Warning! Spoilers and long read ahead.

This post is at least two years too late and it's more for me to have on record, but it's something I feel I have to write right now. My relationship with Shadow of the Colossus is definitely love/hate, leaning more towards the love with brief, intense moments of hate. But let me go through the motions before you bash me.

When I first got my hands on this game, back when it was first released, it didn't seem like something that interested me—I didn't get it, I was more interested in things like Mario Kart and Perfect Dark on the N64. One fateful day, however, those games temporarily paled for one reason or another and I picked up Shadow of the Colossus instead. I was hooked before I even scaled the cliff before the first colossus.

For the next week, I would play at my friend's house, all day every day, and soon enough a few more friends showed up and I had my own personal cheer squad. We loved every minute of it, yelling with excitement when I–we reached the top, and swearing at the top of our lungs when the grip gave out. It made for some pretty intense times and great memories, we'd go out for snowball fights when things got tough and we needed to start fresh.

Eventually the day came when we beat the game, put it away, and managed to forget about it for the longest time. Our friendship waned, and my friend later moved away. I made new friends, graduated high school and bummed around for a few weeks. In that time, a friend came over on his day off from classes and we'd just play video games all day. One day he made it known that he owned a copy of this game that he'd beaten and said I could borrow it. That game was, of course, Shadow of the Colossus. The cycle began anew..

A wave of nostalgia hit me like no other. I remembered how to beat most of the colossus, but some I'd forgotten, and a majority I couldn't even find. I spent my days scaling the beasts and exploring the land, oh how I'd developed a taste for roaming the land on that horse. When I wasn't playing the game, I was reading about it online. It was one of the only games I ever played that didn't support cheats, and the information people had, I wanted to see for myself.

We've all seen the lists online for instructions on how to get the secret weapons, and alternate paint jobs for Agro. Well I wanted all of them, and above all, I wanted the Queen's Sword. It was my Holy Grail, and I didn't even know what it did. All I had to go on was that it supposedly killed a colossus with one hit and prevented the 'nuclear fallout', whatever that means I still don't know. I came up with theories as to what that may have referred to, but they were all proven wrong.

I was on a mission. First, I would complete the Easy Time Attack Mode and beat story mode again with my new arsenal. Second, I would complete Hard Time Attack mode and then story mode again. The latter took far longer than I'd hoped. I went back to school and the Queen's Sword sat at the back of my mind for months. That is, until I took up the controller once more and vowed to complete my mission. And I managed it, too; before noon I had beaten the last three colossi on the list and I had myself a fancy new Cloth of Desperation and the long awaited Queen's Sword.

I was shaking with joy. I exited my game, booted it back up with white Agro, and with renewed joy announced what I had done to all of my online contacts on Messenger. There was one new item on my mission list, though. Collect every piece of fruit, every lizard, and experience every glitch known for myself.

At this point you may be asking, "you've gushed for ten minutes about how much you love it, sure, but what did you hate about it?" And that's a very good question. The way Agro handled really pissed me off at times, and the camera control was enough to make me rage quit a few times. But I've learned to accept those things as part of the game, and in turn, love them as well. Besides, nothing felt better than yelling "where ya going, faggot?" at the television screen, and then eventually shooting flash arrows at him during lulls between action.

I hadn't counted on falling in love with the game by the time I was done. It was a long journey, but I had made it. It was the first game I had ever beaten so completely. I had destroyed that game inside and out.