On one level, Shadow of the Colossus suggests that it's better to let sleeping giants lie, lest you become one. Unlike the Wanderer, however, the enemy on which the US colossus has trained its military might actually wants to become a colossus --- and ironically that hope is futile, because a distributed cell of terrorists cannot organize a modern industrialized nation-state any more than a swarm of mosquitoes can build a termite mound. What's happening, crazily enough, is that the colossus, now roused, is hunting for the wanderer, but the colossus has a vision in its head of being the lone man riding on a horse, only with a cowboy's boots and pistol rather than a bow and sword. So there's an interesting relationship of mutual desire and identification between the colossus and the wanderer: each aspires to be the other in some ways.

On another level, Shadow of the Colossus is simply an astonishing aesthetic experience, with the seductiveness that implies. If Wanderer were not so madly driven, so amorally indifferent to the darkness that he constantly assimilates in his quest, then we would not get to play the game. When playing, we are driven on from murder to murder by the desire to feel that high again. This echoes, not in a precise way but in some oblique manner the way that 9/11 galvanized us and the way that our ongoing pursuit of war seems to be a pursuit of a particular aesthetic state.