Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (2004): The Goofy, Broody, Frustrating, But Competent-Enough, and Ambitious, Sequel

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.

Note that this piece contains full spoilers for the game in the title, as well as for its predecessor (Sands of Time). It contains some NSFW imagery and discussion, most prominently in the first section just below, on “Day One,” but also at the very end of the entire essay, in an image and its caption. There will be a content warning for discussion of IRL animal/human death on a later section as well. Know also that I’m discussing the GameCube version of Warrior Within specifically, played from a disc on the original hardware.

For the equivalent piece on Sands of Time, click here. 

 

Despite what the above image might suggest, I do like Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but replaying it has put me through my paces in more ways than one, and it is undeniably a slap (or kick?) to the face in some ways, coming from Sands of Time, even if you know in advance what to expect. Still, I wouldn’t have written all of This if I didn’t care about it.

 

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY ONE: THE UNDESERVED “M” RATING

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was the first M-rated game I owned as a teenager. Our family followed the recommended ESRB age ratings to the extent that it was decided I could only play the game when my younger brother was not around, though that rule was eventually relaxed. I don’t remember the full extent of my feelings about the game from back then, but I do recall a distinct disappointment with the fact that the sequel to The Sands of Time (2003), a game I had enjoyed, was not something I could play when it initially released. To this day, I still have some hard-to-express feelings when watching the opening high-quality cutscene of Warrior Within. There’s a sort of uneasiness, I believe, not entirely related to the subject matter—the prince fleeing from some ambiguous dark force, which overtakes a malnourished dog at one point, through narrow city streets—and probably is more related to the larger context in which I first experienced it: knowing that I had some limited time to play (maybe), and (certainly) that this was my first M-rated video game. What would I see? How different would it actually be from The Sands of Time? Would I be… changed in some way as a result of the experience? I was on edge going into it.

One likely reason there was (and is) a sense of unease in my gut response to that first cutscene is because of just how similar Warrior Within looks to Sands of Time. The darker tone and the brief shot of the dog’s exposed ribs aside, the look and feel is/was not so different on a surface level. And the truth of the matter is that I think Warrior Within is a game that just edges into that higher rating bracket. The title of this section and what I only just said aside, I do think the game deserves the “M” rating, given how enemies can now be cut in half and decapitated and how they now shed a sort of mixture of blood and sand (though “blood” can be turned off in a menu) and how the ladies of the game have been… upgraded from the first title, with bigger busts and scantier attire. But it all feels a little too… intentional, perhaps. It’s very “edgy,” in that, like a lot of M-rated games, it isn’t so much actually mature given that all its darker atmosphere is still distinctly, obviously fantastical and not at all potentially traumatizing in the way that depictions of things more like actual, real-world mature content could be. It’s just that unfortunate video game thing, where some M-rated games could be genuinely mature and concerned with subject matter and themes inappropriate for younger gamers, but then other M-rated games are just, to be intentionally insulting, comic book nonsense. Warrior Within is some Comic Book Nonsense.

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t remember the exact feelings and reactions from my youth all that well, but I think the fact that blood can be toggled on and off for the game bothered me on some level because it highlighted just how close Warrior Within might have been to actually being T-rated, and to being a game I could have played right away instead of having to wait and then to play in such short bursts because my brother wasn’t allowed to see it.

I do genuinely believe Warrior Within could have been made and could have told the same story and had more or less the same combat system but just sans a few largely superficial elements that pushed it into “M” territory: It feels like you could ditch the excessive blood and dismemberment and the couple of especially violent-looking grappling attacks, tone down the sexuality, which isn’t even that much more intense than in Sands of Time, and there you’d be, T-rated, possibly. The edge these later two games in the trilogy walked is perfectly highlighted by the fact that there was a T-rated version of the third title released. That this game and its sequel were ever rated “M” feels like a willful choice rather than an actual necessity of their making. Like I said before, nothing significant about it—no plot beat or theme—actually justifies an “M” rating. Instead, the reason just appears to me to be the game industry trying to age up along with one or two specific generations of gamers, resulting in a modern landscape that feels very much dominated by M-rated games for no reason other than that’s what seems best engineered to sell to those one or two (or more—I’m not keeping count) aging generations. That and (probably) the rising cost of producing any single title meaning only the biggest and most profitable-seeming stuff gets made. Obviously, there are still T- and E-rated games out there, but the feeling I get is what I once saw someone else say—that younger gamers have largely been left to the mercy of “apps” on mobile devices and to exploitative free-to-play garbage. The industry at large just feels too obsessed with a veneer of so-called “maturity,” Warrior Within-style. (Like, do we really need an M-rated Final Fantasy game featuring “hate crimes”?)

I mentioned in my previous piece about Sands of Time that the romantic atmosphere and the tentative sexuality of that other game get essentially blasted in Warrior Within when its opening cutscene features an unambiguous, lingering close-up of a shapely swaying ass in a sort of thong. The pallid cheeks in question belong to Shahdee, an early antagonist in the game, who’s leading an army of mask-wearing monster-men in battle against the prince at sea while wearing a sort of armored bikini that’s like two parts stone or metal and one part lingerie. (There’s a fun skull emblazoned at the crotch you can see in the image of Shahdee on the back of the game’s box.) Although she sort of caresses some of her troops just before ordering them to kill the prince, the back-of-the-box “sexual themes” here come across as ludicrous because Shahdee’s sexiness feels so obviously out of place within the game, both at sea and within the halls of the island fortress where the prince spends most of the adventure. Warrior Within lacks its predecessor’s focus on luxury and fantasy and pleasure as key, recurring, defining elements of its landscape. It still features a variety of locations, including an overgrown garden tower in resplendent green and a small library area in the game’s signature red and brown, but there’s nothing particularly voluptuous about these environments. The sexiness, for all its apparent M-rated-ness, feels more skin-deep and silly in contrast with Sands of Time where it was meaningfully cultivated across multiple facets of the game, not strictly limited to how certain characters were dressed.

            In that first game, love interest and adventurous foil Farah’s outfit was revealing enough but also felt appropriate for a captive princess. Ditto the garb of the women sand zombies you fought that were likely meant to be taken for the transformed former members of a harem. There was a degree of plausible deniability, which might be called “realism,” with how those outfits fit with the setting and tone of the palace and felt of a kind with the vibe the game was creating overall. On the other hand, Warrior Within’s two main ladies—the aforementioned Shahdee and her mistress (in the royal sense) Kaileena—have their slinky attire on for no good apparent reason. Shahdee’s meant to be a warrior of some kind, and Kaileena doesn’t seem to exactly be living in the lap of luxury where her outfit would make sense. 

 

I’m using this picture of Kaileena from the Giant Bomb wiki for a couple of reasons: First, because it illustrates the more sexualized character designs I was discussing just above, and, second, because I think the caption “Kaileena, relaxing at home” is so funny. Without getting into why I think the presence of the comma alone makes the statement that much more humorous, it’s primarily funny (even incisive) owing to how there’s nothing relaxed about the character or anything homey/relaxing about the place she lives, and I think that’s a problem because of how it makes her outfit stand out as ridiculous because of the contrast or mismatch.

 

I’m not outright against titillation for titillation’s sake, as long as the media in question is honest about its intentions and isn’t doing anything subversive or creepy behind the scenes (and as long as there’s a healthy balance of other media that offers a different sort of experience), but I’m approaching this critique both as a fan of well-executed sexiness and as that disappointed kid I once was who didn’t get to play a game for a while because of its design choices that now, as an adult, stick out especially clearly as downright pretentious.

            Warrior Within has scanty clothes and big breasts but not much else. In this particular area, it is boring (and unambitious) compared with Sands of Time and its elaborate, near-artsy “bath” sequence late in the game that serves as a culmination of hours of character interaction. Ironically, that other title comes off as more truly mature in its handling of its sexual elements than the game with the higher age rating on the box because of how much more genuinely sexy it feels in contrast to Warrior Within’s more exploitative- and shallow-feeling approach. While I do think both “T” (13+) and “M” (16+) players, still teenagers in either case, could uncritically enjoy both games’ approaches equally—and I’m pretty sure I have a wallpaper of Kaileena saved somewhere on one of my old travel drives…—as an adult I can appreciate the differences in execution. This is to say that Sands of Time has that blockbuster quality I’ve mentioned before, like it wouldn’t be altogether out of place on a big screen as a widely-attended summer movie, where its violence and sexuality are both competently portrayed in stylistic and sensical ways that don’t overwhelm the other elements of the experience, whereas Warrior Within has more of a B- or C-movie, exploitative edge to it that I think keeps it from feeling as timeless or nostalgic and that also renders its attempts at maturity laughable. BDSM-adjacent ninja ladies flipping all over the place while repeatedly cooing at the prince about pleasure and pain and how Doesn’t he know he’s not supposed to hit a lady? don’t exactly inspire confidence in one’s ability to play this game in a public place and still be taken seriously.

            Warrior Within’s maturity is perhaps perfectly encapsulated by several early bits: incidental dog with exposed ribs for some reason, gratuitous and out-of-place shot of a woman’s barely-covered backside, and, now, how the prince calls Shahdee a “bitch” after she cuts him across the face during that first boss fight at sea. Having the prince say “bitch” in his growly new voice while addressing a ridiculously under-clothed woman dual-wielding elaborate-looking swords in a game that prominently features metal music and the ability to split a man-sized enemy in half vertically just feels like the most obvious, silly approach to reaching for “maturity.” And that’s stuff that could still stand out in isolation, never mind the ridiculous amount of tonal whiplash you get transitioning from the first game’s very sweet (if also a bit misogynistic) prince and overall sense of romance to… whatever all this is. It’s helped not at all by the jank that mars this opening (and other moments). 

After the boss fight that concludes the tutorial level, Shahdee disarms the prince by grabbing his sword with her swords to throw it away, jabs him in the face with her elbow, kicks him once in the face and then again in the body to knock him overboard, and then we get this (I have to assume) unintentionally goofy shot that zooms in on the woman’s overly still, flat, polygonal face and lingers for a quiet moment for no good reason. It’s the perfect punctuation at the end of the game’s opening: Welcome to Warrior Within—It’s dumb as all hell with its new “maturity,” but still also a fun game mechanically and a worthy sequel, in some regards.

 

At the risk of coming off as a lascivious weirdo, I do want to call attention to the gulf in, uh, “detail” between Shahdee’s introduction via high-quality cutscene (left above) and a similar shot that uses her normal in-game model (right above). The exact cut and even material of the heavy metal thong she’s wearing seem to change from one to the other. It’s arguably not even the same butt, though I’m going to stop that line of thought right there so as to mitigate the risk I mentioned before. I just think it is genuinely interesting, noteworthy, and/or funny to revisit games like this one and see the attempts at sexiness falter and flail within the confines of the graphical limitations of the time. Hair is another area where games like Warrior Within struggle similarly. Kaileena’s long, flowing hair is reduced to a dry-looking, tattered sheet of, like, paper roughly contoured to her head and upper body.

Goofy as Shahdee’s outfit looks, as out of place in contrast with Sands of Time’s established tone for the trilogy as it might be, it does sort of fit with this game’s heavy metal elements. I might have spoken sort of derisively about metal earlier in its role as a cringe signifier of supposed maturity in this game, but I do like metal music, and I do like Warrior Within’s soundtrack, and I don’t find it to even be as much of a full departure from the first game’s soundscape as it might seem at first brush. There are still certain tracks, or elements of certain tracks (like chanting or particular instruments), that feel appropriate for the setting. There’s even at least one quieter song that plays during certain calm moments on the island that has a “little” of the first game’s big, much-loved romantic theme, “Time Only Knows,” to it, though I lack the technical vocabulary or know-how to explain/confirm that impression, but, given the character of the soundtrack, one way of reading Warrior Within’s change in overall musical style that also happens to conform to its story is that the prince has been hardened by his trials but that the softness that made him so compelling before still lives somewhere within, appearing only fleetingly, via suggestion, through the music.

There’s even a sort of gesture toward this future style in the music of Sands of Time itself, which we could say is thematically concerned with the hardness forming in a way that fits with that game’s story of a relatively soft, privileged man who has to toughen up. The disillusionment or harshness is lightly present in some repeated combat music but is especially noticeable in the heavier track that plays to introduce the prison/torture area the prince accidentally falls into late in that game. I didn’t like rock or metal (or much of any music, really) at the time, as a kid, but something in that one piece registered with me and spoke to me, I suppose. It’s one of the songs, right after “Time Only Knows,” from that game that comes immediately to mind when I think of Sands of Time, yet it’s also distinctly more like something from Warrior Within tonally. While the change from the first to the second game in this trilogy is still noticeable (and abrupt-feeling, even), it can’t be said that there is no continuity.

While I will speak negatively of Warrior Within’s tone, as it, again, contrasts so sharply with Sands of Time and just comes off as kind of ridiculous, I will still acknowledge here that the Metal elements—Shahdee’s outfit, the bondage-inspired look of certain late-game enemies, the music—appeal to me and probably do play a role in how fondly I remember this game, still, despite all of its issues and shortcomings. At the risk of coming off as a weirdo, all the red and black and leather works for me, but I wish there was a stronger synergy with the environments. Where Sands of Time has a sense of completeness about it that extends across all aspects of its design, Warrior Within feels more fractured and weird, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally.

 

 

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY TWO: THE PROBLEMS THAT “FREEDOM” BRINGS

            As I’ve been playing these games, I’ve been “thinking ahead” a bit—trying to come up with some topics I might discuss on a particular “Day” at some point in the process of covering the series. One of those prompts that I came up with in advance for Warrior Within was to consider specifically its status as a sequel and to answer the question of what the most impactful addition to the template of sorts that had been established by Sands of Time would be. In my head, I had thought I might come up with something really clever and highly specific, like arguing that being able to slide down wall hangings was the most meaningful addition, but I realize now that it’s actually, probably something else: “freedom.”

            Freedom from an inflexible place is a theme of the game in more than one respect, broadly speaking. In terms of the narrative, the prince and Kaileena both want to be freed from their respective fates which bind them—from erasure by the powers that be for his crime of messing with time in the first game, in the case of the prince, and from being killed by the prince to create the Sands of Time, as he messes with time yet again, in the case of Kaileena. This is why, despite the fact that the prince saves himself in both possible endings, the “good” ending is the one where Kaileena is also saved. It’s two fates defied (for now…) for the price of one. More freedom in aggregate as a result of your actions. Beyond plot and theme, however, “freedom” is also clearly a driving force behind the second game’s approach to iterating on Sands of Time’s mechanics, so much so that it features prominently in the back-of-the-box marketing for the game, as seen below.

 

It must also be said, while I’m showing off Warrior Within’s box, that God of War: Ragnarök’s (2022) is pretty disappointing. The 2018 God of War game still had the classic selling points and small, hard-to-see screenshots, but this newest entry just has a synopsis that emphasizes the plot and characters (in a God of War game!) without any kind of additional sizzle. It makes me wonder if the industry sees the back of game boxes as something perfunctory and unnecessary now. With the internet, do most people go into a store already knowing what they want and why they want it, to the point that the back of the box no longer really matters? (Or they buy everything digitally so that there is no box involved…) Or maybe, even more cynically, I wonder if it’s because of how homogenous major releases have become. Every modern game’s box would just be boasting about its open world and crafting system… Warrior Within’s box, meanwhile, makes what I take to be genuine attempts to sell players on the game. It promises boss battles, for one thing, which Sands of Time was almost entirely missing. (It is also outright wrong about the amount of space required on a memory card to save your game.)

 

            The largest text on display—“One Fate. One Million Ways to Defy It.”—emphasizes a freedom of sorts through what is described just below it as “the Free-Form Fighting system,” promising players the ability to “develop unique combat styles and combos. . . .” That statement is not exactly true in terms of its particulars. Yes, Warrior Within’s combat is much more “free”-feeling compared with Sands of Time’s. Enemies now seem more susceptible to a wider variety of the prince’s tricks, as opposed to feeling more like puzzles with specific solutions in the previous game, and there are more moves available—more melee combos, new acrobatic attacks, new magical sand abilities, and a new grappling system, to provide a not entirely complete list. Even the act of blocking, which was previously more strictly a contextual action available only when the game judged that the prince was in combat, is now more “free” in the sense that you can perform it readily as long as you have your weapons drawn. (Though this new flexibility is more of a trade in the end than a straight up addition since the option to manually sheathe the prince’s weapons is gone, with that X button now primarily used to throw your secondary weapon as an attack.) What isn’t so true about the back-of-the-box combat hype is the supposed freedom of the player to develop a fighting style. While the game does have more moves to use in a more free-form manner much more reminiscent of Warrior Within’s action game contemporaries, like 2004’s Ninja Gaiden, you don’t so much “develop unique combat styles and combos” as you do study the fairly expansive move list and learn to effectively use the abilities available to you, as you do in every other action game. 

            The exhaustive list of moves available to the prince in this game was pretty overwhelming to me as a teenager, but my later experience playing Ninja Gaiden specifically helped me to realize during this replay that a certain number of those seemingly many, many different combos are just the same full combo broken down into its various component parts and possible minute variations. For example, “Breeze of Anguish” (Y), “Blast of Sorrow” (Y, Y), and “Misery Gale” (Y, Y, Y) are all listed as separate moves, but that’s just each hit of a single three-hit combo given its own fancy-sounding name and entry on the list. Furthermore, many inputs produce the same or similar effect, even across Warrior Within’s different weapon types. B, Y and Y, B result in functionally almost identical spinning slices, for example, regardless of the type of weapon you’re wielding, but one just favors the prince’s primary (indestructible) sword, while the other favors his secondary (destructible, swappable, throwable) armament. The effect of a particular combo or move over another is, if not exactly negligible, debatable, which doesn’t really reward you with anything for learning them all, though the intrinsic motivation to clear combat encounters in the most visually distinct way possible—as opposed to just using whatever works—might still be there for some dedicated players.

I didn’t really Get the combat system as a teenager, and I’ve found myself generally better able to understand notation of this sort, along with the accompanying visual information onscreen, as I’ve aged. Still, a (frustrated) player of any age or level of understanding might reasonably ignore a lot of what is actually listed as possible in favor of a few moves that work really well and produce dramatic results. The dive off a wall that bowls over enemies is still in the game from Sands of Time and is still extremely effective at knocking foes down, perhaps even more so now that enemies in general are more vulnerable to a wider range of tools.

            My memories of playing Warrior Within years ago, hazy as they are, don’t necessarily suggest I enjoyed the combat. Day One of this playthrough felt like a massive repudiation of that experience, as I was having a lot more fun and suspected that teenaged Monty simply hadn’t understood the game well enough. By the end of Day Two, however, I was starting to avoid fights where possible because a lack of enemy variety coupled with the game’s general, omnipresent jank had soured me on the combat experience pretty quickly. If there’s a theme to this entry that I’m going to go ahead and make explicit now that I’ve rambled for a bit, it’s that “freedom” without polish (or whatever that translates to in terms of plot or theme, in terms of human lives, digital or otherwise) is not so great. Put more simply: There is more flexibility in Warrior Within’s combat, which is to its potential benefit, but I might actually prefer Sands of Time, with its slower and more constrained combat encounters, given the higher level of polish there.

            I am not doing an exhaustive breakdown of combat issues in this game, but here’s one notable one that goes along with some of the discussion from my Sands of Time piece and that I think is particularly illustrative of the frustration that arises with enough time spent fighting in Warrior Within: Enemies can still attack you during certain animations like finishers performed on grounded opponents, and they now not only seem to do so more consistently than ever, but both B and Y now perform the finisher that used to just be performed with Y, meaning that you can’t readily knock down one enemy and continue fighting the others nearby without accidentally performing a finishing blow on the downed opponent, which opens you up to damage. That both B and Y perform this action feels like some kind of oversight, especially when you consider that both inputs cause the prince to attack with his primary weapon that is usually just tied to B presses. (I did eventually learn that some fun can be had with the finisher, however, since you can now cancel it with a block, and if you cancel the animation after damage is dealt to the enemy but before the usual recovery period at the end of the animation where they have time to get back on their feet, you can sometimes repeatedly “finish” a downed humanoid enemy, potentially trapping them in a loop on the ground that they can’t escape from. This trick still feels like an oversight, though.) 

 

A screengrab of Warrior Within from Steam, illustrating the “finisher” move on a grounded enemy. Since you can’t launch and juggle opponents in the air in Prince of Persia like you can in a lot of other, similar action games, knocking an enemy down is a powerful strategic choice that temporarily takes them out of a fight and also opens them up to damage. That it’s so hard to continue fighting around that enemy without the prince homing in on them for a finisher is obnoxious and removes a lot of the strategic value of putting enemies into this state unless you are fighting few enough of them at once where attempting a finisher (on purpose or by accident) is less likely to make you take damage in the process.

 

Another example of the “freedom” focus we can find on the back of Warrior Within’s box is the bit promising “non-linear environments,” with a screenshot highlighting the new sliding move I mentioned before. That move alone technically offers more freedom with how the developers allow players to move downward vertically, which could sometimes be a laborious process in Sands of Time. More broadly, of course, there’s the mention of a “non-linear” design in that same little chunk of text—perhaps a tantalizing promise back in the long-lost days of 2004 that now reads as a threat given how ubiquitous open worlds have become. Like the combat, however, that promised feature is only partly true and, unfortunately, also flawed.

            In terms of the truthfulness, the game is never substantially “non-linear.” Warrior Within is literally composed of linear sections of gameplay that sometimes include dead-end side paths for health upgrades or secret nooks hiding treasure chests that unlock concept art, and it does one time give you the option of doing a single major branch of the game before the other, but even that is still largely a linear experience in the sense that both options are made up of rooms you must pass through and hallways connecting said rooms to one another so that you proceed through the game in an intended, pre-planned fashion rather than meandering all over the landscape as you please in a variety of directions. This is a really great experience in 2023, honestly! Warrior Within’s fights are not ultimately great, but its puzzles and traversal remain highlights, and going through them in an escalating sequence is, if I may be so trite, a testament to the power of… level design. What may have been meant by “non-linear,” however, if not actually that one instance of a forking path where you get to choose between two areas to explore, is that you can backtrack through the environment now. Where Sands of Time very rarely had you revisit past locations even as part of what was always a guided, linear tour of its palace game world, Warrior Within both allows the player to backtrack and requires it. It makes looping back to and through previous areas a part of its linear, guided path as well.

The option to revisit locations is nice because it means you don’t necessarily miss out on secrets or collectibles if you didn’t get them the first time around—and the game can do that “Metroidvania” thing of showing you treasures or areas you can’t reach yet that fire your mind with questions of when and how—and because it means that level layouts are generally even more clever because they have to accommodate a player moving backward or forward through an area. Some sequences of traps, for example, are easier to circumvent moving in one direction than the other, meaning you might have that lingering prospect of a potentially more dangerous return trip through an area if you have to come back through with depleted sand and health stores. All of this requires you to keep more of the game’s map in your head for longer periods, whereas you could safely disregard the layout of one part of Sands of Time once you had moved through it to a new one. Routing from one area of Warrior Within’s map to another, which might also require you to move from the “past” version of the map to the “present” (or vice versa), is just more satisfying, even if there ultimately isn’t much in the way of notable things to go back for. However, the increased freedom, such as it exists in this aspect of the game’s design, is still a positive thing.

            The flaw that I mentioned before is in how allowing the player to backtrack through environments can create problems in a game that went through a rushed development cycle. I’ve spoken before about how my first playthrough of Warrior Within ended—with the prince trapped forever in a particular area of the game I’d been backtracking through in search of a missing health upgrade, but since a previous trip through had resulted in changes to the environment, I was unable to get out and had to just restart the entire game, which, thankfully, is not really one I’d say adds up to “[c]ountless hours” like the back of the box claims. I haven’t gotten stuck like this (yet) during this replay, but there is plenty of jank on display in every aspect of the game that makes me worry. A particularly troubling (re-)revelation was how a boulder/large chunk of stone that was meant to keep me out of a part of an area (I think) had no collision and just let the prince walk right through it.

Ultimately, the freedom to backtrack was a good thing made bad by the additional freedom to experience one of two endings for the game, the “good” one of which requires you to unlock a “Water Sword” by getting every hidden health upgrade, while said upgrades are no longer dispensed by a special fountain like in Sands of Time, which makes their link with the sword feel sort of nonsensical, unless you count the upgrade splash screen text which mentions the prince’s increased strength as some sort of sly indicator that there’s more to the series of upgrades than just making your health bar longer. The upgrades are not that hard to find with a guide, actually requiring almost no backtracking to obtain, but the box’s promise and the explorability of the game world suggest, perhaps, a grander and more extensive search, and so the player is tempted into poking their nose into old areas in ways that could result in problems.

            “Ambitious” is a word that might also credibly be used to describe Warrior Within. I said before that it’s a good sequel. And I think it meaningfully iterates on and adds to the previous game’s ideas and mechanics, and there’s also just more—more game, more weapons, more ladies, etc. It was just too ambitious for its development cycle, though, and it shows, in the way that sounds, including character voices, sometimes don’t work properly, for example. The admittedly rad combat music loses a lot of its appeal when it just won’t stop playing even after all the enemies have been defeated—or won’t start playing when enemies show up. Swings with the prince’s primary sword are accompanied by sound effects meant to emphasize the power of the attack, but secondary weapons seem to be essentially silent, with stiffer-looking animations to boot. Looking way ahead, however, there’s a reason why I felt compelled to apologize to the developers of this game when I finally saw the credits roll. As much as I can criticize the presentation of Warrior Within and can argue that its commitment to what I’ve identified as this theme of “freedom” in its overall design results in problems that might, subjectively, as good as counter-balance the potential improvements, the criticism may not be entirely fair, and the blame for much of this stuff is best directed at whoever decided the game couldn’t have more time for development and polish than it did. If only the devs themselves had had a little more freedom in the end, yeah?

 

 

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY THREE AND DAY TEN: WASTED TIME—OR, MAY NINTH, TWENTY-TWENTY-THREE

. . . [A]nd someday, some grim situation or another will, with its claws, steal from me my humanity and leave me for a moment, in philosophy, a shattering animal. Today, I’d like to hope that’s not me. I’m- I’m not there: I’m here. I’m right here. I will always be right here.

                - Tim Rogers, “5,” action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi (25 Sept. 2022)

Is a piece of my soul in this video? Perhaps even surviving after my death? I put a lot of myself in my work. Am I immortal now? In a sense, maybe I am. I’m going to say the word "now." "Now." When did I say that? Looking at the clock, it’s 4:16 a.m. on the 9^th of November, 2019, but when did I really say it? I, now, will be 27 and talking about Pathologic forever, even if you come back in another 27 years. Maybe I’m immortal and freed from earthly flesh by existing in the form of a video. Maybe the opposite is true. Maybe I’m trapped here forever, and maybe this is worse than being dead.

                - H.Bomberguy, Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why (21 Nov. 2019)

 

Content warning for discussion of animal death (and just death death) for this section. Feel free to skip ahead to Day Four.

            I’ve spoken previously in this Warrior Within piece about how “maturity” in video games often doesn’t indicate a game actually engages with anything truly salient or mature. It’s just an unfortunate way of classifying games at the end of the day, and in this part of the world, that conflates something like a certain level of violence, no matter the surrounding context, with the concept of maturity and all its various associations. A lot of the subject matter of video games is fantastical nonsense, with little direct relation to anything someone might actually go through. We can extrapolate, of course, so I won’t play dumb. Critics like myself make careers(?) out of attempting to find moving statements in silly, simple acts of digital play. The human mind is designed to make connections and find associations and feel things via association even if what prompts the cascade of bio-electric impulses that constitutes “thought” and “feeling” for us shouldn’t logically result in such agitation. We can see a knot in a tree during a walk in a park and feel guilt because, maybe, we haven’t called our mother recently, and the knot seems to kind of look like her. 

            As I’ve been working on this project, I’ve been doing so with the (as of the original writing of this section) recent knowledge that the last of my family’s pets is dying. My last childhood cat is dying of cancer and will likely leave us less than a year after our previous cat died of cancer. It’s a case where no treatment, however expensive, could actually give her significantly more time even if she survived it. That the death is certain and very likely to happen on some random day in the near future has been awful to live with. When I play games in the family room, she usually comes over and lies down in the chair next to mine and either “watches” or sleeps. She gets me to take breaks by getting up and meowing at me or rubbing on me. When I say that this horrible coincidence as I’m playing this fantastical, silly, frustrating game supposedly about fate has given me a more human connection to the material, I don’t say that to be exploitative or “creative.” I lost one of my best friends to cancer the same year my previous cat died, and I’ve felt for a long time now like I owed him some sort of public acknowledgement. Again, not to exploit, but because putting things in art (or just in words) is one of the only ways I know how to commemorate the people and animals that have meant so much to me.

            Silly as it sounds, I guess this is what knowing “the timeline” feels like, a little. You know what the future holds and can’t change it, and the worst part is having to just live with it and wait. We’re not designed to stay in heightened states for long periods of time (or so I’ve heard), and eventually you just kind of burn yourself out (I’ve heard and felt). Things paradoxically look brighter because you just can’t actively live with the grief anymore, and then you feel even worse than before because, in a way, this is your body and/or mind “getting over it” without your conscious consent, leaving that loved one behind. To me, it feels like a betrayal and like improperly grieving. I wish I could escape from my life or crawl out of my skin. I rage pointlessly against the universe. Writing about it is pointless, but it’s all I can really do. I’d imagine, silly and exploitative as it sounds, that that’s something like what the fictional characters of Warrior Within feel (or would feel if the game had any nuance to its writing). Having to live with knowing the future while being powerless to change it would have to be an awful thing. 

Whether it’s a mercy to have had a sense of how long I still have/had left with this cat, versus the more sudden and tragic loss of the previous one, I don’t know. Or I didn’t know then, when I was writing this the first time. While this piece accidentally became more twisty and recursive than the last one owing to the length of time spent with the game and the inevitable overlap with old topics getting new additions over time, in the end, it’s a fitting structure for a discussion of Warrior Within and its eventual focus on parallel timelines, as the prince ultimately becomes his own shadow self, following along with his other self in the past as that past self travels between its own timeline’s past and present on its way toward a future that is still technically the past of the shadow despite where it now moves in the past of the greater timeline of the whole universe. There’s a major focus on a time loop where the causality of nominally historical events gets scrambled to include the fact that someone from the present—or future, from the “perspective” of that history?—travelled backward through time—so that the prince was only able to accidentally release the Sands of Time in the first game because, after releasing them and then traveling through time to prevent the release, he’d then go on to travel through time still further in this second game and end up creating the sands himself by killing Kaileena, which would eventually lead to their discovery and the prince accidentally releasing them in the first game and then traveling through time to prevent the release, which would lead him to traveling back in time in the second game and creating them himself again so that they could be found, released, created, found, released, and created over and over again…

 In a similar way, words are often treated as eternal. We typically write about literature and art in the present tense because they are never-ending and are always renewing themselves for every encounter with each new or old pair of eyes or hands that interacts with them. At the risk of being unnecessarily grandiose about something (superficially?) simple, that’s the value of preserving people and things this way. Memories will fade and warp with time, but, through art, maybe something of the true substance of those things can be preserved, and when we revisit art, even pieces with no obvious personal connection built into them, even if we’re just going back to a book or game or painting we like and have memories of, are we not, with that act, traveling through time in a sense, in the only way we humanly, realistically can, as we access memories by way of a catalytic relationship with the work?

Even seemingly abstract or generalized feelings in a work of art might represent something deeply personal and specific to the original creator, who might have presented them in a specific way for a reason. Not to get lost in the discourse weeds, but that might be one—among many!—perverse sins of so-called “A.I.” being used to “make” “art.” A soulless machine that can only steal and thoughtlessly replicate “content” based on patterns it personally finds utterly meaningless beyond the logical proximity of one thing to another and the combined whole’s relative proximity to what the program thinks the user’s input is supposed to make it output is something like necromancy. Like a witless Frankenstein stitching together the tattered, torn feelings and memories of real people, alive or dead, and making a shambling mess of them that will please those obsessed with the technology or those with only a superficial, Philistinian relationship with real art, maybe out of jealousy and for want of any personal talent, but that would horrify and leave unsatisfied anyone who makes art or even just appreciates it for what it is—if not exactly an act of memory (a grandiosity I fully admit I’m indulging in here), then just as, even sans some kind of deep personal meaning, an intentional act, backed by taste and forethought, where the order of words, the topics chosen, and even just the impression of effort evident in the end-result (on the page, say) in one form or another speaks to something deeper than just Sensical Pieces In A Logical Order. Therein is the impression of someone, like a footprint or some other marker of their passing. In that trace, we recognize more than just the single thing itself in isolation. We recognize a fellow human soul. That a machine might pretend to do the same, that it might be mistaken for human or replace humans by pantomiming this very intimate and personal act of self-expression, is a horrifying enough prospect that people have made it the subject of many actual, human-made works of art.

 

In writing this piece, I’ve spent a good bit of time poking around on YouTube (to confirm things via other people’s footage) and on Steam, the source of a few of the screenshots I’ve used. In the process, I’ve seen a fair amount of praise of this game, some of it wildly over-exaggerated. The praise I have sometimes seen directed at its story in particular is pretty galling. There are some fun twists in Warrior Within, especially as the time travel elements become more prominent later on, but I would contend that fun concepts or twists do not make a good story, though they’re often mistaken for it by people conducting a superficial review or analysis. Good stories have things like thoughtful characterization, moving dialogue, a degree of quality or creativity at the level of the text in the most literal sense (words and their arrangement), etc. While the game sometimes succeeds on some level as art, like in its use of color—namely the careful use of red and brown to suit its violent tone—I wouldn’t say that it succeeds in enough areas that are necessary for “good” storytelling to make it worth praising as a story. There’s little in it to latch onto emotionally unless you do like I have and find some faint resonance with a very personal and unrelated element of your own life, or perhaps have strong memories associated with experiencing the game, like I sort of do.

 

            My day (read: Real) job is one where I spend a lot of time working on the computer, away from the people and animals I care about. Over the years, I’ve become acutely aware that this is wasted time and that those same people and animals are dying while I’m away from them, either physically or mentally at work. Or at leisure, also, given that I’ve spent a lot of hours playing games or reading or writing alone as well, all while the real beings I should love the most get that much closer to leaving my life for good. Frankly, it makes me never want to play games again. It makes me hate long games all the more. At least these Prince of Persia titles are a reasonable length, but the modern design trend of making every major release dozens of hours long just bothers me—not only because I’m wasting time playing them but also because it’s just bad design. I finally gave up on the much-beloved action RPG Elden Ring (2022) when I reached a new area near the end of the game and just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take poking my nose into every corner again and fighting the same enemies over and over. I guess that’s technically elective, but I will always argue that “optional” content like that isn’t truly optional. I really enjoyed what I played of the more conventional RPG Persona 5 (2016) in part because its structure, where each action in an in-game day consumes time, forced me to let things go. The player alone electing to simply not play parts of a game put into it to be played doesn’t strike me as much of an option, or at least not an actually defensible justification for all the excess. And in Elden Ring’s case I do think the open-world design choice was a bad one. As I said, there’s a lot of repetition of things the older games in the Souls-whatever series would have been able to treat as fun and sometimes horrifying novelties, like specific whole enemy types that appear only once and never again, but that are re-used to the point of becoming rote in Elden Ring.

            “Wasted time” also ties in with my initial choice to replay Warrior Within on “hard” mode. At first, it felt pretty good. Traps and enemies would deal massive damage, requiring precise traversal and thoughtful combat, but as the game has gone on, and as I’ve become more aware of rough edges in the combat in particular, the prospect of “massive damage” has felt less and less appealing and not just because my cat was losing time beside me while she slept. A “hard” mode just feels like a bad fit for this type of game in a way that I can’t necessarily meaningfully capture or explain. It’s almost a vibe, but Prince of Persia doesn’t strike me as a series where repeatedly seeing a “Game Over” screen feels like a good thing. I have a different opinion about Ninja Gaiden or the previously mentioned Souls games. Something about the design of other series can make repeated failure feel like more of a valuable element (like something right or deserved or… of value), whereas Prince of Persia strikes me as more… experiential, like something where friction should generally be moderated more carefully, where you should be more likely to bounce back and progress anyway against the odds rather than flounder, and certainly not as a result of the combat which, despite the early promise in Warrior Within, still feels very secondary to the platforming and puzzles.

So maybe that’s it—a matter of design priorities. This is a general feeling I’ve developed about Warrior Within, though I wish I could remember what section first specifically got me thinking about it. The truth is that I just outlined this entry rather than writing it out originally since I didn’t really feel like writing at the time, given what I had learned on Day Three, or what I went through on the so-called “Day Ten,” months later, which I’ve included as a “Day” here for impact, and for its relevance to these particular thoughts, but not because I actually played anything that day—though I did write, in an unintended inversion of Day Three.

            I had some good experiences overcoming the “hard” mode in Warrior Within up to a point, which includes the boss fight I’ll discuss in some detail under “Day Four,” but I don’t know that it was worth it. I would have felt that way anyway, I think, but I feel it especially keenly given all my reflection on work and gaming and wasted time and what I’ve been essentially losing no matter what I do. Even if writing this is an act of preservation, it’s still only a half- or third- or even quarter-measure. After watching Tim Rogers’ latest six-hour “review” that I quoted at the beginning of this section, I think during the time when I became so frustrated with this game that I put it aside for literal months, the words of that quote have stuck with me. They were with me the day we finally had to put my cat to sleep, exactly one day after I resumed playing this game again with her at my side, sleeping more than ever before but still by my side early in the day. Later that same day, she’d take the hard downward turn that would ultimately take her away from me forever.

I don’t want to jack Rogers’ sentiment, but I listened to that specific quote again on The Ninth of May, Twenty-Twenty-Three and wanted desperately to believe that it’s true—that a man could live on through a video or a cat through words, that the precious, beloved self does not perish and disappear into the inexorable flow of the timeline but can be preserved, recurring again and again in a non-Sisyphean and perhaps more Heaven-esque eternal state of being. I wish there was more I could do to honor this cat and the other cats before her and my best friend and the family members and even the very distant strangers I used to know when I was a kid and whose names periodically appear on the periphery of my life again in announcements of their deaths. Their passing is a testament to the trite universal truth that Everything Dies. That ultimate fate is fixed, and it’s only in video games that we get to play with death—inflicting it without consequence, avoiding it through highly dramatic and satisfying mechanical and narrative tomfoolery. As I’ve been revising and editing this piece further, this experience in the real world certainly changed how I felt about using words like “death” and “kill” so frivolously (though also still accurately) in talking about a video game. This is an incredibly obvious “revelation,” of course, but it doesn’t change the fact that there is something so… potentially concerning with how death is often explicitly invoked by what amounts to a toy, where everyone and everything just pops back up after a reload or upon starting a new game. Meanwhile, the only way to cheat the permanence of death in real life seems to be to be remembered, and, as I said already, that’s not exactly an outright victory.

Twitter owner, meme-stealer, right-wing breeder, and life-long, consummate jerk Elon Musk recently announced that the social media platform would be deleting inactive accounts. Some people have identified this as a petty measure meant to get back at NPR specifically, as the organization publicly abandoned Twitter after Musk incorrectly labeled them as “state media.” Whether that is the case or not hardly matters, though it certainly lends an extra sting to the human consequences of his (maybe) unthinking, (almost certainly) uncaring actions: the accounts of deceased users, which have so far remained up, with the memories and personality and, perhaps, work, which might itself contain impressions of still other valuable lives, they contain being erased. The modern internet is so centralized that so much of the proof of our human lives is now “preserved” in a fragile handful of places that could choose to destroy those little monuments whenever, for very selfish and shallow reasons. I can carefully build this pile of words partly in honor of people and animals I love and partly as a resting place for my own soul and then, someday, have it be gone because Google shuts down Blogger like it tends to shut down everything it does, because only profit and endless growth (and endless profit) matter.

All things die, and all things decay, whether that truism is trite or not. It’s only in (ultimately) stupid consumer garbage like video games where we get to pretend otherwise. I don’t say this with hate in my heart or to be mean-spirited. It’s just what I feel, even if it’s not what I’d like to believe. Obviously, eternal renewal is preferable.

 

 

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY FOUR, DAY EIGHT, AND DAY ELEVEN: RE-USE, RECYCLE, REWARD

            Given its place in the game as a major event narratively and mechanically, it seems fitting that the boss fight(s) against Kaileena should be considered the defining element of the session(s) where I fought her. Despite everything else I did on Day Four (finishing the mechanical tower zone and working through a bit of the post-boss-fight tomb area), it was the boss that occupied my thoughts most, in part because it did make me consider abandoning my “hard” mode playthrough after quite a few deaths. The increased health/defense of bosses on that difficulty, that is also coupled with the high damage they deal, accomplishes the task of forcing a player to engage with the game to succeed rather than muddle through, but I wouldn’t necessarily call the feeling here positive because taking damage in Warrior Within can sometimes feel unfair owing to the oft-mentioned jank: weird animations or hitboxes or A.I. behavior or some combination of those things and maybe other specific things I can’t (and won’t) attempt to suss out here.

I could, if I wanted, argue that a series whose primary focus is on platforming would probably be better off emphasizing that during its major encounters over swordplay. For an example, the series of back-to-back-to-back chase sequences the prince has to go through, with the otherworldly pursuer enemy that wants to erase him from the timeline, after the Kaileena fight, where you loop out of and back into a central tomb area and fiddle with levers and blocks in order to open an escape route, feels more like a fitting boss-adjacent “encounter” over a straightforward sword fight. It escalates the normal pace of traversal decision-making by adding what is essentially a moving timer to the proceedings. These chase sequences occur at multiple points throughout the game, but the repeated occurrence here is what contributes to the sense of this being a boss of sorts.

In my piece on Sands of Time, I mentioned that I felt a certain similarity between the combat and controls of the Prince of Persia games and of the Batman: Arkham series that debuted later in the 2000s, and now I’d say another link they share is their struggle with how to handle bosses. The first Arkham game, Asylum (2009), received some criticism for its lack of unique boss fights, which seemed to result in the later games including more of them. I’m personally something of an Asylum apologist on the grounds that I think a Batman game doesn’t necessarily need a lot of boss fights in the traditional sense so much as it needs unique “encounters,” as not every Batman villain is physically capable of engaging in a knock down, drag out brawl. Asylum does have some of these encounters, like one in a sewer with Killer Croc, that play to the particular strengths of that villain without resorting to a health bar you deplete with your fists.

The Prince of Persia: Warrior Within box promises “[s]oul-shattering boss battles,” and while the exact phrasing sounds a little silly, I do think it was a legitimate inclusion worth highlighting given how Sands of Time has such a noticeable lack of major encounters. It either has just one, against the vizier at the very end, or two, if you’re willing to count the arena battle with the prince’s transformed father and accompanying basic enemies as a boss. The father sand monster may to some extent be a re-skin of one of the tougher basic enemies encountered later in the game (or maybe it’s the other way around?), so, in either case, it does contribute to the game feeling a bit lacking in terms of unique encounters that could have broken up the eventual monotony of trading off platforming/puzzle-solving bits and arena fights without too much variation. That the developers of Warrior Within might respond by A) including more bosses and B) advertising that fact loud and clear makes sense. Even as someone who is only really a hobbyist where game design is concerned, I do know the extra drain on time and resources creating unique bosses can pose. A basic enemy might have one or two things it can do, and you can use that enemy over and over again, but bosses usually need more substance, on top of likely being singular encounters. They’d not only potentially have more moves to implement (which would likely already include new animations and sound effects), but also, potentially, cutscenes that bookend the fight, new music, etc. There can be a lot of effort required to make even a single boss. On that note, though, the fight with the prince’s father in Sands of Time does highlight an important consideration where boss and enemy design are concerned: What can developers re-use to create “new” enemies/encounters while reducing the workload?

An interesting detail about Warrior Within’s Kaileena that I did notice years ago, even before I started thinking about games quite so critically, is that she happens to be a dual-wielder just like Shahdee, and while I don’t necessarily have the technical language to put this in the most accurate terms, it seems to me that that choice might have just been an aesthetic one (part of her slinkiness and sex appeal, suggestive of litheness and agility), or it might have (also) been a practical one, allowing the developers to re-use “parts” of the Shahdee boss since the characters would obviously have to move and fight in similar ways—using a particular swipe from the side they both perform with a single sword, for example. You also clash with them in a similar way where you have to mash the attack button to force them back and win a power struggle. The great thing is that Kaileena has enough of her own unique stuff that what re-use could occur might be completely overlooked by most people. She’s obviously similar to Shahdee, but the similarity comes across more like an escalation of the previously-established mechanics of this Dual-Wielding Lady boss archetype than repetition exactly. Kaileena has her own sword combos, but, more importantly, she also teleports and can temporarily remove herself from the fight to summon two additional opponents, who are themselves re-skinned versions of the crow-man warrior enemies the player has fought previously. Later in the battle, Kaileena can teleport twice in a row instead of just once, which adds to the complexity of the fight without requiring anything more than just telling her to do the teleport attack twice instead of once (I say, eliding the unknown-to-me complexity of actually “telling” her this via the game’s code).

            If you don’t find all the health upgrades/get the hidden sword needed to kill the pursuer monster and instead wind up with the game’s “bad” ending where you have to fight Kaileena again for the finale, you see some obvious re-use with how this whole boss is repeated, but there are still some changes that give it its own character without necessarily requiring a bunch of resources and development time. The final battle takes place in a different arena that lacks breakable objects to replenish sand energy or replace your secondary weapon, thus making the fight harsher in some ways. Kaileena can also teleport and attack three times in a row now instead of twice. Meanwhile, the enemy-summoning ability has been replaced for this final showdown. Kaileena still hovers in the air out of reach in the exact same way as before but now summons several sand tornados the prince has to avoid. These ultimately disperse to leave behind sand charges, which are necessary to effectively deal with Kaileena’s other new ability—slowing time, presumably using her power as the Empress of Time. Activating your own “slow” power counters her ability and allows you to deal damage more easily. These are all examples of relatively minor changes that were probably reasonably implemented but that do alter the fight so that the re-use (or “recycling,” to use a perhaps more positive term) feels less like a problem. As an explicit rematch, the justification for the repetition is also very clear and baked into the game, in-universe, and being able to simultaneously reward the player for their previously accumulated knowledge of the fight while also subverting expectations in some ways is a powerful, proven combo that really works the human brain’s desire for both familiarity and novelty. 

 

This convenient slab of ruined fortress that screams “arena” is another instance of recycling on the game’s part, as you fight multiple battles here—a regular enemy encounter as the prince, a fine-enough boss fight against the flying griffin creature as your dark double you briefly control, and then either Kaileena or the pursuer monster, “The Dahaka,” for the finale. I don’t want to over-indulge in combat discussion here, so “fine-enough” will have to do for the griffin, which is genuinely fine. The Kaileena rematch I described above was actually my preferred final boss, as I found her move set manageable and the new additions of tornados and her ability to slow time perfectly fine as well. I actually enjoyed routing around the arena to dodge the tornados more than I did fighting her summoned minions in the initial encounter.

As for that Dahaka… It’s not great, I think. I beat it twice while replaying the game to write this piece, accidentally both times, skipping, I think, other potential phases of the fight. I found it unfortunately annoying as a boss—the True Final Boss, at that—largely because of a mid-range tentacle attack that seemed both unblockable and unavoidable with the roll (or at least awkward to roll through, as other peoples’ footage on YouTube suggests it can be rolled under), necessitating a cautious strategy of staying at long range to bait either that tentacle attack or another, much less damaging one, where the tendrils erupt multiple times from the ground near the prince’s position instead, then closing in on the boss with “slow” active to deal some damage before backing off again to avoid potential tentacle danger. I suspect this strategy is viable, but I ultimately didn’t feel like finessing the fight when a detailed breakdown was not my goal.

That the game populates the previously empty arena with regenerating sand globes so that you can restock suggests that you’re meant to use the time powers against the boss like I was, but it is kind of a letdown from a design perspective given how these refills just appear rather than being sensically created like they are during the Kaileena rematch by her tornados, and thus earned by the player for avoiding said tornados. The Dahaka, by comparison, also just looks and feels jankier, which is, as I’ve said already, unfortunate, and maybe the presence of the sand refills is something like an acknowledgement of that fact. Sands of Time’s final boss was itself kind of awkward, since it was hard to land hits on the vizier/his clone summoned to fight you in a way that made me feel like I never really understood the intended method of approach, but that “battle” really did seem more like an “encounter” in the sense that there was a lot of dialogue playing out during it that was meant to catch that timeline’s version of Farah up on the vizier’s treachery. In that sense, it was more of an experience for the sake of narrative than a proper fight, but maybe still better for it if the Dahaka is the alternative.

 

            There are similarly sensible instances of this sort of addition to and reworking of enemy behaviors with some of the more regularly-encountered opponents in the game as well—like how the basic melee grunts slowly gain more moves, like a full combo and then a block-breaker, while also physically changing appearance. I don’t begrudge the devs these sort of design shortcuts at all, and, as I mentioned before, I think there’s even a logic to them (building on what the player has encountered previously) and a satisfaction on the player’s part when they recognize familiar behavior even in a new enemy. It calls on their prior knowledge while also hopefully throwing just enough new at them that they’re also still tested and engaged by some degree of novelty.  

 

A final, quicker example of recycling: The game uses the same room design for each of the multiple sand portal areas where you can travel between the past and present version of the map. Doing this means that the devs could also use the same high-quality cutscene of the room either decaying or repairing itself throughout the game for an extra bit of flair that marks the transition from one time to another. The figure in the sand pillar that is seen during this cutscene is also so indistinct that I suspect the same video was used for both the regular prince and his dark shadow.

 

 

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY FIVE: IT FINALLY HAPPENS…—OR, THE QUESTIONABLE VIRTUE OF QTES

            I got stuck—just like I was worried would happen, albeit not in a way that is truly the game’s fault this time. Rather, I overwrote my save after a very taxing gauntlet in the game’s prison level just before a certain boss and with no sand reserves left. The boss in question actually represents another instance of the re-use I mentioned before: one of the previously encountered golem-like giant humanoids but with more health. While there’s a layer of frustration to Warrior Within that threatens to transform any given enemy into my least favorite in the game, the golem may actually, truly be it.

In terms of the initial approach, this is a fairly standard “big” enemy in a video game. It can charge at you to deal damage but otherwise typically attacks at close range by swinging its massive arms or trying to stomp you. The variety of attacks isn’t bad at all, and the fact that this enemy is so much bigger than anything in Sands of Time or the other repeated encounters in Warrior Within makes it special. Further, it’s armored from the front, meaning you have to carefully, continuously position and re-position yourself behind it to deal damage, and the fight can only be finished by scaling the beast to attack its head while avoiding its attempts to grab and throw you off. I’ll return to that latter aspect of the golem in a moment. Before I go negative, however, I want to acknowledge that the enemy variety in Warrior Within (yes, including the golem) is much better than in Sands of Time. There are the aforementioned basic warrior enemies that attack with simple melee strikes or short combos and that get progressively tougher as the game goes on, but there are also ninja women who fight more evasively and distinctively, physically weak shadow-like monsters that zip around very fast and throw knives from a distance, dog-toad-lizard(?) creatures that will charge the player and blow themselves up when critically damaged, and others, with some obvious variant enemies that represent further examples of creative re-use (ninja women but translucent and thus harder to track, for instance). The game feels that much closer to a “proper” action title, with each enemy serving a particular function in combat versus how every enemy in Sands of Time, despite some variation in attack animations or how you had to approach dealing damage to them, felt to me like a straightforward melee fighter. That the golems specifically require you to perform a unique finisher sequence on them from their backs is something that makes fighting against them explicitly different, if also annoying.

            The issue that ultimately got me stuck, as I suggested above, is with this scaling the golem. The game requires you to do this, as the enemy’s health bar stops decreasing if you try to attack it while it’s downed without climbing up, and that health bar will refill if you allow it to stand back up again. In a sense, there’s an unfortunate lack of freedom here. You have to do what the game judges to be the cool thing of finishing the creature off from its back. And it is cool, if you can pull it off, but I can’t and never have been able to. As a kid, I never could read the golem’s movements well enough and quickly enough to tell what direction to move on its back to avoid an incoming grab, and if you get grabbed, you’re thrown to the ground, take heavy damage, and the golem recovers health—again, forcing you to not only do the one very specific thing to finish it off but also to do it well. Or, alternatively, you can scale the golem and then activate the special “slow” sand ability that more or less prevents enemies from doing anything at all (or at least only very… slowly) while it’s active. This can allow the prince to kill basic golems without them even getting a chance to grab him. My impression of a memory is that I had to do the same thing with the golem boss in the prison, but this time, playing on “hard,” I didn’t have enough sand to do it. There seems to be a single charge available in a breakable pot in the arena, but one round of slowed-down button mashing is not enough to deplete the full health bar.

            I was stuck on this very short stretch of prison (the aforementioned gauntlet and then the boss fight) for around two hours—for the entire play session—and after making every effort to try to understand and anticipate the golem’s movements, I looked online to see if there were more distinctive tells that I was missing, and then, after failing some more, to see if there were any cheat codes, hoping there might be one to refill your sand. When that proved to not be the case, I tried the fight some more, including some attempts with the sound turned off since I was getting tired of the fight music and sound effects but also because I thought it might help me concentrate, but that didn’t work either. At this point, I really regret playing the game on “hard” and either have to A) “get good” in a way that seems unlikely to happen and would require wasting who knows how much more time, B) get lucky, which also seems very unlikely to happen given how repeatedly lucky I would need to get to deplete the entire health bar, or C) start the entire game over, probably on an easier difficulty, and make sure I go into the golem fight with enough sand to beat it with my (apparently) usual handicap.

            Frustration with the game’s fiddly combat controls has been growing even stronger for me over the past two or so sessions. Fighting near walls can cause you to wall run when you want to block since both use the same button. Trying to vault over an enemy in the wrong place can cause the prince to contact a wall, resulting in him “sticking” to it and performing a diving attack instead of the vaulting strike you wanted when you pressed B. This particular boss isn’t necessarily frustrating for those reasons (due to issues with the basic combat), but it is frustrating because beating it requires engaging with it in a manner wholly different from normal gameplay, in what is essentially a “QTE” (quick time event), a style of highly context-sensitive gameplay where the player has to perform quick button presses in a sequence or else (often) suffer some kind of penalty, up to instant death in some games. These became a very popular element of action game design during the PS2 and PS3 eras and were popularized by games like Resident Evil 4 (2005) and the original God of War (2005). Funnily enough, Warrior Within’s use of QTEs technically predates both. You have to mash the B button to win certain power-struggle-like events where you lock swords when fighting Shahdee and Kaileena, and, then, there’s the golem finisher sequence, where you have to press left or right to dodge and B to deal damage while atop the creature’s shoulders. It's more active than a lot of QTEs of the era—closer, in fact, to similar, more free-form finisher sequences in 2013’s God of War: Ascension, where the player has more direct control within a limited range instead of just performing singular inputs exactly when prompted.

            The especially frustrating thing about this experience is that I’m personally still fond of QTEs in games. They arguably serve legitimate functions, like allowing/requiring player engagement during cutscenes where they might normally relax or zone out. In an ostensible horror game like Resident Evil 4, having the QTEs during these cinematic sequences keeps the tension high. Alternatively, they could be said to enhance the player-character connection as well. In the heat of God of War’s sometimes incredibly hectic late-game fights, having to mash a button yourself while the protagonist, Kratos, pummels some Grecian monster to death can help put you in the same desperate mindset. I don’t want to get too far off-track into how I think QTE finishers can be employed to perfectly punctuate fights in games like God of War that use them correctly, but they are a valid and valuable way of giving a player control and investment in actions they wouldn’t normally be able to actively participate in: highly-specific interactions that wouldn’t make sense to map to any sort of normal, typically-used input on the controller. Desperately weakening one powerful enemy in a group and then doing the QTE, at risk of damage or even a “Game Over,” in order to remove that opponent from the fight just works for me in God of War.

While many people are understandably tired of mashing a button to, say, pry open doors, I still do find myself enamored. Sort of. I ultimately gave up on Knight’s Contract, a very poorly-received action game from 2011 with a certain visual flair in its use of colors like purple and also what I would consider pretty fun basic combat but with notoriously punishing QTEs, because I couldn’t manage to get past the next-to-last boss on my second playthrough even after having beaten it once before and having written the inputs for the context-sensitive finisher sequence down. Each failed attempt completely reset that last phase of the fight, with multiple health bars to work through against a boss that required a specific approach to even open it up to meaningful damage, putting each new attempt at the QTE sequence annoyingly far away. I would probably still be playing that game now if it wasn’t for the QTEs.

It must be said that QTEs are also always an accessibility concern. More modern titles have increasingly either left them out entirely, offered the option to toggle them on or off, or allowed players to change the method of input (from rapidly tapping a button to just holding it, for example). That I didn’t talk more about the QTEs and their difficulty in my piece on the first God of War remains a regret of mine. I had intended to cover them when discussing the sequel, but I never finished that follow-up, so I will briefly touch on the subject here.

One way that the first God of War increases its difficulty later in the game is by making some QTEs very hard to complete. There was at least one rapid tapping finisher against the more powerful minotaur enemies that I actually stopped initiating altogether because it was physically painful for me to do and because I was worried it would ruin my controller. In that piece about the first God of War, I did touch on the idea of games working over subsequent entries to determine where their difficulty should come from—whether a particularly difficult sliding tile puzzle should have an instant death timer attached to it, for example, in a game that doesn’t have sliding tile puzzles as one of its principal elements. I’ve suggested something similar about Warrior Within already (about how I think its platforming is leagues better than its combat and that difficult combat encounters don’t necessarily serve it well), but it seems I’ve come back around to the subject again.

I think the golem QTE sucks, for all of the above reasons, though perhaps most of all because it does still feel frustratingly close to a “skill issue” on my part.

 

An unrepresentatively dramatic shot of a normal thrall/brute/golem in the game. This repeated opponent is another great example of the more diverse and interesting enemy designs of Warrior Within, though that praise comes with the caveat that you must complete a QTE-like finisher to defeat it, which could be an accessibility concern for players with slower reflexes or who cannot tap a button very quickly. It would have been better to give the player the choice of how to approach fighting this monster—letting them scale it and risk being thrown for massive damage in exchange for dealing more damage and ending the fight sooner, perhaps, while also providing the option of continuing to roll around and stab at the creature’s ankles as an alternative.

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY FIVE-AND-A-HALF: HERE I GO AGAIN, IN A GOOD WAY

            I had thought about either skipping Warrior Within for the time being or else entirely, but I’m stubborn, and I didn’t want to end the gaming day in a bad mood, so I played about an hour, I think, from the beginning on “normal” difficulty after getting completely stuck on the golem boss. I believe I can get through what I’d already done faster now that I know what to do and since damage is noticeably less severe.

I found myself basically reliving my initial positive impressions, more or less. As rough and annoying as the game can be (and I am still skipping some enemy encounters this time), there is a core of fun present in both the traversal and the fighting. Unfortunately, I expect I’ll sour on it over time as frustrations mount again. That being said, and stubbornness aside, the fact that I took to the game again so quickly does speak to its quality from my perspective. The diary-appropriate association I can drop in here in this short half-an-entry is that that feeling reminds me a little of my experience with the platformer/action-adventure game Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc (2003), which is probably my most-played game ever given how I’d finish a playthrough and then immediately start a new one as a kid. I’ve lost track of the actual count, but I remember it being somewhere in the upper teens (around sixteen or seventeen, I think). That’s a game that I found innately satisfying in a way that just made me want more of it, and I guess Warrior Within is similar… ish.

 

 

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY SIX: HOLDING

           I do worry a bit about playing these games with my very worn GameCube controller and, obviously, aged system. That console has for years most often been used for some periodic casual rounds of the fun racing game Kirby’s Air Ride (2003) with family, so I worry about wearing out the system or the controller (or both) playing these sort of hardcore games where you have to mash and hold buttons a lot.

The age of the controller further compounds a certain amount of uncertainty I have about the game and some enemy attacks—namely whether they are truly unblockable or if my inputs aren’t registering properly. I had thought that Shahdee, for example, had at least one unblockable attack where she would sweep at the prince’s legs with one of her swords, but then it and everything else she could throw out seemed blockable during my first attempt at replaying the game on “hard.” Similarly, I found every attack by the very defensive enemies made out of crows that the prince infrequently encounters, and who move around the environment in between “rounds” to help you find your way forward through certain areas, to be blockable as well. Then, on this “normal” second attempt at a replay, I found that Shahdee’s one kick was unblockable and that the crow-person also seemed to have an attack that would break the prince’s block and that I didn’t think I had ever seen it use before.

           There’s no grand statement to be made here—just that, with the game’s sometimes questionable design rubbing up against both its jank and my controller’s age, I wonder about exactly what fine touches I might be missing out on or taking as profound when actually they’re just some sort of technical or hardware issue. Thankfully, with the “diaries” approach, I feel a bit less compelled to try to discover some sort of exhaustive, exhausting truth.

 

File this note under “topics I’d originally excluded to avoid being too exhaustive but am slotting in now so that I can work in another image to break up the text”: One of my least favorite sections of Sands of Time was one that involved fighting bird monsters while attempting to platform around an area. I eventually discovered you could just beat all of the birds before trying to move through the room, though doing so involved somewhat awkwardly timing a sword attack while balance-beam-walking to destroy each enemy as it attempted to dive-bomb the prince. Mistiming that attack would result in the prince taking damage and having to clamor back up onto the beam from a hanging position to try again, each and every time I missed and got hit by a bird. Warrior Within expands on the nuisance of fighting and traversing simultaneously by sometimes having a ninja woman rush at you along a balance beam or try to intercept you during a wall-run or by having one of the four-legged enemies clinging to the middle of a wall you have to run across. In all of these cases, a carefully timed sword attack is necessary to defeat the enemy and, in the case of the wall run encounters, avoid a likely death from a fall.

On the one hand, being attacked while platforming is theoretically a good thing so that you don’t feel too safe during the moments when your feet are not solidly planted on the ground of an obvious potential arena. However, there’s likely a good bit of frustration to this design choice as well—like how depth perception can make judging when to attack during a wall run difficult, for example. These situations, where the enemy dies in a single attack that must be timed exactly right, might also technically qualify as more QTEs.

 

 

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY SEVEN: GOOD ENOUGH

            I’ve fiddled with the title of this full piece as I’ve worked on it. Essentially, the more positive original title has gotten more heavily qualified as my frustration has mounted. I do think Warrior Within is “good enough” in a lot of ways, though it obviously could have been better with more development time and polish. Also “good enough” (for the game being played), I suppose, are my combat tactics, which have devolved a bit from that first day in ways that are disappointing and frustrating but also relieving. Which is to say that I’m mostly relying on parries to win a lot of my fights since they keep the prince safe from most damage and deal high damage. For example, when fighting against the agile ninja women who attack quickly and can grab you from behind, the safest strategy is to set the prince’s back against a wall and start parrying.

Full combos don’t typically have much of an appreciable effect and also just feel hard to execute, in part because of how enemies seem to have this serendipitous sense of timing about them—where the moment you drop your guard to try to take some sort of action is also the moment when they decide to swing as well. The prince flinches easily, which makes attempting some moves like charge attacks and the longer combos unreasonably difficult, and there’s the aforementioned, oft-invoked jank of it all with how you can sometimes take damage in unanticipated ways, where an enemy attack seems to deal damage even if it didn’t actually succeed/if the animation was interrupted, for example. I’ve sometimes been playing and have seen the tell-tale red in the prince’s health bar that indicates damage taken but have had no idea when I got hit. I don’t trust the game enough to engage with it on “fair” terms, so I spam parries and vaulting attacks and other comparatively “safer” maneuvers, like stun-locking downed enemies with finishers.

I’ve also still been skipping some fights, as I’ve said already, but this sometimes feels distinctly unintentional with the way that the prince’s movement is restricted when combat begins: how you’re locked into strafing when near enemies and sometimes can have an awkward time jumping or climbing away from them. I highlighted the ability to block at will before as an example of the increased freedom from context-sensitive actions in Warrior Within, but there are still plenty of things that remain noticeably out of your control and that result in frustration. These frustrations almost universally impact the combat. The platforming is more than “good enough,” however, and those bits are arguably the real stars of this show, with the combat (still, even after all the renovation following Sands of Time) still ultimately proving to be more of an annoyance in the long term and only just maybe “good enough.”

 

 

WARRIOR WITHIN DAY NINE AND DAY ELEVEN: MECHANICS OVER MOOD—OR, ABOUT FOUR MONTHS LATER

            While a bit harder to explain than “freedom,” another recurring element of Warrior Within’s design, I’ve come to feel, is a focus on offering a mechanically deeper experience over creating a mood like Sands of Time does.

To start, consider the block action again. In Sands of Time, blocking is something the game lets you do when it determines combat is underway but otherwise does not allow. This avoids a nonsensical situation where the prince is blocking for no reason, adding something like “realism,” or another, better word—in service of creating a resonant experience over an infinitely controllable one. Your sword attacks in Sands of Time are also highly contextual, where you press a single button and the prince does whatever is called for at the moment. Simply pressing B while standing on the ground can have very different results depending on the exact context, whether that’s the usual basic combo or a different shorter combo that cuts frozen enemies in half or a sort of heavy hopping chop that knocks enemies over when they’re stunned or a similar short hack or chop when near breakable environmental objects. Meanwhile, Warrior Within offers a greater degree of control in contrast, despite retaining some contextual functions like the unique attacks against environmental objects. (Most games employ context-sensitive actions out of necessity or to streamline control in reasonable ways, so their inclusion is not a negative, though I will quickly note that it’s important to avoid assigning multiple functions to an input where those functions may overlap in unpredictable or frustrating ways. For this reason, for instance, “attack” and “interact” functions usually aren’t assigned the same button since you want the player to be able to potentially fight enemies near a door without opening it accidentally.) You can now block whenever you want, even if it doesn’t make sense to do so, and you have multiple pages of different sword attacks that you initiate yourself.

These are just some representative examples to start off this discussion. One might go so far as to say that Warrior Within is looking forward a bit toward the free-form, player-driven impulses of modern gaming. It’s possible, with a bit of interpretive reaching, to see some of the elements that now define modern games present here in a sort of embryonic or “proto” state of being. While Warrior Within absolutely does focus on a more linear experience for big chunks of the game, it also tries to give the player agency over their experience by letting them pick one of two paths at one point or backtrack through parts of the game, potentially fighting unnecessary enemy groups along the way and delaying narrative progression. It’s less interested in telling a singular meaningful story and instead forks its ending in the name of mechanics and agency.

            Along with the greater focus on mechanics comes a greater focus on mechanical challenge. While Sands of Time had its own clear mechanical arc—featuring progressively tougher enemies, for one thing, and concluding with a climactic platforming section sans the signature “rewind” mechanic that lets a player undo something like a deadly fall for most of the game—Warrior Within finds new places to insert additional difficulty: one obvious example being how health upgrades work this time around. In Sands of Time, the health upgrades were essentially free once you located each secret area. You’d enter a hallway with hanging fabric and that eventually disappeared into darkness, hear the ephemeral-sounding music indicative of an upgrade area, and then you’d traverse the straightforward path to arrive in a fantastical-looking blue-lit cavern with many different bridges all leading to a central fountain of water. You’d approach the center, and the prince would automatically drink from the fountain in a cutscene, which would include him staggering/floating under a blue magical influence and with glowing eyes while a woman’s whispering voice was heard. And then you’d get warped back to the entrance of the initial hallway but with the actual entrance now gone. The health bar displayed onscreen would lengthen with a distinctive whooshing or zapping sound effect to call your attention to the upgrade.

Overall, there was a delightful subjectivity to these halls as something explicitly magical, much like the titular sands and accompanying monsters but also clearly of another, softer and gentler and even more mysterious, sort. They contributed to the romantic mood of the game, I argued in my piece on Sands of Time, both as a part of the general fantastical aesthetic and as tonal garnish on the unfolding love story.

            Meanwhile, in Warrior Within, the health upgrades are no longer free and no longer the same sort of magical. The hidden hallways are now filled with traps (usually arrayed in some denser and more demanding configurations then you’d normally see) that you must traverse to reach a sort of shrine where the prince can insert the medallion he wears embedded in his outfit. The shrine encloses the medallion and seemingly empowers it, as the prince is lifted into the air when the medallion is returned to its slot on his person. His eyes are shown to be rolled back before he lands on the ground again. The intended effect seems to be somewhat more eerie than the equivalent cutscene in Sands of Time, which is fine since that added horror flavor is a consistent part of Warrior Within’s overall vibe. Then, before you regain control, a splash screen announces that you’ve obtained a health upgrade, and then, after confirming it with a button press, you have to walk back through the trap hallway—sans traps on the return trip—to get back to the main path and resume your forward progression.

I suppose there’s still a certain moodiness in there somewhere, but the focus is now on the mechanical task (evading traps) and the reward (Health Upgrade!) over the altogether more subtle and immersive approach of Sands of Time. On the one hand, if Warrior Within wants to gate health upgrades behind additional challenges, then I am glad the devs chose to focus on traversal over combat (for reasons I’ve hopefully already made clear above), though there may be something of a weird disparity in difficulty among the challenges, with the ones I found earlier feeling, to me, subjectively, longer and more challenging than some of the later ones. Additionally, even though the traversal is a strength of the game, there’s some potential annoyance that comes with being asked to just do more of it, the same thing you’ve been doing all game and may have just been doing before you found the secret area. This relevant quote below from musician and YouTube essayist Grim Beard, on the subject of PS3-era action-platformer Alice: Madness Returns (2011) and its hidden challenge areas, is one that’s stuck with me and describes the situation well:

I remember having my interest piqued when they introduced the snail shell challenge rooms, which, initially, just asks (sic) you a riddle, and if you get the right answer, you get a piece of a rose, and when you collect four of these, you get a health upgrade. This was kind of a fun little idea. Played with the themes of the world of Wonderland. But, then, in the rest of them, you just fight waves of enemies until the timer’s up, which is, like, "Guys, that’s what I’ve been doin’ this whole time! What, am I gonna take a break to fight more guys? Come on, man…"

I’m not saying that Warrior Within should have had riddles like Alice, as that would not be playing to the themes of this game’s setting, of course, but maybe using the hallways as a breather from the normal flow of gameplay and/or to enhance the mood or maybe narrative would have been better. They could have been flashbacks to the hardships the prince has endured over the years that would help humanize this new, growlier version of him. Better yet, maybe they could have offered some insight into Kaileena, a new character, major antagonist, and potential love interest we learn so little about since she doesn’t accompany the prince like Farah did… Backseat game dev aside, it is simply possible to have too much of a core gameplay element, I feel, regardless of quality. Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge (2012/2013), while controversial within its own series, does have more polished and satisfying combat than Warrior Within, yet it also indulges in long, grueling wave-based battles as its defining element of level design, with little to nothing in the form of traversal or puzzle-solving between the fights, and then, when it offers extra challenges in the form of glowing skulls you “pick up” to initiate the challenge, it just throws even longer, even more grueling wave-based battles at you with nothing much differentiating them from the ones you’ve already been fighting. As the old saying goes, sometimes “less” can be “more.”

            I think Warrior Within’s mechanics-first approach is evident even in its titling. Where “Sands of Time” sets up an important element of the plot (that also happens to impact gameplay), and “The Two Thrones” does something similar, though with perhaps some additional thematic heft, Warrior Within’s title says nothing of substance about the plot or themes—only gameplay. It brings us back once more to the back of the box and the focus on the combat system: “One Fate. One Million Ways to Defy It” isn’t exactly a narrative hook, though the prince does try to defy fate in a few different ways during the game, and is instead largely about the combat, the mechanical experience. The box says also, further below, “Only by summoning the infinite powers of a devastating new combat art can [the prince] awaken the warrior within—and emerge with his life.” The title has no real significance beyond this back-of-the-box sizzle. This isn’t some plot-relevant thing; it’s just a promise to the player regarding the gameplay, hinting at the expanded combat options.

Of course, the box should sell the player on the game, I’ve said already, but I just think it’s interesting how… confined this title is compared with the others. It’s remedied somewhat in the PSP re-release, which I’ll talk more about in a bit, where the title has been changed to Revelations, which is kind of bland but does at least feel like something that means… something. There are definitely some revelations in the plot, though now we may have lost the element of gameplay, so it’s still not a “fix” if we’re measuring the title against the others in the trilogy. The word “revelation” appears in the original Warrior Within, I found, in a special feature video specifically highlighting the flexibility of the combat system, so the exact intention for its use as a title in the re-release is interesting to think about, in that it may still just be about the mechanical experience after all. The equivalent portable (and Wii) version of Two Thrones fares much better with its change to Rival Swords. I personally find it less evocative/poetic and less interesting than the original title, but it at least still captures a sense of the broad essence of that game, both narrative and mechanical, where you play alternatively as the regular prince and his “dark” variant as the two vie for control of the one body and the kingdom it stands to inherit and rule over. They are rivals, representing two different “thrones” in the sense that one personality would be a very different ruler from the other one.

 

Since my Sands of Time piece had box art talk, I’ll do the same for Warrior Within and Revelations. Seen above, I have to say, folks, that it’s dire. While I won’t lie and say that the heavy use of red doesn’t still read to me as “cool” (I am a Gamer at heart), I absolutely hate the look on the prince’s face, which tells me his hobbies include small animal torture and that his favorite movie is Fight Club. For some reason he’s doing The Kubrick Stare—head tilted downward, eyes looking upward at the audience—an expression that’s meant to make a character look unhinged. This look, which seems to have been changed to something more somber and less cringe for the PSP version (though there seems to also be a variant out there that still has the original expression on it), makes me miss the concentrated polygonal rage of the Sands of Time cover. There doesn’t seem to be a more artistic, moving, moody foreign alternative this time around either: always just the prince in a sort of void, brandishing his swords at nothing, standing, in the original at least, like it’s his turn on the Xbox.

 

            Another aspect of the game that suffers because of its focus on the mechanical experience rather than the mood is the moment late in the adventure when the prince acquires the mask that turns him into “The Sand Wraith.” The high-quality cutscene that plays here is definitely moody and looks like something out of a horror game, but then the transformation is undercut by a splash screen declaring “You Are The Sand Wraith” while spelling out your new power (regenerating sand energy!) and your weakness (constantly draining health!) and prompting you to press A to confirm your receipt of this information. This prompt is a variation of the one that I described before that announces your health upgrades, and it also appears when you first access a sand portal to the past/present in the game and are rewarded with either higher sand capacity or a new magical sand power. It’s consistent, but the Sand Wraith splash screen, arguably even more so than the one announcing your upgraded health, truly spoils a moment. The tell-tale sound and visuals cut right through the horror atmosphere of the previous cutscene and the accompanying Revelation: that you’ve seen the wraith already, earlier in the game, and while the prince has taken up the mask because he plans to use it to undo his previous mistake of accidentally creating the Sands of Time himself in the past, he only just now realizes that the wraith is the same being that he saw get consumed by the immortal pursuer just before the first confrontation with Kaileena. In trying to change his fate, the prince has, once again, just doomed himself, perhaps more clearly and decisively than ever given the utter lack of ambiguity about the final destination for the wraith. The prince now knows exactly when, where, and how he (may) die. There’s a great deal of horror and excitement in this moment, as the player is made to wonder how the prince is going to avoid this new fate—

            And then the game screams at you that YOU ARE THE SAND WRAITH.

I actually laughed at this declaration and took a picture of the TV screen with my phone just because. I was so delighted—but less horrified or moved than I probably should have been. Sands of Time was never so brazen and in-your-face with its upgrades. While its own approach of putting simple text at the bottom of the screen to tutorialize new options could also be problematic if you were trying to do something else in-game and read the prompts at the same time, it was one that still preserved the mood. Warrior Within has a lot more of this intrusive mechanics-focused text, and, unfortunately, it sometimes feels more awkwardly copyedited than anything I noticed in Sands of Time, which can further take the player out of the experience.

            Despite the rough introduction, the wraith section of the game in Warrior Within is a fun one. The aforementioned splash screen aside, going into this climactic-feeling race as a character who also loses health constantly (but only up to a point—the drain effect can’t kill you outright, which is good) has a nice feel to it. It represents an escalation in the narrative and the mechanics of the game, with the draining health letting the developers get some extra mileage out of the same sort of trapped hallway set-ups and enemy types you’ve been dealing with all along but now with the added threat of losing health just by wasting time, never mind the damage you might take. The other fun wrinkle with the wraith is the regenerating sand energy. This lets you use all of your abilities freely and thus, critically, allows the developers to design challenges around the fact that you are guaranteed to have the sand needed for them. The “slow” power, especially, is one that you sometimes seem to need for certain challenges as the regular prince, but the Sand Wraith’s endless sand energy presents an opportunity to potentially really push the player. It presents a great opportunity for pushing the challenges of the game beyond what could reasonably be asked of the normal prince through new platforming (ok enough) and combat (UGH) sections while also routing players through old areas as well, where previous traversal and combat sections are given new tension via the draining health mechanic that is somewhat balanced by the absolutely cut-throat way you can fight when spamming your best sand abilities is always an option.

            One aspect of Revelations worth discussing here and that ties into both the wraith portion of the game and this focus on mechanics versus mood is how that PSP re-release comes with a few extra areas added to it. I haven’t played that version myself, but I have watched footage of it on YouTube. Slightly more of the new areas seem to be dedicated to the wraith, whose time in the game is somewhat limited in Warrior Within. And yet, these new areas present the same problem I’ve been emphasizing for a while now—that they prioritize mechanics over mood (over pacing, even), possibly to the detriment of the overall experience. If the time spent as the wraith is short, then So What? Like I said already, there’s a climactic race against the clock going on in more ways than one. I don’t think it makes a lot of tonal sense to dilly-dally around as that character, whose health drain already starts to feel like a burden by the time a new circuit of basically every area of the island (in some capacity, however limited) has been completed.

Furthermore, I find the aesthetics of these new areas to be a bit either A) bland or B) Much: “bland” in the sense that some parts seem low on environmental detail in a way that clashes with the overall look of the game’s world (it’s not a practical space, but it mostly feels like a place rather than a Level); “much” in the sense that some of these spaces strain the credibility, however fantastical, of the palace-fortress. I’m not watching every second of footage of the added content (editor’s note: Yes, he did—though at 1.5x speed), but a whole hallway packed with the retracting-then-telescoping smashing blocks or lined with sawblades looks like something a fan would make rather than a real designer—over-the-top in just the wrong way where it stops being compelling and of a kind with the rest of the game’s architecture and feels altogether too “constructed.” Fit, perhaps, for an optional challenge mode but a bit too extravagant for the “story mode.” The overall atmosphere of Warrior Within’s setting doesn’t do it for me like the palace in Sands of Time, but I still think packing it with additional cavernous zones, ostensibly man-made or natural, filled with rafters and ledges and the like, dilutes the feeling of placefulness the game otherwise has. It feels more mechanical with all this extra stuffing, the already somewhat thinly-spread story, with its long periods of silent player input without meaningful development, stretched further still.

            Add to that, also, that these areas look like they would be hellish to backtrack through, depending on their placement, and depending on if they are actually re-traversable. I’m not completely sure, though at least some may be linear and either bypass-able in the future or placed in the game where they can’t be revisited. The first of these seems like a massive addition to the, in the original release, respectable-enough-sized, trap-lined hallway that connects the chamber that functions as a sort of central hub for the world to the hourglass room that leads to Kaileena’s throne. I found this stretch of fortress pretty engaging to traverse in both directions on the multiple occasions you have to travel from one end to the other, but this new version looks like a step over the line, with configurations of enemies and traps that feel out of place with that point in the game, looking to me like they would throw off the originally intended pacing. A similar sentiment applies to the rest of the Revelations-specific content as well. There’s not one new area that seems like a necessity to me.

For fans of the original game who were playing it again, these substantial new zones might be fun subversions of expectation, on top of being a reasonable challenge for someone who’s already familiar with the game’s layout and narrative so that the  pace-killing obtrusiveness is less of an issue on multiple fronts, but I find them very questionable-looking for all the above reasons—some blandness, some over-large-ness in relation to the rest of the setting, some straining of the credibility of the world (such as it is), some (potential) extra annoyance just trying to get from one place to another, whether you have to backtrack through the content or not. These new areas represent the “mechanics over mood” attitude, which I’ve hopefully demonstrated by this point, writ very large—though, again, perhaps Warrior Within is just forward-looking in this way. Games over-stuffed at the expense of the overall experience of playing them seem to now be the norm. Even if I’d only played through Warrior Within one full time while writing this piece, I still would have found it to be enough, both in a good and bad sense. Enough of a crafted experience to satisfy, and with enough issues and tedious combat to make me ready to move on to something truly new by the end of it all.

Sands of Time may be the better experience, though as my own tendency to get lost in discussions of minute details, both mechanical and otherwise, might suggest, I have a fondness for this extra, if largely more potential than satisfactorily actualized, complexity. That promise of a meatier and more expressive game, alongside the sort of heavy metal influence, is probably what draws me back to Warrior Within with fondness even as I am continually, repeatedly repulsed by its flaws and was more than ready for it to be over by the time I finally rolled the credits three times in one day, fighting both final bosses, seeing both endings more or less in parallel (and the “good” one twice), listening to Godsmack over the credits. While I’ve got nothing against them personally, having a group called “God” “Smack” play over the credits for a Prince of Persia game just feels… dissonant, though maybe more appropriate than it first appears given that you are, in a sense, giving a god (or gods?) a “smack” of sorts by defying fate. Awkward? Fitting, for Warrior Within. 

 

Both the “bad” and “good” endings of Warrior Within share the same apocalyptic vision of the prince’s home city of Babylon in flames, though the vision is more expansive in the “good” ending, where images of violence and of a shadowy figure laying claim to the prince’s crown are intercut with a sort of artsy-ish and more or less T-rated sex scene between the prince and Kaileena. The moment of climax, seen above, is a pretty odd one at a glance, from the perspective of this ostensibly being a sex scene, but expressive, interesting, and maybe goofy imagery aside, I actually prefer the “bad” ending for how its precipitating final boss encounter just makes more sense. The “good” ending route jumps abruptly from Kaileena threatening to kill the prince to him begging her to wait in a way that reveals the forking programming a little too clearly, thanks in no small part to the quick frame or so of black screen with a fade-in you see between what is obviously two different cutscenes, with the link between them made painfully obvious: “If Water Sword obtained, play Dahaka cutscene; if not, start Kaileena fight,” essentially.

When the Dahaka shows up to claim Kaileena on the path to the “good” end, the prince sounds perhaps unreasonably concerned—like he had always planned to save her rather than take her into the present to, as she correctly guesses earlier in the lead-up to the final encounter, kill her there to change the timeline. “In bringing her here, I have sentenced her to death!” he says like that’s a surprise and not the original plan. The Water Sword just seems to introduce this odd warping of the prince’s intentions and feelings about Kaileena that seems almost non-canonical, which is kind of fitting for how out of the way this ending is (requiring you to get all the health upgrades in the game), even though it is actually the canonical one. The Two Thrones’ opening narration will acknowledge a mistaken assumption that the prince returned home alone, at least attempting to account for the possibility that some players might not have ever discovered this kind of awkward alternative to killing Kaileena.