I am really struggling, at this point, to come up with anything to say about the Spyro series every time I get around to playing one of these. I don’t mean for this to imply that I think Spyro: A Hero’s Tail is a bad game, truthfully I think it's probably my favorite since the first game, very much better than Enter the Dragonfly and definitely a more refined experience in comparison to Ripto’s Rage and Year of the Dragon. It expands on the different breath types introduced in EtD by actually having puzzles involve them, and by giving each type their own attributes, the lightning breath in particular I loved because of its extended read and stun affliction. It also, I don’t think exactly fixed or improved, but defined the other playable characters sections; in YotD they really just felt like extensions of Spyro’s gameplay with slight deviation in move set, creating a feeling of almost bloat, and while again I don’t feel like this feeling as been shaken off, I think it's more manageable here because these sections are different enough to feel distinct and add a little bit of variety. But outside of that there is nothing this game does that makes it particularly stand out, there is just nothing, it's not interesting; and frankly, the series has felt this way for a couple of games now. I genuinely have nothing to say, I hate to do another short review so soon but that's the reality here; and while me feeling burnt out has of late when it comes to this whole backlog journey I have been doing for nearly a year and a half now might be playing a part in my opinion of this game, I don’t think that changes the fact that this game is just ok at best. Again, it is not bad by any means, just nothing of note. With that though, this will probably be the last review, and game, that I do for the next couple of months. My summer job is going to be very time consuming and I don’t anticipate me having any time to play anything, but who knows, maybe I will be able to squeeze one or two out, we’ll see.

I liked Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. I liked quite a lot of it. There was a great deal of improvement from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time to this one, mainly within the realm of controls, combat, and environmental design. As well, it really hit my blindside with the direction the developers decided to take for the game’s structure, it is not something that would typically expect, or even see, from a 3D platformer that would be released during this game’s time period. But, despite the areas that Warrior Within impressed and improved in, there are an equal number of extremely glaring issues that plague this otherwise fantastic game. These issues are definitely indicative of a rushed development, which is a real shame, because maybe with a bit more time these kinks could have been ironed out, and a truly great game could be uncovered.

To start with the good, the combat introduced in The Sands of Time has refined. The sword fighting, parkour mix that game had going on, while good, suffered the problem of being very repetitive. The Prince had access to all of his combat moves from the get go, so there was no sense of progression and difficulty scaling with that aspect, and the enemies didn’t really challenge these abilities in any sort of evolving way, everything was very static; this then lead the player to adopt a playstyle that abused the whatever the best move they had discovered was, typically the wall rebound or vaulting slash. Warrior Within fixes this by greatly expanding the number of different combat moves The Prince can perform. Pretty much any combination of buttons will perform some kind of different attack, and when added with the acrobatic moves like the wall run or rebound, the possibilities just skyrocket, to the point that it is very likely that the player will still be discovering new attacks even into the late game. Thankfully, the enemies too evolve with this move set. Each one is distinct and had their own attack pattern and little quirks that really change up how the player approaches encounters, like how the ninjas will dodge practically every swing that is thrown their way, or how the weird frog things explode upon taking enough damage; very much a far cry from the one note enemies of the previous game. Additionally, the further the player progresses in the game, they begin to unlock new abilities that use the sand tanks, no longer just being used for turning back time. These abilities range from being able to slow down time to a crawl except for The Prince, a giant AOE sand blast that can be used as a get off me tool, and a sort of rage mode that lets the player go absolutely ham on everything around them. These sand abilities add a lot of depth and intrigue into the combat, as well as creating a great feeling of progression that The Sands of Time sorely lacked. While this is all great in its own right, it is also how these new abilities interact with the new environments that really drew me in.

Foregoing the linear nature that the series had come to know, Warrior Within opts for pseudo open world structure, something that I was 100 percent not expecting. While the game still flows between area to area rather linearly, there is a much heavier emphasis on exploration and back tracking. The player will find themself going through the same areas multiple times in order to get to where they need to be, but don’t worry, just because they are the same areas doesn’t mean they function the same. One of this game’s new features is the ability to travel between past and present time periods via the many time portals that can be found throughout the map. The player will come across each of these portals and their respective chambers as they play through the game, but it is up to the player to figure out how to effectively use them in order to explore around and find secrets. In correlation with this new structure, the game’s map and areas are all interconnected and weave into each other fluidly, little to no loading screens can be found moving from place to place, save for the occasional death or cutscene. Of course, these new areas are also filled to the brim with traps and platforming sections that really halt the player and challenge their skills. They aren’t too dissimilar from what was seen in the prior game, The Prince’s moves, for example, are a one to one carbon copy from The Sands of Time, with the only new addition being that dangling ropes can now be used to extend the wall run. But while that hasn’t changed, the obstacles have, they have been made far more difficult in order to compensate for the new sand abilities, and I am all here for it. I vividly remember thinking that The Sands of Time would really benefit from having some sort of time slow down ability that would allow the platforming to be more difficult, and that is exactly what I got. The advent of, I'll call it bullet time for now, allows for traps to be much more deadly, with spinning blades and crushing walls being extremely fast, and requiring a deadly amount of precision and timing on the players end, all with the safety net of using a sand tank in order to make it slightly easier. But all of these new layers and improvements aside, the game is still riddled with issues that, while thankfully are not on the game design side, are sadly on the technical side.

I mentioned earlier that I believe this game had a rushed development, and I firmly believe this because the glitches and bugs that I encountered come directly from simple oversights that could have been remedied by simply having more testing done. From what I can gather, there are two big glitches, both of which I encountered, and a couple of smaller, less significant ones. The first one happens pretty early on in the game, after the player fights the first boss. The Prince kills the boss and then the player goes about their merry way following the path before them, eventually they come across the next time chamber, but the portal is already active, so they just walk right in and continue as normal. This is until they reach the next major area where a cutscene that is supposed to play, doesn’t, leaving the player trapped in this room because the exit wasn’t opened like it was supposed to. If this hypothetical player is anything like me, they would then reload a save to see if they had simply missed a trigger, only to find that upon resetting, they are no longer playing as The Prince, but instead The Sandwraith, something the player isn’t supposed to see until much, much later. The only way to undo this glitch is to load two or three saves back, so if the player has been saving over their saves, they are screwed and just have to start the game over from the start. The second big glitch happens in the exact same area at the end of the game. In order to get the secret ending the player must find all of the health upgrades throughout the game, so before I entered the last boss, I was doing a Metroid style round up of all the ones that I missed, something that the game was clearly encouraging. This was all going smoothly up until I had to go grab the very first upgrade that is housed in one of the earlier areas, the area that the first boss is fought in. I went back, grabbed it, and then had to proceed down the intended route because the bridge had given out and I couldn’t go back the way I came, but when I got to that very same area from earlier, the path way was open, like you would expect, but there was an invisible wall keeping me from grabbing the ledge to it, effectively soft locking me in this room because there was no other way out, the only solution was just to reload a save and settle with getting the bad ending. Both of these glitches are entire playthrough killers, if I hadn’t been creating new save files the first one would have made me quit, and I was very close to when the second one happened. I can only assume that these two glitches are linked in some way, given that they occur in the exact same areas and are pretty much the same issue. There is nothing that can seemingly be done about this, as even the HD version on PS3 houses the same issue, so it is unfortunately just a cruel reality of this game.

Outside of those two gigantic problems, some other issues I took with the game was that the auto targeting during fights was a bit too strong, making it very hard to strategically not fight some enemies because of low health or some other reason. The map the game provides too is also awful, it gives little to no information about where you are or how to get places, and serves no real purpose other than telling the player where they are, and where their objective is. With these issues in mind, though, I still think the game is objectively great and honestly a bit ahead of its time. It is similarly troubled like its older sibling, but rather than its problems stemming from poor game design choices, they come from a lack of polish and time, pun somewhat intended. If The Sands of Time gets to have a remake, this game certainly does too.

There is nothing that I can say that really does justice to this masterpiece of a game. It is so deeply embedded in the idea of personal experience that anything that I try to pass off as objective would be doing the whole game’s meaning a disservice. I could say that the game refocuses the core gameplay back on the stealth aspect of the series from where Metal Gear Solid 1 took a more set piece focused structure; I could say that the game finally justifies itself being in 3D with how it very effectively utilizes verticality and its first person perspective; I could say how I think Kojima’s writing style really matures in this one, compared to the more blunt and in your face style that the prior games had, here being much more subtle and intricate while still holding on to that grandiose nature; and I could say that MGS2 is one of the most unique experiences I have ever had in this medium. But the entire game is built on the premise of building your own memories, and creating your own conclusions, so I feel a bit out of place in trying to chronicle my experience rather than just keeping my experience to myself. So, with that, I think I'm just going to leave this as a cop out review and let my thoughts about this game settle for a while, because there is truly a lot to digest. Though, I think that is probably the only objective thing I can say about Metal Gear Solid 2; that no matter who you are, you will undoubtedly find something deeply meaningful in this game, one way or the other.