8. The Sorcerer - Shadow of the Colossus
Surprised? Don't be. Before you start throwing rocks at someone desecrating your precious Shadow of the Colossus, a game this writer would easily list among his favourites, recall that it is not a game without flaws. The last colossus is certainly one of them. I understand the concept: all the other colossus in the game require you to pursue and chase, scale and take down. The final colossus, known as the Sorcerer, forced you to jump, duck, dodge, run and scale around his stationary feet whilst blasting bolts of energy at you that send you flying just long enough for Wander to recover and stand up just in time to be hit again. It's an exercise in pure frustration and indeed on my recent play-through of Shadow on the PS3 HD Collection, I outright quit and ejected the disc with a level of disgust I hadn't known previously possible for this game. If you manage to get beyond the tedium of having to sneak around the Sorcerers immediate vicinity long enough to sneak up on him and begin the climb to the top of his head, you're then precariously forced to jump from the colossus' back onto it's left arm. Sounds easy, right? Yeah. Sounds it. What often happens though, due to the games admittedly unresponsive controls, is Wander will often just outright miss, tumbling all the way down his death and you having to start all over again. If however, you manage to successfully scale the arm, climb up, stab the pressure point and then shoot the Sorcerers other arm with your bow, your next task is to scale up and finally leap up onto his head, endure roughly ten minutes of him furiously trying to shake you off like a tic (all the while Wander is completely unable to attack) and find the spare two-second bursts between shakes when you can stab the living hell out of your last opponent. It takes a while. But by this point, you've probably just given up.