Prince of Persia (2008)

My 5-game Prince of Persia franchise run finally exited the janky PlayStation 2 era of gaming and entered the more civilized Xbox 360 one. Prince of Persia (2008) is the second reboot of the series -- and remains to this day as the sole mainline entry in its continuity. I greatly appreciated the so-much smoother gameplay but the experience was also conflicting due to the game feeling like a spinoff: whereas the previous games were divided pretty evenly between combat and platforming, was this one 90% of the latter.

Prince of Platforming

The game opens with the Prince (voiced this time by Nolan North) looking for his loot-carrying donkey, Farah, in a rocky desert. He encounters a woman, Elika, who is fleeing from soldiers. After few twists and turns, the Prince and Elika end up on a quest to remove corruption from the region to re-imprison a demonic entity, Ahriman.

The narrative felt a tad nonsensical and as if it was conceived way after the game's repetitive structure had been realized. The corruption removal process happens by Elika cleansing fertile grounds. There are four "wings", I suppose, each with its own boss. You encounter each boss five times without a conclusive ending to cleanse each wing. Once that is done, their respective final showdown is unlocked.

Traversing a still-corrupted area is dangerous: there are all manner of bonus hazards to avoid. Once healed, platforming in the area becomes more relaxed and the place gets sprinkled with light seeds that need to be collected for Elika to unlock new powers -- which is the use of magical plates to enable further platforming antics.

The red and blue plates seemed identical in their effect, merely launching the Prince and Elika to some other spot. The green ones shifts gravity toward the surface the plate is on and you as the Prince run forward on it while avoiding collisions with the environment. And finally, the yellow plate make the Prince and Elika fly through the air, occasionally requiring input to avoid obstacles.

Each wing requires two powers to fully traverse (and more to grab every single light seed it has). The map shows which two are needed for each wing and you might want to actually check and plan beforehand which two to unlock first so that you don't need to switch to another wing because you can't progress in the current one anymore. That may have happened to me.

There are 1001 light seeds in total but you need merely 540 to unlock all 4 upgrades. Collecting all the light seeds supposedly rewards you with a cosmetic skin for the Prince (and an achievement if you're on a platform the game has those). I didn't bother being a completionist; after a point, the seed gathering became tedious. A few seeds are in weird places that take actual effort to figure out the route to. The game's formulaic nature got old as well.

One thing that irked me about the otherwise quite smooth platforming, was how when jumping straight at a wall, the Prince automatically runs it up (if there was nothing to grab at the initial height). Usually in games that kind of action requires extra input from you and I kept hitting the jump button which immediately launches the Prince backwards off the wall. It took a bit to learn to not do it.

If there is nothing to grab at the height of the vertical wall run, the Prince will slide down, using his gauntlet to slow his fall. The automatic upwards run creates a slight annoyance at a couple of fertile grounds that are located high up and you need to climb down to continue to the next. The routes repeatedly make you slide down an angled surface into a jump against a vertical surface to slide down -- which the Prince every time unnecessarily runs up first even though it's down where you need to be going.

Platforming is easier than in the previous also because you can't actually die. Instead of the Prince falling to his death, you get a quick scene of Elika grabbing his arm, and then you're back at the last solid surface with barely any progress lost. The finale of the game does have a set of longer sections without pauses but I suppose it's fine as the ultimate challenge.

Elika's occasional floating and barefootedness reminded me of Lune in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. As I recall, that game's developer Sandfall Interactive has former Ubisoft people. I wonder if there's a connection.

Easy combat

Elika will also save you in combat in the same fashion. The opponent you're fighting resets back to its health in the previous phase (which might be full) but the fight feels a continuous encounter despite that.

You always fight against a singular enemy in an almost 2.5D-style duel. Most of the combat is against the boss enemies but when traveling towards a corrupted node, you can encounter a simpler monster between the areas if you're not fast enough to get to the platform to slash the spawn point. If you can force the monster against a wall or a cliff edge with a combo right away, the Prince executes it quickly with a special attack.

I never looked up the combo move lists provided in the menu, which might have been smart thing to actually do. I did figure out few longer ones by merely experimenting myself, though. As you progress through the game, the encounters become more complex by having every enemy be able to go into an empowered state, which come eventually in three different options. When in such a state, only the respective kind of attack from you won't get countered. It doesn't matter much but you particularly don't want to use Elika's attack (Y) against a wrong state because she will get knocked out for quite a bit and you end up stuck parrying the enemy if they next go into the state that requires her attack to counter.

Art style is quite distinct from the previous Prince of Persia games. It's quite like Spiders' Bound by Flame: the black outlines and the watercolor-like palette. Music was composed by Stuart Chatwood and Inon Zur who had been on the series since Warrior Within as a duo. I'd say the music was better than before thanks to the entirely (I think) orchestral score -- no dull sounding instrumental rock this time. It wasn't particularly memorable, however.

As was apparently common for Ubisoft and other publishers at the time, Prince of Persia (2008) too got a DLC that was never released on PC. The Epilogue adds to the end of the game but from what I looked up, not playing it isn't a great loss. It doesn't change anything, practically just gets the Prince scolded by Elika.