Toronto Thumbs

Prince of Persia
The Prince is Being Reduced

During a recent job hunt, I received a phone call from a well-established Toronto company. Their business model was traditional in every sense, but they were also experiencing change due to the success of a product that had drawn them into the popularity of virtual worlds. Their exponential growth forced them to expand their staffing searches and offer interviews to maniacal malcontents, such as yours truly. But the informal interview that followed was an important reminder of why I prefer self-employment.

Despite the success that change had achieved, my questions about further innovation met with confusion, indifference, and a lack of appreciation for the convergence that had proved successful. It was baffling to see how innovation could succeed only to have the status-quo nature of business quickly assert control again. Where I see the greatest risk as the one not taken, I was visiting an environment still influenced by the type of 1950s thinking that plagues business and education, certainly a factor in the economic crisis we currently suffer through.

It’s a philosophy that fears change, relying on a slow process of incremental adjustments. And while the idea is not to risk gains through chance endeavours, the result is the denial of the type of opportunities only achieved through a dramatic departure from established boundaries.

I prefer to imagine that I write about an industry less rooted in this failing design, and yet I find myself confronted with Ubisoft’s newest addition to their Prince of Persia series. Despite The Sands of Time proving an innovative and critical success, subsequent entries suffered from the typical disease associated with sequels. This new entry promised a dramatic re-imagining of the series, but the result is a game that attempts minor adjustments rather than evolution, an experience restricted by the failure to engage in any form of risk.

The Prince is caught in a sandstorm, searching for his donkey and the small fortune allegedly strapped to its back. Suddenly he is literally struck by Elika, a princess whose introduction begins a familiar scenario of girl-on-the-run meets loveable rogue. The Prince is obliged to assist by nature of this set-up, quickly drawn into the quest to save her kingdom and subsequently the world. Initially I know nothing about the kingdom nor the menace within. The narrative requires little to no explanation, and is securely rooted in the template of countless games before this.

I inherently understand the idea of defeating an ancient evil, so I set off to save Elika’s kingdom without question. Explanations do exist, however, as the player is free to ask Elika for a history lesson and just as free to ignore those aspects altogether. But narrative isn’t the focus here.

Prince of Persia’s primary concern is the presentation of an artistic pursuit. In describing the visual aesthetics of the game, reviewers are encouraged to rely on words like “poetic” and “sublime,” which are fading words that pay lip service to surface considerations and prove as empty as the core game-play found within. The artistic rendering of this world merits a few new words. It’s dramatically different from cel-shading, a technique which proved capable of giving characters an added depth of emotion through facial features in titles like The Wind Waker.

In contrast, Prince of Persia’s visual style does little to accentuate characters, often giving an appearance similar to paper-dolls against the backdrop. The star here is the landscape behind the Prince and Elika, which seems to contend for the role of protagonist with a warming aesthetic formed from a hybrid reminiscent of coloured sketches and watercolour paintings. The healed areas of the kingdom demonstrate the accomplishment with an ecological bliss that blends the flow of water, stretches of vibrant grass, and grains of wood to create a compelling landscape. In comparison, the intentionally cold and rotting areas of contaminated lands never achieve the same connection. In contrast to a title like Okami, returning life to dead land is achieved by folding back the covering of contamination, which treats these areas more like a peeling wallpaper rather than tangible spaces.

It’s advantageous to compare this environment to a painting, because much like the static nature of art, there is every opportunity for appreciation but no chance for true interaction. I can’t be certain that this is direct subjective trickery, but the developers seemingly expect players to derive pleasure simply from the perceived artistic merits of the game rather than any true game-play depth. The favouring of style over substance is apparent at every turn, resulting in a flat landscape.

Though the Prince can perform acrobatic feats in traversing dizzying heights, the action isn’t conveyed but rather implied. Areas may appear large, but the effect is reminiscent of the painted backdrops once so popular in film, a means of tricking the eyes with faux-depth. This isn’t only a result of the artistic direction, but also a direct ramification of the way in which players move through the environment. The Prince primarily travels along the outside, clinging to the frame of this painting and often crawling along the edges. The points at which the depth of a middle ground is made available serve only as necessary stages to accommodate the ballet performance pieces that combat are reduced to.

If you’ve ever had the chance to play with a Hot Wheels play set, then you might share my sense of Déjà vu. At least one Christmas saw me carefully laying out the track pieces, holding down the trigger and watching as the cars sped around the turns, twists, and death defying loops I’d designed. The idea was that watching these cars thrown into motion and following my course was somehow fun. But the non-interactive nature is absolutely boring, anything beyond two laps proving tedious if not torturous because the motion and direction is locked into place with no room for spontaneous deviation.

This is the underlying design principle behind Prince of Persia. The environmental path is a methodically laid out track that allows the Prince to travel via all manner of acrobatic wonder. But just like my play set, these movements and paths are locked into place and deny improvisation. These movements are also accomplished with nothing beyond the press of a button, specifically of tapping the right button at the appropriate time. With a single press, the Prince grabs the ring and spins to the next point where the button is pressed again so he might jump, grab, or leap to the next connection. The player has no responsibility regarding any sense of momentum or motion. The Prince simply does what is asked, offering no challenge to the player and thus no sense of accomplishment beyond detaching the player from the environment altogether. It’s a simple equation that without effort, there is no investment, and thereby no motivation to continue.

If the narrative choices leave me with no attachment to these lands, then the responsibility is for the game-play mechanics to encourage my reason for continuing. But if the surface objective within Prince of Persia is to heal the land, I can’t escape the idea that Ubisoft’s belief is that I should spend the larger portion of my experience simply appreciating their artistic accomplishments. Certainly that idea isn’t a stretch when they seem to put more effort into behind-the-scenes appreciation videos. And the game does further enforce this idea of appreciation. The side objective of gathering light seeds forces the player to retread the landscape, perhaps multiple times. While this extends the game-play, it really functions as a means of force-focusing the player’s attention on the landscape. But Ubisoft hasn’t earned appreciation in their treatment of the player, having created a game in which the player isn’t really entrusted with the ability to explore the masterpiece in question. Control is never really given in a significant way, designers having essentially completed the game for all of us, reducing our role to an endless strand of quick time events. And beyond all lofty notions of appreciation, this restriction of action is compensation for the fact that there is no real landscape to explore.

Gathering light seeds is a prime example. The player requires a certain number of them in order to access new areas. This is a typical element in many games, often meant to extend or create game-play. But as soon as the last of four areas is unlocked, there is no longer any requirement to gather these light seeds. Suddenly the player is free to ignore them after having spent over half the game collecting them. The entire endeavour proves pointless, something that has been forcibly required of the player but offers no tangible reward. It comes across as a distraction, meant to entertain the heathens at the art show who “don’t really get it,” the type of early 3D titles that placed random collectibles throughout the environment to compensate for the fact that there was little else for the player to do. Contrast this with the primary break in game-play, the plate sequences, situations that solve a recurring disconnect in spatial settings by simply propelling the player into flight with all the originality of the initial Spyro the Dragon games.

Prince of Persia offers some degree of combat, designed with a combat tree consisting of combinations between three possible approaches to attacking. Longer chains of attack reduce an opponent’s health faster, but the average enemy encounter is two per area, and can be avoided completely if the player manages to strike the swirl of contamination quickly enough. Combat is mostly reserved then for encounters with the four primary villains ruling over the contaminated lands. But the game treats combat with a disinterest that questions the nature of its presentation to begin with. These situations are forced from narrative direction and a traditionalist view of conflict resolution. The combat system often results in an elongated dance of repeatedly blocking enemy attacks until an opening appears or a quick time event allows for the advantage. There was perhaps a moment where I felt a sense of satisfaction while fighting the Hunter, a clash of swords that offered a pang of feeling, a villain who took aim at the fourth wall by spitting at the screen to temporally blind me. And although the ability to crash an enemy into a pillar was promising it was never fully developed. But the real confusion of the combat structure is the lack of effort to work confrontations into the primary game-play style. This doesn’t occur in any form until the final confrontation, and largely because this final fight expectedly presents a villain too large to work within the combat framework the game uses up until this point. Yet it is still reduced to running across platforms without any sense of real peril. This is perhaps the most dramatic example of what comes from avoiding risk, creating a title that attempts to change game-play in one sense but subscribes to traditional standards of obligatory conflict only to have this awkward and resentful imbalance undermine the entire effort.

Ultimately the larger issue of combat and environmental depth relate back to the design choice of pairing the Prince with Elika. Elika is the player’s guide, but also a set of tools. She is the means used to heal the land, and that which prevents the Prince from dying. The latter aspect is what causes the greatest disconnect between the player and the environment. If the Prince falls from a ledge, Elika simply drags him back to the nearest point of stable ground. During an enemy encounter she ensures that the Prince never dies, with the minor consequence of restoring enemy health whenever she interferes. Knowing that Elika will always save me causes me to take greater risks, an idea that could have been exploited by the developers. But ultimately it just affords me the opportunity to take haphazard chances, causing me to pay less attention to obstacles. I never needed to learn the combat system in-depth, because with death removed, it’s simply a matter of time before any obstacle is overcome. Still it is a powerful tool to consider, and certainly merits more thought and consideration than it has received here.

Finally there is the matter of this relationship between the Prince and Elika. It’s an arranged marriage – we simply have no choice in the matter. The insinuation is that their relationship should blossom as the land is healed, that as the two bring life back to the kingdom a relationship should obviously develop and thus aid the assumptions of the game’s ending. But forced into this arrangement, or more over forced into Ubisoft’s ideal of this arrangement, I thought I must have, in some way, been playing the first “date” game on a console. It’s the kind of game your girlfriend/wife would watch you play because she enjoys the cliché of the characters’ relationship and finds the experience “filmic” because she doesn’t have to watch you die repeatedly. The only problem is that there is absolutely no basis during the game-play to justify the type of relationship displayed during short cut-scenes. The two develop an often-misplaced understanding of one another, sharing a humour that emerges from a vacuum, and certainly bears no roots within the game-play.

There is more emotional attachment to be found in Super Mario World’s Yoshi, a character who provided advantages based on player actions. If I feed Yoshi, he provides power-ups. If I feed him certain enemies, Yoshi gains abilities that allow me to overcome an obstacle. The idea is that I have to do these things with Yoshi, as two characters merged into a single entity. It doesn’t matter that I punch Yoshi in the head to get him to stick his tongue out.

Elika, however, simply serves my needs without fail. She is always following behind like a dog, every bit as loyal but not nearly so endearing. Even in situations where she was in physical danger, she was still able to save me. There is no attempt to gradually build a relationship, and the game simply implies the connection in increasingly detached ways that ultimately suit the inevitable sequel rather than create a complete and fulfilling experience.

Posted in PlayStation 3, Reviews, Xbox 360 |