God what a borderline perfect game. All the elements are in place for this to be THE game I'd recommend to everyone. Platforming and traversal are addicting, The Prince controls smooth as butter, camera is really cooperative, the time mechanics prevent frustration. Like they nailed everything on that end. I can see why this game became a parkour template for games in general, the amount of interesting locales and setpieces keep the act of holding the right trigger fun throughout.
Ooh and the dialogue? Wonderful. I love the characterization of The Prince and Farah, hearing how Farah slowly starts to get through The Prince's insecurities and find the thoughtful person he can be. I love the interactions between them!! it's so fucking good!!
But some rogue audio engineer delivered perhaps the worst audio mixing in the history of games. I played this on PC, PS3, Gamecube, and Xbox just to make sure I wasn't losing my mind, but I could not find a single version of this game where the audio wasn't mixed like total shit. The Prince and Farah's voices are deathly quiet, sword clanking is blowing your speaker out, the reverb is insanely high, and the dumbass Australian guard has the loudest voice in history, if an atomic bomb was going off outside your window during that puzzle you would not hear a thing.
For a game to have such amazing dialogue but drown it out under so much noise is one of the nastiest tricks the devil ever pulled. But the combat is the kiss of death on this game ever getting anything higher than a 3 1/2.
Combat is actually really functional for one-on-one duels, like, oh let's say for example, Prince of Persia 89. That's why, naturally, you fight hordes of enemies who swarm you in a way that doesn't work at all with the combat system. For how many options you get (block, parry, rolls, backflips, downstrikes, spins, wall-launches) you are only ever going to use the wall-launches or jumping off of enemies heads into downstrikes, because anything else is just not viable.
Enemies teleport to swarm you and the Prince lacks meaningful crowd control, so you jump off of someone's head, down a downstrike, suck them up into the dagger, and do this approximately 300 more times before a combat encounter is done. At least until a new enemy type is introduced who invalidates that strategy and requires wall-launching instead. Either way combat that starts off as novel and interesting becomes genuinely taxing and exhausting due to the brutal amount of it you are going to have to do.
Why would such a well-designed game have this? My guess is Ubisoft has a shittiness quota that has to be met. A game requires a specific amount of crap before Ubisoft will put their seal of approval on it. Rayman 2 accidentally shipped with only good bits and it was a huge embarrassment to the company.
Real answer though, probably worries about length. It's such needless padding and the game would be shorter without it, and I know back in 2003 reviewers were pedantic and annoying about how a 60 hour game would be considered too short, but I love how brisk Sands of Time is! It's a complete story with character arcs, it comes up with fun scenarios and leads to a thrilling climax. It's a swashbuckling adventure and is confident enough to not overstay its welcome, so fighting 20 of the same dickheads for hours is not worth the time and effort implementing it.
I can't overstate though, I do genuinely love this game. I would be losing my mind during one of the truly insipid combat encounters, thinking about just turning the game off and watching a playthrough online, but then it'd be done, and I'd get to hear Farah and The Prince chat, I'd get to do wall-running, jumping, climbing, and god it'd be like heaven. The good is so good in this game. It might not be enough to out-weight the phenomenally bad but that's what makes it such a compelling piece of art.
Ooh and the dialogue? Wonderful. I love the characterization of The Prince and Farah, hearing how Farah slowly starts to get through The Prince's insecurities and find the thoughtful person he can be. I love the interactions between them!! it's so fucking good!!
But some rogue audio engineer delivered perhaps the worst audio mixing in the history of games. I played this on PC, PS3, Gamecube, and Xbox just to make sure I wasn't losing my mind, but I could not find a single version of this game where the audio wasn't mixed like total shit. The Prince and Farah's voices are deathly quiet, sword clanking is blowing your speaker out, the reverb is insanely high, and the dumbass Australian guard has the loudest voice in history, if an atomic bomb was going off outside your window during that puzzle you would not hear a thing.
For a game to have such amazing dialogue but drown it out under so much noise is one of the nastiest tricks the devil ever pulled. But the combat is the kiss of death on this game ever getting anything higher than a 3 1/2.
Combat is actually really functional for one-on-one duels, like, oh let's say for example, Prince of Persia 89. That's why, naturally, you fight hordes of enemies who swarm you in a way that doesn't work at all with the combat system. For how many options you get (block, parry, rolls, backflips, downstrikes, spins, wall-launches) you are only ever going to use the wall-launches or jumping off of enemies heads into downstrikes, because anything else is just not viable.
Enemies teleport to swarm you and the Prince lacks meaningful crowd control, so you jump off of someone's head, down a downstrike, suck them up into the dagger, and do this approximately 300 more times before a combat encounter is done. At least until a new enemy type is introduced who invalidates that strategy and requires wall-launching instead. Either way combat that starts off as novel and interesting becomes genuinely taxing and exhausting due to the brutal amount of it you are going to have to do.
Why would such a well-designed game have this? My guess is Ubisoft has a shittiness quota that has to be met. A game requires a specific amount of crap before Ubisoft will put their seal of approval on it. Rayman 2 accidentally shipped with only good bits and it was a huge embarrassment to the company.
Real answer though, probably worries about length. It's such needless padding and the game would be shorter without it, and I know back in 2003 reviewers were pedantic and annoying about how a 60 hour game would be considered too short, but I love how brisk Sands of Time is! It's a complete story with character arcs, it comes up with fun scenarios and leads to a thrilling climax. It's a swashbuckling adventure and is confident enough to not overstay its welcome, so fighting 20 of the same dickheads for hours is not worth the time and effort implementing it.
I can't overstate though, I do genuinely love this game. I would be losing my mind during one of the truly insipid combat encounters, thinking about just turning the game off and watching a playthrough online, but then it'd be done, and I'd get to hear Farah and The Prince chat, I'd get to do wall-running, jumping, climbing, and god it'd be like heaven. The good is so good in this game. It might not be enough to out-weight the phenomenally bad but that's what makes it such a compelling piece of art.