The Real Reason Why I Found Ico to be Very Emotional
I know I'm not the only one who was very saddened by playing Ico. Like Dave Jaffe, admittedly inspired by it, the plot and setting made me desperately long for days of old, when adventure games were all about getting lost in vast, sprawling dungeons. I almost cried when I realized how much I missed platformers and RPGs with rich, meaningful locales that tied multiple isolated parts into a logical, coherent whole. The days when pathways would double over each other, tying together disparate moments of play into a sensible gameplay narrative. Back when returning to a previously visited location didn't mean merely backtracking, but instead looking at the same arrangement from a different perspective.
It sad that newer Zelda (Wind Waker) and Final Fantasy titles (past six) have lost sight of this art. Even Final Fantasy I, which didn't quite have as elaborate arenas as I prefer, at least respected the dungeon as a gameplay element. Those who think FFI was ever about the extremely simplistic battle system miss the point; its real attraction was the thrill of entering some cavern and not being sure if you'd be able to make it out. Once the Playstation trilogy came out, there was hardly a dungeon that couldn't be barreled through on the first attempt. And the same with Wind Waker, which concentrated on sailing and cell-shading instead of providing the types of enthralling puzzle feasts we had seen in Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. Luckily, there's signs that Twilight Princess may return to the majesty of its ancestors.
Like a good session of crawling in D&D, the payoff of a good dungeon was the moment when all the pieces came together in the revelation of what the dungeon really meant. When, after all those hours of solving small, seemingly unrelated puzzles, it becomes clear how they were all part of the player inadvertently working on something much larger. It gives a feeling of being not at all in control and yet completely responsible. Very humbling.
I'm very pleased like Mr. Jaffe realizes this. It's a good sign that he didn't merely imitate Ico's 3-d perspective, nor its guided camera, nor its style of puzzles; he captured its celebration of the fantasy genre's most important contribution to gaming. God of War had one of the cleverest macroscopic puzzles (the Rings of Pandora) I'd seen in a long while. All the stages in solving it were separated by long intervals of intermittent gameplay, without having said stages feel disconnected or arbitrary. It was just like Ico's multi-tiered rooms, in which each floor was visited non-sequentially, or its dual gate template which were mirror images architecturally, but contained an asymmetrical arrangement of puzzles. I'd love to see more games follow the examples set forth by these two.