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Shadow of the Colossus
Sony, PS2 (2006)
It's not art, it's emo
Like it or not "Emo" is now
considered a bona fide
movement, uniting all of
Western society’s self-obsessed,
pubescent, attention seekers under
a single dismal banner of pathetic
dejection. Music, fashion, film and TV;
all have been infected by the whining
wrist-slashers. And while many of
you may not have realised it, we’ve
already allowed an emo videogame to
mope its way into the disc trays of our
noble PS2s .
Shadow Of The Colossus is emo.
Just look at the protagonist’s lank
hair, androgynous face, tight clothing,
and off-kilter gait. He’s a tragedychasing
emo kid, with an emo-horse
and a dead emo girlfriend (who he
probably only fell in love with after she
died – the nihilist). The colossi even
look like depressed self-harmers,
aimlessly sulking around with no
direction in life. And why do you think
the developers stuck in so much
sparse landscape to ride through?
It’s so emos have ample opportunity
to pen laboured poems on how the
game expresses their feelings of
isolation and loneliness, complete
with angry analogies between
the scarred terrain and their own
rampant acne.
Emo pessimism inhabits every
corner of Shadow Of The Colossus.
For instance, if you or I managed
to stab a gargantuan beast to
death, we would be roaring with
masculine ecstasy, but each time the
protagonist slaughters a colossus
(y’know, bringing his girlfriend one
step closer to reincarnation) he
doesn’t even crack a smile and,
instead, effeminately passes out to
the sound of depressed orchestrals.
The entire game wants you to feel
insecure about your own actions,
it wants you to feel remorse and
sadness. In other words, it wants you
to feel like an emo kid.
I don’t want videogames to be
miserable and introspective, I want
them to have flashing lights and
68-hit combos. I don’t want to feel
remorse for my enemies; I want to
chew on their adrenal glands for a
health boost. And, above all else, I
want to control a real man, wearing
jeans stained red from the blood of
his own haemorrhoids. Videogames
are for the emotionally defective;
we don’t want to reflect on morality
and we don’t want to contemplate
the selfishness of love. The only two
things we want to feel are fear and
exhilaration. So ignore the ramblings
of naive and pretentious critics.
Shadow Of The Colossus isn’t art and
it isn’t good, it’s emo.
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