Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003): The Earnest, Romantic Blockbuster

Note that this piece contains full spoilers for the game in the title and some NSFW discussion, namely in the final section on “romance.” Know also that I’m talking about the GameCube version specifically, played from a disc on the original hardware.

I’ve wanted to be less excessively comprehensive in my coverage of games, so I decided to try out a “diaries” format, where I would challenge myself to cover one topic per day I spent playing the game rather than attempting to cover every aspect I could possibly think of, checklist-style. My hope was that the end-result would be more personal, selective, and interesting by virtue of the restrictions.

 

The cover for Sands of Time, the first game in a much-loved trilogy of action-adventure titles released over the course of only several years in the early 2000s. I’m not sure the hardcore expression on the prince’s very polygonal-looking face captures the overall mood of the game, which I’ll discuss below, but I do like the detail of the sand creature monster face you can see reflected in the surface of the sword. Game covers have this tendency to focus a lot on isolated images of main characters looking coolly toward or away from the “camera,” often eschewing symbolism or detail in favor of bland recognizability. The fact that the prince seems to be mid-action in this image does put it a cut above a lot of other box art I’ve seen. (The above photo is my own.)

 

SANDS OF TIME DAY ONE: MATTERS OF PRESENTATION

            One of the first things I think of when I think of the first entry in the Sands of Time trilogy is its presentation. If you’ve played the game yourself, then certain prominent presentational choices might immediately spring to mind: like how the entire game is contextualized as a story the prince character is telling, and how that means deaths are creatively written off as errors in that telling, as if the narrator simply made a mistake and then can easily back up to correct himself. Where the “game over” state in a lot of games remains a non-canonical oddity that potentially breaks immersion, that non-canonical status is acknowledged here and effectively incorporated as canonical, in the sense that the prince supposedly messed up describing some event in his story and needs a redo. This is a clever way of making failure feel a bit less like a total stop in the game and is a tactic which the 2008 Prince of Persia would take even further by essentially cutting out “game over” screens entirely.

And that is one of the ways in which Sands of Time is a creative and interesting game with regard to presentation, but my actual first thought that I alluded to before is about the lack of subtitles, which has been a pretty big hurdle in the way of my replaying this game when I’ve considered it at points over time. It’s hard to believe now—now that games like the recently-released God of War: Ragnarök (2022) not only have subtitles but also various deeper settings to modify said subtitles—but there was once a period of time in gaming where this most basic of player aides was not something you could count on having. And, for the record, Sands of Time really needed those subtitles because the audio balance in the game is not great, with some dialogue, including whole conversations between the prince and the captive princess Farah who accompanies him throughout big chunks of the adventure, being too low to hear if there’s anything else going on in the room where you’re playing. The audio quality also, at least in the GameCube version, is pretty crunchy and low-quality-sounding overall, though these noticeably dated elements of the game now give it a certain charm from my perspective as well.

            There is currently a Sands of Time remake that is stuck in some level of development hell, but I’m someone who doesn’t feel like the game needs a remake. There are definitely things that could be smoothed out and modernized (like the addition of the subtitles!), but it does feel like you could almost compare the game industry’s (and gamers’) relationship with aging games to the world at large’s relationship with human aging. Which is to say that we try as hard as possible to avoid it, see it as a detriment, and lust after youth in one way or another—some of us, like certain men with regard to their dating preferences, in a really literal way. In all instances of aging, we could, in general, afford to cultivate a more accepting and even inquisitive mindset. In replaying The Sands of Time, I found many of its shortcomings, including the aforementioned audio quality, charming. I enjoyed looking at the character models to see how many just have a “block” of fingers instead of any semblance of fully modeled, much less flexible, digits.

The bits where you emerge into the exterior areas of the main palace setting were favorites of mine during this playthrough for similar reasons, as I got to look around and see how the game’s designers attempted to create a sense of scale and spectacle while working within the technological limitations of the time. Like I discussed in my piece on the first God of War, which would follow Sands of Time two years later and would take some considerable inspiration from the puzzle design and level progression of this game, I think it’s worth looking at the shortcomings of aging titles like this one because the places where detail is lacking can help point to the areas that were a priority for achieving the developers’ vision. Of course, the generally smaller standard-definition TVs of the time would have helped hide more of the rough edges as well. With the right setup and/or the right mindset, all the pieces are in place during those previously mentioned exterior bits to give off the impression of a fantastically vast, sensically-connected palace space with an appropriately barren wilderness surrounding it. The limitations and the steps taken to overcome them merit appreciating.

There are elements of Sands of Time that I think are still genuinely impressive and perhaps reveal some of those priorities I mentioned before. The environmental elements of water and hanging cloth, in particular, look very nice. These feel like important details to get right since both tie into the tone and the fantasy of the game so much. You spend a fair amount of time exploring the luxurious rooms of a structure designed for pleasure. Getting the water to look inviting and the hanging cloth to look soft and supple and diaphanous matters for the purposes of atmosphere and believability. I also noticed some nice mist and floating sand, “motes” of a sort within a thick beam of light, water dripping from stalactites, little cascades of dust or sand falling from ledges the prince traverses, how you can’t wall run successfully the first time you try it after being in the water because, presumably, the prince is too wet to find any traction. The more I played, the more little details I saw. For example, there are even attempts made with some of the plant life the prince can walk through to have the objects react a bit physically and to give off a rustling noise.

Those particular details stuck out to me because there was a “take” on Twitter one day that I saw where someone was complaining about a lack of plant reactivity in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart (2021). The harshness of the criticism drew a lot of (justified) ribbing. Maybe if Rift Apart was a stealth game where you spent a lot of time lurking in or around plants, making them reactive would be a worthwhile time investment, but in a fast-paced action-platformer-and-shooter the plants are really just there as set dressing—like those vague details suggestive of a wilderness in the distance in Sands of Time, just meant to give off the right impression in conjunction with other, more important details around them and not to actually hold up to close scrutiny. The obsession with minute details in games (like how a rope coils or reflective surfaces… reflect) is a drag on games as both art and products, in my opinion. The increased “standards” for graphical fidelity have only caused the industry to contract in terms of the number of titles released and the creativity and diversity on display, and they have made the prospect of a trilogy of games, like this one, into a decade-plus commitment rather than something that could be reasonably accomplished in a few years.

 

I don’t have the capability to capture footage from the GameCube, so consider the above an artistic (if also low-effort) attempt to recreate the SD look of the game using a screenshot from the HD PC/Steam version by fiddling around with adding blurring and darkness. Maybe it’s just my setup or the aging game or a combination of the two, but there was definitely a certain haziness to the visuals. Still, as is the case with my “interpretation” above, the broad strokes (even of fine details) shine through, and playing such a game on original hardware is perfectly doable after a little adjustment period.

Having said all that, there is a certain irony to essentially contrasting Sands of Time against these modern, bloated blockbuster games given that, at the time of its release, Sands of Time probably was one of those games. See, perhaps, the reactive plants? In all seriousness, though, it’s obvious Sands of Time was meant to be a looker and was meant to dazzle with its storytelling as well. The narrative framing I mentioned before is a great example, and the companion character, Farah, is another. The way that she responds to things the prince does (exclaiming if he draws his sword with no enemies around or gasping if he stumbles near a ledge sometimes) gives her the sort of reactivity and credibility that are now seen as basically standard for games. She and the prince converse back and forth as they explore, talking through some “puzzles,” for example, where the player controls the prince and Farah helps out by pulling levers and doing some light traversal autonomously. It creates a bond with the character and the impression that she is living enough. Attack her, on purpose or accidentally, and she’ll sensibly retaliate.

You can draw a straight line from Farah telling you she can’t reach a lever herself to, say, the companion characters in God of War: Ragnarök “helpfully” giving you puzzle solutions. That they chime in so readily is an annoyance for those who want to figure things out on their own but is both a gameplay accommodation of sorts and is meant to create that same sort of Farah-like believability. Your friends wouldn’t just stand around doing nothing while you tried to open a path forward, right? They’d probably chime in, and so they do. Sands of Time arguably does this much better, though, since the number of times a character outright gives you a solution is incredibly slight compared with the number of times it will just let you flounder around and figure things out, perhaps straining credibility with Farah a bit on one hand but better preserving the mechanical, exploratory experience of the game on the other.

Narrative and gameplay converge in Sands of Time in ways that give it a sense of scale about its whole production: Characters don’t just become passive vessels for the player during “levels,” with the cutscenes where interactions happen sequestered in their own little universe. “Seamless” is a good word for it—the way that deaths are cleverly incorporated into the telling of the story, the way that the game’s environments lead naturally enough from one place to another, and how the prince and Farah feel like constant active presences within that world. There’s a grandeur here that finds its climax in the game’s ending theme, “Time Only Knows,” a catchy and appropriately big-feeling way to conclude the adventure as the credits roll. I did become fatigued with the gameplay of Sands of Time (more on that below) over the course of my playthrough, but it’s the presentation that ultimately still makes me look on it fondly. If there is another thing that I always think of when I remember the game, it’s that ending theme and, also, the final sand vision the prince is granted.

             The swirling pillars of sand you encounter at pretty regular intervals and that function as save points contribute to the time focus of the game by showing you future events, including snippets of platforming and combat and cutscenes, and while these looks ahead can become repetitive as you witness the same sorts of sword-swinging and wall-running actions over and over again, the final vision has always been a favorite and remains as striking to me as “Time Only Knows” for how it drives home the ending of the adventure. In that final vision, the prince sees no future events—only room after room of the palace devoid of any signs of life, with only the drifting sand left to occupy them. This final vision looks backward to emphasize with its emptiness everything you’ve accomplished in (for me, this time) just over 7 hours and is deeply melancholic considering the loss of all life, including Farah’s recent death. I love this vision for how it subverts the pattern from the rest of the game and also for how it really does feel like “the end.” There literally is no future in the game left to foresee (sort of), even if you do still have some cutscenes and one final combat challenge against the antagonistic vizier to complete once the prince re-seals the titular Sands of Time and returns to the past to change how things play out, saving the life of his father and countless others, including Farah, by way of a fairly anticlimactic fight… 

 

The Japanese box art for Sands of Time, pictured above (source here), better captures the tone of the game, I feel. It’s more beautiful and romantic rather than cool and violent, highlighting both the prince and Farah rather than the prince and a sand creature. Where the earlier art was more focused on the prince’s acrobatic skill, his lethal intent, and his wounds while treating his body as more neutral, incidental ground (subsumed into the general coolness of the whole), here he looks a little warmer physically, with more definition/attention given to his muscles. He’s kind of oiled up, even. Fairness in sexualization, maybe? I also love how Farah looks sort of distant here (turned away) and how the blue dagger in the middle of the orange and yellow sandiness draws the eye, centering on both figures and with the title as part of that huddle. The other art was a bit more overwhelmingly blue and “busy”-feeling. This version of the cover is altogether softer but also more readable. It’s tonally a much better fit with the game inside.

 

SANDS OF TIME DAY TWO: FEELS LIKE BATMAN—OR, SOME MATTERS OF CONTROL

            Another reason I put off replaying Sands of Time—and one reason why I almost considered just replaying the other two games in the trilogy by themselves—is the fighting. While I remember having my issues with both Warrior Within and The Two Thrones, Sands of Time sticks out in my mind as a very… limited game in terms of combat options. Of course, this isn’t objectively a bad thing. Having some kind of fighting system is pretty much the standard for games, even if it’s as simple as just jumping on top of an enemy in a platformer, but I’m a combat guy, and my favorite games are those with meaty, meaningful combat systems (like the Devil May Cry series). The other issue with Sands of Time having simple combat is that it does insist on you doing a lot of it—basically alternating combat encounters and platforming/puzzle segments in much the same way that I find so endearing and engaging in the God of War series. You traverse a bit until you’re ready to fight something, and then you get a pretty hefty encounter that makes you feel ready for another period of comparatively quiet traversal again. The balance doesn’t seem as good with Sands of Time, however.

            “Acrobatic” is the defining element of these modern Prince of Persia games, which clearly expand on the gameplay of the previous titles. The higher graphical fidelity allows for a more blockbuster-like approach to the platforming elements and, also, to the combat. One of the most basic special combat moves the prince can perform involves leaping over an enemy to slash at them from the air while descending to the ground, sometimes accompanied by slow motion or a shift in camera perspective to make the action look all the more cinematic. While the prince has a basic sword combo performed by tapping a single button that is at least somewhat contextual (with the exact result of the input changing depending on whether you are attacking an enemy or a bit of scenery or an enemy that has been stunned or an enemy that has been slowed using the special power of the magical dagger the prince carries), the emphasis in combat is largely on overcoming enemy defenses using one of a few special maneuvers. The vaulting attack over an enemy is one, but you can also vault into the air off a wall to attack or spring straight off the wall with a sort of piercing, rolling move that can bowl enemies over. The prince also has parries he can perform while blocking and some other magic abilities tied to the dagger.

A comprehensive list of everything at your disposal sounds reasonably impressive, but Sands of Time isn’t really like Devil May Cry in the sense that chaining abilities together in interesting, flexible ways isn’t so much the goal or really viable and, rather, the “limited” element I mentioned before was in reference to how each individual enemy feels like a kind of puzzle. Most of them will resist being attacked repeatedly with basic combos (and will start to block hits consistently), prompting you to try out a special move on them to break through their defenses, and different enemy types are more, or less, vulnerable to different approaches. That vaulting attack over the enemy, for example, can be interrupted with a counterattack by certain opponents, while others will block attempts to bowl them over with a wall attack. Some can be knocked down easily by parrying their strikes, while others will respond to a parry with another attack of their own. Since large fights tend to spawn the same enemy types over and over again until you kill them all, and since most humanoid enemies attack in very similar ways with their melee weapons, you typically find yourself performing the same sort of action(s) over and over again depending on what you’re fighting. The ease with which most enemies can be defeated on their own is counter-balanced with greater numbers, longer fights, the amount of damage enemies can deal to the prince if one of their very slow attacks actually lands, and how the companion Farah has her own health that can be quickly depleted if enemies attack her consistently.

There are some quirks to the combat system worth getting into, though I want to try to avoid writing a dozen pages on the topic in this “diary” format. One notable quirk is how the majority of enemies in the game offer a spin on the longstanding concept of zombies. These are all former humans killed, reanimated, and warped by the magical sands, and, like all zombies, they are hardy and difficult to put down permanently. Hitting a humanoid enemy enough times or with the right special attack or after Farah has stunned them with arrows will knock them to the ground, but they can only (most straightforwardly) be finished for good with the prince’s dagger by absorbing the sand that now gives them their form. This mechanic is a good one because it’s a fun spin on the resilience of zombie enemies and because finishing an enemy with the dagger refills the stocks of sand the prince needs to perform magic abilities and also contributes toward increasing those stocks over time. You can defeat enemies by other means, but doing so without the dagger finisher will not yield the sand resources I mentioned before, meaning you basically trade a somewhat easier time in combat for slowed progression and lower stores of an important resource. This forced decision-making during combat is good and adds depth to the otherwise simple process of defeating enemies.

Some further, perhaps unintentional, quirks complicate this process, though. First, the “finish off a grounded enemy” button is the same as the “stab with the dagger to slow an active opponent” button, meaning you can try to finish one enemy off to get sand back but end up expending it instead when the prince tries to stab a different enemy owing to how, relatedly, the game’s “soft lock-on” system pretty aggressively adjusts the prince’s facing depending on what it judges to be the most important current target. Enemies have a bad habit of bunching up very close together around the prince, which can result in confusion on the game’s part about what a certain input is supposed to do. Second, initiating a finisher locks the prince into the process, which may include an elaborate animation of him maneuvering himself close enough to the enemy to strike them with the dagger, an action which is also often punctuated by a dramatic, more zoomed-in camera perspective for maximum impact. Given how high-commitment this action is, the game devs wisely prevented enemies from launching attacks during it… unless they had already started an attack before or just as you performed the input for the finisher.

Meaning—You can try to finish off an enemy, realize another one was winding up a swing when you pressed the dagger button, and find yourself in a position where all you can do is take the hit since you can’t respond to the incoming attack. Maybe this is intentional and meant to teach patience and good timing over reckless aggression, but given that the game was accommodating enough to prevent new attacks from coming out during the finishing animation, it almost feels like an oversight, like the enemies are essentially “grandfathered” into still dealing damage during the finisher animation because they weren’t in a neutral or (even) receptive state to receive the command not to act.

              You can mitigate/avoid this risky situation somewhat by performing other forms of “retrieval,” like vaulting into a dagger stab or stabbing after a parry, but I’m going to be honest and admit that I forgot the former was even an option until I read the manual very late into my playthrough—arguably a rookie mistake with a game this old, perhaps, though it’s modern enough to still readily tutorialize things in-game, though said tutorialization happens via silent text at the bottom of the screen. This is a smooth, relatively unobtrusive way to handle basic instruction, given that familiar players can just ignore it, but also dangerous since you might miss a message if you’re over-focused on combat or platforming. Experimenting with the newfound-to-me moves, I personally found the parry timings awkward in this game, possibly because of how lethargic a lot of enemy attacks can feel with their long, slow wind-ups, but as much as I’d maybe like to argue for some sort of objective inferiority (how parries tend to get blocked like basic melee hits versus the more widely effective diving attack off a wall, for example), I’m going to just admit that I may not have used the prince’s move set to its fullest, so maybe the grounded retrieval is meant to be risky to push the player toward more advanced methods of finishing off enemies, though a mistimed parry could be considered equally risky compared with the grounded finisher since both open you up to potential damage, which may be even worse in the case of the parry given that you have to be in the path of an enemy’s weapon to do it at all…

 

Sands of Time Day Five: Loose Ends?

One of the things that makes doing these video game pieces so fun but also so stressful is the complexity of the subject matter. There’s a lot of nuance that can be missed, and depending on the statements I’m making, like, say, offering some sort of definitive statement about the whole combat system in a game, there’s the danger that any given missing detail is going to result in an incorrect or invalid assessment. At the same time, though, I don’t have unlimited time to just mess around with the same game forever, and doing so would be boring as well. Where to draw the line is always in question, and my hope was that this “diaries” format would help with that by forcing me to set some boundaries.

I did go back and replay around a third of The Sands of Time, just to see what else I could find (primarily about combat), and I don’t think any of it radically changes my feelings. I was still noting little presentational details, like how the bars the prince can swing from sometimes jostle and bounce in a realistic way that suggests his weight is going to rip the things right out of the wall. And the “Making of” videos, while they don’t contribute much in the way of meaningful information, do add to that feeling that you’re playing a movie given their bonus-features-on-a-DVD-like nature.

In terms of combat, I made a concentrated effort to parry more and to try to use the vaulting retrieve move and the sand powers just to see if they altered the flow of encounters significantly, and I would say… they don’t, at least not to a major degree. It’s possible to use the slow power to bypass certain enemy defenses (like those who normally counter vaulting attacks, for example), so there might be more flexibility than my initial replay suggested, though I still came away with a “limited” feeling and that enemies were like puzzles to be solved. Sometimes you can just throw things at them, including normal sword attacks, until they crumple, but, intentional or not, it’s usually safer and faster to hit them with their weakness, whether that’s a vaulting retrieve or a vaulting sword combo or a piercing attack off a nearby wall.

That’s not inherently a bad thing, though, as I did mention in passing early in the day two entry. Sussing out an enemy’s particular weakness and then consistently defeating them with it has a certain satisfaction to it, and, having come back to The Sands of Time from Warrior Within to polish up this piece, I wouldn’t even say now that this more limited combat system is the worst of the two (two-and-a-half counting tweaks in The Two Thrones?) on offer in the trilogy. It lacks a bunch of combos and feels like it might railroad the player a bit more by design, but it also feels solid and less janky than that other approach. It’s also distinctive enough from its action contemporaries in the early 2000s that it probably deserves to be recognized as one of the foundational action games modern titles have built upon. (The above photo is my own.)

Some other quick combat and control notes: Blocking in the game uses the same button as wall-running and interacting with objects in the environment like pushable blocks, which means defending yourself against enemy attacks is somewhat contextual, and the game is left to decide when you can do it (or not). This is particularly frustrating with flying enemies, because the combat music will be playing and the enemies will be visible onscreen but you can’t preemptively put your guard up until the game decides the enemy is close enough to be an active part of the fight. This means you stand around holding down the button and feeling silly and wanting to block without being able to. This is a problem that exists in other games, in the action-RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), for example, and is almost certainly a consequence of controllers only having so many buttons available, as well as a perfectly logical impulse on the part of the game’s designers to have actions overlap with one another in sensical ways that are easy for a player to understand and operate. Even with a keyboard and mouse control scheme, it would still make sense to use fewer buttons rather than more so that the player doesn’t have to do something completely different for every single action. At least some input is going to have to pull double duty based on context, though defensive moves like blocking and dodging have my vote for being the worst actions to do this with.

Furthermore (and finally, I promise), the soft lock-on in Sands of Time I mentioned before restricts player movement in ways that make traversing ground quickly (if Farah is getting attacked some distance away, say) more difficult by locking the prince into a strafing stance that causes him to back up and sidestep rather than turn and run as normal. The strafing serves the important function of allowing the prince to more easily dodge around and direct attacks toward a specific enemy, but the automation is the issue. Devil May Cry has a similar lock-on with a strafing stance, but the key difference is that it’s player-initiated rather than something the game turns on and off automatically.

Where I’m going with all these various observations—about the limitations of combat, the flashy animations, the contextual or even automated nature of some of it—is to say that, clearly, spectacle was the focus for Sands of Time over mechanical complexity. Conveying a sense of acrobatic flair with visual flourishes equivalent to what you might see on the big screen in an action film was more important than creating a “deep” combat system. This is still not necessarily a problem, however. The God of War series has historically been less mechanically complex than its contemporaries like Ninja Gaiden in favor of making a more accessible game where flashy and satisfying results can be achieved with less friction, though it is still more flexible than other titles like, yes, this game, but also the series I thought of during my recent time spent with Sands of Time—Batman: Arkham, which has received a lot of praise for how effectively its gameplay has captured the essence of the title character as depicted in other media like films and comics.

There are similarities in the design and game feel that are notable, like how Batman vaults very prince-like over enemies as one of his main evasive moves in combat and how certain actions prioritize creating a cinematically satisfying experience over a mechanical one: particularly how Batman’s parry locks him into a counter animation that stops other enemies from launching attacks, for instance, or how positioning is not so much in the player’s control because of how moving the left stick toward an enemy and pushing the dedicated “attack” button sends him flying toward that enemy to perform whatever sort of attack the game decides on in a manner not dissimilar to how the prince moves and fights in Sands of Time. Floored enemies in the Arkham games are also sometimes not truly down for the count, requiring additional attacks to finish them off, though the same could be said of Ninja Gaiden as well, so the line of influence feels blurrier there. For something more telling but not exactly combat-related, consider how in the Arkham series, in Asylum (2009) and onwards, Batman’s appearance becomes increasingly degraded over the course of each game to emphasize the strain he’s under, and in Sands of Time the prince similarly gains more injuries and loses more and more clothing as the adventure goes on.

 

One of the highlights of The Sands of Time that was judged fit to “sell” it on the back of the box is the vaulting move I mentioned before, seen above in the middle screenshot of three. While the prince has other flashy animations, this is one of the first combat abilities aside from basic sword strikes the player will encounter, and it is both a staple of combat and perfectly encapsulates the focus on acrobatics. From a presentational standpoint, it’s a complex interaction (the prince and enemy character models working together) that also highlights the visual fidelity and flair. This move is a sort of very cool, hype showcase of what is most appealing about the game, making it a good choice for the back of the box. (The above photo is my own.)

 

The ultimate point of all this? Perhaps that I think Sands of Time prioritizes spectacle too much in its combat to have the encounters be as lengthy as they can be here, though the visual flair does satisfy when you get into a flow state of taking enemies down in as creative or efficient a manner as you can manage, and with the relatively high damage output of the opponents and the fragility of the prince and/or Farah adding some vital edge to the proceedings. Alternatively, this is just me trying to connect Sands of Time to the action games around it and that have followed it, to try to pinpoint various threads of (potential) influence or at least similarity: the way that pointing the prince toward a downed enemy with the left stick and pressing a single button to trigger a complex takedown animation really reminded me strongly of Batman: Arkham, though the focus on attacking off of enemies or walls reminds me more of similar actions in Ninja Gaiden, and the arena-style encounters that make up most of the game’s combat where you take on various enemy types in waves remind me of Devil May Cry (which reasonably predates Sands of Time) and also every other action game—Batman: Arkham and Ninja Gaiden, included, and maybe especially that second title given how similarly tedious and repetitive some of the longer fights in that series can become. The way that Sands of Time typically segregates combat and platforming as entirely separate events definitely contributed to my feelings of fatigue regarding both, and it reminded me of the 2011 action-platformer Alice: Madness Returns, which also focused on big arena fights and platforming/puzzle-solving in a similarly tiring (in the long term) way. A lack of combat options may have contributed to that feeling for me in both Sands of Time and Madness Returns, though there were other sorts of frustrations in the former that contributed as well.   

 

 

SANDS OF TIME DAY THREE: FURTHER MATTERS OF (MARRED) PRESENTATION

            The third day (of the original four) that I spent replaying Sands of Time was defined, I felt, by presentation once more. Some of my above observations about the little details in the game technically came from this day instead and were just placed with day one because it made sense to do so. Unique to day three, however, were the most noticeable true, unintended issues with the game in the form of three glitches that I encountered. One was somewhat familiar (I think) and involved me dropping from a hanging ledge at an odd angle, resulting in the prince getting stuck in a shimmying stance that was only meant to be used with his back facing away from a wall; however, the odd drop resulted in the character facing forward and creeping along thin air with his hands, and since he could only drop or jump backward (impossible due to the wall behind him) or clamor upward (impossible since there were no ledges to grab in the thin air above him) from that posture, I was stuck in such a way that I had to reload my last save. The next two glitches were not so familiar to me, though I feel like I had to have encountered at least the first of them based on how persistent it seemed during this playthrough.

There is a short platforming challenge in Sands of Time located in an observatory area where you have to spin one of the models suspended from the ceiling around so that a bar attached to it aligns with the others in a series that the prince can grasp and use to leap forward in the air to cross the room. I spun the bar into what looked like the correct position, with the right distance between it and the others, but the prince simply could not make the jump. I messed around with other (even obviously impassable-looking) positions for the model just to test if there was some angle of approach I wasn’t seeing, but after using up all my sand falling and rewinding time, I finally looked up a walkthrough on YouTube to see what the solution was… and it was exactly what I had done the first time, but the prince made the jump in the video. Weirdly, after getting a “game over” and choosing “retry” to start from my last save point, I made the jump on the first attempt myself. I had done everything exactly the same as I had before, but now the prince was capable of making the jump between bars for some reason. This suggested to me that there might be some degree of contextual fiddling behind the scenes with the platforming as well—where, rather than traveling the same distance every time, maybe the game cheated a little (theoretically in the player’s favor) to sometimes make longer, more dangerous-looking jumps possible. So maybe that exception for the model-bar jumps just wasn’t being recognized for some reason? I can only guess.

Unfortunately, after a bit more traversal with no save point, I ran into glitch number three during the next big arena fight after reaching a courtyard outside the observatory. The game crashed—or something like it—with the screen displaying a bunch of roughly geometric shapes in different colors. I was able to open the pause menu, if I recall correctly, but the option select was incredibly laggy, and the game would not actually quit to the menu, forcing me to restart the entire GameCube to reload. On my next attempt at the observatory, the prince simply would not make the same jump from before again, causing me to waste more time trying to figure out a solution, until I finally got a “game over” and chose to “retry” once more, at which point the jump worked perfectly on the first attempt like before. Thankfully, the third glitch did not repeat, and I was able to beat the arena fight and save, though I did quit for the day after that since I had been playing for a while and was pretty frustrated.

            Ultimately, I encountered no more of these sorts of issues on the final day I played, and I wouldn’t go so far as to call them experience-ruining. I remembered Sands of Time as being the least glitchy and technically weird of the games in the trilogy, but, as I said before, something about the ledge-drop facing glitch did strike me as familiar. Similarly, I had a feeling in my gut going into the observatory—nothing definite enough to say that I had issues there in the past, though I might very well have. As much as I am (or was, now that I’m looking backward!) looking forward to the expanded combat options of the second game in the series, Warrior Within, it’s also the one game in the trilogy where I got truly stuck and had to restart it thanks to not exactly a glitch—more like an unfortunate oversight where I backtracked later in the game into a room I could no longer get out of thanks to changes in the environment from an earlier visit. While I don’t think I’ll repeat that exact misstep again, I’m worried about what sort of issues I might encounter in what seems to be considered the buggiest game in the series, especially after finding Sands of Time to be less sound than I remembered, even if there still is a lot more that works for me about this game than that doesn’t work, bug-wise or in terms of its execution of some very important, intimate elements.

 

 

SANDS OF TIME DAY FOUR: MATTERS OF ROMANCE

            I said before that Sands of Time’s visuals are meant to evoke a certain lush, pleasurous quality. I essentially argued that it was implicit with the focus on prominent, repeated environmental details like water and fabric, but it’s also very explicit with regard to the sort of rooms you sometimes encounter, with their statuary celebrating the feminine form, their pools of water, and their colorful rugs and pillows. I don’t even want to attempt to touch the “cultural” aspects of this game—whether this is an exploitative portrait of a real place and time—but, obviously, the intention is romantic in the broadest sense: Sands of Time is a love story, but it’s also meant to be a luxurious, fantastical tale that unfolds across a ruined seat of excess that still retains some of its old grandeur and essentially the ghosts of old bodily pleasure. Yes, you do spend time in ruins and wells and dungeons, but there are a fair few of those very pleasure-oriented spaces, aside even from the most obvious choice like the literal harem that I wouldn’t even have recognized as such were it not for the save/load screen that often displays text that identifies your position in the game world. Even the obligatory ascending elevator brawl near the game’s conclusion actually takes place on a very weird, large lift adorned with those aforementioned rugs and pillows. When I say Sands of Time has a certain sexiness about it, I’m not just referring to the more noticeable elements, like Farah’s outfit or the sexualized lady sand zombie type of enemy you encounter at points, or even to the actual sex scene, which is a fun kind of particularly lush and surreal in its own right.

This climax (ha) of the prince and Farah relationship occurs after the two have already reached the theoretical end of their journey but are thrown down from the palace’s treasure tower by the power of the evil vizier after the prince hesitates to follow Farah’s directions regarding how to operate the giant hourglass that once housed the Sands of Time before the prince was tricked by the vizier into releasing them. The game has a very simple plot and is more character-focused for much of its length. Consequently, the long sections of platforming and combat sometimes yield rewards in the form of a new sword or upgrade to your sand capacity, but much of what you receive as a reward is more dialogue, either between the prince and Farah or between the prince and himself or the prince and the unseen listener he’s retelling the events of the game to. Farah warms up to the prince in more vocal ways during the journey, but his own romantic responses are more interior—perhaps thankfully for his sake since he thinks of Farah as a headstrong woman who needs some taming but is nonetheless worthy of being his wife by virtue of her noble blood. It’s a well-meaning, naïve sort of misogyny. Even as his feelings turn more romantic, however, the prince remains distrustful of Farah’s intentions, which all comes to a head when they’re blown out of the tower by the vizier and nearly killed. Farah calls the prince out for his lack of trust in her, and then the mood turns romantic as the two contemplate the seeming end of their journey sealed away in the depths of the palace.

            This cutscene in a (literal) tomb is an interesting one, as it partway-through transitions to just a black screen with some sand drifting down from the top, creating an uncertain and even surreal sort of vibe. The prince and Farah are just having a conversation, though there are some little silences or exclamations here that I think adolescent Monty found pretty terrifying, especially with the audio balance unintentionally obscuring things. During this conversation, Farah shares a secret word with the prince that her mother told to her when she was young. This seems to open a passageway concealed in one of the sarcophagi-like fixtures in the room. The scene becomes truly visible again and the prince, now alone, jumps into the open tomb, and when we regain control of the character he has to descend a spiraling stairway adorned with more of the game’s familiar hanging cloth. This descent went on long enough that I was trying to remember if it was one of those tricks in games where you have to go backward to proceed. Eventually, however, going downward, the prince arrives at yet another room with a pool and a statue of a woman in the center of it. Leading off the circular room are numerous dark, cloth-draped doorways, and what follows is a little puzzle sequence where the player has to identify the doorway with the splashing water sounds emitting from it to make progress, though “progress” seems at first to just return the prince to the same room, and then to the upper level of that room with still more doors to enter. It’s very reminiscent of the “Lost Woods” area in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), where the player has to use sound to navigate a similar maze of dark doorways.

            During this dreamlike sequence, Farah’s voice can be clearly heard, despite the apparent distance between the prince and herself, saying some romantic things, like how she and the prince could take a bath together. When the prince finally finds her—naked in some other, furnished and maintained, pool by all accounts hidden away in the depths of the palace—we get a tasteful and more or less by the numbers, though competently executed, scene where the two swim together and then touch one another before we cut away to preserve the mystique and the “T” rating. Critically, the prince sheds his weapons before entering the water, which is emphasized with a close-up of the act, and we get a shot of Farah’s face as he goes to disarm where she looks a little sneaky and pleased, and, taken together with some of the sand visions we’ve seen previously of Farah picking up the Dagger of Time, the implication is that this sex (if it actually happens at all) is at least partly manipulative. It’s after this scene that we enter the final leg of the game (mostly) without the dagger or the sand powers to help during many of the ultimate climbing and combat sequences. When the prince reawakens after the scene with Farah in the bath, he’s back in that same initial cramped tomb again like nothing happened, calling into question the whole long dream of it all.

This is an appropriately romantic—sensuous but tasteful—depiction of the two characters having sex that fits with both the overall vibe of the game (that luxurious and fantastical deal) but that also acts as an extension of a previously established element of dream with a mechanical function where the prince can find hidden hallways in the castle, draped in fabric, leading perhaps unrealistically deep into the structure, much like the stairway to the bath below the tomb. These hallways all lead to the most explicitly fantastical area in the game: lit blue by crystals and set in some cavernous space with numerous bridges all leading toward a fountain of water in the middle. Drinking from this fountain extends the prince’s health bar but also teleports him back to where he initially entered the hallway, with the entranceway removed and just a blank wall in its place. Farah is tagging along during one of these magical encounters, and she remarks with admiration tinged quite romantic when the prince breaks down the wall that conceals the special hallway, but she refuses to come with him when he enters and then, afterward, seems to have no memory of him going anywhere. Aside from the fun subjectivity that these hallways bring, that particular scene where the… magical influence seems to turn Farah romantic or else conjure up a fake interaction with her tinged with romance feels very much of a kind with the whole bath sequence/sex scene.

Clearly Farah takes the prince’s weapons at some point, but was there ever anything physical between them? The ending of the game leans into an ambiguous future for the two in a way that, again, feels appropriate for the established mood. After killing the vizier to prevent the release of the deadly sands from ever occurring in the first place, the prince does kiss Farah, and when she rejects the kiss (on top of the fantastical story he’s told her), he rewinds time to undo the kiss but leaves her on her balcony with the private word that she told to him in the undone timeline where the sands were released, cheekily telling her it’s his name as he exits. Cue “Time Only Knows” as the camera pulls dramatically and definitively away from the balcony as both we and the prince leave Farah behind, if only for the time being. It’s very romantic! And cute and competently crowd-pleasing in the way of a good blockbuster. Even the nonconsensual kiss and the creepy implications of being able to do such a thing and then make it so that the other person doesn’t remember, which I am obligated to point out by virtue of being a Socially-Conscious Critic, ties in with the sense of romantic adventure the whole game has been cultivating and wouldn’t be at all out of place in a film.

 

Not to call anybody out too hard, but I was watching a video of the Sands of Time “love scene” on YouTube (the source of the above image) to make sure I got the details right, and there were some viewer comments that struck me as very funny and/or telling. One said, simply, “Hot.” (I agree!) While another said, “I never understood this scene.” (A good sign, I think, that the intended uncertainty is hitting like it should.) And, also, finally, my fave, one of those wonderful perhaps overly sincere YouTube comments: “One of the most beautiful love stories of all. So magical, even if it was a dream. I wish I could have experienced it.” (Man, that final statement: It says a lot.)

I was also watching another complete playthrough a bit to double-check some other details about the game and noticed the section YouTube had marked as “most replayed” was the love sequence. And on that note…

 

           Without getting too deep into the Monty Terrible pathology, I first played Sands of Time as an adolescent when I had a very mixed relationship with sexual things. I actually did not watch the bath scene back then, maybe because I was in the family room and there was at least one other person around, but also because it just made me uncomfortable in general. I’m pretty sure I turned the TV off during the conversation on the black screen because I didn’t like what I was hearing, and then again during the actual “bath” itself, which resulted in me tuning back in some (estimated) time later to find the enemies that spawn to harry the weaponless prince beating the stuffing out of him in my absence. Would I have watched these scenes in full given more of a “choice”? Maybe. I did when I played Sands of Time again at some indeterminate point after that first encounter.

In some ways, I think The Sands of Time is a very good romance for a teen and not just because the content is strictly T-rated. All things taken together—the sex and its portrayal, but also the whole fantastical and romantic thing the game is doing—there’s a sort of burgeoning sexuality to the proceedings that feels very appropriate. The way that the puzzle before the bath scene proper draws things out and gives a teenaged brain plenty of time to realize what’s probably about to happen and to build up some expectations or uncertainty about what it will be like, the way that sex is a sort of near-inaccessible or hidden, mysterious thing in a maze of dark doorways? To read too much into it: It’s very adolescent, like the rest of the game. Carnal but also very smitten, tentative, even, what with how the prince “likes” Farah but is kind of an inelegant dingus and asshole about it in his conception of the relationship and also how he both wants but doesn’t trust this girl. Even though the characters are some kind of adult, I think, there’s a teenager-ish-ness to it all. Some idealization of sex via luxurious bath and hanging fabric and tasteful cinematography and editing. Like I keep saying: “romantic.”

Of course, the EDGIER Warrior Within will make the jump to an “M” rating and will hit us with an unobstructed, lingering ass shot extremely early on, but that tonal whiplash only impacted people as hard as it did because Sands of Time was so good at establishing a distinctive, consistent, enjoyable mood for itself. A mood that I mostly associate with JRPGs and their (often) focus on some kind of romantic dynamic that feels engineered for teens in similarly specific and broad ways. The romance of it all is, appropriately, timeless.

            And I don’t believe it’s exactly entirely nostalgia speaking when I say that I still don’t think Sands of Time needs a remake so much as it just needs future-proofing in a way that makes it readily accessible to new and old players. Yes, even the highest-quality cutscenes in the game that use the most detailed character models don’t quite hold up. Farah naked in the bath has a certain blocky, video-game-y look to her face that does age and de-sex the whole thing considerably, but the attention to detail on display in the game’s visual design and the way that it goes big despite the technological limitations and how it tells its story are worth preserving as they were. It’s art and should be admired for the accomplishment that it is, and while you can add more polygons (and subtitles?) to it, no newer, likely much longer, sleeker model is a true replacement for the original. To be a bit overly romantic and on the nose, which feels very fitting: I don’t think this game should be lost… to the sands of time.