Prince of Persia...also known as Prince of Persia 4, PoP, the Prince of Persia, the Prince of Iran, Jake Gylenhall, the Prince of Persia 4, the Prince who can kick your ass and kick mine when i'm writing this...of Persia, the Prince....of Persia, P...E...R...S...I...A...A...A...A...A...A...!, the Prince...of...Persia, the Prince...of...Persia.........4...and the list goes on....Prince of Persia....Prince of....Persia....Pers....P.............
PRINCE OF PERSIA!!!!!
Many of you would know this game, since the release of the first Prince of Persia for the playstation 2, better known as Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or PoP1, or The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, or Prince of Persia: SoT,....ENOUGH!
The Prince, again retaining his usual guile of being nameless, now returns to fans like you, me and even Little Jimmy next door as a wandering swashbuckling acrobatic freak in this latest incarnation. This time, he gets down with Elika...a princess to be precise...a fucking hot princess to be precise. Elika, his omnipotent sidekick, basically makes the Prince unkillable.
Remember in Sands of Time when you'd have to use the sand gauge to reverse time to before you got smashed by a mob, or before you made that fatal jump? Well, say bye bye to that piece of redundant silica oxide contraption piece of crap! With Elika around, she'll automatically pull you from certain death, and even resurrect you when you were at the brink of getting smashed by bosses and mobs alike. This is real time saving! Now with Elika, puzzle solving in PoP was elevated to new grounds. Mainly...with Elika, you'll get to do something no man nor Prince has ever dared, go to places no man on God's green earth has ever been...that's right ladies, you get to...as a pixelated 3D character of course....RIDE ELIKA! Score one for the perverts!
The combat system has again evolved. This time, playing as a duo, Elika gets a part in the combo system. The combo system now includes your normal sword attacks, a gauntlet attack, an acrobatic attack, and from Elika, magic attacks. With these at your disposal, mobs and bosses would just die at the sight of the awesomeness! Really, just find a mob amd ask......but wait...you can't! It's already dead from the AWESOMENESS!
The Prince would be Princess without the amazingly breathtaking depth of puzzles. And like all newer PoP installments, the world of puzzles in this one have reached a new threshold. The world is now so freakishly huge, my 22" monitor can only render the mole on Prince's left thigh. The details and finishing on the background is nothing less than infinity. I can safely say the scale and breathtaking views in this game alone would worth my daylight robbed RM12 from a pirated game shop in Ktn...heck I'd happily donate 50 cents more had I known about the graphics.
Now for the flip side...
As good as everything is perfect in this game, I just find it way too short. Again like all god games, the breadth of the playability would be the biggest challenge, mounted on an already amazing gameplay, storyline and graphics etc. Prince of Persia in my opinion, phailed to elude this giant pitfall, like the likes of Zone of the Enders 2: Anubis...a shame pimple on Hideo Kojima's phace...
Or it might just be the addictiveness of the game that made me a plowing machine...and finished it in 12 hours :(
As awesome as the awesomeness in the combat system, I found it way too easy to defeat my opponents. However, having played and completed the 1st, 3rd and the 4th Prince of Persia games, it was easy to see the developers didn't wanted to invest much in combat, but rather in puzzle solving. With the evolved combat system in PoP4, I can appreciate the aesthetic balance of puzzle solving and combat system. I think they balanced it real well this time.
Now with time reverse out of the window, PoP might be a tad too easy to plow through...and it sorta kills the tradition upheld in the previous 3 predecessors. Not much of a challenge for the Prince...nor Ben, now they've got a sexy res donkey. Similarly with the combat system, mobs and would die too fast before sharpening their claws with Persian blood.
A sucker punch at the gonads for the fans, PoP4 discontinued the storyline carried through from the 1st to the third. In this new one, the Prince is simply a wandering tomb raider en route to return ransom to a king. I was not happy to learn that Farah, or Princess Farah from the 1st and 2nd PoP, got spun by the developers as a donkey in PoP4. Srsly.....An ASS? Not very developed in the frontal lobe huh, game developers....
Prince of Persia was a hit due to the pioneering gameplay of an almost non-linear style puzzle solving. When came Sands of Time, I was like...WTF was that? This game is AWESOME! *eyes bleed*
In PoP4, it might just be the different times, or it might just be my prodigal instinctive gaming direction, I just found this game to be a tad bit linear. The Prince of Persia franchise was meant to be the grandaddy to games like Assasin's Creed, or Mirror's Edge. But PoP4 just doesn't cut it enough...
Prince of Persia 4 was slated for the next generation of gaming console, namely Phailstation 3 or xbox 360. What next generation mean is...get rich and get a phailstation 3. It does NOT mean...that piece of obsolete crap you're staring at now. PoP4 is pretty high end. You won't be able to enjoy the game with smooth sailing, unless you have at least 2.3 Ghz Dual Core with graphics card better than the fat kid next door, and rams bigger than your dad's monster truck.
To sum everything in a sweaty sauna pit, Prince of Persia 4 is genuinely a god game, with the usual flaws of over-compensating one aspect of the game while downgrading another. It is undoubtedly a beautiful game, albeit as a fan of the Prince of Persia franchise, it was a big let down to not have the story of the real Prince resumed in this installment. But then again, what's a crappy gameplay with an awesome storyline...or an awesome gameplay with crappy storyline? This however, does not go on to say the storyline in PoP4 isn't anything less than epic.
Thinking back to the 1st Prince of Persia I played, The Sands of Time, the storyline then was one of the best I've known. The way the Prince was telling someone a story throughout the game, and I get to play it as flashbacks, only to find out that the Prince reversed time so much that he is actually talking to Princess Farah before it all started...that was AMAZING! Man I really miss that. You can hardly find anything with gasping suspense nowadays...except in The Riftwar Saga!...but that's another tale for another blog revival.
The Prince of Persia have come a long way...seriously, I took it across oceans! ...and again found it's way into the very kernel of a gamer dude in Perth. I was kinda happy when Limys messaged me when he discovered the up coming release of PoP4 at the time...happy was I to know that he remembered how much I loved the 1st one.
I felt inclined to blog about this, as I was reigned with a mixed sense of relief, rage, and sadness as I watched the credits roll :(
Quite rarely do I get to feel this intense about a game, and quite honestly, I would find less inspiration in my daily life to rekindle this release.
p.s. Seeing Jake Gylenhall in the introduction was NOT a typo...He's playing the Prince in the movie adaptation, out in 2010 :(
p.s.s but still, :)