#65: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Retrospective: The Blunder Within

Last week, I began a series of retrospectives on the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy. Starting with the original Sands of Time, I mostly praised the game for the many, many things it did correctly, including its gameplay, narrative, and setting. However, despite the great reception of the game, all good things must one day come to an end. Of course, I am referring to the direct sequel to the game, Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within. Released in 2004 as the second game in a soon to be trilogy, The Warrior Within had a lot to live up to. Sadly, it failed to do so it many, painful ways. For very good reason, this second entry in the trilogy has been labeled a black sheep by fans. Allow me to elaborate.

The very first thing that people noticed about The Warrior Within was that the Prince had undergone a severe personality shift somewhere between the two games. In the previous entry, our protagonist was a bit of a snark, but otherwise went out of his way to help those in need when he had the chance. His demeanor added a degree of levity to the preceding, helping to maintain the original game's fairly light tone. In its sequel, this was flatly not the case. Though he was technically the same Prince players knew from The Sands of Time, he acted in a completely different manner. As an example, one of the earliest lines in the game has our dear Prince calling a female lieutenant of an unknown enemy a “Bitch.” Now, to our modern AAA sensibilities, that is hardly a blip on the radar, since “Bitch” is such a common word that it feels tame. However, the Prince and a much more regal speech pattern in the Sands of Time, so this new personality was simply jarring, and the new personality permeates the entire game. Ubisoft even went so far as to get a new voice actor, Robin Atkin Downes to replace Yuri Lowenthal, who had voiced the Prince in the previous game, to sell fans on the new Prince.

If I am being honest, though. That was only a symptom of a greater problem. Overall, the Warrior Within tried to go in a much darker direction than the Sands of Time. The level design and graphics look noticeably bleaker than the much more vibrant locales of the original game. The original game's bright yellow sands, blue waters, and green grass have been replaced by dark caves, dark ruins, dark towers, and dark green gardens. Even the relative cartoon-like graphics of the original game were replaced with a more “gritty, realistic, mature” style (about 4-5 years too early, guys). This was so bad that the earliest female enemy was wearing nothing but a leather bikini with gauntlets and iron leggings in an obvious case of pandering. While Farah's outfit in Sands of Time was a little skimpy, it fit with the setting and her origins as a princess from India. This dominatrix leather outfit looked completely ridiculous, like the game was trying too hard to be mature.

Even the plot suffered from this new tone. To avoid spoiling the game for those who have not yet played it and for some reason still intend to, I will paint in broad strokes. With that said, after the time-bending antics of the Sands of Time, the prince is being chased by a Guardian of Time, called the “Dahaka”, because he was supposed to die in the “true” timeline. In order to save his own skin, the Prince embarks on a quest to the Island of Time with the purpose of going back in time to stop the creation on the Sands of Time. This will resolve the temporal paradox because he could never have fiddled with time had the Sands of Time never been created... or something. This element of the plot does not bother me too much because to some degree all time-travel plots have an element of “Just go with it”, being innately vulnerable to plot holes or logical inconsistencies. What bothered me was how the plot took all the light-hardheartedness and humor of the first game and replaced it with grim-dark upon grim-dark, since the Prince does little else but brood over his likely demise and complain to others about how unfair his circumstances are. I suppose that on some level, I can applaud the designers for daring to do something comparatively different. However, this was a bit of a slap in the face for series fans.

Not everything the Warrior Within changed was for the worse. Some of the things they tweaked were actually genuine improvements. The most notable of these improvements was with the game's combat system, fitting for a game called “The Warrior Within.” Now, the Prince has the ability to pick up secondary weapons for use in his off-hand. Though these weapons will break after enough use, the new combat system allowed players to very their attacks and perform different combos with them. In addition, secondary weapons can be thrown at enemies, permanently discarding them, but adding extra attack options to deal with ranged foes. Though I enjoyed the combat of the Sands of Time, even I must admit that this was an improvement. The combat has gone from a fairly hack and slash fest to a more visceral experience that skilled players can excel at.

Furthermore, even in the original game, ranged enemies could be difficult because melee combat was really the only option in a fight, meaning players had to either wait for enemies to come to them or find a way to close the distance. My biggest criticism of the Sands of Time was also answered, because enemies in The Warrior Within rarely exceeded 4-5 enemies, although there were points where they slipped into old habits. And yet again my praise is tempered with a handful of other issues. For example, while the game rarely threw large waves of enemies at the player, foes often had a large amount of health. I was no longer tired by the overabundance of weak enemies. Now, I was tired by the overabundance of health each individual enemy had and the sheer amount of damage they would soak up before they died. The series had gone from one extreme to the other, and neither one of them were exactly pleasant.

Other changes to the gameplay were made as well, aside from the combat. The most notable of these changes was the semi-open world of the game. In the previous game, the layout of the world was decidedly linear. Players would enter an area where they would then solve a puzzle, undergo a platforming segment, or fight a group of enemies. This would unlock a save point and the entrance to the next location and so on. The beginning of The Warrior Within follows this for a while. Then, the Island of Time opens up a little. Players are able to, with some restrictions, explore the island almost completely. Through sand portals, it is also possible to travel between the past and present versions of the island. This allowed the game to give players multiple objectives that they could tackle in any order in certain points in the story.

While this was an interesting little experiment with game design in a platformer, ultimately it had a number of problems associated with it. For one, it resulted in a major design oversight such that it a certain area of the game was not arranged in a specific fashion before it is revisited in the story, it would literally be impossible to finish the game. Another problem is that due to the similarities between past and present areas and the need to go back to previously explored areas, the Warrior Within feels like it is wasting the player's by literally forcing them to repeat already completed areas two, maybe even three or more times in the story in nearly the exactly same way.

Hardware limitations also stifled this pseudo open-world concept. As a special guest for nidoking042's Let's Play of the game, one of the developers stated that the original intent was to give players a series of shortcuts that unlocked once they completed an area in order to return to the central section of the Island of Time, similar to the way Skyrim always gave player's a secret exit at the end of a dungeon. However, the hardware of the PS2, Gamecube, and original Xbox were unable to load quickly enough to make this possible. As a result, when a player clears an area, they need to go back through it in order to make their way to the central hub which connects all the areas in the game. Speaking from experience, this added needless frustration to the game.

By comparison, other changes to gameplay are minor. For one, the amount of the Sands of Time players will be able to store is much more limiting than it was in the original. Though both games started the player off with three tanks of sand, the Warrior Within gives only an additional three through progression of the story, as opposed to the gradual upgrading via absorption of sand clouds in the original. Furthermore, the tanks are used to both fuel time rewind and the other sand powers obtained throughout the game. Unlike the previous game, where the tanks for rewinding time and for using powers were separate resources. While on the subject of sands, the Prince no longer has to absorb sand from enemies to finish them off, as he no longer possesses the Dagger of Time. Instead, sand is semi-randomly obtained through breaking objects and defeating sand creatures. These factors combined give the player a significantly smaller margin of error for making mistakes in the game. With less sand, players (myself included) would see the game over screen much more frequently.

In the end, this is easily the worst game in the Sands of Time trilogy. Fans of The Warrior Within do exist, but they are vastly outnumbered by the group who preferred the original game over it. As for myself, I ragequit the game when I realized how tired I was growing of constantly fighting enemies and dying while backtracking in platforming sections. I only know about what happens in the game thanks to nidoking042's Let's Play. This game was an experiment as to how to improve the Prince of Persia franchise, and for the most part a failed one. Even Ubisoft's developers realized that by the time development of the final game in the trilogy began. As loathe as I am to admit it, the Warrior Within is likely an important stepping stone to the grand finale of the Sands of Time trilogy as without it, Ubisoft would not have learned the lessons that they did. But we will talk about that in greater detail next time.

#51: Medievil 2: Going Medieval on London

(Spoiler Alert: Both of the Medievil games are up for discussion in this article. You've been warned.)

Last week, I wrote a piece on the original Medievil game from the PlayStation era. As I promised at the end of that article, this week will be dedicated to the game's sequel, which was released two years later in April 2000. Comparing these two games from the same series is rather interesting because when these two games are compared to each other it is possible to draw parallels to the design of sequels to modern games, but that will become more clear once I have finished the comparison. Before we begin, you should know that I expect you to have read my previous article on this first Medievil game or to have played the game for yourself as a point of comparison. Since this is a sequel to one of my favorite games for the original PlayStation, it invites such comparisons. With that in mind...

The premise of Medievil 2 is a little easier to understand than the original game's. After defeating Zarok once and for all, Sir Dan returns to his crypt and finally rests in peace. Fast forward 500 years later, in 1886, Fortesque's remains have been moved to the Medieval exhibit in an old museum in London. At the same time, someone else in the city has managed to acquire Zarok's now-legendary spell book and has begun to use it for his own end, casting the spell of Eternal Night and placing London square in the throws of an age old curse. Once again, Daniel rises from the grave in order to combat this new threat, which is where the player gets involved and the game truly begins. From there he meets the ghost of a ten year old kid who was summoned to guide him to Professor Hamilton Kift, who is an expert in both scientific and magical pursuits. The professor points Dan to the Kensington district of the city in order to look for clues as to who is behind recent events. There, he investigates the site where the spell was cast and finds a few clues to take back to Kift. Before leaving, he sees an anthropomorphic lizard and dog leave the museum, lamenting the inability to enter the tomb in the King Ramses exhibit. This leads Sir Fortesque into the tomb himself (after a few puzzles), where he finds a young mummified woman named Kiya, who was one of King Ramesses II's 200 wives. After Daniel discovers that the villain is an English noble by the name of Lord Palethorn and thwarts a number of his schemes, the Professor receives notice of two sites of psychic disturbance, one in an old mansion and the other in Whitechapel district. Kift suggests having Dan and Kiya split up, but Fortesque argues against it, saying that it is too dangerous for Kiya to go off on her own.

Eventually he concedes, going to the mansion and allowing Kiya to go to Whitechapel. After returning, the Professor tells Daniel that Kiya has yet to return, sending him to go look for her. Unfortunately, Sir Daniel was too late and by the time he arrived, Jack the Ripper (who is a demon in Medievil 2) has just finished draining the soul from her body, leaving her for dead. Rather than fight to avenge her second death, Fortesque falls into a depression and runs away into the sewer system, where he meets a tribe of warriors who make their home down there and worship him as a god because they found a statue of him. They tell him that they need help because a sewer monster kidnapped all of the women of their tribe, which killed their will to live. Being the medieval knight that he is and desperate for a way to prove himself, Sir Dan rescues the women and slays the beast. Along the way, he is given a poster to the Time Machine exhibit in the Museum and safe passage back to the surface, courtesy of the tribe. As he is leaving, the tribe's chief makes a passing mention of the Time Stone that is in their possession. Once back in the professor's lab, Daniel and Kift have a talk where Kift reveals a few things. First, he tells Fortesque that he knew Palethorn was behind the second coming of the Eternal Night and that his time machine only partially works in that it moves through space, but not time.

With this information in hand, Sir Fortesque once again ignores the threat of Palethorn in order to use the Time Machine to rescue Kiya. After returning to the Museum and finding the prerequisite parts, Daniel uses the machine to head back into the sewers. As previously noted, the machine can only travel through space, not time. In order to get it fully functional and return to Whitechapel in the past, Fortesque steals the Time Stone from the sewer tribe and disguises himself as the tribe chieftain to escape and get back to his Time Machine, now in complete working order. Traveling back to the past, Daniel fights Jack the Ripper and kills him before history repeats itself. Once the battle is over, Dan meets the Dan from the past, where they shake hands and fuse together, giving the new merged Dan a new suit of magic armor. Resuming where he left off before Kiya's death threw him into a spiral of stupidi... I mean depression, the Professor has discovered that the final page of Zarok's spell book is located in Cathedral Spires. After braving the horrors of the Cathedral, Sir Dan finds the final page. It gets stolen by Palethorn with the help of a levitation spell he apparently has, and used to summon a powerful demon to begin his subjugation of the world. Successfully goading the demon into attacking Palethorn, Daniel defeats them both and finally saves the day.

Like in the first game, the plot starts off fairly strong. But as the game goes on, the story begins to feel padded out for no reason but to lengthen the game and provide additional levels to explore. For a game that is already short, lasting for about four hours, this is pretty bad. One level that perfectly illustrates what I am talking about is a two part level, the first part called “Dankenstein” and the second part “Iron Slugger.” In one of Palethorn's miscellaneous schemes in the first half of the game, he builds a mechanical monster with the intent to kill Dan, Kiya, and Kift in one fell swoop. To combat this creature, the professor and Kiya devised a plan to create a creature of their own to fight it. Dan's job for the first part of the level, “Dankenstein,” is to head into the London underground in order to collect limbs to use from the results of the professor's previous experiments in creating a superhuman through magic and science. As they are about to finish up and attach the head to it the creature, the professor trips, dropping and destroying it. With no other options, Fortesque affixes his own head to the creature in order to pilot it to fight Palethorn's monster. In the second part of this level, “Iron Slugger,” the creature named Dankenstein (Get it?) fights the Iron Slugger in a boxing match. This level and plot point seems completely out of place because it breaks the (admittedly rather loose) continuity of the game. It does not make sense for these two sides to just take a break from one-upping each other in the search for Zarok's spell book pages to have a boxing match. This not only breaks continuity, but it also inconsistent with the tone of the game. Medievil has always had a bit of comedy to it, but this crosses into the truly ridiculous.

The other example I could point to of the plot being weaker than the first game's is the whole subplot regarding Kiya and Sir Daniel's romantic interest in her. Honestly, aside from her death in Whitechapel which leads to Dan's depression and the whole Time Travel arc, Kiya does not serve much of a purpose in the overarching story. I hesitate to use the label of “sexist” because I find that the label is thrown around far too much, but it is hard to deny the fact that the only female character's major contribution to the plot is to die and postpone the conclusion of the game because Daniel had a romantic interest in her and wanted to act as her chivalrous knight. It does not help that the whole section with the Sewers and the Time Machine contains some of the game's weakest writing, approaching the levels of bad fan-fiction. Even worse is that this whole depression that Fortesque falls into detracts from his development in the original game, where the entire point is to prove himself worthy of being a true hero. It turns out that the moment where humanity needs him the most to save the day, Dan can only think of a girl he just met and how she was killed, damning everything else. I am not kidding in this either. When the professor tries to get him back into the game by saying “If we don't stop Palethorn, he'll take over the world” before he runs into the Sewers, Sir Dan mumbles (He still lacks a jaw) “He can have it, I don't care.” As a child, I just went with it because I did not know any better. As an young man, it infuriates me that they shoehorned in a love interest and completely negated the entire point of the first game.

Before I conclude in my analysis of the plot to Medievil 2, I want to note that I feel that in the designers failed to really utilize the central premise of the game effectively. What I mean by that is that I think it would have been interesting to see a resurrected medieval knight come to grips with the new reality of Victorian London. When Dan comes back to life in this new world, he does not seem to have any questions regarding the technology, society, or anything really. This is a minor point to make, but I think acknowledging and poking fun at the differences between the two societies would be entertaining while staying true to the feeling of the original Medievil, which combined humor and horror quite effectively. As it stands, Daniel has no questions regarding Victorian level technology and instantly understands everything he comes across. For a brief example, the very first ranged weapon Fortesque gains is a pistol, which he instantly knows how to use. This is not necessarily a complaint, but it is something that I feel could have been used effectively by the developers.

Now enough with the plot comparisons, it is high time we went into the gameplay and how it changed from the original. For the most part, it plays very much the same and the controls would feel very familiar to a fan of the original Medievil playing for the first time, but there are a few key differences. The first of these differences is the addition of analog stick support. However, since this was when the pressure sensitive nature of analog inputs were still in their infancy, it was difficult to use the analog stick to just walk around and for the most part it would result in just running everywhere, which made precision platforming difficult at times. While the gameplay was still similar, the level design proved to be much more lethal. Medievil 2 remains as one of the few games that I have been completely unable to beat without the use of cheat codes. (Remember those things?) There were a higher concentration of levels that involved platforming in Medievil 2. Given the health system of the series, which is the exact same system of health bar and Life Bottles from the first game, this means that unless players were willing to exit and replay levels over and over to perfection, they could lose lots of health on platforming. Even worse is that getting health back is harder in Medievil 2. I did not talk about it, but it the original Medievil there were Fountains of Rejuvenation in every level, which healed players and refilled Life Bottles when standing in them until they ran out of health. A popular way to replenish lost health was to replay the first level repeatedly because fountains “respawned” each playthrough of a level. In Medievil 2, they clamped down on that by tracking how much health was taken from each fountain even when players left a level and came back, meaning there was a finite amount of health in the game's world. Paired with the difficult platforming, this could potentially leave players in an unwinnable state without cheating.

Combat also became much more difficult with a reliance on enemies that either become invulnerable during certain attacks or just cannot be killed conventionally. This is especially true of the levels Wolfram Hall, which contain vampires that can only be killed by moving them into sunlight, and the Sewers, which have creatures that possess the tribals and goad them into killing the player. These creatures cannot be slain until they are removed from their host and the tribals themselves can only be dazed. The puzzle element to Medievil 2's gameplay was still at the same level of the original games, but made more interesting. One of the additions that helped keep puzzles fresh was the addition of the Dan-Hand mechanic, where Sir Daniel can put his head on a reanimated, undead hand and control it remotely, separate from his body. Dan can also place his head in many different places in order to help him solve puzzles. It was a refreshing an interesting way to add variety to the game. But as a general rule, while it still plays very much the same, Medievil 2 is a much harder game than its predecessor.

The last returning element from the original game that returned is the Chalice of Souls. Just like in the first game, most of the levels of Medievil 2 contained a Chalice that would fill up with the souls of defeated enemies. Redeeming this Chalice at the professor's lab after completing a level would reward players with a new weapon. The problem with this mechanic is that it seems out of place in Medievil 2. In the original game, the Chalices came from the Hall of Heroes as a challenge for Sir Dan to prove himself. In the sequel, there is no real justification for these magic cups to be scattered throughout the world. They are just lying there waiting for the player to collect and redeem. As for why Fortesque wants to collect them, there is a small reason. The professor asks him to collect magic energy to help power his lab so that he can craft new equipment. Unlike the original game, the Chalices are no longer a central element and seem to be only a vestigial mechanic whose purpose is to make the game a “true” Medievil game. They seem to have no real bearing on the actual story. I say “seem to” because the ending is actually determined by how many of them out of a possible ten the player has collected. The good ending can only be acquired by NOT getting all ten Chalices and beating the game. In that ending, Dan and Kira return to Kira's tomb in the Museum and rest in peace together. Should the player beat the game with all ten Chalices, and thus a full arsenal, they will be treated to the game's bad ending, where Dan and Kira take Kift's time machine back to the past... and land in Zarok's arena in Gallowmere from the first game. They look up and see the giant monster Zarok transformed into at the end of the first game, except Palethorn's head will be there instead of Zarok's, and the screen fades to black. I cannot figure out how the ending could be determined in universe by the number of Chalices collected. The time machine does not need magic energy to work, it already works because there was a whole segment of the game dedicated to fixing it and getting the Time Stone. It just seems like they did it this way because the original games also did it this way, without thinking about the logistics of it.

Back in the year 2000, when Medievil 2 was first released and I was a seven year old playing a game I was eagerly awaiting for a long time, I though that this game was a great game in its own right, even if it was not as good as the original. Now that I have replayed and reflected on both of them, I have to say that this game is pretty lackluster. It had a mediocre story and extremely difficult gameplay. The game shows what happens when designers reuse old mechanics for the sake of reusing them without considering why they were used in the first place and whether or not they still fit. Developers of the game also really failed to properly play test the game since among fans of the franchise, the second game is notoriously harder than the first in an almost unfair way. Lastly, Medievil 2 suffered a major mistake by overwriting key aspects of the protagonist established in the original game's bare-bones (pun intended) plot by forcing elements like a major love interest for no benefit to the overall storyline. Since many major releases from modern gaming often have similar problems in their writing, it is still worth pointing out these kinds of mistakes when they happen. Overall, as a life long fan of this franchise, it is pretty painful for me to say this and when I went back to replay these games that was not my intent. I still hold the original game up as a classic, but I have to rethink where I place the sequel. It is just not as good as I remember.