Team Ico were strange people who thought that bad controls equal realism?
My brief history with this game - in 2011 I started playing console (PS2) games for the first time in my life before that being an exclusive PC gamer and obviously I started with what were supposedly the best PS2 games and SoTC among them, but transitioning from PC to console gaming is not easy for at least one reason.
In PC games playing with mouse you usually have total control over the camera. In SoTC however camera lives by itself and constantly wants to move somewhere. I couldn't get used to that and was fighting the camera all the time and ended up ragequitting this game.
But now 3 years later when I have played tons of console games I was ready to give this game another chance. The camera doesn't bother me that much anymore but what bothers me is this supposed realism, it just doesn't work in video games. In a video game, when my character falls down and I press UP I want him to stand UP. The fact that he is laying down for 5 seconds because 'realism' is ANNOYING, especially when you are fighting a titan that can stomp you. When I walk to my horse and press MOUNT I want to mount the horse not jump around it 2 or 3 times until I finally mount.
That is called bad controls and that is the reason why I give this game 7, not 9 out of 10.
If released on PC in 2005 or in 2006/7 on PS360 and with tight controls, this game could have been something else. As much as I love PS2, it simply wasn't the system to release this game on.