancient stone plating. With the same energy that Phalanx itself initially burst from the ground, blood sprays like another geyser out from under your sword. It twists and turns, finally cognizant of another beings presence, but far too late to save itself.

Did the colossus even comprehend what attacked it? Or was it simply thrust into a world of pain, crying out in hurt and confusion with its final gasps of air? Even in death, Phalanx cements itself as part of the world in a way your character will never be, bending into a great ring like those that scatter the desert.

And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone’s thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. the sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. (The Fog Horn, 1953)

Your character is an intruder in the aptly titled Forbidden Lands. Much of Shadow has the air of a breathtaking world you weren’t meant to see. Like the bottom of the ocean or the surface of Venus, Phalanx had existed far before humans existed in that world and would have outlasted them by just as long. Its death at your hands was a transgression, an interference of humans into nature that can never be taken back. Although true of all the colossi in the game, this thirteenth fight makes the contrast clearest of all; you are responsible for the death of this land.

“Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. Waiting and waiting.”

I sat in my car, listening. I couldn’t see the lighthouse or the light standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the Horn. It sounded like the monster calling.

I sat there wishing there was something I could say

[KSubzero1000]

Great write-up! Elegant and powerful. It made me want to check out The Fog Horn.

SotC is indeed one of these games which manage to capture the audience's imagination in a beautiful way. Good choice for an essay.

The end does seem a bit abrupt, though. Was this intentional?

[seansthomas]

Really nice post. Hadn't realised that you could bring it down with an arrow to the belly either.

My recollection is that I rode Agro alongside it and leapt onto its back. Maybe that's just how I choose to remember it though!

Always been the boss that most stayed with me too. And made me feel the most guilty.

[Yacobg42]

Great write-up! Elegant and powerful. It made me want to check out The Fog Horn.

SotC is indeed one of these games which manage to capture the audience's imagination in a beautiful way. Good choice for an essay.

The end does seem a bit abrupt, though. Was this intentional?

Thanks for reading it!
I could definitely flesh out the ending a little more, maybe tie it back to the idea of moments in a larger sense.
The Fog Horn is absolutely wonderful, and only about 6 pages. Well worth a read.