This entire year has been a great one for gaming, despite what the outsider analysts would say because of the lack of name brand releases. Even the hounding recession that goes on nearly worldwide has done little to hurt the sales of games. Several acclaimed games have come and gone, from Little Big Planet to Gears 2 to Left4Dead. But throughout this year, besides my unavoidable obsession with MGS4, which I will never get to play… I have really only been looking forward to one game with true excitement and anticipation to see how it turns out. That’s been Prince of Persia. I’m excited because I honestly don’t know if it’ll end up being a classic, or a forgotten promise.



This game is practically a series reboot due to the level of changes that they have made to it. The classic prince from the sands of time trilogy is gone. For that matter, the awesome time shifting abilities that came with the dagger of time are also removed. Heck, anything that you knew from the original series have been thrown out at this point. Except for the general theme of an acrobatic young Persian man in a similarly Persian styled location. This makes you wonder just what in the hell were the developers thinking on this one, because the last generations’ Prince games ranged from good action/platform games to excellently told genre defining platform games. They didn’t really need to do anything but put out another chapter in the prince’s story and people would buy it, and all would be the same from years previous. But they didn’t do that, and that has me wondering, maybe even hoping, if they have a really excellent idea in store for us with this next game.

Talking about new aspects of the game, the female partners that the other games have only used minimally or with no relation to gameplay, have been replaced with Elika. From all the statements I’ve gathered, she has been made completely integral to each element of the game. Platforming can only be done through the help of Elika’s assisted jumps and magic. She deals magical damage that makes the enemies react differently. She moves the story along through interacting with her and removing the pestilence from the land in each area. And possibly most shocking of all, she destroys any need for a game over screen by saving the Prince from any deaths he could experience through falling down one of the games many infinite chasms. It sounds like you aren’t simply playing as the prince but a combination of the prince and Elika, as if they were melded into one mind with two bodies with which to move around. This is a highly dangerous tactic by the developers, because teammates for you to worry about have hardly ever worked well in video games.



And yet, Ben Mattes, the producer seems to be so sure of how successful they were that he bet his job on Elika not being in the players’ way. I don’t know just what was going on in his head when he said that, but that takes either impressive levels of idiocy or some huge balls. Interestingly, Elika wasn’t described as a character for you to empathize with like Yorda in Ico, but is meant to elicit an experience closer to how you feel about a useful item in your inventory. I’m not so sure what to think of that comment. If that’s their goal, why even have all those actions be performed by a character, why not have those functions just go to some awesome weapon similar to the sands of time? Maybe they have plans to use these general good feelings that will likely be fostered by Elika being useful to their advantage in telling a heart wrenching story. Who knows. But what I do know it does is make me excited to find out how it will play out.

As if the introduction of a new partner to the game wasn’t enough, they’ve also decided to drop a new style on the Persian flavored world in Prince of Persia. If other fans of the series were anything like me, when they found out they were a little bit perplexed, and even a bit more hesitant. I couldn’t decide if something like that was necessary let alone whether I liked the style at first. However, after hearing their reasoning, I understand the need to differentiate the game from Ubisoft’s brother title, “Assassin’s Creed”, which takes the route of realism. As for the art style, I think it best speaks for itself in the trailers. I wasn’t able to get a grasp of what they were shooting for by simply looking at pictures of the game. I mean, sure it looks like an interactive fairy tale on paper, but that‘s flat and unimpressive. But you don’t get it through your head that you play this until you see it in motion. It all clicked for me when I saw this years’ E3 trailer. It floored me with the song by Sigur Ros setting the mood and inviting me into an all too beautiful world for me to explore and traverse. The animation, something that I find to be key to how immersive a game is, for the most part looks like it does justice to the ridiculously-fluid-for-it’s-time last gen Prince of Persia. I think simply watching this game will be satisfying in ways that other developers should take note of.



The element of the game that I’m most apprehensive about is actually the gameplay, the one thing that hasn’t really faltered throughout the series’ uneven progress. First of all, no dagger of time? eff-this! That sums up part of my beef with the games’ new story direction. I loved the ability to go back and fix the last mistake you just made with the dagger, and I’m afraid that not having it is gonna really flare up any kind of irritation that the platforming or fighting got away with because you could undo it. It also means that if they try and compensate by giving you less fiendish puzzles to get through, we could end up seeing a very neutered version of the platforming that we all know and love with the series. The saving grace of this issue could be how well Elika is implemented, but it‘s hard to tell just how those chips will fall.

The other side of the equation though, fighting, has been handled differently with each iteration of the PoP games, yet it has always remained brutal and challenging. This time the developers have come up with a new philosophy for the fighting in this game, trying to make each encounter with Ahriman’s emissaries feel like the equivalent of a boss fight in other games. A noble pursuit, and one that made me sit up and take notice of how they were doing it. The team plans on limiting the number of enemies, and will try and break up the now tired back and forth of a sword fight with cinematic camera cuts, and a combo like system using a button for any action involving Elika, the princes‘ glove, and jumping each. In theory, it sounds like a cool idea, and one that would get rid of any need to learn combos, since you’re making them up as you go. But Nick Chester’s recent evaluation of the combat when he played a demo has me worried that it gets repetitive, and is too easy to win. If that’s how it remains in the final build, then a great deal of the game’s potential worth to hardcore fans has been lost.

Ultimately, I’m excited about this new Prince of Persia, because I see it as a chance for a new exhilarating adventure in a world that could only be realized in the space of a video game. Mind you, right now, it’s just the hope of it being an exhilarating experience, but it’s still got me pretty excited to see what kind of opinions it gets. I think with a game like this, the creative potential is huge, and therefore, even if it’s not that great or is poorly executed, it is still worth talking about and even worth pondering what could have been.