The Most Disappointing Video Game Sequels – Part 8 of 8
Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was brilliant on so many levels. I mean, time manipulation had been done before, but never with such…such rampant pizzazz, for wont of a better term. The fact that it successfully incorporated free-running elements put it over the top in my and virtually every other gamer’s view.
<tangent>: you can’t have a bad game that nevertheless gets free-running right. An excellent representation can and has single-handedly saved a game. The simple rule is that if you work out free-running, your game will at least be worth playing. </endtangent>
The point is, Sands of Time is one of the greatest games ever made, and passes the “can I still play it today and have fun?” litmus test with flying colors.
So what the fuck happened to the sequel?
I could come up with any number of outlandish theories for our mutual amusement. I could discuss the possibility of Paint Chip Souffle becoming all the vogue at the offices of Ubisoft. I could talk about space aliens stealing the developers’ common sense in order to fuel the dying star that gives light and warmth to their homeworld. I could kick Obsidian in the shins again (OH GOD, IT’S JUST SO TEMPTING). But we know that the truth is far more depressing than any of those possibilities.
The reality is that the failure of The Warrior Within was due to the same factor that caused a lot of the failures on this list: marketing appeal. The producers of the game decided the original Prince wasn’t “cool” enough to “jive” with enough of todays young “hep cat” crowd (this despite the game selling something like a metric fuckload of copies worldwide). They needed a prince who was “edgier,” more “rad,” and more of a “shithead.”
Let’s do a study in comparison, shall we? The original Prince was a wisecracking, slightly superior, yet somewhat self-conscious character; in other words, a lot like a real person. The revised prince was a hostile, angsty whinypants who enjoyed stabbing things in the face and probably had “Crawling” by Linkin Park on infinite repeat on his iPod (you just KNOW he had an iPod); in other words, a lot like a real person, only the sort of real person you see on the subway who you wish someone would curb-stomp just to make the gene pool a little cleaner. Where the original prince would manipulate time in order to cleverly solve a puzzle facing him, the revised prince would manipulate time in order to cleverly knife someone in the balls a few more times. Where the original Prince might have made light of a dramatic situation, the revised prince would grimace and possibly spout a menace-laden one-liner about pain or blood or how no one reads his livejournal. Where the original Prince loved kittens and unicorns, the revised prince ate live puppies and hunted sweet old grandmothers for sport.
What I’m getting at here is that the revised prince was kind of a dick. Having main characters who are kind of dicks is actually ok in most games (see: War, God of), as long as there’s 1) something redeeming about the character, 2) another character in the game you can sympathize with, or 3) the character had always been like that. But there was NOTHING to like about the revised prince, and apparently everyone in the world of The Warrior Within had fallen victim to the Angst Pandemic. We’ve already discussed the prince’s shift in demeanor (by contrast, Kratos was ALWAYS a dick), but he wasn’t nearly the only victim of it; I swear, the entire game was like being trapped in a Linkin Park video. The story and characters of The Warrior Within were so unredeemable that the game’s vastly improved combat and graphics didn’t matter; the series was officially dead to me.
This is one of the few times my opinion and that of Yahtzee Croshaw diverge pretty drastically. He loved The Warrior Within despite its identity crisis; I wanted to find every developer involved with it and punch them in the face. It was shitty enough that when the third game, The Two Thrones, rolled around, I couldn’t even be bothered to care whether or not it was good. That’s the most depressing thing to me; I didn’t even care if it sucked.
Apparently, I missed something important. I couldn’t bring myself to play The Two Thrones at the time, but I decided to give The Forgotten Sands (the latest iteration of the series) a shot. While it’s by no means a perfect game (and not actually interesting enough to merit a full review), in terms of tone they’ve moved right back to their wheelhouse and kicked the shithead Prince to the curb. Amen, I say.
That’s why this is the last entry, actually; Ubisoft, alone among all of the companies on this list, seemed to recognize their mistake and backpedal from it as quickly as they could. Frankly, I like to end on a happy note, and this is it.
