Warning: This post contains spoilers for Shadow of the Colossus. Fairly be thee warned.

I rented Shadow of the Colossus last night, and found the game to be much like Tycho hinted at. The story, basically, is that you have lost someone dear to you. She was sacrificed by your culture. Countermanding ancient traditions and taboos, you venture into a sacred holy land in order to retrieve her soul from the afterlife and bring her living body back home with you.

But there's a price. To get her soul back, you must hunt down and murder peaceful giants. Perhaps they've been taken over by dark spirits, perhaps not -- the game isn't quite clear on it, and the game won't be clear on it until you beat it.

And you do it. You hunt them down and you murder them. You don't care about tradition, nor do you care that you're slaughtering several beings to bring back one woman (she's rather cute though). Each Colossus grunts in pain, sorrow, and agony as you bring it down to the ground by crawling all over it until you drive a magic sword directly into one of its internal organs (quite often its brain, spine, or heart). When you slay each one, its spirit is absorbed into your torso and you fall unconscious from the trauma.

Does your murderous rampage pay off? Well, play the game through and see. Though the game only lasted 10 hours for me (I've started a new game in Hard mode now), I feel it was very worth it. It's a wonderful exploration of human behaviour.


In any case, the game started to raise the question for me... if you had a guaranteed way to bring back someone you loved dearly from beyond the grave, even if it meant that you had to break the law and murder innocent, sentient things, would you do it? (Thank all that is good that such power doesn't exist in the real world.)

I would have to say, unfortunately, that yes, I would. Call me selfish or what have you, but my love would be eternal, and if I knew bringing her back would be possible, even at great risk, sacrifice, and staining upon my soul, I would do it. The only factor that would potentially stop me is the idea that if I were to do such things, I would be changed in such a way that she would no longer love me once revived.