Yesterday while reinstalling Windows on my living-room media PC for the ninety-twelveth time to try to figure out a stupid crash/reboot issue (which I still have not resolved, thanks) I finished up the third Prince of Persia game. The Xbox version, natch.

I loved the first game, Sands of Time. It had a dreamy fairy-tale quality to it that really grabbed me. I liked the characters, the music, the visuals, and the gameplay was fantastic. Some people complained about the simplistic or repetitive fighting, but by the end of it I wasn’t bored with it. There were some frustrating fights, but that was mostly because I hadn’t taken the time to really learn the combat maneuvers very well. The ending was sad, but the way the story was tied together was fantastic.

The sequel, Warrior Within, was a rather different experience. Having read reviews I was prepared, but it was still more than a little obnoxious. The soundtrack was harder and modern, with a rock/metal influence. The storybook feel of the game was gone, replaced by a “dark” motif that did nothing for me. The whole characterization of the Prince was changed from the first game, for the worse.

The gameplay involved a lot of going back and forth over the same terrain, often making it very difficult to figure out where exactly I was supposed to be going. I had to refer to a walkthrough at nearly every stage. I’d rather check gamefaqs for a hint than spend hours figuring out exactly what’s expected of me, but the constant need to flip back and forth was frustrating. The new fighting system was very overwhelming at first, but once I started paying attention and actually trying to use the combos rather than just button-mashing, the pay-off was worth the effort. Fights because a great deal of fun. I liked some of the new special abilities quite a bit, some others not so much. I liked that the save function was changed so that fountains not only restored your health, as in the first game, but were also save points.

The story was convoluted, but pretty decent. There’s a twist about 80% of the way through that I found particularly entertaining. Just when I thought I was done, a whole new aspect of the story opened up. I didn’t bother going for the alternate ending, as I’d missed several of the health upgrades that were necessary and really didn’t want to try to figure out where they were. Aside from the continuance of the storyline and the new fighting system, though, this was mostly a letdown. The bossfights were especially a pain.

The finale, The Two Thrones, was something of an improvement over the second. There was a marked attempt to restore the fairytale feeling, using some of the same techniques. The fighting system from Warrior Within was refined and improved, though many of the special abilities were removed. Or maybe I just missed picking them up. I know I missed at least power upgrade and several health upgrades, possibly more. The story tied the first and second games in very strongly and very well. I was quite pleased with the way that unfolded. The main premise of the game, though, the main character’s switching back and forth with his dark alter-ego, seemed tacked-on and unnecessary. I loved the way it was handled, but it just seemed like it was thrown in. It was mostly unimportant to the plot.

Again, the bossfights were a huge pain. A new feature to the game, the “speed kill” added a strange new facet, though. For normal bad guys, if you sneak up on them you can initiate a speed kill, a cinematic sequence that requires you to hit the Attack button at key moments to complete it. If you miss your timing, the speedkill fails and you get hurt.

For boss monsters, in some cases the speed kill is the only way to kill them. The cinematics trigger automatically and you have to hit that button at exactly the right moments, otherwise you die and have to start over from the last save point. That was a major pain.

Also, the way savegames were handled was really odd. Throughout most of the game, you save at fountains as in Warrior Within. At some points, particularly after long non-standard game sequences (like the chariot-chases through the city) the game just stops and asks if you want to save. Other times, particularly after cinematic sequences, if you die it will start you after the sequence rather then back at the last actual save point. I have to wonder why it bothered with save points at all. Code for auto-save at waypoints was obviously included, so why not just use that for the whole game?

I was also irked by exactly where some of those waypoints were placed. For example, for the last boss the auto-save was just before a long elevator ride. After the elevator, the cinematic for the boss-fight was triggered, then the fight starts. I’m not sure why I had to ride that elevator twenty or thirty times while I tried to kill that boss. Oh, and speaking of cinematics, in Warrior Within there was a nice feature where if you’d viewed a cut-scene once, you could hit a key and it’d rush through it on fast-forward. It was a very cool nod toward the central theme of the game, rewinding time. In Two Thrones, except for the final boss fight, you had to re-watch every cinematic every time you hit it. That’s a huge pain.

Anyway, the ending of Two Thrones was really great. It handled the “dark prince” alter-ego nicely, tied up the time-travel / alternate-past / can’t-change-your-fate / fixing-your-mistakes-just-makes-things-worse themes very well, got rid of a character I never liked, and then to satisfy me even more it completed a circle from the first game.