Capsule: Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Status: Completed X360 version.

Put this on your box: In Persia, no pot is safe.

Most intriguing idea: Allowing the player to change, rather than just use, the environment in the course of a platform run.

Best design decision: Requiring precision timing with the environmental powers.

Worst design decision: Putting the rewind and combat powers on the same magic gauge.


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Critical Thinking Compilation: Prince of Persia

The decision to completely reinvent the Prince of Persia universe, following the (mostly) widely-praised Sands of Time trilogy may have come as a surprise to many fans. Removing the time-manipulation mechanic, discarding the character of the Prince, and adopting a dreamlike, cel-shaded look all seemed like significant and perhaps inexplicable departures. Duncan Fyfe has suggested, in "Time after Time", that the franchise needs to keep rebooting itself because the simplistic core of its story and gameplay is at odds with the need to extend its stories into trilogies and series. Perhaps it was this, perhaps Ubisoft simply felt that it was time to go in a new direction. Given the great affection of many gamers and critics for Sands of Time, it was perhaps inevitable that Prince of Persia would be scrutinized extensively. Perhaps it was held to too high a standard, as Scott Juster thinks, but fairly or not several of the decisions in the new game's design have proven widely divisive.

A gentle journey upstream

Among hardcore gamers there is little doubt that Prince of Persia is easy to play, but a debate rages over whether it is too easy, whatever that might mean. The game is devoid of punishing "Game Over" screens or unforgiving platforming puzzles in the mold of Sands of Time's Tower of Dawn. The Prince's companion Elika has streamlined the experience of "death" in the game, as Richard Naik and others have pointed out. In addition, Joe Tortuga has identified an equivalence of action for the face buttons in different modes that is likely to make the control experience more sensible for the newcomer. Moreover, as a consequence of the open-world design, the difficulty curve is rather flat.

The upshot of all of this is a game in a hardcore mold that reaches out to more casual players. Michael Abbott, in "Prince of Noobs", relates that the striking visuals of the game attracted the attention of new players in his family, while the toned-down difficulty and simplified mechanics got out of the way of their enjoyment. Scott Juster believes that this approach fits with a new era of gaming, in which major titles primarily aspire to be accessible, rather than challenging. On the other hand, Jorge Albor and GSG have argued that Prince of Persia may be a bridge intended to stimulate the casual player's further interest in games. In this respect, Ubisoft may be recapitulating Nintendo's upstreaming strategy.

Gameplay as characterization

The idea that the challenge was stripped from a game in order to make room for casual players is not one that will make the hardcore crowd happy. Other writers have suggested, however, that the simplification of gameplay has aims beyond merely appealing to the pick-up-and-play crowd. Rather, the platforming and interactions with the world are designed to make the player feel a particular way. The compelling interactions with the game world grab the player's attention, according to Spitfire, while Angelo asserts that the platforming segments and interactions with Elika develop into a kind of motion poetry. Greg Tannahill argues that the fun of the game comes from experiencing the platforming, rather than overcoming it. For Thomas Cross, the exuberant movements of the Prince draw the player into his world. I go even farther to argue that the emotions the player feels while platforming are a way of characterizing the Prince himself. If these things are true, then analyzing the game as a puzzle-platformer is inappropriate because that's simply not the kind of game it is. Iroquois Pliskin understands it as more of a rhythm game than a character action title. For him, the physicality of the platforming gave rise to the romance of the story.

Haptic interactions between Elika and the Prince are an important component of the storytelling in the game. The way they touch each other while moving through the world makes the player feel like he's in control of an actual person interacting with another actual person. As Jorge Albor says, touch deepens their relationship in a way comparable to Ico. Because Elika streamlines some aspects of the game and slows down others, David Zhong views interactions with her as a mixed blessing in terms of the gameplay. In "Wait for Me!" he ponders whether this ambivalence makes her more real. For Allen Cook, her relentless helpfulness actually made Elika seem at once passive-aggressive and boring. Although Joe Tortuga liked them, he felt that the haptic interactions interrupted the flow of play to the game's detriment.

Because the feelings elicited by gameplay to a large extent depended on the flowing nature of the platforming, just about anything that brought that to a halt was viewed as a negative. Even the optional conversations, which were praised in some quarters, were criticized along these lines by Nels Anderson. Although he liked that these segments were optional, he detested the way they broke up the game and the fact that they were visually boring. I felt the combat fell flat for similar reasons. For me, the slow, halting nature of the combat was completely at odds with the rest of the gameplay, and also didn't really fit the character of the Prince himself.

An interactive storybook?

Despite all of this, the difficulty level remains the elephant in the room, repeatedly brought to mind by the more ludicrous "Achievements" the game offers. David Zhong, for instance, characterizes the game as practically playing itself. In a pair of essays, Sinan Kubba argues that the lack of challenge in the game goes beyond the simplicity of execution and actually descends to the level of removing meaningful player input. In his view, Prince of Persia becomes something of an extended quicktime event, more akin to an interactive story than an actual game.

Is there something to this? The game seems to fiddle with player agency in interesting ways, especially at the end. The Prince's decision to cut down the trees was at odds with the desires of many players. As discussed at Tangletown Games, this fact emphasizes the division between the Prince, as a character, and the player as an agent, and forces the player to examine his own values. David Zhong felt that the optional dialogue gave rise to a disconnect between the player and the Prince. His informal survey suggests that many people saw the Prince, rather than themselves, as the agent in the closing scenes. In general we think of games as being about player agency (even if it is only the weak agency of "continue or end"). Could the reaction to the game's difficulty result from a feeling that the game in its story and mechanics removes agency from the player, despite its open story structure?

The Prince or the Princess?

The choice to invest so much in the Prince seems odd in retrospect because few critics were impressed with him. Always a good point man on character matters, Michael Abbott brings two essays to this line of inquiry. In "Prince of Promises" he identifies an uneasy tension between the light-hearted wisecracking of the Prince and the depressing destruction of the world; he feels the game might be telling the wrong story. The Prince's character artlessly reaches for Han Solo territory, as Michael details in "Prince of Nada", which makes him much less interesting than Elika.

So, why not make the game Princess of Persia? In his essay, "Caring about the Prince" Tom Cross acknowledged that Elika is the real emotional core of the story, and this is a thread that you can find in many of these essays. In his consideration of Elika, Ben Fritz pointed out that she's so powerful one wonders why she needs the Prince at all. Yet the game's story works against Elika, and its narrative conforms to patriarchal values, as Scott Juster explains in his excellent "Prince of Patriarchy". In the game, nature and women are subjugated to the desires of men, and the King (at the beginning) and the Prince (at the end) undermine whatever agency Elika has.

Does Prince of Persia earn its ending?

The ending of the game puts all the decision-making power in the hands of the Prince, taking it away from Elika, and even from the player. Even people who agree about the difficulty seem to be sharply divided by the game's conclusion. Steve Amodio thought that Elika was clearly worth saving and the cold, dead world of the Ahura was not. As mtvernon points out, the feeling of freedom in the gameplay depends entirely on Elika; her absence in the closing segment of the game makes the player feel uncertain and wary during the platforming. Spitfire felt that the ending worked in part because the Prince was a dynamic character, and in part because the gameplay incubated affection for Elika in the heart of the player. When the Prince slapped the bier, Spitfire got excited because he was united with the Prince in not wanting the experience to end.

Voices from the other side of the spectrum were just as loud. Sean Beanland felt that the game actually didn't do enough to convince the player that the Prince would choose to save Elika. Eric Swain thought that the structure of the Prince of Persia's story worked against the development of the relationship because it prevented it from following any real trajectory (he also proposes a particular arc in an interesting piece). Although the vignettes with the various corrupted successfully create a vision of what Ahriman is and what can be accomplished through him, Swain wonders why the Prince doesn't learn anything from their hollow victories. In fact the Prince reveals on at least one occasion that he understands Ahriman's duplicity. In my own view, the game never does enough to build up the relationship between the Prince and Elika, or convince the player he's foolish enough to make this choice. Moreover, by destroying the player's time investment the ending makes him feel like a sucker.

The player's time investment comes up in Game-Boy's wide-ranging discussion of the game. He feels that Prince of Persia goes out of its way with mechanics like Elika's life-saving to respect the player's investment of time. As a result, he's confused by the choice to devalue that investment at the end. Joe Tortuga identified a different kind of tension at this point, in that the game has a very free and open structure up until the final battle, but at that point doesn't allow you any alternatives.

Or does it? The early credit scroll led to some extended discussion of whether turning the game off early was a valid approach. Joe didn't think stopping early was a legitimate response, and as a consequence he felt the ending ruined the game. In contrast, Michael Abbott chose to walk away from the game rather than submit to its epilogue. As Greg Tannahill notes in his equivocal piece "Closing the Book", turning off a game early can improve the experience, but the question remains whether you are gutting the intentions of the creator. At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, games are about creating a feeling of player agency. In a game like Prince of Persia, is turning it off the only relevant contribution a player can make?



Happy reading, everyone. Special thanks to Michael Abbott for setting up some cross-blogging about the game's finale. That link collection was a good starting point for the rest of this. As always, point me to anything you think I overlooked using the comments, twitter, or e-mail.

Last updated: 4/6/09

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It's about how you feel

The major controversy about Prince of Persia, even more divisive than its ending, has concerned the game's difficulty, or supposed lack thereof. Because the main character essentially cannot "die", and because the platforming is fairly easy to figure out, some hardcore fans of the preceding trilogy have reacted harshly against the new game. Defenders have responded that the game really isn't so easy, and also that it was intended to appeal to a broader, more casual audience. These things are true, but in a way I think these counterclaims don't go far enough. Prince of Persia is a very different game from the Sands of Time trilogy, with different aims. The complaint about excessive ease strikes me as a failure of reviewers to grasp the core ideas that the platforming segments convey.

The previous Prince of Persia trilogy featured a style of platforming in which each environment served as a pathfinding puzzle to be solved by directing the Prince to perform the correct sequence of movements. This kind of level design meant that areas were rarely traversed in continuous sequence. Instead, the player tended to move around in fits and starts, pausing frequently to decide where to go next (often involving a reversal of direction) and what moves were needed to get there. Often this could only be determined by trial and error, using the series' time reversal mechanic to erase mistakes — an idea that was woven thematically into the larger story of the trilogy.

Although the Prince of the new games uses a similar set of moves, the nature of the platforming is completely different. The player never has any need to decide which maneuver to use, because the environment provides copious visual cues at every opportunity. Pathfinding, of course, is simplified by Elika's guiding light, but this is rarely necessary. In most cases, the route between two points in the open world is quite linear. Moreover, once the player starts down one of these paths, the camera typically orients itself in such a way that the next immediate step along the way is positioned right in the center of the screen. The player is never left in doubt about what to do next (but often in doubt as to what he will do after that). Of course this will seem to be too easy if you are expecting environmental puzzles, because there aren't any, but their absence should clue you in to the fact that this game is doing something different from its predecessors.

The platforming in Prince of Persia is not meant to be an intellectual activity. It does not present a problem to solve, or reward making a plan. Rather, the platforming focuses on instinct and rhythm. The immediate effect of this is to created extended, fluid parkour sequences, but I think the intent goes beyond the simple physical representation. Despite their linearity, the platforming traversals inspire a feeling of exhilarating freedom, an idea that you can go anywhere in this world. This sensation survives the linearity because the rhythmic appearance of new interaction points prevents the player from ever surveying the whole of the traversal pathway. A player, having successfully learned to identify the immediately needed motion at each point, will feel confident and completely in control of his journey through the lands of the Ahura. The open-world design reinforces this sentiment.

It's important for the player to feel this way because this illusion of power, this certainty that he controls his own destiny is at the core of the Prince's character. He isn't right — he relies on Elika completely to make his way through the game world — but during the course of the game one starts to take her for granted, as does the Prince. The myopic concentration on the next immediate need perhaps mimics his inability to make good long-term judgments, and his nomadic nature might be reflected in the perpetual-motion extensions of the parkour sequences. The platforming is not a means of testing the player; it is a way of inspiring him to feel as the Prince does.

I think this interpretation informs an understanding of the game's failings. The arena-style combat, with its molasses tempo and arrhythmic quicktime events, feels constrained and restrictive. The flying and running plates force the player into a semi-preset path and cannot be navigated just by element recognition. This causes them to break up the flow of traversal and illusion of control. These segments have other flaws also, but their critical failing is that they are at odds with the feeling the rest of the game so carefully cultivates.

Video games are not all elaborate mechanisms for measuring manual dexterity. They tell stories, they teach, and they convey emotion. The requirement for skill ought to be assessed in light of the priorities of a particular game—not just in terms of the external factors such as audience, but also in terms of its own internal aims. Prince of Persia, despite its pedigree, is not a puzzle-platformer. The platforming segments are not primarily meant as a test of the player's intellect or reflexes. Rather, they seem meant to inspire certain feelings in the player, emotions that mirror those of the game's titular character. They should have been judged on this basis.

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So long, sucker!

I should have turned it off.

It's not like I haven't done it before. I turned Silent Hill: Homecoming off at a point where I thought it should end, though I eventually gave in to the developers' vision. It would hardly have been a sin to treat Prince of Persia the same way. To be honest, though, the moment sneaked up on me. By the time my suspicion that things had gone horribly wrong turned into certainty, I had already gone so far into the game's conclusion that there was nothing left but to let it reach its full, insulting grandeur.

Don't read further unless you've reached the "end" or just don't care about spoilers.

Prince of Persia's ending has three serious issues. The first of these is that it is not an ending, but rather an obvious opening into a sequel. None of the problems have been solved, no real closure has been achieved. I know that video games, like nearly all modern media, love to build on successful efforts with sequels, trilogies, and full-on series. It's a bit irksome, however, to have that so boldly thrown in your face. Games are pretty expensive, and it twists my tail to have a developer ransom my interest in the story for the price of a second game.

A related problem is that the ending nullifies the player's effort to finish the game. The player, along with the Prince and Elika, has struggled for hours to return Ahriman to the prison. By releasing the dark god again, the developers basically strip the worth of that time. The ending they devise denies the player a sense of accomplishment; every fight, every traversal, was just a wasted effort. What's more, the player is forced to participate. Once Elika has been placed on the platform, the player has no choice but to undo all his hard work, even if he doesn't want to do it, or believe that the "Prince" would.

And make no mistake, this ending does not work with this character. It doesn't suit the kind of character he is, for one thing. The game would have been more accurately titled The Princess of Ahura, because it is clearly Elika's story. Were it not for his occasional employment of sword-fighting skills, the Prince would be completely superfluous. He never makes the critical decisions, and Elika clearly doesn't really need him to make her way through the environment. Although he's the focus of the player's experience, there's no escaping the fact that the Prince is not the hero of the story. He's the comic relief. Promoting him to the center of the story in the last moments feels like a misuse of the character.

Even if you accept his newfound central role, the Prince's decision is inexplicable. When Elika asks him why he did it he gives her a look that I assume is supposed to be searing (it's hard to tell given the characters' apparent facial paralysis), but nothing in the game to this point supports such all-consuming infatuation. Again, maybe the developers meant those awful, mask-like faces to convey some kind of emotion throughout the game, but the dialogue itself never amounts to anything more than mild flirtation, in which Elika repeatedly shoots the Prince down. It became utterly obvious about 3/4 of the way through the game that her death was inevitable. The Prince we are introduced to up to and beyond that point struck me as the kind of person who would take the death stoically and chalk it up to just more bad luck.

In addition, the game builds up plenty of antipathy between the Prince and Ahriman. As he runs through the desert you can hear Ahriman whisper that he's done no injury to the Prince, and I guess that's so if you don't count being stabbed, crushed, knocked about the head, choked, slashed, and repeatedly drowned. Moreover, the Prince makes clear during his fights with the Concubine that he knows Ahriman is not to be trusted. He also knows that Elika would not wish him to do this. I simply can't buy that the Prince is infatuated enough, or foolish enough, to follow through with what Ahriman wants.

The story of Prince of Persia is bland and competent, if nowhere near as interestingly presented as Sands of Time or The Two Thrones, but the ending is a mess. It devalues the player's investment in the game and his efforts to complete it. Additionally, it just doesn't fit the character of the Prince. To add injury to insult, the player is forced to work for this ending. He has no alternative but to put an effort into senselessly undoing everything he worked for.

That's not entirely true, though, is it? There is an alternative, and it's one I should have used. I should have turned it off.

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Second verse, same as the first

Although Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time has been widely praised as one of the best games in the last decade, many players and critics justly excoriated the game for its combat segments. The swordfighting in that game took up a great deal of time, felt very repetitive, and also was essentially divorced from the platforming activity that took up most of the game and gave it much of its appeal. For the reboot of the franchise beginning with the recently released Prince of Persia, the developers promised a very different take on combat. This they delivered, but the fighting in Prince of Persia nonetheless suffers from most of the same problems as in Sands of Time, and some new ones as well.

As I've mentioned before, one of the reasons I hold a high opinion of The Two Thrones is that it managed to partially solve the division between combat and platforming that had plagued the previous two games in the series. I had hoped that the PoP team would take the new game further in this direction to seamlessly integrate the two systems. Instead, they went in exactly the opposite direction. In the new Prince of Persia, entering combat feels like entering an entirely different game, one that is utterly divorced from the rest of the world. The changes in the screen are part of this, but there are other aspects, too.

Each battle takes place in a large, open space, meaning that it is nearly impossible to really use the environment in combat. Yes, there are scripted things that can happen involving walls or platform edges, but the variety of acrobatic tricks involving walls and pillars that were possible in the earlier games now seem to be gone. The pacing of the two gameplay modes is also incongruent. The platforming of Prince of Persia is fast and fluid, while the combat is slow and halting. In addition, the platforming doesn't actually rely very heavily on timing. Especially late in the game, however, the fights devolve into very unforgiving sequences of quick-time events, in which it becomes absolutely essential to get the timing precisely right.

So the combat is divided from the rest of the game by its look, its central activities, its pacing, and its attitude towards towards player error. Because of this it actually feels further apart from the platforming than did the combat in Sands of Time.

The combat also ends up being fairly repetitive. Some of this is due to the fact that you literally must repeat battles with each of the main enemies. Each of the game's four bosses must be fought six times, and only in the case of the Warrior do the fights change up significantly. The occasional battles against Ahriman's soldiers hardly provide any variety — the enemies all seem to have essentially the same moveset, and the combat locations differ from each other only in minor ways. Within each fight there is also repetition on account of the different "shields" the enemies can use. Although these have the virtue of pushing the player out of his comfort zone and forcing him to explore the combat tree, each use of a shield forces the fight into a set shield-counter-attack pattern. When the use of a shield is occasional this is not a problem, but as the game goes on your enemies will engage one at every possible opportunity, forcing each fight into a routine. What's worse, some enemies will keep using the same shield over and over, making the activity even more uniform, and stripping the system of its only virtue.

The main new problem for the combat is that it is all wrong for the character. Part of this comes from the pace of combat. The Prince of this game moves fast and talks fast, but when the sword comes out he starts inching around everywhere like a caterpillar. He's practically incapable of closing with his enemies, most of whom move with greater speed and fluidity than he. Seeing this man scamper around the land of the Ahura, you might expect that he would fight in a similar manner, using speed, guile, and the environment to defeat his foes. He's the sort of man you might expect to take on a squad of guards with a dagger and a loaf of bread and somehow trick them all into running each other through. Instead, he fights in a series of one-on-one duels, moving sluggishly around an empty arena with his giant sword.

The weapon itself is also outrageously inappropriate. The man is a thief, after all — he needs a weapon that's light and easy to carry on his acrobatic forays through crumbling tombs. Instead he gets a blade longer than his legs. You couldn't walk around your living room wearing that sword without knocking it against a dozen pieces of furniture and every wall, so it's hard to buy that he can manage wall-runs and navigate ledges with it on. This weapon belongs to the Prince of the previous trilogy, a man obsessed with martial glory, not the tomb raider of the present game.

Prince of Persia has rebooted the franchise with a new storyline, a different look, and significantly altered combat mechanics. Some of these new directions feel like progress, but the combat seems to have taken a step backward, shedding the advances of The Two Thrones in order to revert to the same gameplay division and combat tedium that hurt The Sands of Time, while adding a new wrinkle in that the combat style is now totally unsuited to the Prince himself. All in all, the combat still juts out from the rest of the game like a sore thumb. This brand-new Prince may have a whole new world to explore, but the combat has the same old problems.

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Farah and the Prince

Corvus Elrod's proposed Round Table subject for June is instances of the role of relationships in games. This follows on previous posts of his in which he argued that great relationships, rather than great characters, define a good game. I don't quite agree, because I think the truly great successes occur when great characters and great relationships appear together. That, for me, was something that happened with the Prince and Farah in two Prince of Persia games. Now, I've written about the modern Prince of Persia trilogy before, focusing my treatment on the Prince's transformation and the ways in which the gameplay takes the player along the same path. This time I want to discuss the different ways in which the series' female lead, the Maharajah's daughter Farah, is used in the two games where she appears.

To be honest, Farah is not a fully fleshed-out character in either Sands of Time or The Two Thrones. Her interactions with the Prince show her to be strong-willed and to possess firm convictions about right and wrong, but it's tough to say just from the short time we spend with her what she would be like, were she not trapped in a city crawling with sand monsters. Only in The Two Thrones do we learn the most elementary things about her. Apparently, she likes pomegranates, the color red, and challenges, the last of which certainly serves her well in dealing with the Prince.

Without Farah, we'd know precious little about the Prince, either, and the Prince is a great character (and even more so in The Two Thrones). It's no difficulty to figure out that he's acrobatic and has a thing for revenge, but again this doesn't give us much of an idea what he'd be like in the absence of slavering sand fiends. Yet through the course of the game we also discover that he's a bit spoiled, something of a male chauvinist, fairly bad with women, has a deep sarcastic streak, and is charming despite his flaws. All of this knowledge we owe to Farah—not because of anything she says or does, but because of how the Prince reacts to what she says and does.

Granted, we could have been treated to a limp cutscene in which the Prince is scolded for his insolence by his well-meaning father. This, however, would not have been nearly as illuminating (or amusing) as the lines the Prince mutters while walking across a high beam just after Farah has told him to meet her at the baths:

I'll just ask the first Sand Creature I run into! 'Could you direct me to the baths, please? Well, thank you.' 'Don't mention it, I used to be a bath attendant back when I was alive...'

and later, as he works his way into a cavern full of waterfalls:

Oh, have you been waiting here all this time? I didn't realize you meant these baths! I went to the other baths clear across the other side of the city! I had a lovely wash and a rub with fragrant oils. Too bad you weren't there... Stop talking to yourself!

Without Farah, the Prince is just navigating scenery at these moments. With her around, even if only to push his buttons, we learn a great deal about what kind of person he is, beyond his desire to plunge the Dagger of Time into the Vizier's black heart.

It's important to note that in Sands of Time Farah does really not succeed in inducing any kind of change in the Prince. If nothing else, the end of the story, in which the Prince selfishly uses the dagger to kiss Farah without having her think less of him, should convince you of that. Even the scene in which he obeys her directions to stab the Hourglass plays out ambiguously, making it unclear whether he believes that this action will save his life or end it. Another exemplar in this regard is the entirety of Warrior Within, which neither needs nor deserves further discussion here.

In The Two Thrones Farah's role changes significantly. She's no longer used to illuminate who the Prince is: that task is taken up by the Dark Prince persona. This is a necessary change because of gameplay and story considerations. In this game (as opposed to Sands of Time) Farah is used exclusively in a puzzle-solving capacity, and so she is an occasional, rather than regular, companion. Because the Prince as a person is in flux through much of the game, a constant companion is necessary, and so we have the voice in the head to illuminate his changing character.

Farah's role in The Two Thrones is as a catalyst for the Prince's transformation. The events of Sands of Time have given her emotional power over the Prince, even though the repeated reversals of the story mean she has never actually met him in the timeline of the game. Her attitude towards soldiers and fighting has not changed significantly from the first game, but the Prince's own battle-weariness and longing for her mean that he listens this time. Almost nothing that occurs in the game hurts him more than her rejection on seeing his sand form; absolutely nothing in the game affects him more than her convictions about his duty as Prince.

In the absence of Farah, the main plot of The Two Thrones probably would not change significantly: the Prince would cut his way through the city and destroy the Vizier regardless. However, Farah's presence determines who the Prince is, and why he fights, when he reaches his enemy. In that sense, she is essential to the story. Without her, the Dark Prince is the only Prince—without her, the Prince could never escape the warrior within.

The Prince's relationship with Farah is essential to both the games in which she appears. In Sands of Time, the relationship reflects who he is; in The Two Thrones it defines who he will become.

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"Time is an ocean in a storm..."

The modern Prince of Persia trilogy begins almost inexplicably—a man stands on a balcony that looks out into a thick jungle. All he can do is enter a palatial building through swaying drapes. Then come the images—a drop of water, the desert, a beautiful woman—and the story begins:

Most people think Time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of Time, and I can tell you, they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm. You may wonder who I am, or why I say this. Come, sit down, and I will tell you a tale like none you have ever heard...

Impressively, this is true; more impressively, the tale is actually good.

Megaspoilers below the fold.

The man telling the story is the Prince himself, and the game in which he tells it, Sands of Time, is deliberately constructed to evoke the feel of the 1001 Nights. As the game progresses, the Prince's narration occasionally explains where you are or what he's feeling. When the player dies, the Prince steps in to correct him: "No, no, no, that's not what happened."

The characters are also evocative of the 1001 Nights. The Prince himself is the main character, accompanied by the Maharajah's daughter Farah. His opponent, the treacherous Vizier, first betrayed the Maharajah to the Persians, and then betrayed his new master by tricking the Prince into opening the Sands of Time. This mystical substance has destroyed the palace of Azad and infected its inhabitants. In order to "undo what he has done", the Prince must traverse the crumbling ruins to confront the Vizier and re-seal the Sands in their Hourglass. Along the way, he must mature from a sarcastic young charmer fixated on honor and glory into a responsible adult who properly understands his duty as a person.

To do this, he must use an array of acrobatic skills. The Prince can run up or across walls, jump great distances, balance on beams, swing on poles, and cling to precarious ledges. The challenge of the Prince of Persia games is to figure out which route to use through a landscape, and which skills must be used. Then, precise timing is often required to make it through. Mistakes are inevitable, but the Prince can survive them using the Dagger of Time which he finds early in the game. With this, he can rewind time back to a moment before his failure, or slow down time to make evading a trap easier, or even freeze his opponents in time.

The Prince's first confrontation with the Vizier ends in failure. Despite the bond that has grown between him and Farah on their journey through the ruins, he distrusts her at the critical moment and the Vizier casts them down into a tomb. They escape, but the price of his failure is that Farah steals the Dagger. But because she is not a warrior, she dies en route to the Hourglass. Filled with remorse and aware of the futility of fighting for honor and glory, the Prince at last heeds her words and plunges the Dagger into the Hourglass. The effect is to rewind time all the way back to before the Vizier betrayed the Maharajah. As the story ends, it becomes clear that the whole game that was played was the story the Prince was telling to Farah to warn her of the Vizier's treachery.

The final combat with the Vizier is a rather mundane sequence; properly viewed as an epilogue rather than the final boss. The true final boss of the game, as others have noted, is the Tower of Dawn, which the Prince must climb using all his skill but without the Dagger. This is a critically important key to understanding what the Prince of Persia games are really about. The platforming, motion, and timing are the essence of the game. Farah's criticism of fighting as futile is also important to this point.

Yet the developers themselves did not understand it. In the sequel, Warrior Within, the focus is on combat. Because Sands of Time was criticized for its repetitive and excessive fighting, the developers attempted to address this by creating more unique fighting moves. This was an attempt to solve the wrong problem. The fundamental flaw with the combat was not that it was dull or there was too much of it, though both these things were true. The problem was that the combat had nothing to do with the rest of the game.

The platforming and combat aspects of gameplay in Sands of Time did not interface well, to the point where it felt like you were playing two different games. One of them was a magnificent platformer, and the other was a mediocre hack-and-slash game. The careful timing, exhilarating acrobatics, and understanding of the environment that were the core of the platforming were abandoned when the swords came out. Thus, the player had to shift gears every time a battle started. Jerry Holkins likened the feeling to ordering a pizza and getting a free walrus. Any step to "fix" the combat that did not recognize this divide was doomed to failure.

In Warrior Within The Prince, pursued by the demonic Dahaka for the crime of opening the Sands, flees to the Isle of Time to prevent their creation. He fundamentally does not change his behavior—when he accidentally creates the Sands of Time by killing the Empress Kaileena, his answer is to go back in time to fix his error. He succeeds in doing this, and also kills the Dahaka. The Prince's failure to change as a human being is accompanied by an intellectual regression in the game itself. Farah's rejection of violence is cast aside, and in a way she is ridiculed from afar by the game's glorification of violence and puerile, chauvinistic sexuality (best evinced in Shahdee's outfit). Granted, a chauvinistic viewpoint (the Prince's) was also present in Sands of Time, but there it was used to ridicule the Prince and demonstrate his childishness. In Warrior Within the chauvinist's view is celebrated. Moreover, every aspect of the 1001 Nights influence vanishes, replaced by generic architectural and musical elements; the narration is excised completely. As a cumulative effect of these decisions the game is an artistic failure.

Warrior Within alienated many fans of Sands of Time, but all the errors were fixed in the finale, The Two Thrones (or Rival Swords in its Wii incarnation). The Prince returns to Babylon with Kaileena, who narrates the tale, recovering this part of the atmosphere. The classic characters also return, for the Prince finds the city ravaged by the Vizier, who has overthrown the Maharajah, imprisoned Farah, and invaded the Prince's kingdom, with the intention of seizing Kaileena. He succeeds in doing this, and the Prince, still acting as he did in Warrior Within, attacks recklessly and fails to save her. She dies, releasing the destruction of the Sands of Time within the city, and also into the Prince. He comes away from his failure with nothing other than the Dagger.

The Sands give rise to an alter ego—the Dark Prince, who in form resembles a sand monster, and whose personality is the purest articulation of the man the Prince was in Warrior Within. As the Prince works his way back to the Vizier for a final confrontation, the Dark Prince constantly urges him into combat and seduces him with promises of bloody vengeance. Farah once more argues against this path, ultimately convincing the Prince himself. For the Prince, hearing his dark half's eulogy of the bloodthirsty warrior, replies, "...what you describe is not a man, but a beast..." Implicit here is a criticism of the very kind of game Warrior Within was, and of what it celebrated.

This is more than just a passing note from the writers, for the game itself constantly de-emphasizes the sword-based combat that dominated the earlier entries. While the Prince can fight in this way, the best approach to combat is always to use the stealth-based "speed kill" system. In this sense, "stealth" means moving through the environment to a point above or behind the target, waiting for the right moment, and then engaging in a timing-critical attack sequence. Bloody, violent combat becomes less a part of play, while platforming begins to inform every aspect of the game. The boss fights, once purely combat experiences, become fusions of combat with platforming or timing. The "two games" problem is thus put to rest.

This evolution is best articulated in the fight against the Vizier, which has three phases. The first is a straight-up fight that might have come directly out of Sands of Time. In the second, the Prince must engage three speed kills, and the combat of Warrior Within vanishes. In the last segment, the Prince must navigate a floating maze to reach the Vizier—with this, the death of fighting is nearly complete. Combat has been supplanted by platforming.

Yet the final articulation of the Prince's agreement with Farah comes in the game's epilogue. Here the Prince confronts the Dark Prince in the realm of the mind. To defeat the Dark Prince, platforming is necessary, but the amount of combat needed declines throughout the sequence. In the end, to triumph over the Dark Prince, the player must choose not to fight him, and instead to follow Farah's voice, casting the "warrior within" aside forever. Thus the player's gameplay transition matches the Prince's maturation process.

This is true in another connection as well. Throughout the trilogy, the Prince and the player fix mistakes by manipulating time. This is fundamentally childish, akin to putting a broken lamp back together using Elmer's glue in an attempt to make it seem as if an accident never happened. Yet each repair the Prince performs causes a new problem. Undoing his error at Azad provokes the Dahaka. Going back in time to kill the Empress creates the Sands. Traversing time again to rescue Kaileena from himself and destroy the Dahaka only brings the Empress into the grasp of the Vizier. Near the end of The Two Thrones, when the Vizier has captured Farah and cast the Prince down into the Palace catacombs, he comes across the greatest sign of this failure: the body of his dead father. As the voice of the Dark Prince mocks him, the Prince casts aside the idea of "undoing" his mistakes. He will not rewind time; rather, he will confront his mistakes and their consequences.

The player, who knows all too well (from three games) the attraction of rewinding time to reverse one's errors, is implicitly invited to this kind of maturity. And, by giving up the dagger after the confrontation with the Vizier, but before the game ends, the player is made a part of the Prince's decision. This could have been accentuated more powerfully, as in Sands of Time, by giving up the Dagger when the Prince finds his father, but for story reasons the Dagger must be with him at the top of the tower after the Vizier's defeat. Nonetheless, by playing the final stage (within the mind) without the dagger, the player and Prince are united in confronting the outcome of their mistakes (in this case, the Dark Prince) without trying to "undo" them.

The Prince of Persia trilogy is very uneven; Warrior Within was a significant artistic failure, devoid of the atmosphere and meaning that informed Sands of Time and The Two Thrones. Sands of Time itself was seriously flawed, because of its divided gameplay. Its story and atmosphere, however, more than compensated for that imperfection. These were preserved in The Two Thrones, and moreover that game achieved a gestalt in which the two primary gameplay aspects were unified with each other, and then brought into alignment with the thematic rejection of violence and of "undoing" mistakes. When the Prince repeats his introduction from Sands of Time at the end of The Two Thrones, the story comes full circle, but his enormous growth as a person is undeniable, for the player has participated in it.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (highly recommended) and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (not so highly recommended) can both be played at GameTap. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and its Wii counterpart Prince of Persia: Rival Swords are still available for purchase at video game retailers (as of 3/2008). I would regard any video game library as incomplete without The Two Thrones.

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