In the past two days, I have fallen in love with a little helpless pale girl named Yorda. That\'s right, Yorda, like Yoda, but with an "R." It\'s not because I am an utterly obsessed gaming freak where animated chicks turn me on to no end. Matter of factly, I utterly love my girlfriend and some day I plan to marry her, but for the past two days, I\'ve made a little bit of room in my heart for that special little helpless girl.
After re-reading that little section, I sound like I am full of crap and you\'re probably right. It\'s about 2 AM here anyways and I\'m writing a review that will be read by about twenty people. However, even though I admit to being completely full of it from time to time, I am absolutely positive that everyone will love Yorda and Ico. No bull my little poppets, EVERYONE.
As I think about Ico and the gameplay the enviornments and the story, the most vibrant thing, besides the highly detailed amazing visuals, are the character\'s personalities. The dialogue for the entire game can probably be fit onto a tiny napkin stolen from your local Taco Bell, but the emotions, mannerisms, and actions of the characters easily develop solid personalities for all three major members of the cast and immediately after their introductions, you fall in love with them. Hell, you can only understand one character completely, only half of another, and then a complete blank on yet another and still, I love them. I love them enough that even if Ban Dai made their action figures, I\'d still probably buy them.
Anyways, enough of my trash, lets get to the real meat of this review.
Presentation:The manual in Ico is pretty standard fare in full color with a few nice screenshots here and there, but my major problem with it is that it gives away far too much of the story in about three short paragraphs of intro. I admit, reading the manual partially stunted my excitement towards the overall story because Ico is a mystery waiting to be unpeeled like a large onion in an 8-hour timeframe. I urge you all to stay away from the manual and just test out and learn the controls on your own.
Load times in Ico are incredibly short, especially for the immense areas the PS2 is rendering. Everytime in the demo of Ico, there was black screen and then the game loaded about 2-3 seconds later. In the actual game, that same fade-in fade-out style is present to compensate for the load time, but the timer never extends more then a good two full seconds and even then, there are plenty of areas that are just completely huge with nary a loading screen in site.
Speaking of load times, I believe the cinemas are all done in real-time and on the fly. There is never a loading screen between gameplay and the cinema ever. The story flows flawlessly through your PS2 and your senses much like the beautiful waterfalls present all throughout Ico. This game has just left me begging those infamous words: "Please sir, may I have some more."
Graphics:WHenever I think of Next-Generation graphics, I always think of the benchmarks for each genre: Shenmue for Action\\RPG, Final Fantasy X for RPG, Soul Calibur for Fighters, and of course Gran Turismo for racers, but now, we can add Ico to that next-generation list gaming graphical leaps that we have all come to expect in the Adventure department.
Jaggies? What jaggies? I saw maybe two scenes in the entire game where jaggies were even remotely noticable and those were the times when I was actually scanning the entire horizon searching for them. If Ico is any indication, PS2 is going to be awesome and the power will be tapped even more as time goes on improving on games\' graphics, but right now, Ico is the cream of the crop. The ultimate available show-piece that just makes entire crowds collectively say "Whoa."
The lighting is utterly jaw-dropping. In one particular scene in what appears to be a court yard near a gully, I just let the game sit for a moment while I responded to a few posts in the forums concerning Ico help. When I tured around, I saw the leaves of the trees shimmering in the light and blowing back and forth with the wind. Rarely do we ever see a game displaying such painstaking detail for leaves and lighting, but in this case, I am so glad the Sony team that produced this took the time out to consider all the details of the world and build them as realistic as possible.
My most favorite part of Ico, other then the lighting of course, has to be the emotions displayed in the character\'s faces. The last hour of the game is especially remarkable detailing many different moods that the characters are feeling all without scripted obvious dialogue telling the player how they feel rather than the player seeing it. It\'s really amazing and I hope that the companies making sequels to their popular franchises see that less really is more when it comes to their games.
Sound:Ending MusicAgain, working on the policy that less is more, Ico has very little music and very little dialogue. The spoken dialogue is also incomprehensible coming off as almost a form of ebonic Japanese requiring the use of subtitles so the player can follow along with the story. That sounds pretty trite seeing as how spoken dialogue is the hottest thing nowadays for videogames in the sound department, that\'s just not the case for Ico and it comes off as incredibly satisfying just the same.
As mentioned before, there is barely any music to speak of, but the little amounts of it had me wish there was a lot more. There are tracks for the intro, saving, and the ending and that\'s about the only serious tracks that stand out above the short lived 20 second tunes strewn sparsley throughout the game. Again, just like the dialogue though, less is more and the game comes off as being incredibly aural despite its short soundtrack.
Sound effects are one thing Ico has an abundance of and although there is a vast amount, rarely do they ever become annoying. About 90% of the sound work in the game are just background noises like birds chirping, water rushing, gears turning, fires blazing, and chains dangling. Each sound has its place in different parts of the game and they all fit so well together quite nicely.
Gameplay:This has to be the one area where Ico excels as well as fails. First of all, the puzzles in the game are real brain-benders. The solutions to them all are failry easy to figure out, but you have to use Ico and every single one of his and Yorda\'s abilities in order to fully utilize yourselves and advance in the game world. The puzzles alone are great, but they are not too difficult as for you to warrant any deep thoughts in traffic on your way to work once you get to a certain point in the game.
There is quite a bit of fighting in Ico as well requiring you to defeat these smoke demons that work for the keeper of the castle. If they invelop Yorda, the game is over on the spot. That seems pretty interesting until you find out there is only one button for attack and it\'s roughly 3 different attacks per volley.I would not complain so much about this feature if it was not for the Final Boss in the game who actually has a clever sequence to their attacks requiring a bit more intelligence to solve rather than the standard *hack hack hack, run* policy Ico seems to have generated quite quickly.
The controls are very responsive to every move, the characters are beautifully rendered and the facial expressions are awesome in themselves. My main gripe is that there is a smidgen of slowdown (about half a second) at the end of the game where the much larger enviornments are. Great graphics and decent gameplay with slowdown? Come on, that\'s a bit odd.
All-in-all, the game comes off as a welcome refresher to the policy of most developers running a graphics over quality debate within their own departments. Ico delivers beauty and fascination in a package that is rarely beat. I just hope Ico 2 is just as interestng.
Lasting Appeal:Well, I do know that listening to Yorda speak, especially at key moments, makes me very interested in seeing exactly what it is that she said. There are two moments that are just like that that I can remember and I am desperately needing closure on the subject. Other then that, my total game time was just under 7 hours so be wary if you prefer elongated RPG\'s to short awesome drivel that has become very common place as of late.
Bottom Line:
I love the characters, I love the sounds and music, and I definitely love the games look and feel, but the overall combat style needs some serious work. Defeating the smoke monsters is not a strenuous daunting task and when you have a sword in your hand, it\'s even better, but I can easily see how some people may find it heavily repetetive.
