< Back   -   Talking ICO: Part 2 - The Last Battle

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The Last Battle

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A storm rages under the dark and livid heaven. The sun has long since retired into the night. Blurry in the rain and lit by lightning, the castle has shed its old serenity and stands in unmitigated gloom. Before, it could look handsome. It is only monstrous now.

The boy awakens, wet and probably less than warm, on one of the great cages hanging off the cliff under the front gate. It appears that he, falling off the bridge when it was almost fully withdrawn, dropped down to the cage. (If you will, go to the first picture link in the chapter titled Entombment. You can see the cages under the gate.) What will he do now? His comrade is gone, reclaimed by the witch. Heaven knows what has become of her. He is friendless, weaponless, clueless--as he was at the beginning. What is left now, but to resume what he has been doing all along, to try and get himself out of the castle? For the queen has made it clear she has no interest in him. She has got her daughter back. She will not interfere if he escapes alone. Indeed did she not order him to leave? But what he does next goes against the advice of common wisdom. Let us take another look at the castle's map.

Where Ico regains consciousness is the southern tip of the central isle, which directly faces the shore he has been trying thus far to reach. Where he heads next is the northernmost isle at the top of the map--the farthest point from the shore. This is where he first met Yorda and also where he was entombed. Now what is this child thinking, backtracking through the whole island, undoing the progress he has made, to return to the very place he has risked his life all this time to get away from?

All of a sudden the adventure has taken on a new attitude. We thought freedom was the aim of this quest. But if that is true the boy is not helping himself by running back into the prison. Now we realize escape is not the object of the game. There has all along been another, less apparent object which commands greater priority. That object is the bond between the two children. Escape is agreeable only so long as it coincides with this. But now that one of the companions has been taken away--well, freedom will just have to be put on hold until she is recovered and the companionship restored. So back he must go.

Here some of you may raise a sensible objection. You may say "Eliot is exaggerating Ico's valor. He does not go back because he wants to, but rather because the path inevitably leads him that way. The puzzles he solves force him back to the northern isle. He has no choice to go elsewhere."

That is not true. The ones who have no choice are we. Ico has a choice. Or rather he had a choice--and made it. Consider for instance the murderously steep bluff he tackles to reach the northern isle. Now if he could do that, by common sense he should also be able to climb down to the shore and escape alone. Then you may say "Actually he couldn't, since the only available footpath along the cliff leads back to the prearranged destination." And why do you think the footpath is prearranged? It is put there by the storyteller to prevent us, the gamers, from taking Ico somewhere he does not want to go. It is there to ensure that we do not ruin the story by having him do something he would never do of his own will, such as abandoning Yorda to save his own hide. But the assumption all the while is that he could--if he wished, which he does not--have applied the same effort to saving himself instead of rescuing his friend. He is not, as we are, groping in the dark for just any exit. He is on a search. We of course do not learn this until he reaches his destination. Only then do we realize "So that's what he was trying to do. He was trying to get back to the tower where he met the girl."

In this linear adventure we are as much spectators as we are players. Our control over Ico's actions is limited to having him do more or less what he has already decided he will do. We "play as Ico"--that is, we are expected to behave as he would, and we are accordingly penalized when we go against that expectation. We can have him do what he wants well, or we can have him do it incompetently. But we cannot have him not do it at all. In other words we can either have him succeed at his aim, or we can have him fail--but we cannot alter the aim itself. And his aim is to rescue Yorda. On our part we can let him do exactly that or else refuse by quitting the game. That is all the choice we have. The script says "Either you let him do what he will, or the story does not progress beyond this point."

Let me repeat that ICO is a linear tale. That means it is entirely scripted. We are allowed to control the protagonist so long as we do not deviate from the script; when we do deviate, the story either halts until we get back on the track or it ends altogether with the boy's death. The storyteller has already decided how this tale is to end. Consequently he so set up the puzzles and the paths that we will play out the climax the way he wants it played out. We have no choice but to return to the northern isle. But that is only because Ico himself has chosen to do so.

Make no mistake about it: he still wants to escape. But not unless he has his friend with him. By now he knows this cannot be done without first confronting the queen. Twice already she has frustrated them when they were only steps away from freedom. What is more, she could have done so anytime she wished. There is not a spot in the castle hidden from her eyes, not a spot beyond her reach. As long as the queen is there rescuing Yorda is a lost cause. How much confidence does this boy have in his chances against her? Either he knows full well he is running to his doom, or--more likely--he gives no thought at all to the odds of success. Which is more heroic, I could not say.


Back he goes, into the shadowy underside of the castle which he had glimpsed earlier with Yorda, through the enormous water engines busy at some mysterious work, tracing the deadly slopes of the cliff, until he finds the northern tower rising in the storm like a ghost mansion. He enters the isle and finds himself in the subterranean vault--astonishingly immense!--where the knights had brought him before. He has come a full circle round the stronghold. At the bottom of the vault is the very first idol gate he saw, the same that the knights had opened with the magic blade. Outside, he finds the dock by which he had arrived at the castle. A path leads away from the dock to an altar of stone by the cavern's exit. A familiar object sits on it. The magic sword is at last found.

Ico can go anywhere in the castle now; he no longer requires Yorda's help to escape. Of course the game is so arranged that this will not be permitted. But what I said three paragraphs above applies fully here. In fact if he wanted to leave alone he does not even have to bother with the sword. He can simply take the boat out of the cavern. We know the lattice can be lowered; we saw the knights do it. Again the only reason we cannot lower the lattice or push the boat into the water is not that these actions are inherently undoable but that they contradict the script. It is not that Ico cannot do them but that he will not. This becomes easier to understand if you pretend that instead of playing a game you are watching a film or reading a book.

Now that he has the sword, let us take a good look at it; we couldn't before because it was kept sheathed. Intricate characters are carved on the blade. We have seen these characters before--on the elevator which he is now about to ride, on the casket in which he almost met his doom, and in the speech of the princess and the queen. No doubt about it: the sword is an artifact of the castle. It must have been placed at the cavern to allow the knights, and others like them, to carry out their terrible duty. But placed by whom? By the queen, I should think; for who else should have the authority to grant entry to the castle?

Armed with the queen's sword, the boy opens the gate and enters the crypt. Everything is the way he left it--the grim multitude of caskets, one of them overturned--except for a dark congregation of wraiths at the apse of the chamber. They dance about an unmoving figure like savages celebrating a kill. It is the princess. She has been turned into stone, arrested at the precise moment of the boy's fall, her hand still outstretched for his.

He charges at the gathering. The wraiths scatter, hissing at the intruder. He hacks at them unopposed. The sword's power is remarkable. It strikes down the foe with a single blow. And no wonder. It is a sword forged with the queen's own magic--drawing from the same power which operates the castle entire. The wraiths are helpless against their mistress' sorcery, just as they were whenever Yorda opened one of the gates.

Not long into the fight we notice something odd. Some of the caskets on the wall are glowing for no apparent reason. We have Ico examine them, but we can detect nothing otherwise special about them. The fight continues meanwhile, and more and more caskets begin to glow. At some point a chilling realization grips us. Every destroyed enemy causes a sarcophagus to lit up. We take a harder look at the demons Ico has been massacring. We note they are uniformly small, just about our hero's size. Then we observe in horror that each sports on its head horns like his.

Now if you were at all like me, you halted the assault at this point and debated whether you should continue what you had been doing. And I am certain that is how the storyteller envisioned Ico reacting. A game was never so successful in immersing the player into the protagonist's mind.

But destroy them he must; else he cannot proceed. One by one he cuts down the specters of the previous sacrifices whose rank he had come perilously close to joining. Now, many have drawn interesting inferences from this revelation such as: Ico is not so much killing the wraiths--since they are already dead--as freeing their enslaved souls; the wraiths do not seem as hostile here as the others we have seen; and the other wraiths were likely also humans in life. I will not comment further on these speculations though I find some of them appealing. I do not know enough to support or reject them. I point them out however so you can consider them on your own.

When the dreadful task is complete, the stairs before the final idol gate is lowered, making the last chamber of the castle accessible. I do not want to speculate exactly how the destruction of the specters triggers this. Like many other aspects of the game, to me it seems to make more dramatic sense than strictly logical sense. For all I know it may be the queen is inviting the boy. We know she was watching the whole time.

The final chamber is one of the castle's grandest and certainly its gloomiest. It is a Medieval great hall where the monarch met with the public and received guests. It is hard to describe its melancholy. There is not so much as a lit candle to allay the somber blue that pervades all. A lofty throne, solitary and unoccupied, sits under a soaring dome. Thick dust like fog shrouds the floor. The boy's own echoing footfalls alone relieve the utter silence. We can almost smell the cold stale air. It is the portrait of a bygone glory, of a dynasty in decay. For me this was the most intensely poetic moment in the story. It inspired a feeling akin to reverence. It made me afraid to disturb the deathlike calm. It made me slow down Ico's steps; it felt wrong to run in that space.

He approaches the throne. Nothing happens. The hall is quite deserted. He moves back towards the exit. A voice stops him short then. When he turns the queen is leaning into the throne, legs imperially crossed, looking eminently at home.

He demands to know what has been done to the girl. The witch replies he is too late to do anything and at last reveals her design. She is aging. She means to grant herself another life by seizing her daughter's body. Warning him that Yorda will be no more upon awakening, she tells him to give up the sword--it is hers after all--and leave. She is a pragmatic tyrant, it seems; she would spare violence where unnecessary. Three times now she has given him chances to turn back: first at the main gate when she ordered him thus, then on the bridge where she split the pair with mechanical precision, thinking no doubt that the boy would take the hint and stay on his side of the gap, and finally now. Again we are forced to assume that theoretically Ico could have escaped on his own. I do believe, though I cannot prove, that the queen would have spared him had he taken her offer. Somehow the thought makes her more formidable, not less.

Of course Ico, the bullheaded little hero he is, does not listen. He runs headlong at the throne, sword raised. He loses a horn for his trouble. The queen decides the child will not be diplomatic. The fight begins for real. She unleashes deadly petrification spell, which seems to be her favorite. (Next to transformation it is perhaps the form of enchantment most prominent in Western lore.) As long as he holds the sword he is safe. Apparently the only thing that can withstand the queen's magic is a weapon endowed with that magic. Slashing at the barrier cocooning the enemy, he plunges the sword into her heart. The queen sinks back into the throne, mortally wounded.

With her last strained breaths she tells her diminutive conqueror that her her death notwithstanding Yorda will never be able to leave the castle. Then she vanishes, never to reappear--in an invisible burst so forceful it flings the boy across the hall. His remaining horn snaps off. For the third time in two days he passes out.

Out in the crypt the caskets flash once again. They release mysterious white bolts--reminiscent of opening an idol gate--which converge on Yorda. The petrification is undone. But the Yorda that awakens is not the girl familiar to us. It is the dark figure we saw in Ico's vision. She examines her own hand curiously. Heaven knows what sort of a face she is making. She gazes meaningfully next at the open entrance to the great hall. She seems to divine instinctively what must have happened while she was unconscious.

An ominous tremor has seized the castle and will not subside. The walls begin to crumble around Ico's prone form. Yorda enters, her body crackling with black something, and looking more like her mother than ever before. Kneeling by the boy she touches a broken stump of his horn, a certain tenderness in her touch. She sees the sword embedded in the empty throne. She realizes what he has done. The chamber is meanwhile rapidly coming apart. There is only one thing left to do now. He has saved her. She will save him. With surprising ease she takes her companion into her arms. If I were to hazard a guess I should say she is indeed stronger than before. Timid uncertainty no longer marks her action. She has assumed what used to be his work. Casting a last lingering look at the queen's hall, she steps onto the elevator and descends to the cavern. The water has risen, and the boat is already afloat--or is it the isle that is beginning to submerge? She places him in the boat and releases it to the waves. So much she has braved to see the outside world, yet she chooses not to accompany him. For she now understands she is not like him. She does not belong in his world any more than he belongs in hers. Let him go back. She will stay. She bids him farewell.

The castle succumbs to decay it has so long resisted. First to cave are the parts which were already in ruins. Then the rest follows. With the queen no more it cannot hold itself together; as a river is doomed that has been severed from the source, the castle dies with its mistress. The very islands sink into the ocean. Not a brick, nor a pebble, remains of her dominion--once mighty, ruinous of recent, and having come so very near reviving itself.

All is swept away clean.
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The blinding sun awakens the boy. He rises, and looks about in a daze. Things had not quite looked like this when he lost consciousness. He is in a boat, washed ashore. The beach is foreign to him. What in the world has happened? He jumps overboard onto the sand. A spell of dizziness causes him to plop down. He has forgotten about the nasty wounds dappling his head in crimson. They must throb quite painfully.

The hornless Ico walks along the beach. No doubt he is trying to reconcile, with little success, the current situation with his last conscious memory. The queen is dead. He slew her. But what of the castle? What of the princess? The sea is clear and unending, and offers no sight of the fortress.

He trudges onward. Once again he is friendless, weaponless, clueless--all that ordeal behind him and still an exile. He is as alone and lost as ever. Some things never change. But a moment. There is something ahead--on the sand, by the breaking waves. He keeps walking. It is beginning to look familiar. It is the girl. She lies on her side, still as a corpse. The water laps at her feet. He runs. He stands before her now.

No glad smile touches his lips, no happy relief in his eyes. He is afraid. She is so still. She cannot have survived the sea. He dares not touch her. She cannot be dead--

But look: her fingers, they curl. Slowly her eyes blink open to the light. Squinting ever so slightly she takes in the beach, then the boy. She opens her mouth--


FIN