Prince of Persia - Complaints

I did a TON of gaming over the Thanksgiving weekend. Unfortunately I didn't do any blogging, so now it's time to play catch-up.

First I'll finish my series on Prince of Persia. I was pretty positive about the game earlier, but now it's time to vent some bile by pointing out all the game's flaws. In no particular order:

- The combat is boring and cheap. It relies way too heavily on quick-time events, some of which require the player to hammer away on a specific button for several seconds. Enemies block at random and can trigger special attacks whenever they care to, often multiple times in a row later in the game. I could do the platforming in this game for hours but the battles lose my interest in seconds.

- Enemies also sometimes glow a specific color that indicates they can only be hit by a certain type of attack. The color for a magic attack with Elika is black. The color for a throw attack is dark, dark, dark purple (i.e. black). If you call for Elika when you were supposed to do a grab move, she collapses in a heap until you can get to her position and revive her. Take a guess as to how this works out during a frantic, quick-time event laden battle. An Xbox can render THOUSANDS of different colors - why exactly did these two have to be identical?

- PoP is surprisingly glitchy for an Ubisoft game. In particular, the Epilogue is very poorly constructed. The most egregious was an audio bug that caused a high pitched screeching sound like nails down a chalkboard to loop constantly while playing. Most of the bugs are well documented in the online community, yet Ubisoft has done little to fix them.

- Speaking of the Epilogue, which can be downloaded from Live for a little extra dough, it is a FLAMING TURD. I've heard that some people complained the game was too easy, and Ubisoft apparently thought the best way to handle that complaint was to sharpen their platforming gameplay to a point and shove it under our fingernails as we tearfully apologized for our impertinence. The retail game makes you feel like a superhero as you swing and leap around the environment, while the add-on content makes you feel as if the Prince's hands have been replaced by walrus flippers, stumbling and flailing about the ridiculously lengthy series of jumping puzzles.

- Oh, and everything that sucks about the combat in the regular game is 100 times worse in the Epilogue. Same bosses as the original but even cheaper? Hooray!

- The Achievement list is mostly based on widget collection (1001 light seeds). All the icons are the same crappy picture. The whole thing is pretty uninspired.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

- And the worst issue of all: the ending is CRIMINALLY bad. I would have been irate with the ending if I hadn't been so stupified with its pure idiocy. Not only does it not make any sense given the characters, but it completely nullifies everything you worked to achieve in the game. Then everyone complained that the ending sucked, so they made an Epilogue to give the game a more "satisfying" ending, only that one sucked too! You go through the whole game working your ass off to save the land, then undo it all in seconds. Why? So they can make a PoP2 and make you do it all again. Seriously Ubisoft...fuck you. That is a total dick move and I won't forget it.

SPOILERS ENDED

I'm not sure what to make of Ubisoft these days. I've liked their games in the past, but we're not getting along so well lately. At least I got the sense that they were trying to make a good game with Assassin's Creed, even if they failed miserably. This PoP game has some strong points, but it's riddled with bugs and bad design decisions, plus the cop-out ending is a total deal-breaker for me. I'm not ready to cut them off completely, but a couple more bombs like this and we could get to that point.

For those still interested in PoP, I'd recommend renting the retail version and avoiding the downloadable Epilogue like the plague.

Prince of Persia - Plot

Most of the time I can see pretty early where a game is headed story-wise, and it'll be abundantly clear whether I'm going to like the plot or not. But occasionally a game will surprise me. Prince of Persia is one of those games.

PoP establishes a rudimentary plot right from the word go. Within the first hour you (as the titular character) meet a mysterious woman (Elika), save her from some bad guys, observe as her father opens the seal to a dark God in an ancient temple (why do people do this...it never ends well), and escape with your lives. The rest of the game involves hunting down a bunch of McGuffins, in this case Light Seeds, and healing the various sections of the land to prevent the reincarnation of the dark god.

My first thought: LAME.

Sorry Ubisoft, but we've been down this road many times before. Preventing the re-emergence of an evil being of terrible power is a REALLY common video game trope. And in this case we get very little backstory to make the task more interesting. Where is this strange land? Why does the Prince, a wandering tomb thief, care about this? Who is this dark god threatening, and why? How does Elika fit into all of this?

But no, the game just throws you into the adventure and says "Get to work" without a bit of explanation. Needless to say, I was not impressed.

Here's the thing though - I was totally wrong. The game isn't about all that "save the world from the dark god" crap at all. I mean it is, but only in the sense of having a reason to run around, explore the environments, and get in the occasional dust-up with an enemy. The REAL story is the burgeoning relationship between Elika and the Prince. Yep, PoP is a love story!

Don't believe me? Check out the two main characters. The Prince is your typical bad-boy with a heart of a gold. He makes his way by stealing valuables, but only from the tombs of dead rich people. He's a little rough around the edges, but it's largely a macho front designed to keep people at a distance because he's been through a past trauma. He constantly talks about only looking out for himself because it's the only person he can trust. Of course, that doesn't stop him from dropping everything going in his life to risk his neck repeatedly for a mysterious female stranger. He's wandered throughout the world on a number of adventures, but it's always been ALONE.

As for Elika, she's a princess who has spent her life carrying a terrible burden for her people. She has magical powers that protect her people from the dark god, but because of that she must live in protected isolation, never leaving the bounds of the palace. Plus she has her own emotional baggage, with a mother who died while she was young, a father who suffered depression since, and no friends to help her along the way. She's tough and proud, but mostly just to hide the fact that she's lonely and has never seen the world.

Now, I'm no expert on romance novels (that's my wife's territory), but are these two not straight out of central casting? He's the dark, wandering hero who the Princess can find frustrating and yet intriguing at the same time. And she's the proud, beautiful woman who needs his help and just might be able mend his (nominally) wicked ways.

The crazy thing is that their romance is completely optional, because they only really interact if you press the L Trigger to keep their conversation going. You can just ignore it (much like the Z-button scenes in Tales of Symphonia), but you'd really be missing out on one of the best parts of the game. The interactions between Elika and the Prince feel realistic and make the story a lot more interesting.

Prince of Persia - Gameplay

Prince of Persia is a series reboot that Ubisoft released for a variety of platforms, including the 360. The previous games were much beloved, and I'd like to think this move was an apology by Ubisoft for the wretched release that was Assassin's Creed. For a full review of that monumental failure, check Jeff's Achievement Box here.

Playing Prince of Persia, I feel like Ubisoft could have made the perfect game if they had just combined it and Assassin's Creed into one uber-game. Whereas AC saddled their platforming masterpiece with a bunch of tedious busywork and design flaws, POP is all about scrambling through richly detailed environments. That includes climbing walls, hopping from pillar to pillar, leaping across chasms, and a number of other acrobatic moves. While there's certainly a learning curve, a little practice is all it takes to get the Prince scaling impossible surfaces with seeming ease.

I can't play a third-person platformer without commenting on the camera, and in the case of POP that means doling out some well deserved praise. The camera in this game is fantastic, easy to position and almost always pointed right where I need it. A sure sign of a great camera is that I've barely even thought about it while playing.

Another mechanic that works really well in POP is your companion Elika, the magical "do-over" machine. Any time you make a mistake and send the Prince on a flailing plunge to Jagged Rock City, Elika uses her magic to transport you back to the most recent solid ground you were inhabiting. It's the same effect as if you were saving the game after every series of jumps, but without the tedium of actually doing so. I really like the way Elika works in the game, because it encourages you to explore the environment without the punishment of a Game Over if you're wrong. Hmm...that column is pretty far away. Can I make the jump? Whoops, it looks like I can't...good thing Elika is here to save me!

The only area where I think Ubisoft needs more improvement is in combat. POP doesn't feature nearly as much combat as AC (thank God), but there's still a fair bit of it. They've replaced the frequent battles against waves of soldiers with occasional battles against boss monsters. The issue is that these are repeated quite a bit and they become pretty tedious over time. Again, Elika saves you before you can ever die, so it's mostly a matter of pattern recognition and attrition. By the time you fight the same boss for a fifth time, you'll probably feel just about done with the experience.

I'm a little over halfway done with POP, but so far I'd recommend it to anyone who likes well-designed platformers.