Prince of Persia

When we last left the popular Prince of Persia series on the Playstation 2, our hero had devolved from classy but naive to a generic dark and Emo guy with anger management and personal hygiene issues. Perhaps for this reason it is not surprising to see Ubisoft hitting the glossy red reset button in their next generation console incarnation of the series. Gone is the snarling, pain-wracked prince with a heart full of vengeance and shadow. Gone also is the popular, defining mechanic of the dagger of time, allowing fortuitous rewinds to ameliorate the awkward moments of 3rd person action adventure tomb raiding (the dagger was reportedly last seen in the possession of a Microsoft employee named Tim.) In their place we have a new hero who may or may not be a prince, living in a world that most certainly is not Persia, and adventuring with an immortality mechanic in female form. Will this new entry stand up to the sands of time?

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Prince of Persia
Platform: Xbox 360
Played For: 17 hours




The new Prince of Persia has suffered some criticism for its dalliance with a Persian fantasy theme. While much of the look of the game is taken from Middle Eastern mores, no further effort is made to match the genre than the plainly visual. Our heroes certainly do not sound like they inhabit an Arabian Nights world. Beyond their decidedly American accents, the attitudes, emotions and speech pattern presented in the game make no effort at Orientalism. There is an otherness to those who have grown up with a different set of beliefs and cultural conventions than your own, and many good fantasy authors like Fred Chappell or Ian Mcdonald (to name two authors I’ve just recently read) manage to spin tales of a constant cultural theme, without the dissonance that PoP incurs. It would certainly be a neat thing to see games set in worlds such as these, drawing heavily from storytelling traditions that are foreign to the Western Worldview. Prince of Persia is not that as such.

But does that really take away from what PoP does succeed in being? Fantasy is by nature a mixture of the imaginative and the real. Borrowing a few iconic ideas from one kind of culture or another do not then require a full commitment to every aspect of that realm. Does every Tolkien-based fantasy have to sport Christian values? If you want Martial Arts in your realm, must you have Confucian or Buddhist doctrine as well? Those who were upset by the characters in PoP would hardly have been more satisfied had they dropped the words “praise Allah” once or twice per sentence as is done in the Arabian Nights... only controversy would have resulted from deeper adherence to the source material. American ideology is not just a popular choice in video game characterization for sales reasons... it is also because it is safe, and least likely to offend in the current, possibly over-sensitive creative climate.

And besides, a lot of the dialogue is actually quite good. It is a rare action video game that puts so much effort into building characters. The script is funny, occasionally poignant, and most incredibly, an effective romance to boot. Elika and the “Prince” often have chemistry, and their quiet, akward attempts to reach out or hold each other at bay were some of the most enjoyable moments in the game for me. This is a game that can claim story as a real motivation for play.

Which is very good, because in other arenas the adventure falls sadly short of its predecessors. With both Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia, it is clear that Ubisoft as a company is grappling with the very difficult problem of repetition. Collecting light seeds, fighting monsters, discovering new locations... all of these tasks rapidly take on a character of extreme self-similarity. About a half hour into the game, it feels as if the Prince has offered up every ability at his disposal. Each new realm encountered, while stunningly beautiful in graphical presentation, are in terms of gameplay exactly, depressingly the same.

Part of the problem here is that the central “game” in Prince of Persia is how to get from point A to point B. In the previous trilogy, our acrobatic Prince was often presented with large, complicated rooms to navigate, strangely full of poles and posts, crevices and ivy and other things for the Prince to have a good shimmy across. Now, however, the world has been divided into very discrete and obvious paths, all easily reversible, making one feel like they are constrained to a simple network of loops. Traversing the world becomes a test of pushing the right sequence of buttons so that the Prince can grab at the right objects. In a way, the Prince is too adept at what he does... his movements so seamless that the controls give no room for error or variation.

Worse, he is now immortal. While I really enjoyed having Elika as a travel companion, her ability to instantly save the Prince’s life at any moment removes any sense of danger from the game (and at times makes you wonder why the Prince is at all necessary since she’s so damn capable anyway.) The dagger of time was a fantastic mechanic precisely because it eliminated the frustration of misjudging a bad jump, while still coming with limited uses that insured thought before action. Traveling around the PoP world is now essentially brainless, with no punishment for getting it wrong. Similarly, enemies are universally defeated by using the same combos over and over again. Gameplay has been reduced to routine, and the few little side puzzles sprinkled around the world are not enough to ameliorate this glaring flaw.

Batman and James Bond have proven to Hollywood that there is gold to be found in re-imagining venerable intellectual properties. Given the power that brand names have in the market today, it is likely we will see a lot more sequels of this sort in both movies and games... it is much safer to remake an existing idea than to develop a new one that may or may not stand on its own. While the new Prince of Persia has some serious problems, it has also gotten a lot of things right, and I am hopeful that the game will mature in its next incarnation. For now, enjoy PoP for its character and its story, and for the tranquil, trance-like state that its mind-numbing gameplay can inspire.

Will I play it more: Seen one light seed, seen 1001 of them.