You are maybe touching on something that surprised me a little about SotC there dragoon lover. Most of the impressions I’ve ever picked up on were usually vaguely apologetic of the fact ‘all you do is kill 16 big enemies’, as well as a trend of being down on the graphics, even from people who like the game. So that’s the one thing I wasn’t expecting, just how amazingly put together the entire landscape was, and how engaging the rest of the gameplay is even aside from the Colossi.
I don’t need to be killing things to feel like I’m doing something (I’m not saying you do dragoonlover, I’m only making my own point) and in truth that’s why it’s a better game for me. The combat elements in ICO were yet another part where I could not help drawing parallels to Tomb Raider, in both games it’s just an extremely rudimentary counterpoint to the puzzle solving and environment progression. And in both games it serves a worthy purpose, but I always felt the amount of fighting could have been cut in half for ICO, far too many instances of doing the same pattern over and over just waiting for the spawning to end or buy enough free space to exit or whatever.
Sorry, just wanted to illustrate why I actually felt like I’d done a lot more by the end of SotC, even though it probly didn’t take much longer. And again the graphics… just amazing. They aren’t playing to the PS2’s strengths in the same way most of the “best looking” later generation games do, and because it’s so texture driven it comes across more uneven in places. But for everything the game is actually doing I’m almost more impressed with the engine than anything else I’ve seen.