Little Guy and a Titan Type Game

A not-really-genre type of genre I enjoy are where you play as a small/normal size character, and there are massive titans in the same world as you. Not necessarily structures or vehicles, but some being that moves around the environment and that you can interact with.

Likely the first game that comes to mind, and truly the pinnacle of the genre is Shadow of the Colossus. It is likely what most games in this genre are riffing off of. (Even though there are many Colossi that really aren’t that big.) The scale of the beasts is incredible and overwhelming and just old. They feel so much bigger than the player not only in size but in their importance to the world. That they were there much earlier than you, and will be there after you. And that is an important distinction. Giant mechs do not count here because that is something a human made for the purpose of piloting, and they have to be older than humans. Or at least older than the humans of the story.

And a game where that is more the case is Breath of the Wild. The Divine Beasts are technically just large robots build by Sheikah, but you never actually see the Sheikh who made them. Just them being dug out of the ground, like fossils that were around millennium before any of the events of the story took place. They count as old, and do seem to have some slight personalities of their own throughout the game. But also, they possess an old, great power that is elemental. Very important to their great status. Makes it good. I loved having to figure out what that shadowy moving cloud in the sky above Hebra was. I had no idea mechanical beasts were in the game, so it was incredible to realize it was a giant beast-like machine. (also odd that “divine beast” is said in Twilight Princess). Even if they were all the same, I loved how much focus each Divine Beast pulled. Vah Naboris was such an imposing force in the desert, and it really felt scary to go near it. I’m still upset that Tears of the Kingdom had zero references to the remnants of the divine beasts. I feel like that is a major blunder of that game. It was one of the first things I checked to see if the Divine Beasts would still be on that map and explorable, or at least being taken apart.

The game that really made me think about this was Xenoblade Chronicles. What an incredible concept for a world in a JRPG. When most are just Earth, but now fantasy, Xenoblade Chronicles makes the entire world into two opposing TItans that lie dormant after a battle that is still waged by the residents of both. I loved the imposing Mechonis that you could almost always see across the sky. It gave such a good sense of place, and was just so incredible to see that in the sky. Also also similarly seeing the parts of the Bionis and the Sword and even the fallen hand. It just gives everything such a great sense of place that you can see everything from everywhere else. It really makes you feel like you are actually on the Bionis, and I love it. Especially how being on the fallen hand makes you feel like you are almost outside of the world. It feels so secluded from the battle taking place. Like somewhere that shouldn’t exist at all. Just a really great atmosphere there. And it is especially such a choice to have there be absolutely nothing in this world besides the Titans. It really makes the world feel out of place, and only about this eternal war between Machine and Biological life. Honestly the premise of the world is the main reason why I played the game.

Now I will complain for the same reasons that I find it so great. The Wii version’s camera and resolution actually make it a bit harder to appreciate the scale because it wants to much to look at the ground rather than the sky. You really have to force it to give you a view of the sky that I honestly think it hurts what the game it trying to do with the atmosphere. A similar complaint is that sometimes the actual scale of the Bionis specifically feels a bit too small. Especially when you are on top of the Bionis. It really feels like it is only about a mile across. Which I don’t know if that is a fixable problem or just a technical limitation, but it did come off a little bit like Belle’s Castle in Disney World. The forced perspective didn’t hit like I think it really could have. Also, the areas in the Mechanic, besides the hand, lack a lot of interesting graphic/artistic touches that the first areas nail, which honestly makes it the weaker half of the game. I love that the fallen Mechonis’s hand is a mix of nature and machine, and that is where you start to learn that the Machina aren’t bad. It really feels like an example of what the world could be if there wasn’t this eternal conflict expressed by just the environment. It’s just a really cool way of communicating that, but the internal Mechonis areas just feel repetitive and boring, which may just be because I dislike machine aesthetics, but I think it hurts some of the newness of the later areas that really only pick up with re visiting the BIonis interior. But sadly I think Prison Island is probably one of the weakest areas visually just because of how much a dark prison area isn’t that specific to Xenoblade, and I like plants.

But yeah, I hope that basically explains what I like about there being very large creatures in the environment. They look cool, provide a sense of place, and I just think they are neat.