Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (2005): Sands of Time 2—or, The Compromise Game—or, The Two Tones
I’ve wanted to be less excessively comprehensive in my coverage of video games, so I decided to try out a “diaries” format, where I would challenge myself to discuss 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. Things have not exactly gone according to plan!
Note that this piece contains full spoilers for the game in the title and its predecessors (Sands of Time and Warrior Within). It contains some NSFW discussion, specifically in the sections for “Day One” and “Day Five.” That fifth entry is much more risqué, of the two. Know also that I’m discussing the GameCube version, played from a disc on the original hardware—at least initially, but with a second playthrough of the GameCube version on a reverse-compatible Wii.
For the equivalent piece on Sands of Time, click here.
And here is the one for Warrior Within.
I’m also going to briefly recommend “Prince of Persia Retrospective | An Exhaustive History and Review” on YouTube, on the I Finished A Video Game channel. That video covers seemingly every entry in this franchise—not just the Sands of Time trilogy—and I found it interesting to watch as a sort of counterpoint as I was working on these essays and shaping my own thoughts (I also recommend the similar Lord of the Rings and Castlevania videos on the channel). Since I can’t capture game footage myself, I did borrow some images from this retrospective and was also considering a couple of quotes from The Two Thrones section when writing my own discussion of the game’s story and themes; however, I ended up disagreeing with that stance and omitting the quotes, after some thought. In short, looking ahead a bit, I’m ultimately more positive (or at least neutral, or “mixed”) on those elements, where the stance in the retrospective is more negative.
The cover art for The Two
Thrones might be my favorite of the trilogy. There’s always been something
pleasing about it to me. It’s more calm and evocative than the action shot of
the wall-running prince presumably about to attack a sand monster (from the Sands
of Time cover) or him standing and grinning creepily while holding bloodied
swords in a barren void (for Warrior Within). The prince’s stance here,
with both hands gripping the handle of his sword, looks so solid or… secure.
The Dark Prince’s chain whip swirls around their body in an elegant sort of
way. The half-transformation teases the story, themes, and gameplay while also
just being a cool bit of art. It’s perhaps oddly serene- and focused-feeling,
maybe gesturing at the maturity the protagonist is supposed to have by the end
of the game. The prince’s facial expression on the box contributes to this vibe.
His scowl (Sands of Time) and unhinged smirk (Warrior Within)
definitely heavily shaped the tone of the earlier two titles in similar but
also divergent ways. If this cover has a failing, I think it’s that the prince
looks a bit too old in contrast with the in-game model. 
THE TWO THRONES DAY ONE: PRESENTATION AND MOOD REVISITED
A spirit of compromise permeates every aspect of this final game in the Sands of Time trilogy—some of it good, some neutral, and some bad; some of it explicit and some of it interpretive. With a production time supposedly somewhere in the neighborhood of nine months, compromise was no doubt a frequent and inevitable part of the game’s creation. I’ve said before that I don’t really investigate the exact details of the creative process behind games, opting instead for analysis and interpretation of the finished product, but it’s worth noting the material conditions that led to The Two Thrones. Unlike with Warrior Within, however, the end-result doesn’t bear so many obvious signs of a troubled development, likely because it’s a more streamlined and less ambitious game in some ways. Here, the promise on the back of the box of “the open-ended city of Babylon” is simply an outright lie. Instead, the game takes after the progression of Sands of Time, guiding the player through a linear series of areas, though while also maintaining and expanding many of Warrior Within’s mechanical elements.
The end-result is an experience that feels like a mediation between those two previous games, perhaps in a way that’s disappointing to hardcore fans of one style or the other for how, again, the compromise is so clear but that is also fascinating for how the real-world desire to address the backlash against Warrior Within meshes so well with the in-game story of the prince’s struggle to resolve the two halves of his soul—one a sensitive, if also proud, man who cares about his people, the other a revenge- and power-driven half-monster who craves violence. Is The Two Thrones’ swing back toward Sands of Time a craven retreat from controversy and/or danger in the name of profit? Maybe? Maybe no more so than Warrior Within’s own awkward flirtation with “maturity” was just as commercial-minded. It’s the nature of the industry (of all industries): Art exists in constant conflict with the need to turn a profit. That’s The Two Thrones—struggling to find the position of balance.
Presentation-wise, the shift from Warrior Within is noticeable as soon as you boot up the game. The ominous sounds and distinctive red-coloration of even the Ubisoft logo in Warrior Within are now gone. The whole game is more yellow than red this time around, putting it closer aesthetically to Sands of Time. The title screen music is also much more reminiscent of that first game’s sensibilities—as is all of the other music as well—and the layout of its menu options is now a conventional vertical list rather than semi-circular, or spiraling, unhinged. Subtitles, which were partially implemented in Warrior Within (only in the major cutscenes), are completely gone once more, making playing the game in a busy room a complicated proposition again. Yet I was delighted when I realized this fact because it felt like such a small but meaningful indication of the backward-looking heart of The Two Thrones, even if that particular tie to Sands of Time was completely accidental. In the “maybe accidental, maybe intentional” category, we can put the big new ending song, which has a certain resonance with “Time Only Knows.” I don’t have the technical vocabulary to draw out too many parallels, though the vibe strikes me as similar in some ways. “I Still Love You” sounds different enough but also obviously has significantly more in common with its counterpart from the first game, with the romantic theming and clean, big-screen sound, than it does with the grodier, meaner Godsmack track used for Warrior Within. And even the title of this ostensibly new song could be taken for more nostalgia, if you want to read it that way.
The plot of the game once again focuses on Farah and the evil vizier and concerns the Sands being released on a large population. The framing device of a story being told to an audience returns, though less complicated and interesting this time since it’s simply Kaileena talking to the player directly, and she doesn’t even bother to contextualize deaths as mistakes in the re-telling like Sands of Time did when the prince was filling in Farah about his adventures with her in the alternate future he’s rewound time to prevent. With that last item especially, you might get a whiff of a certain desperation to the game’s design choices: “People liked the tone and narrative style of The Sands of Time, right? Well, do that again!” But ultimately lesser since it’s been done before and is less clever in its execution this time around. The prince is once again more talkative like he was in Sands of Time, and he now also has his dark double speaking to him as well so that there are even more voices involved, pretty thoroughly avoiding the long stretches of silence that made Warrior Within feel like a game more concerned with its mechanics than its narrative. There is more of a consistent blend of the two once more, like in Sands of Time.
The sense that this extensive listing hopefully conveys is just how much The Two Thrones feels like a spiritual “Sands of Time 2,” or like Warrior Within but “brightened” up to more resemble Sands of Time. This means that certain elements of that middle game have been considerably toned down. While you can still toggle “Blood” off in a menu, the violence against living creatures has been noticeably reduced even with it turned on. Warrior Within’s enemies were always a strange mix of sand monster and flesh and blood, but The Two Thrones has the player fight humans for a bit before switching to pure sand beasts, just like in Sands of Time, and those early human enemies will bleed a little but cannot be dismembered. An attack like the vaulting B, B combo that would split a weakened enemy in half down the middle in Warrior Within, for example, will now play the same squishy sound effect and show the enemy unsteady on their feet, but they then fall to the ground intact, sometimes in an awkwardly rigid position. These masked/helmeted opponents already look and sound monstrous even before their transformation, but the game’s designers decided to not enable extreme violence against them until they’ve been officially turned into sand creatures. This didn’t change the game’s initial rating, but I think the “M” on the box, as much as it disappointed me as a kid, is ultimately immaterial to this essay. I think I pretty thoroughly discussed the rating and my feelings about it in the previous piece in this series. What matters more currently is what the depiction of violence, regardless of rating, “says” within the game. The prince decapitating and sawing people in half characterizes him in a way that is off-putting and doesn’t serve the larger goal of re-softening and redeeming him after the portrayal in Warrior Within where he growls like a weird animal during combat while taunting his enemies and cutting them apart. The Two Thrones has the same combos and nearly the same grapple attacks as Warrior Within, but the prince now fights with a dagger as his primary weapon, making him more visually reminiscent of his old self as well. I go back and forth on how much qualification to apply to claims about developer intentions like this, but there seems to be a clear goal here of trying to recall the old prince through as many available aspects of the game as possible.
Another important visual element to note is the prince’s new outfit. While he has a distinctive splash of red in the form of a trailing cloth wrapped around his waist, his new attire is primarily white instead of Warrior Within’s signature red and brown. And his haircut is now more symmetrical and less edgy looking. Meanwhile, Kaileena, who gets quickly removed from the game in a manner I’ll discuss in more detail on a later “Day,” has similarly had her appearance softened from Warrior Within. Also clad in white rather than bloody red, her makeup is less severe-looking, and her clothes, while still revealing, are now looser and are no longer emphasizing her breasts quite so aggressively. Actress Monica Bellucci, who brought a certain, appropriate imperiousness and harshness to the role in Warrior Within, has been replaced as well, with the new voice of Kaileena being altogether softer and meeker. This change is a disappointment in a way, as the character no longer really feels like herself. The prince’s voice has also changed, with the original actor from Sands of Time, Yuri Lowenthal, returning, in a move that feels once again very indicative of the intentions behind The Two Thrones’ attempts to replicate Sands of Time that I’ve been describing so far.
The Two Thrones’ troubled
development is not a topic I’ll focus on heavily here since finding
extratextual clues isn’t as interesting to me as looking at the Text as it
exists (and speculation regarding/documentation of the game’s time as “Kindred
Blades” is not hard to find elsewhere), but I want to stress that while the
game is undoubtedly “compromised” because of its rocky, abbreviated creation, I
don’t consider the end-result hugely flawed or “incomplete” in some sort of
off-putting way. When I first played The Two Thrones years ago, I can
remember what felt like a pretty long (at the time) first session, where I
played it until I got an unrelated headache and then came back later to play
some more. Even though I eventually got pretty fed up with the gameplay—combat
especially—before I finished revisiting The Two Thrones, I still initially
took to it quite readily, eagerly. While I’ll discuss my issues with combat
and stealth in particular in laborious detail below, there’s a powerful sense
of satisfaction that comes with absolutely nailing a platforming or
stealth/combat section that does strike me as wholly unique to The Two
Thrones as it exists. It’s fun and/or intellectually stimulating to discuss
how it might be some sort of compromised and, also, I assume, to dig for Kindred
Blades tidbits if you’re interested, but this is still a “good” game: fun,
and focused in ways that modern titles simply are not anymore, for another thing.
I didn’t comment on the vocal performances in Warrior Within when I was writing about it, but my feeling is that they were not great, though I don’t blame the actors for that. If I had to guess, the rushed production probably contributed, and this was also the early 2000s, when video game voice acting was more often spotty anyway. If I had to guess, I’d also say they probably might not have had much time with Bellucci in particular (just based on her live-action film cred), so if her performance is kind of grating or weak, then I, again, wouldn’t blame her for it, though there’s always also the chance that she’s someone who just isn’t suited to voice acting since the two are different skillsets… Either way, things are better in The Two Thrones, which is a statement that probably applies to most aspects of the game, and not just the voice acting, though what I want to try to emphasize is that the shift, even toward something possibly objectively better, isn’t inherently an improvement. I stand by what I said above, for example, about Kaileena losing her character via the change in actress and even in certain aspects of her appearance (which probably does include the breast thing, even if it sounds Weird to make too much of a fuss about it).
I’ll continue talking about
the specific promises from the back of The Two Thrones’ box below, but
I’ll just note here that it has a pleasing symmetry to it. Of the three games,
in fact, it may be the most pleasantly arranged in that way. It is kind of
interesting how all three designs follow a similar template of three (probably)
in-game screenshots and then a high-quality image of a single character—Farah
for The Sands of Time, Shahdee for Warrior Within, and the Dark
Prince for The Two Thrones. I could try to say something contrived about
how this game that’s attempting to balance the tones of the previous two titles
and is also explicitly about achieving peace/balance for the prince fittingly
takes these familiar elements and arranges them the most neatly, but I also
just want to call attention to this element of a video game that I feel usually
gets neglected in essays like this one. I don’t often read/hear a lot of box
talk. The “Sands of Time 2”
thing is kind of reinforced here since the back-of-the-box plot synopsis is
being written from the perspective of the prince again, like it was with Sands
of Time, rather than from an ambiguous third-person perspective, like with Warrior
Within. That, more so than the arrangement of the imagery and text, may be
more likely to be some kind of intentional signal to the consumer regarding the
nature of this sequel. It’s an implicit apology, or possibly a promise
regarding the content and tone of the game inside this box.
It all comes back to what I said before about The Two Thrones’ creative vision being one of compromise—or that is compromised, in a sense. Yes, the violence has been toned down to not make the prince look like so much of a cruel beast, though the veneer of Sands-of-Time-ness is noticeably disturbed by elements like the design of the first boss: an obese, masked giant with his lower jaw entirely torn away, leaving a massive and bloody wound that his long tongue dangles from, and whose scanty attire includes a thong-like harness bisecting his massive cheeks. This is all so much more distinctively Warrior Within-esque that it prevents the game from fully tonally regressing to Sands of Time, whether that was the intention or not. The giant is a massive spectacle: It’s the biggest enemy yet introduced in one of these games and that requires a mix of traversal, normal combat, and cinematic timed button inputs to bring down in a manner extremely reminiscent of the first God of War (released earlier in the same year) in a pleasing enough way, but it also relies on fatphobic imagery to bolster the sense of monstrousness. It’s willfully, craftfully gross, and the mix of fleshy gore and body horror contradicts or compromises the efforts made to otherwise tone down the violent imagery with other enemies.
Compromise also characterizes the game’s approach to health upgrades, as it essentially melds Sands of Time and Warrior Within yet again in its handling of them. You now find lonely hallways once more that lead off the main path and are conspicuously empty of enemies and traps. These digressions end in a somewhat magical-looking small fountain that you drink from to access a different, heavily trap-laden hallway (after an awkwardly unceremonious transition from the previous space) that ends in a door/hall of bright light that you enter to gain the health upgrade and to be transported back to the access fountain, which has been mysteriously broken somehow by this interaction. These diversions have a little of the old mysticism and dreamy uncertainty of The Sands of Time, but they also retain the second game’s insistence that the upgrade is something you have to earn via a trial. Unlike Warrior Within, however, the health boost is announced with simple text on the bottom of the display rather than a loud fanfare and splash screen that requires a button press of acknowledgement, though such bombastic announcements of new acquisitions still exist (albeit without the need for player confirmation) and pop up when you clear periodic wave-based enemy encounters and access a sand-spewing portal to collect another sort of upgrade or bonus.
In some ways, The Two Thrones feels like an appropriate sequel to the previous games with how it synthesizes their ideas and tones, but, in others, maybe only subjectively, it can be uncharitably viewed as less of its own Thing than either of the other two entries in the trilogy. Where Warrior Within struck out so definitively away from Sands of Time, for better or for worse, The Two Thrones hews closer in a way that might come off as hollow or cynical depending on your exact feelings about the choices it makes in that regard.
I didn’t really address
graphical fidelity in my piece on Warrior Within, but I think I can
comfortably, quickly say that it was a step up overall from Sands of Time,
with a fairly clear, if also somewhat hard to pin down in its particulars,
increase in detail. The Two Thrones doesn’t represent as much of an
obvious leap, with character models and environments looking more or less on
par with the previous title. What has expanded, though, is the scope of
the landscape on display. The events of Sands of Time took place in a
single, albeit very large, palace environment surrounded by an indistinct
wasteland; Warrior Within was primarily set in and around a remote island
fortress, so there was still not too much to see in the distance in the
exterior areas; however, The Two Thrones clearly increases the
complexity of the scenes it’s depicting, starting with a fiery harbor where you
have both the city before you and burning ships in the water. It has plenty of
isolated and contained locations like the previous two games, in which you’re
unable to see very far, but it also features sections high on the outside of
the royal tower or even just on the rooftops of the city or at some distance
from that city in the wilderness when the game is clearly attempting to put
grander and more distinct vistas on display, in contrast with the first two
titles. The aforementioned massive,
distinctive royal tower that represents your main goal throughout the game
serves as a landmark and as a way of making the player really feel like their
movements have a logic to them: There’s a place you’re trying to reach, and
where it stands in relation to your current position tells you something
meaningful about how far you’ve come or still have left to go. Furthermore,
taking place across an entire city like it does, The Two Thrones technically
has the largest scope of the trilogy, even if that city travel doesn’t amount
to more hours of gameplay. Even the main menu contributes to a sense of
increased scale, forgoing the standard of the previous two titles that focused
on a single image (the exterior of Farah’s room in Sands of Time and a
time portal in Warrior Within) in favor of a scrolling view of the
Babylonian cityscape burning and actively under attack from some unseen force.
THE TWO THRONES DAY TWO: STEALTH AND THE SOFT FAIL STATE—OR, COMBAT, CONTROL, AND QTES REVISITED
Suggesting that all The Two Thrones does is mediate between the competing spirits of Sands of Time and Warrior Within to its detriment is not my intention, and that wouldn’t be an accurate way of assessing the entire game anyway. The Two Thrones absolutely feels like the third game of a trilogy with how it continues to add to and iterate on established conventions. There are tweaks (like how the grab move used to weaken humanoid enemies doesn’t allow you to indefinitely strangle them anymore, thus no longer trivializing one-on-one fights quite so goofily) and quite a few new additions, both large and small, that include new traversal objects and interactions, like special wall jump pads that launch the prince a great distance at an angle through the air or long, vertical shafts between two close-set walls that the prince can use to clamor up or slide down more easily. He can now climb on top of the poles you used to only be able to swing from as well. And this is still an incomplete list! Arguably, though, if I have limited “Days” to talk about the game, I would want to choose the most consistently present and noticeable elements and not something like, say, the chariot-driving segments, which are so infrequent that they don’t really impact the whole experience. While I may come back to some of these more specific and smaller additions to the game in more detail later, there are two large ones that I will certainly need to address: the stealth system and the unambiguously-named “Dark Prince” transformation.
I think it’s very telling that the stealth takedowns in this game are not referred to with anything so generally descriptive and clear but are instead referred to by the (trademark-able?) designation “Speed Kills.” I will discuss why I think that specific choice of phrasing is so apt and so telling in a bit, but I want to take a little time here just to describe the stealth system of the game. As a kid, it struck me as overly simplistic, with no real distinction between being detected and a full-blown “alert” where enemies were aggroed and would not pacify again. I still partly feel this way, but I do see now how they can be partially alerted to your presence via a sound but then pacify again if they don’t actually see you. It’s still a barebones system, though that may be appropriate given its place in this game as just one mechanic among many (one that some players may, due to choice or lack of skill, not even engage with). It’s a highly contextual system as well, where the prince automatically enters a distinctive crouch that lowers his profile, quiets his footsteps, and enables “Speed Kills” when the game determines that you’re in a situation where stealth is possible. Thankfully, it seems pretty good about making that call. I haven’t ever had the game bug out and not put the prince in stealth or to not allow for the special, context-sensitive attack when I was in a position to do one. One, very minor, Thing is how the prince can exit a “Speed Kill” animation and then draw his weapons as if in combat before then quickly sheathing them again. Something similar can happen with patrolling enemies in some situations—where the prince enters and exits stealth mode repeatedly as the enemy draws nearer or further away, despite the fact that the whole area is intended for stealth and I haven’t initiated open combat/been spotted. This is simply the risk of automating the character’s state (in stealth or not, weapons sheathed or not), however. It is, at most, an annoyance and kind of immersion-cracking…
Approaching an enemy in the stealthing state, either on the ground or from certain elevated vantage points, causes a distortion effect around the edges of the screen that tells the player they can press Y to initiate a “Speed Kill.” This button is normally reserved for grappling with enemies (if the prince’s off-hand is empty) or performing attacks with sub-weapons (if that hand is full), so this is another example of the contextual nature of this system that could theoretically be an issue if the player wanted, for some reason, to hit the enemy in the back with a sub-weapon or grapple them instead of performing the takedown. That seems like a very unlikely situation given the massive utility of stealth kills, but I’m going to say it anyway, in addition to noting that it’s a bit weird how the regular prince’s versions of these violent interactions have him use his dagger, which is mapped to B, while the animation is initiated with Y instead. Although, since Y is sometimes used for grappling, maybe that’s the implication—that this is a special sort of grab?
At any rate, once a “Speed Kill” is initiated, the player engages in a QTE sequence where they have to quickly perform certain inputs in time with the animation that plays out on-screen to defeat the enemy instantly. In an act of fitting, if possibly accidental, characterization, the regular prince performs the kill with timed inputs of the B (dagger) button at specific points in the animation that match well with the precision attacks of the weapon and with his weaker status versus the hulking enemies, whereas the Dark Prince performs takedowns by garroting his unfortunate opponent with his spiky chain-whip, the act of which is captured alongside the character’s ferocity through rapid presses of the Y (whip) button.
There’s a strong synergy between the inputs, accompanying animations, and the acts being performed that makes these stealth attacks both satisfying to perform but also that much more violent-feeling, even if they don’t end in any dismemberment during the earliest part of the game. The Dark Prince’s “Speed Kill” is virtually impossible to fail, assuming the player can tap Y fast enough, but the prince’s takedowns require careful attention to the animations and both patience and speed, as the player needs to press B only at the moment when the dagger flashes and the animation dramatically slows. Being out of sync results in the prince being thrown off by the enemy, though not necessarily damaged, and in the entire stealth sequence essentially failing. Against one or two enemies, this is just an annoyance; however, in the game’s new version of wave-based encounters situated around a sand portal, failing a stealth QTE can be disastrous, as if the captain among the enemies activates the portal, waves of opponents will spawn until every enemy is defeated. This both risks death/repeating the whole sequence again and slows the game to a crawl, forcing the player to engage with its combat in its lengthiest and most grueling form.
I chose my words carefully just above, as I’m now circling back to the naming of this “Speed Kill” system. Like I said already, it feels very tellingly named: “speed” “kill.” The implication is so clear it’s arguably not even an implication—which is to say that these takedowns represent the fastest way to dispatch enemies and progress in the game. Despite what the back of The Two Thrones box says about the player “[c]raft[ing] [their] killing style with stealthy Speed Kills and creative Free-Form Fighting,” there are generally clear moments in the game to use both approaches, and engaging with the latter, open combat, is often a punishment for failing at the former, stealth gameplay. Furthermore, the image that accompanies that description of a flexible, player-crafted approach on the box is of the prince mounted atop the head of the previously mentioned first boss, performing what is actually an example of a required “Speed Kill.” It's not an organic, free-form interaction at all and is kind of deceptive that way, but I digress, sort of… I titled this section using the phrase “soft fail state,” as that’s how I’ve come to view a lot of the combat that can occur in The Two Thrones, where the player hasn’t failed “hard” in the sense that they haven’t triggered a “Game Over,” but they have failed at one level of gameplay, which forces them down, in a sense, to the other, “lower” or less desirable route or option. A lot of enemy encounters in the game, especially the ones centered on the sand portals, feature specific sequences of platforming and “Speed Kills” the player is intended to complete in order to finish the sequence properly (and quickly).
There’s a degree of legitimate challenge to some of these, as they can require careful observation of the environment and enemies, with some intended paths only revealing themselves after a failed attempt that ends in a straightforward fight. The less legitimate challenge, however, arises from the fact that QTEs like these are always an accessibility concern. The “Speed Kill” system represents the forced “cool” golem finisher from Warrior Within disseminated more broadly. I’m someone who is physically and mentally capable of doing the QTEs but who also has a certain twitchy disposition that can make strict input challenges like these in games pretty difficult, and I found a lot of my failures at the more complex stealth sequences in the game very annoying. Early on, I was actually prone to letting the alerted enemies kill the prince so that I could just get a proper “Game Over” and try again, though I stopped doing this intentionally after I realized just how much time and frustration it would likely add to my playthrough. While allowing the player to make up for failed stealth with normal combat is technically a more flexible and even fair outcome than simply booting them straight to a “Game Over” screen, I have sometimes felt like that would have been preferable, as I hated the sense that I was failing my way forward. While the game still lacks an obvious scoring or “style ranking” system in the manner of certain other action games from the time, like Ninja Gaiden, the Dark Prince seems to sometimes speak up after encounters to congratulate or berate the prince depending on his performance, which makes the sting of failure all the worse. This (I guess you could say) “soft ranking system” by way of character interactions post-combat is one that still exists today in games like the recent God of War titles, where allies speak up during and after fights in ways that can be evaluative. Maybe this little touch is Prince of Persia melding narrative and gameplay in a very forward-looking sort of way.
I won’t go so far as to say that the “Speed Kill” system in The Two Thrones is an outright acknowledgement that the combat in these games is kind of tedious and uninteresting when drawn out, but it certainly feels a bit like it. On the one hand, having this ability to potentially bypass so much of the fighting does still feel like a positive since it keeps the game moving forward with just enough friction to be meaningful in the way I indicated felt best in my Warrior Within piece, but, on the other hand, the presence of this system and the soft fail state it presents the player results in some troubling implications for combat that undermine the emphasis the game seems to want to place on it as an equally valid option parallel, rather than opposed, to the stealth. This is to say that for a stealth system to be compelling, combat needs to feel like a punishment to make the stealth meaningful, which obviously runs contrary to making the player want to engage in it. My subjective impression is (and has been for years) that the enemies in The Two Thrones, especially the most commonly encountered ones like the basic armored melee guys, feel like a return to the tougher, tankier opponents of Sands of Time over the more vulnerable-seeming humanoids and creatures from Warrior Within. One sort of empirical piece of evidence I can use to support this assertion is that the basic guys start out more dangerous this time around. They have a block-breaker from the beginning of the game rather than only gaining it later on like in Warrior Within, and they seem to be more reliably willing to use it if the prince is standing in front of them with his guard up, which punishes fishing for parry opportunities or staying in one place. I didn’t find the challenge of combat to be insurmountable by any means, especially after getting the slow time ability, during this replay, but one of my distinct memories of The Two Thrones from years ago was repeatedly running straight up a wall and using the descending spin move (with Y) to cheese combat encounters since I found them hard to deal with and tedious.
While the “Speed Kill” system
is introduced as a stealth mechanic, and I think its naming suggests its
interaction with stealth most clearly, it is still used during most of the
game’s boss fights in open combat in a way that more closely aligns with
classic God of War’s QTE finishers than with the ostensible stealth
function. By which I mean that you don’t use it to outright defeat the enemy
before combat starts using stealth and instead will see the indication for a
“Speed Kill” pop up at designated points in a fight so that you can perform the
timed inputs to advance the encounter. Against the first giant boss (pictured
above), for example, you complete two short platforming segments to reach
vantage points where you can take out the boss’ eyes via QTEs, before depleting
its health bar by attacking its legs on the ground and then initiating a final
QTE sequence to finish it off. The second boss fight does not have a “Speed
Kill” component, though it still contains QTEs since it requires you to mash B
to win power struggles where the prince and his opponent lock blades. The third
boss has the prompt for a “Speed Kill” appear at two points, after one of the
two opponents has been sufficiently weakened, and the as-good-as-final boss
requires you to perform three of these interactions during its second
phase, with a final “Speed Kill” that concludes the third/final phase but that’s
really just more of a dramatic flourish than something you need to approach
carefully. I’ve already raised the most
important criticism of the inclusion of these QTEs, regarding accessibility
concerns, so I will bypass that point here to emphasize that all of these boss
fights are better than the ones in Warrior Within, timed input
challenges aside. I said in that other essay that I thought the combat was the
weakest element and that the game might have been better off emphasizing
traversal in its major encounters instead. While The Two Thrones does
not go quite that far with these bosses and still features plenty of
straightforward combat, the developers do seem to have made an attempt to
incorporate some puzzle-esque element into each fight. The giant, as I’ve said
already, requires you to platform to get at its eyes before you can safely
approach it on the ground without getting grabbed. In the second encounter, you
start with a straightforward fight against a remix of the Shahdee/Kaileena
dual-wielding slinky lady enemy archetype from Warrior Within before the
prince transforms into his dark double mid-fight, and you then have to race
against your depleting health to chase the boss around the arena, performing
some light platforming and also combat against lesser enemies (replenishing
your sand energy and health) to get close to your target again, activate slow,
and then hit her a few times before she leaps away once more. It’s repetitive,
but you can see the attempted novelty. The third boss encounter
against two enemies at once has an initially somewhat obtuse puzzle element to
it that could be pretty frustrating to come to grips with, in that you need to
ignore the axe-wielding opponent to attack the sword-wielder. He’ll block all
of your attacks, but hitting his guard repeatedly prompts a unique leaping move
from the axe guy, which you must then evade and punish by attacking that
vulnerable enemy while the other one continues to strike at you. Hitting a
certain threshold of damage allows you to perform a “Speed Kill” that breaks
through the swordsman’s otherwise impenetrable guard to take out half of this
health. The second such QTE ends the fight. I like this idea in theory, but, in
practice, it’s hurt by the series’ usual fiddly combat problems, one of which
is how the game auto-locks the prince onto an enemy, for example, which messes
with your facing and how you need to move the left stick to evade. The fact
that you can’t skip the boss intro cutscene on repeated attempts just makes it
that much more frustrating. While finessing the fight feels awkward, or even
just ill-advised given how the prince is outnumbered, that’s more or less what
you have to do. Rather than go wild attacking the axe-man when he’s vulnerable
to try to win as quickly as possible, you have to keep combos conservative and
be ready and willing to block incoming sword damage to give yourself more
health/a greater margin for error during the process of trying to bait the
important axe attack again as the fight cycles. Played this way, it’s not
ultimately that awful… The actual final “boss” of the
game is more of an experience than a mechanical challenge—where you chase the
Dark Prince through a golden void until you finally “win” by choosing to walk
away in a thematically appropriate way—but that’s perfectly fine since the
technically next-to-final boss serves as the true mechanical climax. The
vizier’s weird godly butterfly form has some basic melee attacks you have to
avoid, and then he periodically, after you deal a certain amount of damage,
retreats out of reach to throw debris before moving back into melee range
(progressing from one projectile on the first retreat to two and then three).
It’s not a terribly difficult fight as long as you hit him before he can attack
you and you stay strategically aggressive. There’s a fine rhythm to it—Get
close, hit the vizier twice, evade whatever counter-attack he does, move with
him as he repositions, hit him twice more, and so on. He has an energy orb that
he can shoot, but you can stop him from ever using it by always staying close.
He seems to have a diving attack as well, though I only saw it while watching
other people’s footage of the fight and never had to deal with it myself. Where
things get tricky is in the second phase, when the boss summons a bunch of
large floating debris pieces that spin around the arena while he occasionally also
fires his orb at you. It’s just very hard to actually avoid the debris because
of the pieces’ size and, for another thing, because approaching the boss shifts
the camera and restricts your view of the full arena, making it impossible to
track the blocks very well. Your goal is to run up a pillar behind the boss and
then initiate a “Speed Kill” QTE before he moves away to another pillar. You
have to do this quickly and efficiently to spend as little time as possible
dodging the debris. After three of these somewhat extended QTE sequences, the
third phase begins with the vizier flying up into the sky and arranging a bunch
of floating chunks of the palace as a final platforming challenge. He
occasionally throws down an orb during this ascent, and it can be difficult to
avoid if you mistime your movements and are in a position where, like swinging
on a pole, you can be knocked to your death by the attack. The final blow is
dramatically delayed after you have the prince leap toward the vizier and the
scene freezes while the camera orbits the two figures. That’s a satisfyingly
cinematic finish, and heavy QTE focus and somewhat awkward platforming notwithstanding,
this is still a good example of a boss that somewhat reflects a balance of
combat and traversal rather than attempting to be just a test of
hack-n-slash reflexes. I’ll conclude by noting that I
also like this particular game’s approach to its bosses because of how they’re
all set up in the cutscene where Kaileena dies. The vizier is present, along
with the human versions of each of his major subordinates, and the game
structure can be roughly divided into sections based on which major opponent
you’re working up to fighting. The levels aren’t exactly all that obviously delineated
or themed—though the brutal-looking giant is in the arena, and you fight The
Woman after going through the brothel (of course!)—but it’s satisfying to have
a clearly-defined kill list to work through on your way to the biggest of the
bads. Defeating each subordinate also frees more of the captured citizens of
Babylon, increasing the prince’s renown, thwarting the vizier’s conquest bit by
bit, and building a fighting force to help liberate the city.
Given the emphasis on stealth, I do think that feeling of greater, even off-putting, friction in open fights is intentional, and this is further borne out by contrasting the regular prince’s combat with that of the Dark Prince. This other character that you control at set points in the game, who has his own unique move set tied to his blade-whip, seems capable of tearing through enemies much more quickly than the prince, maybe due to having an actual higher damage output but also, if nothing else, owing to the much greater range of the sweeping strikes he can perform alongside dagger attacks.
Additionally, a key element of the Dark Prince gameplay experience is how he represents an evolution of the Sand Wraith from Warrior Within, in that his health constantly drains away during gameplay. As with the Sand Wraith, this adds extra tension to the segments where you control this character—arguably even more this time given that the draining effect can actually take you all the way to 0 HP, where the Wraith’s health would stop decreasing after a point. The Dark Prince no longer regenerates sand energy automatically like the Wraith, but he recovers his full health whenever he collects sand from any source, whether that’s a single defeated enemy or even just a broken environmental object. This mechanic helps keep the tension and challenge of playing as him more manageable, but it also makes combat significantly easier and more fun, as even a single bit of sand will give you all of your health back, allowing the player to more easily overlook the still-present jank as they fight the larger number of enemies the developers send after the Dark Prince.
Again, the contrast seems very meaningful, if not outright intentional: The Dark Prince represents the prince’s most sadistic and gleefully combative self, and that characterization is mirrored in his fighting style. He saws enemies’ heads off from stealth with more easily-performed takedowns and is rejuvenated through open combat so as to make it easier and more fun. He even moves through the environment more freely than the normal prince thanks to his abilities with the whip that let him swing from poles and latch onto certain fixtures to extend a wall run. Within the story, the Dark Prince is meant to be a temptation, seducing the prince into embracing all his worst tendencies in the name of power. To fight against that temptation, the prince, in the plot, has to forgo a desire for combat and revenge to instead help the people of the city, gaining Farah’s trust and building an army to back him up. Alone, the game tells us through its plot and mechanics that the prince is weak where the Dark Prince is strong, and, for better or worse, the way that stealth (and QTEs) and combat interact is part of that admittedly compelling portrait. Where Warrior Within’s expanded combat system was treated as the central feature of that game despite the fact that it had no real plot or thematic relevance (outside, I guess, serving as some indication of the prince being… meaner, maybe), The Two Thrones feels like the better Story for how it makes combat—even the problems with it—feel like a part of the larger tapestry of its mood, messaging, and characterization.
The progression of my
experience with The Two Thrones’ combat goes something like this: button
mashing without understanding, I think, as a teenager; intentional combo
memorization and use as an adult; button mashing with understanding as an
adult. I was tired of trying by the
end of my time with the game, and there’s also the
fundamental issue of how most combos, for the prince and Dark Prince both, more
or less function identically—with a focus on spinning attacks that can
(thankfully) strike multiple enemies. There’s some variation that’s probably,
technically worth knowing since not absolutely all attacks spin all the
time or in the same way, and you may also want to be aware of just how much of
a commitment a particular combo might be, but there’s generally little reason
to care. There’s a real awkwardness to the combat, again with both princes,
that I haven’t touched on so far, and that’s how much you can essentially
“queue up” inputs in order to perform combos. 
THE TWO THRONES DAY THREE: THE THINGS BETWEEN—OR, WHY THE STATUE-ROTATING PUZZLE IS GOOD, ACTUALLY
Over the years, I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about why I prefer some action games to others—why God of War appeals to me so much but the Warriors series, with its one-versus-thousands spectacle, does not, for example. The answer that I arrived at a while ago is that I don’t like action games where the combat is the only thing you seem to do. The God of Wars have always had a nice ebb and flow to them, where you trade off combat and traversal/puzzle-solving, with each of those aspects giving you time to build up a desire for the other one again. By contrast, the Warriorses’ constant combat bored me. There are other titles I could mention here: I couldn’t get into the Senran Kagura series because of an over-emphasis on fighting without proper levels (at least in the one I played—2018’s Burst Re:Newal), and I prefer the first and second 3D Ninja Gaiden games over the third because they have a stronger emphasis on (relatively simple) traversal and sometimes (relatively light) puzzle-solving between generally well-paced fights, whereas the third is missing almost anything between bouts of grueling combat. As I’ve been replaying this Prince of Persia trilogy, I’ve found myself thinking of it with a similar level or kind of fondness that I feel for God of War. Neither series has the best—most refined, most complicated—combat, but the fact that they also devote so much time to other things like puzzles just makes for a potent combination for me specifically. It is ultimately a shame that the developers of the Sands of Time trilogy were given so little time between entries to polish things up.
Before replaying these three Prince of Persia games and writing about them like this, I didn’t fully appreciate just how thoroughly In The Mix they were, releasing right alongside the aforementioned Ninja Gaiden and God of War, as well as the series likely responsible for shaping these other games in terms of stylish combat, Devil May Cry. This Prince of Persia trilogy was more of a peer to those other names than I had realized before, which just makes its current-day absence from the gaming landscape (alongside a long-dormant Ninja Gaiden) all the more depressing for me. (At least, that was true at the original time of writing this piece. I haven’t played Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, but it exists, is new, and seems to be good!) The future of Devil May Cry in a non-“free-to-play” format is currently unclear, while God of War still exists but in a deeply altered, sort of compromised state, where it’s taken on a lot of modern conventions, like RPG elements, in order to survive. Meanwhile, the Sands of Time remake seems to be in development hell, on top of not being all that desirable of a thing for me personally since it is a remake and not something new. “Action” is an incredibly nebulous genre, despite some attempts to further specify, like “Character Action,” and while I am definitely happy for those who love retro-inspired shooters and survival horror, which seem to be enjoying a bit of a revival, I can’t help but feel under-served when it comes to the particular flavor of game I enjoy—one with a, as previously established, pretty heavy melee combat focus but also with enough other stuff going on to provide balance and variety.
A specific element of The Two Thrones’ Not Combat I want to discuss is a particular puzzle late in the game where the prince is tricked into entering a burning factory-like environment to rescue some of the people of the city and must maneuver an enormous statue of his father into position using the workshop’s machinery in order to smash open the building’s giant door with it. The statue is controlled by two levers and two accompanying dagger-activated mechanisms set in nearby walls high above the floor of the factory that you must first reach via some platforming/traversal. One lever and mechanism pair moves the statue backward or forward, while the other pair rotates it left or right. Moving from one set of devices to the other requires scaling a ladder, moving along a wooden platform to the far side of the building, and then descending another ladder. It’s actually pretty quick (or at least straightforward), but consider the prospect of doing it over and over again every time you want to access the opposing set of controls. You must perform the right combination of interactions to guide the statue from the back of the factory to the front, inputting a certain combination of movements and rotations to fit it through the space and ultimately reach the door with it facing forward.
I had actually forgotten
the existence of this puzzle somehow, but when I reached it during this replay,
my memories from years before came back, and I remembered how frustrating I had
found it then. As I was preparing to write this entry, after the day’s play
session, I looked online to see what other people had to say about this puzzle,
and I found this post from a “luigi33” on GameFAQs from back in 2010
that I feel very nicely captures the experience:
“One of the most rage inducing puzzles ever. One of the reasons that made it so bad was the constant going between the two ladders and waiting for the long tedious spinning animation to finish and then hitting the lever which was also long and tedious, and finally watching the statue move which was ALSO tedious. Completely destroyed the pace, I hated this part of the game.”
I’m not saying a lot of the more casual writing I’ve seen about these games is bad (I haven’t read that much in the grand scheme of things, so I couldn’t say), but I love how this commenter is able to accurately identify and passionately express the major problem with this puzzle—the tediousness of it all which contributes to a problem with the pace of the game. What I can add to their thoughts is that I think the context of the statue puzzle matters a lot where these negative feelings are concerned and that these issues wouldn’t be issues in a somewhat different context.
For one thing, within the larger context of this whole game, the statue section stands out as a problematic inclusion because it is so much more belabored and intensive than anything else you are ever asked to do. It creates the bad sort of friction I’ve previously identified in these later two titles’ approaches to combat: It slows the player’s forward momentum too much, and it feels particularly frustrating given that it’s the only section of its kind, which makes it an odd extreme or outlier in the grand scheme of the experience. It feels like the game grinding to a halt, which is, furthermore, an issue within the context of this specific moment especially since the game is screaming at you (with the fire and the civilians in need of saving) that this is an urgent situation, yet it requires you to do something that is counter-intuitively slow and ponderous and drawn out. Putting the puzzle on a timer could have been even worse, though the fact that you can apparently linger in this supposedly desperate state for as long as it takes to figure out a solution also further undercuts the emotional intensity. In a less dramatic moment, I actually would have enjoyed putting my brain to work like this, even if it was still a weird shift in complexity from every other “puzzle” on offer.
The previously described puzzle
in “action.” Interacting with one of the dagger mechanisms to move the statue
cuts to this more generous perspective overlooking the area that shows the
adjustment occurring. It allows you to better track the positioning of the
enormous statue within the space (and drives home the titanic scale of your
interactions in a theoretically satisfying or cool way), but it also
contributes to the tedium of the puzzle by further slowing the process. On a marginally related note,
one presentational and mechanical change in The Two Thrones concerns what
is known in the trilogy as the “alternate view” or “landscape camera.” Generally,
these games control in a very modern way, where the player moves with the left
stick and can freely rotate the camera with the right to frame the third-person
view of the game world as they please. A (more or less expected) first-person
option exists, but so does a unique, “alternate,” third-person perspective that
mimics the fixed camera set-ups of some older games like the classic Resident
Evils or the first Devil May Cry. Pressing the button to activate
this perspective relocates the camera typically much further from the prince,
and not necessarily centered on him, but grants a better view of nearby
environmental details. Often, these camera angles emphasize the path forward,
and I sometimes found them helpful while playing. The
first two games allowed you to toggle this camera view at almost any point, but
The Two Thrones has a more limited selection, only available in specific
areas, and it also prompts the player with an icon on the screen to let them
know this other option is available. What I want to highlight here
is not just the difference between the games but also how it was undoubtedly
extra work to program and test so many of these “landscape” cameras in the
previous games that players might never have even bothered with/remembered they
could use. It makes perfect sense that The Two Thrones scaled back and
also more strongly emphasized this feature, though I do sort of miss the possibility
of being able to push a button and instantly see a more cinematic view of
the game at any time.
Of course, if I wanted to be a Critic about this, I could twist those (very real, I think) negatives into something like the following: This sequence isn’t just a puzzle and instead represents the most important character development for the prince in the game. It’s actually the culmination of the entire story leading up to this point, as he finally chooses to directly help the people of the city over pursuing a single-minded quest for vengeance that he justifies as the one true solution to all the suffering. The rescue is planned rather than an accident like at the arena, when defeating the giant ended up benefitting the people held there. Critically, the prince also intervenes this time without Farah’s involvement or prompting, so he’s not trying to impress her or keep her personally, individually, safe, and it’s only in the aftermath of this whole sequence, after the puzzle and the following chariot-driving bit leading into the double boss fight, that Farah comes back to the prince again, having been convinced of his good heart at last. I say all that to establish the monumental shift that’s supposed to be happening here in terms of plot and character because it’s monumental like a monument, or statue, right?
Or, somewhat more seriously, perhaps, doing the right thing should be hard, right? In the despairing moments before he resolves to use the statue to break down the door, the prince asks his absent father for “guidance” and “strength” (which is what steers him toward the effigy of the man as a solution to his predicament), and the suggestion is that the prince wishes his father was here to help him and to save these people in his stead, that he’s capable of fighting monsters and rescuing an individual person here or there but that the scope of this rescue—the prospect of becoming the protector of these people that he should ideally be as their ruler—is something he’s struggling to accept. And so we might justify this difficulty spike thusly.
The statue is the symbolic equivalent of the prince’s own acceptance of authority and of his burgeoning empathy and resolve. These things are struggling to emerge like the statue struggles to fit in the openings we need it to pass through, and so we reverse it and bring it forward and reverse it again, and we bang it against one wall while trying to rotate it and then against the other as well. And when we think we’ve finally got it into position and can just bring it all the way forward to the door, we bounce off one last time because it’s not facing forward properly. When the statue finally breaks through the door, it’s a moment of liberation for the player just like it is for the prince and the trapped citizens. They’re all saved from a fiery death, and the prince is finally freed from his worst impulses and his insecurity. Moreover, in liberating this building, we happen to re-unite with the old man in red from Warrior Within who told the prince about the Island of Time and whose warning that the prince could not change his fate would be repeated even at the very end of that title, even during the “good” (or “better”) ending. Now, despite that warning, the formerly grim figure is himself changed. No longer characterized as a despondent, hollow-eyed oracle of doom, he instead leads the people in accepting the prince as their savior, and then he directs them into combat with the sand creature army so that the prince and Farah can reach the palace.
Is this just one more compromise—The Two Thrones painting awkwardly over Warrior Within once again by re-using this majorly recognizable element of that game but trying to make it upbeat because of some mandate to rework the tone? Maybe! It still kind of works symbolically, though. The redemption the prince actually needs isn’t to be found in outwitting the universe to avoid responsibility, which is one way of reading the previous games’ stories. Here, he accepts his fate instead (or at least part of it) rather than running away or trying to cheat his way around it. The old man is as good as a mood ring: sad when the prince is doing the wrong thing and more high-spirited when he’s doing what the game’s creators judge is right. In the process of doing good, he topples a statue of his father, a very loaded visual. He’s unintentionally symbolically taking the king’s place as he literally also ends up doing so.
THE TWO THRONES DAY FOUR: HERE COMMA AGAIN
That isn’t even so much of a reach, really, as The Two Thrones more or less settles on this stuff about accepting responsibility as the moral of the entire trilogy. The game makes it quite explicit, but let’s start with something extratextual and fuzzy instead but that I think correlates in a satisfying sort of way: Just like the prince is said to have been running from the consequences of his actions in the first game by bending time backward, there’s a similarly recursive narrative you can stitch together out of the “modern” Prince of Persia console games and Ubisoft’s handling of the series. Sands of Time is the classic, the beloved game, but then Warrior Within tried to strike out in a different direction, only for the next outing (this one, The Two Thrones) to turn back and reorient in the direction of The Sands of Time. The 2008 reboot would try to move away from Sands of Time again, with some truly major shake-ups to the gameplay and graphics and vibe (going far more fantastical and colorful and stylized overall), only for 2010’s The Forgotten Sands to race back to the Sands of Time universe again. And then the series languished in limbo, eventually entering development hell proper with a full Sands of Time remake that might never be released at this point… This sort of narrative-crafting is an over-simplification of the timeline of Prince of Persia games released, as well as the complications of game development, and it ignores rather than even guessing at the motivations that actually might have led to this sort of spiraling focus on a game from all the way back in 2003, but it sure looks like a moral, right?
The series almost seems to have been chasing Sands of Time’s tail (its own tail) for years now. In the time it’s taken me to actually finish this essay, though, Prince of Persia has undergone a bit of a revival with the 2024 The Lost Crown and upcoming (now released, as of this editing…) The Rogue Prince of Persia. The former is a “2.5D” “Metroidvania” and seems substantially removed from the Sands of Time trilogy, while the latter is a “roguelike” developed by a team outside of Ubisoft itself. The series is more alive than it’s been in over a decade, and what it looks like from the perspective of our little narrative is forward progress again, finally—seemingly accomplished by moving on/away from Sands of Time. This is what seems to be necessary and healthy. To keep going back to the events at Azad over and over again is not, but that’s essentially what the Sands of Time prince has been doing, this last installment in the trilogy has decided.
Part of me resents this rejiggering of the conclusion of that first game. There’s not actually anything about Sands of Time that suggests a sequel was needed, and it stands alone and as complete-feeling. It’s a fairytale or romance or fable or myth that ends in an appropriately fairytale-esque or romantic way, with the clever protagonist, having learned a harsh lesson, out-maneuvering the apocalyptic consequences of his actions to make sure that only the villain of the story who instigated everything dies in the end. It feels really good to experience! It concludes with a wink and a kiss and sweeping music as the rogue makes his exit and we all applaud. It’s neat, tidy, and satisfying. These two other games are more muddy, tangled, and ugly in ways both visual and more abstract. Turning back time, the clever move that creates such a complete and happy ending for the first story, becomes a sin instead. (Funnily enough, that game’s manual uses the word “sin” to describe opening the magical hourglass in the first place…) The prince is avoiding the consequences of his actions, and this reflects poorly on his character and is something that needs to be overcome. This is his “fate,” like one day being king is his fate. He and Farah were meant to struggle to survive together and to then fall in love; the Sands of Time were meant to be released; the vizier and the prince’s father (and countless other people) were meant to die in the ensuing infestation. The fairytale ending was tantamount to a crime that the prince must atone for—first through the suffering in Warrior Within of being hunted night and day by an unkillable monster and then, second, by reliving the events of the first game in The Two Thrones so that everything meant to happen still comes to pass despite all his (and our) efforts...
Ultimately, after two re-playthroughs, I’m still not sure how I feel about the plot of The Two Thrones as an adult. As a kid/teenager, I never felt like anything was amiss or that it was less than a sensical continuation of the story. It broadly works as a follow up to the two previous games in terms of plot and themes, and it is also internally consistent about what it’s saying. From the beginning, there’s a strong emphasis placed on the prince needing to (re)learn how to care about others and to assume responsibility as the leader of his people after so much time fighting just to survive and for himself. Maybe you feel that this early assertion by narrator Kaileena that the prince wanted to fix things but only “to ease his own pain” mischaracterizes him based on what was done with Sands of Time. The issue may be that this is the first time a truly omniscient perspective has been used in these games. In Sands of Time, the prince narrated his own journey, so that was technically a subjective point of view. It might have given off a sense of being all-knowing, but the prince just knew everything about his own, limited, perspective. Warrior Within lacked such a narrative frame or much in-the-moment introspection or reflection, period, but The Two Thrones is brought to us by a being that is supposed to see all timelines and is something somewhat godlike. So maybe there’s not as much wild, unfitting contrast here as we might think, if we accept that this is a new layer of insight into the prince and his motivations that we might not have had access to before.
There’s an indistinct sense I have of this game’s thematic conclusion as a disappointment not just because it messes with the ending of the original game but also because it strikes me as a sort of conservative position, like the prince needs to pull himself up by his bootstraps (or bootstrap equivalent). The idea that suffering is good, even in some abstract or vague way, and that you take some kind of “responsibility” by letting yourself and others suffer strikes me as an incredibly limiting but also incredibly real way of seeing the world—It’s what our institutions and politicians essentially advocate for daily. If a better world can be made, though, where not as many people need to suffer, why is that a bad thing? At the risk of going too far, socialized healthcare or a universal basic income are equivalent “magical” solutions that will make people lazy (or some such talking point). In a fictional world where magic exists, of course, this comparison doesn’t exactly fit since you can actually “anger the gods” or find yourself fighting literal fate, but there are still uncomfortable implications that I sense in the game’s final thoughts on its series-long exploration of time travel. Its attempts to create themes or even morals with a universal, not strictly fantastical, significance are worth approaching critically.
As I was saying before, the game is very explicit about this messaging, and it stands out particularly clearly in the post-factory section, in the run-up to the final confrontation with the vizier: After a bit of palace exploration (sort of) with Farah, a sequence of events somewhat similar to those of the first game occurs. Back then, with their goal right in front of them, Farah and the prince were sent plummeting into the depths of the palace of Azad by the vizier so that they could finally confront the lack of trust between them—and maybe consummate their relationship—while here only the prince is sent tumbling down when the vizier abducts Farah. After a frustratingly extensive and precise capstone platforming and combat sequence as the Dark Prince, you find the body of the prince’s father. This is more or less what the audience probably expected (something else the Dark Prince says outright), and it’s the conclusion of the fixation on the man by the prince, when he was wishing the king was there in the burning factory to take charge or when he (the prince) was extoling his (the king’s) virtues to Farah in the palace while admitting that he left things between them in rough shape years ago. In this moment, the Dark Prince, now completely antagonistic, taunts the prince, asking him if he’s planning to try to roll back time again, but the prince refuses. He accepts responsibility instead, and, having taken up his father’s sword, an icon of authority, he is able to transform back into himself without being exposed to water. Having accepted the full responsibility of his station, the prince of Persia is able to control his own body once more.
This is obviously a powerful moment for the narrative, and the game’s creators drive this feeling home through the subversion of the established rules of the prince’s transformation before going even further, once the player regains control, by also altering the combat. The king’s powerful sword is a permanent addition, so while it still displays in the usual way as a secondary weapon with a health bar, its durability never actually depletes, and it cannot be thrown. Which is to say, thematically, the responsibility cannot be cast aside. Mechanically, this makes it impossible to grapple and throw enemies or steal their weapons for the remainder of the game. Artistically, this removes a lot of the meanness from fighting, though dismemberment is still possible using other moves. It arguably makes combat “worse” (or “simpler”) while rolling things back to something like Sands of Time’s standard yet again, since the prince is once more equipped with an indestructible sword and the Dagger of Time. The sword is incredibly powerful, however, to the point that it can kill enemies in a single hit (just like the last sword upgrade from the 2003 game), and this speeds up combat considerably. That, to me, was enough to balance the reduced options when fighting since, as with the previous games, I was well and truly sick of combat by this point. The climactic final chunk of fighting and platforming here, after you receive the extremely powerful sword, is more substantial than the one in Sands of Time but still quite reminiscent, as you once more end up scaling the exterior of a tower surrounded by deadly drops to reach the game’s conclusion.
I’ve seen arguments over the years that The Two Thrones is Too Short, but I (obviously) don’t agree. I would say it’s a “fine” length overall, and the progression and pacing of your route through the city makes a good deal of visual sense given the clear goal of reaching and scaling the palace tower. I was similarly satisfied with and fed up by Sands of Time and Warrior Within and, if anything, found them too long rather than too short. The latter received some additional content with its PSP release (called Revelations). I haven’t played that version, but I watched footage of someone else going through the added content and felt that it made an already long-enough game seem too long by killing the pacing, while also likely throwing off the original difficulty curve of the traversal and puzzle-solving. The PSP version of The Two Thrones (Rival Swords) was similarly expanded, and while I haven’t played that either, I did once again watch videos covering the new stuff. But this time my feelings are actually more mixed: In Revelations, the new areas were simply slotted into the larger world, expanding (or distending) it, but Rival Swords finds space for its equivalents in a somewhat more acceptable way by making them separate maps that you reach via teleportation at the existing sand portals. Instead of just clearing the nearby enemy encounter and interacting with the portal to immediately get a reward, the prince now has to travel through each portal and complete the new short sequence on the other side to get the upgrade or “Sand Credits” bonus.
On the one hand, I still think making this interaction more complicated than it already was messes with the previously established pace of the game. There’s a kind of absurd understatement in the footage I watched, where the prince goes on this whole dramatic adventure to a new location and then pops back up and has to go do something mundane like push a block. My favorite instance has to be the last, though, where the prince is ostensibly working together with Farah, so he comes out of the portal and goes right into a conversation with her as if nothing at all happened. No transition, no explanation, no acknowledgement—just right back to (base game) business.
And yet, these areas still feel a lot more “considered” than the ones from Revelations as well since they’re A) not gigantic and not quite so mechanically out of step with the original content and B) actually do contain little hints of narrative or character that tie in with the rest of the game (and, C, they exist in their own separate areas and leave the seamless city map from the base experience untouched). There was even some attempt made to fit the upgrades you previously received from the sand portals—and now get from these new sections—to the nature of each new zone. There are three area types that repeat three times each: more substantial, grander temple-like levels dedicated to honoring the vizier’s transformed self; treasure hoards where the vizier and his forces are ostensibly storing the riches stolen from the city they’re conquering; and simple shrines focused on the Sands/Kaileena. The first category of level awards new “Sand Tanks” so that you can use your powers more often; the second category gives out the aforementioned credits that can be used from the main menu to unlock concept art; and the third always gives you an upgrade to your sand powers. That you would get these things from these locations just makes sense, especially how the treasure hoard gives you the equivalent of treasure and how Kaileena, the mystical empress, is giving you new magical abilities.
I’m a little reluctant to go into great detail about the new areas individually since I didn’t actually play them, and this content also has a tenuous link to the theme of this particular “Day.” Which is to say, I could argue that the fiddling with the existing game bears a certain resemblance to the recursion issue I mentioned before—The prince and Ubisoft can’t stop meddling. But maybe “tenuous” is also just ok since it sort of fits with the nature of the content, making for more resonance between the criticism and the work being critiqued? I guess let’s go into a sand portal of our own for a time, then…
There are apparently some
differences in content in the Rival Swords PSP release, depending on the
“region,” with not all parts of the world receiving the bonus areas I’m
describing in this section. The Wii version doesn’t seem to have new content at
all, though it does have the (potentially dubious) “bonus” of motion controls.
I haven’t played it and can’t speak to the accuracy of the implementation,
though I can only imagine how much more muddled an already awkward-feeling game
might become with less than stellar motion-tracking functionality. The above
image comes from a kind of fun, illustrative trailer for Rival Swords on
the Wii that shows off various actions in the game performed with the system’s
unique paired peripherals.
The first new level worried me when I saw it initially because of what it seemed to suggest about the added areas as a group. It was a really colorful and lush temple zone that felt out of sync with the rest of the game aesthetically (far too blue, for one thing). It also included a wacky puzzle that requires pushing buttons bearing the symbols/logos of the three Sands of Time trilogy games in sequence, which just feels like a bizarre near-Fourth Wall break. Despite looking really dense at first, though, the traversal didn’t end up being as extreme or as drawn out as the Revelations areas. At about the halfway point (give or take), the prince gets his upgrade from the central alter, which destabilizes the place and initiates an escape sequence where the energy shifts noticeably. It’s not a tonally flat experience.
Up next was the first treasure hoard, which was a relief to see because it was visually consistent with the rest of the game and looked like something that could be located in the same city you were already traversing. It’s also worth noting here that the portals seem to be the vizier’s way of getting around quickly in The Two Thrones. Having them now lead to these new little areas actually does work well with the base game in at least one regard, since the prince and Dark Prince discuss following the vizier through the first sand portal but then are unable to do so (and just get the upgrade without going anywhere). Here, the portal is still a dead end for them, but they do get to use the network, sort of, making that floated possibility feel a bit less abortive and ultimately silly. This bonus section is very brief, and the player can get back on track quickly.
The third portal leads to a location somewhat reminiscent of the old blue health-upgrade-granting caverns from Sands of Time. The prince vocally identifies it as such, and the Dark Prince outright says that Kaileena was helping them even then. This is a huge retcon, as far as what is actually in the games is concerned, and I don’t think that I like how it further tangles the first game up in the mess that these sequels have made of the plot and lore. I guess it’s “cool” that they could make this connection, though, and it’s not like it’s nonsensical, exactly... And this area also goes by lightning-fast. You warp in, get the upgrade, and then warp back out. This could be seen as a disappointment by folks who wanted even more new content, but I see it as a positive. Having the portals lead to segments that vary in terms of time commitment and gameplay feels like the more considered way to insert new material, rather than just going with the biggest murder gauntlet the developers could envision. It makes these zones or levels or areas feel more harmonious with the surrounding content for potential first-time players, I assume, whereas Revelations’ new stuff looked like a fan-made hack that as good as assumes the player’s familiarity (and/or masochism).
At this point, the cycle of areas begins again, with another temple dedicated to the vizier. This one is less obviously otherworldly, however, thanks to the more familiar sandy color palette. It begins with a focus on a ship belonging to the prince’s father and then becomes a set piece challenge with a collapsing tower sequence. Taking the power from the alters in each of these three areas seems to do damage to the statue of the vizier’s godly form that stands nearby. Outside of what the game actually tells you about how this might be helping your cause (the prince theorizes at the end of the third temple section that destroying the alters has made the villain “vulnerable”), I think giving the vizier an even greater presence in the story with these areas and the hoards does feel like a good thing for keeping him at the forefront of the player’s mind and for making them feel like they’re tangibly gaining ground against him. Neither the ship or tower takes very much time, and the new Dark Prince sequence that caps off this portal is also very brief.
And then there’s another variation on the treasure hoard template. And then another Kaileena shrine. And then a fire/lava-focused temple that is a full-on Dark Prince level (but doesn’t take excessively long) that again looks pretty out of step with the rest of the game visually. I may be being unfairly critical of the extravagance and color on display in some of these new sections, however, as the temple areas are established from the get-go as legendary or magical and related to the vizier’s transformation. The whole teleportation deal together with these three temples and some narration from the prince in the first bring the more fantastical elements of the franchise even more strongly to the forefront in a way that I am still mixed on. I wouldn’t call these three games “grounded” at all, but it still feels like there’s a certain threshold being crossed here, that an avatar of a god pushes past but that I felt sand zombies and assorted other monsters and magical powers and time travel didn’t breach for some reason. Maybe it’s the lack of explanation that makes those other things work for me, but starting to dip into some sort of concrete cosmology causes me to feel like I’m drifting toward total fantasy (like Prince of Persia 2008). This stuff isn’t absent from the original Two Thrones, but the Rival Swords levels make it even harder to miss.
The final treasure hoard is pretty unremarkable (and still short), but it’s noteworthy because the prince mentions his father “putting up a fight” as a reason for the light enemy resistance waiting for him. That’s some nice foreshadowing (or perhaps dramatic irony for familiar players). Similarly, the final Kaileena shrine adds a bit more of a sense of conflict to the prince’s relationship with her and with Farah through some taunting from the Dark Prince (which unfortunately goes nowhere and is not foreshadowing). While the exposition in the first temple area had me thinking there might be a similar level of new narrative material with each of the other added zones, what you actually get might be more accurately characterized as “reminders.” Like I was saying before, the vizier has even more of a presence in the story, and Kaileena and the prince’s father also loom that little extra bit larger. I wouldn’t say missing out on this content is actually “missing out,” but it does not feel completely disconnected from the narrative like the Revelations areas, and that’s perhaps the biggest reason that I wanted to cover it somewhat thoroughly.
“Considered,” I said before, and that is still how I’d describe it here. As much as teleporting away from the main game map to temporarily do something else somewhere else feels like it should produce some disconnect, there were clearly steps taken to try to minimize the awkwardness and to still fit these new areas to the game’s established blend of narrative and gameplay rather than have them be strictly mechanical experiences that feel completely out of place. To reach a little again, toward theming, it’s not that the recursion or rejiggering is outright, always bad. These new zones seem like some thought was put into them, and when the game ultimately ends with the prince starting to tell Farah the complete story of his adventures, looping us back to the opening of Sands of Time once more, I’m not going to pretend that I’m too good to point and hoot and holler (and tear up) like everyone else.
Farah, relaxing (not) at home.
THE TWO THRONES DAY FIVE: KAILEENA VS FARAH—OR, “WHICH WIFE?”—OR, SYMPATHY FOR THE WITCH WIFE
“Tonight I want a slut. Would you be mine?
Heard you was freaky from a friend of mine.”
- “Shake That” (2005), Eminem (feat. Nate Dogg)
“The Prince of Persia, a seasoned warrior, returns from the Island of Time to Babylon with his love, Kaileena.”
- From the Steam description of The Two Thrones, emphasis mine
Speaking of not pretending to be too good to do something—Farah, or Kaileena?
There’s a more vulgar, subjective, personal, high school cafeteria type of response to that question (Kaileena: She’s more glamorous, seems older or more mature, and she’s meaner, in Warrior Within at least), but there’s also something more empirical, gleaned from the romantic arithmetic of the trilogy. Less “Which one do you prefer?” and more “Which one do the developers prefer?” Farah, obviously, is the answer since she’s the Lady of Interest in two out of the three games and is the one left standing in the end, but I still want to pursue this question as a means to talk about both of these major characters, the treatment of Kaileena specifically, and the ending of The Two Thrones.
Here's an ugly truth about these games (and characters) that nostalgia paints over: No one here is particularly well-characterized or complex. Kaileena v. Farah mostly comes down to a preference of looks or just vibes with maybe a dash of narrative importance or scant personality as essentially garnish. You don’t learn enough about either of these women to understand them as a theoretical romantic prospect. Farah is headstrong, independent and/or capable, and doesn’t take any guff, but you could say the same thing about Kaileena, at least in Warrior Within, and about any number of other video game characters (women and men both). Personality-wise, there’s little else. Ironically, Farah herself brings up something like this issue during an elevator ride in The Two Thrones, where she asks the prince about his favorite color and explains that she’s doing it precisely because they know so little about one another despite all their time together. It’s an indictment of the text from within, though with a somewhat reasonable and readily accessible explanation as well (they’ve been struggling to survive against overwhelming supernatural forces, not chatting before and after an 8 a.m. math class).
Of course, conversation and understanding aren’t the only ways to fall in love. If you treat the circumstances that the prince and these women go through as serious, then that struggle to survive certainly could bond them. Additionally, while we don’t learn much about Farah as a pretend person, she still has these moments of vulnerability with the prince in Sands of Time—especially the… climax of the relationship in the depths of the palace, and also the scene or so that precede it—that would obviously endear her to him, and to the audience. And that’s ultimately what we’re talking about here: The prince wants whoever the story decides he should, but the process by which the games’ developers try to put the player in that same perspective is the real topic of interest. Because these are games, where things like narrative and characterization are not strictly passive but instead involve some level of interactivity, it’s possible to create a stronger sense of knowing a character intimately through the mechanics.
This is where Farah in The Sands of Time feels like she receives so much preferential treatment. She’s physically present in the game world alongside the prince (can even be hurt and killed by him if the player attacks her accidentally or intentionally). She “helps” with certain puzzles and also helps, without quote marks, in combat by stunning enemies with her arrows and sometimes drawing aggro, splitting a hostile group. She requires protection during the fights, which some people might classify as “escort mission”-like and a nuisance, but it also endears her to you, forcefully if necessary, by making her life as critical as yours/the prince’s. If either of you die, it’s a “Game Over.” This equal treatment in the gameplay better mirrors the harrowing fight for survival the characters are enduring within the fiction and creates pathos through something more primal and subconscious than better conversations. There’s a real-time element to Sands of Time Farah that makes her both an active-feeling participant and more like a real, separate entity rather than an instrument of plot or gameplay. This isn’t to say that it “excuses,” or even “balances,” a lack of detail beneath the superficial impressions, but the story and characters function ok without elaboration because the game can fall back on the mechanical experience to knit the bits and pieces together and smooth over the gaps. And on some level Sands of Time may even work better without the additional complications, being so fantastical or romantic. The prince is just “the Prince,” for example. He’s downright archetypal, in a way. We’re not dealing with people so much as splashes of color suggestive of people, and suggestion can be enough when you’re working within a mythic frame. Complexity and moving beyond a tidy “The End,” however, create a need for something more concrete, I feel. Warrior Within and The Two Thrones weave ever more complicated narratives and expand the scope and continue things in such a way that the mythic quality fades a bit. They also do a worse job with the romance because they come to rely more on the story and less on the mechanical experience.
I do need to acknowledge here that it makes sense for the prince/player to know very little about Kaileena in Warrior Within, at least up to a point. She’s a (not-so) secret antagonist, in addition to the beefy pursuer monster, so she’s aloof—both emotionally and physically distant—because she doesn’t want to be killed by the prince and is trying to kill him first, within the context of the fiction, and because, from a craft perspective, the developers want her to be a mystery that the twist boss fight against her resolves. But could they really not have had her accompany the prince, like Farah did, at some point? Maybe it doesn’t suit Kaileena’s personality, but there’s also the issue of the game’s rushed development to consider. Rather than draw things out too much, let me just jump ahead and note that Farah runs into this same issue in The Two Thrones but without as much potential justification in the narrative or her personality. The overall lack of actual, in-the-moment cooperation with Farah (the loss of the “real-time” component from Sands of Time), despite the narrative conceit being that she and the prince are collaborating at points, hurts the emotional appeal. It’s more or less all cutscenes instead, and the developers keep her out of the way during actual gameplay rather than having her participate in the puzzle-solving or fighting at the prince’s side.
As with Kaileena in Warrior Within, the extratextual answer to the question of “why” is that the amount of work required to script certain interactions and program the AI and implement things like health depletion for combat, which would further require additional considerations like getting enemies to target these other characters and attack them, would have undoubtedly required too much work in too little time—not just the time needed to set up the women as active participants but also the additional testing and balancing that this would have needed as well. While The Two Thrones tries to make the prince and Farah fall in love again via the narrative, I’ve already spoken about why I consider that to be an issue. Arguably, it relies on the player’s pre-existing investment in the prince-Farah relationship rather than successfully recreating and strengthening that investment here.
See how even I can’t seem to resist pushing Kaileena out of the frame, though? I do feel sorry for the character. If you play Warrior Within and The Two Thrones back-to-back (and also get the true ending in the former), then her treatment feels especially cruel. She escapes death in the second game along with the prince, sort of starts a relationship with him, and then is immediately seized by the vizier’s forces and shortly thereafter killed in the third game, which then goes on to push the prince and Farah back together instead. Were those two always meant to be “endgame,” or were the prince’s romantic interests as swayed by the trilogy’s uneven, hurried progress from entry to entry as the mechanical and technical aspects? For years, I had assumed there was something like a smoking gun in the ending(s) of Warrior Within. The image at the start of this section comes from the true/good ending, and I had remembered it as being Kaileena in peril, though on replay and during the writing process for the previous essay in this retrospective it became obvious that the woman from the vision of a besieged Babylon is Farah instead (though her Sands of Time design). This revelation made the “fridging” of Kaileena and the shift in attention back to Farah feel much more premeditated. But is that what Warrior Within sets up?
Once again dealing in archetypes or tropes or mythic patterns (cultural, social, or artistic assumptions), when the prince asks Kaileena to “[c]ome with [him] to Babylon,” what does that invitation imply? I realized I had always assumed something romantic, Kaileena being the obvious attractive damsel in this situation, but it doesn’t actually make sense that way in the game since the prince barely knows this woman and there haven’t been any other romantic overtures to speak of, unless you “read between the lines” like I did and take her for a romantic prospect just because that’s what the various traditions seem to suggest. Something like the brief close-up shot of their two hands on the same sword hilt at one point, prior to the prince learning Kaileena’s true identity and before the invitation to Babylon, almost certainly contributes as well.
And also—“come to Babylon” and… Enjoy our low, low taxes and thriving arts scene, and maybe I’ll come visit you sometime to see how things are going? It almost feels equally ridiculous for this to not be romantic.
And then there’s the sex they end up having! Of course, in the real world, where people have depth and where we don’t make decisions based on templates for behavior and on the needs of some sort of overarching plot, people do sleep together for any number of reasons, sometimes without any expectations for long-term commitment, or maybe the expectations are there but later go unfulfilled. Actual human lives are messy, and arguably the best art engages with that messiness and tries to translate some degree of it to the page or screen while still also offering a satisfying artistic experience. At the risk of being incredibly insulting and of assuming way too much, I don’t think “The Sands of Time Trilogy” is on that level. The first game works as a simple fairytale, as previously established, but the other two are just… not great as narrative art. They’re functional as video game stories, but forgive me (creators of those stories, specifically) if I suggest that they don’t really strike me as the sort of works with room for the messiness I was vaguely describing. Assuming that simplicity, then the intimacy established with Kaileena feels like a problem to be resolved, another bit of course-correction.
Despite Getting Busy together, you might reasonably argue that Warrior Within’s ending leaves the exact nature of the prince’s relationship with Kaileena ambiguous. The two certainly don’t appear to be romantically involved at the beginning of The Two Thrones before their boat is sunk and Kaileena is taken away by the vizier’s soldiers. A bit of narration from Kaileena very early on further downplays any sense of potential romance, as she says outright that the prince is not motivated by love (for her). The physical relationship is jokingly acknowledged by the Dark Prince during his first manifestation, as one of several possible causes for the prince’s transformation: “Maybe it’s the Dagger. Maybe it’s all the time you spent amongst the Sands, or… amongst the Empress…” As previously mentioned, certain regions of the world also got a small hint of potential conflict/resolution in the final Rival Swords bonus area, but nothing ever comes of the Dark Prince’s goading about explaining to Farah how the prince’s “dead lover is helping [him] from beyond the grave” and about his “holiday on the Island of Time.” I don’t count these passing references as meaningfully dealing with the messiness since it never really matters to the plot. While the game spends a lot of time—the entire narrative, in fact—working through the process by which the prince rebounds from the darkness he embraced in Warrior Within, handling that conflict with a lot of weight, the relationship with Kaileena isn’t given the same treatment. While creating the final game of a trilogy with a split ending could be weird and not as definitive-feeling, there is this obvious potential that could have been made to work that way, by somehow letting the prince/player choose between Farah and Kaileena. As much as the prince and player might feel a preference for Farah because of Sands of Time, all involved parties have conceivably grown and changed over the years, right?
A question worth asking is, outside of strictly nostalgia for The Sands of Time, what is it about Kaileena that might make her a less than ideal partner for the prince? If Farah was always meant to be The One and Kaileena was just an… interlude, then why? What makes Farah so great? I have a specific reason in mind, of course, but I’m going to build up to it a bit. While working on this piece, I decided to check Reddit to see what sort of things other people had to say about the Farah-Kaileena situation and found this small thread from r/PrinceOfPersia called “Kaileena or Farah, and why?” I’m going to quote some of the posts here and will note up front that there’s no mockery intended. I’m going to take them seriously, and any grammatical issues that I reproduce I’m keeping in the name of accuracy.
One user says, “Kaileena understands Prince more, Farah is like that childhood crush you cant let go lol.” Another writes that Farah is “[m]ore romantic and childish but better for me . I mean she is a Warrior and a princess too, she is the BEST for the Prince with no doubt , Kaileena is more passional but Farah is like the other half of the Orange for the Prince.” Still another puts it in much simpler terms:
“Kiss - Kaileena
Marry - Farah
Avoid - Shahdee.”
These are not all of the replies, of course, and some go into great detail about how Kaileena’s story, or “inner conflict,” in Warrior Within “mirrored” that of the prince, which is something I also brought up in my essay on that game: “[T]he prince and Kaileena both want to be freed from their respective fates which bind them. . . . [T]he ‘good’ ending is the one where Kaileena is also saved.” I think the above several quotes from the Reddit thread are particularly interesting, though, because of a pattern that I see in their thinking about Kaileena and Farah. Kaileena has a certain maturity, we might say (she “understands” the prince better), and she’s associated with passion. She’s the one you want to… “kiss.” But Farah is “that childhood crush.” She’s associated not with passion but with something deeper and more poetic, and also more lasting (“Marry”). This is far from comprehensive, empirical research into the matter—and there’s actually a strong pro-Kaileena sentiment to that thread overall—but I think it’s somewhat telling what these two women get associated with, even in this limited sampling. It feels meaningful because I think it aligns with how the developers at Ubisoft portrayed the characters in the games themselves: Kaileena is associated with passion, power, and danger. She’s more heavily sexualized, especially in Warrior Within. Meanwhile, Farah’s clothing is not quite as revealing, and she’s treated less like a potential conquest and more like a love interest, despite certain text (here taken from the Sands of Time manual) describing “the wiles of a seductive princess.” Even though older Farah in The Two Thrones has been glammed up a bit, her outfit is not substantially skimpier than before and has been further augmented with armor-like elements, gesturing at her warrior-princess status in the game. Consequently, there’s still a certain chasteness or even innocence to her design.
The love scene with Farah in Sands of Time is romantic, sweet, soft, sensual and dreamlike, and it’s ultimately undone by the prince’s reversal of time, assuming it actually happened at all. In my essay on Sands of Time, I described this scene as “very adolescent, like the rest of the game. Carnal but also very smitten, tentative, even. . . .” It is spiritually or aesthetically aligned with something like a childhood crush consummated. The equivalent scene with Kaileena is definitely rougher and darker—not just because of the vision of future destruction that comes with it but because there’s a sort of uncomfortable ambiguity to the way that it’s depicted, with plenty of cinematic precedents: Kaileena approaches the prince below deck as they’re sailing for Babylon, and then we cut to him pushing her against a wall, and she seems sort of resistant at first, while the prince manhandles her face, before “giving into passion” or whatever. Where the scene with Farah in the bath is kept mysterious by fading to black before anything much happens, we see (just) about a second of Kaileena sliding down in a telling sort of way in Warrior Within, and the further very carefully framed and then eventually sort of trippy imagery of the… encounter that we’re shown between shots of a ravaged Babylon isn’t so hard to parse for further explicit suggestions. This definitely happens, in Warrior Within’s canon ending; we see a lot more of it, in contrast to Sands of Time; and it is not undone. If Kaileena was a virgin before this, she isn’t anymore, and one way of looking at what happens to her in The Two Thrones—how she’s killed and cast aside in favor of Farah—is yet another approach to depicting physical intimacy (or, more accurately, its “consequences”) in media with a long history.
I’m not going to seriously use the phrase “slut shaming” here, as Kaileena is a fictional person with no agency, but that’s the spirit of what I’m going to argue: That Kaileena, from her physical, excessively voluptuous, appearance to the fact that she’s canonically had sex (with the prince) makes her an unacceptable partner in something like the mind of the game, if you think of the combined wills behind its creation as a sort of collective consciousness. I was going to say before that “slut shaming” also doesn’t apply since a single-partner history shouldn’t qualify but then immediately realized that that is completely immaterial. The whole point of real-world puritanical, punitive attitudes around this stuff, particularly with regard to women, is that they’re illogical and excessive. It doesn’t matter that Kaileena has only been with the prince as far as we know or that someone’s body or clothes shouldn’t “disqualify” them from being worthy of love—We see it all the time in the real world, with real people, and media naturally reflects the messy hypocrisy. I’m not saying Ubisoft killed a character for being Too Hot (that they made that way), but I think that’s one way of reading the Kaileena-Farah conflict and how they’re treated by the final entry in the trilogy. As previously established, you just “kiss” Kaileena, the dual-wielding temptress with the dramatic eye makeup and big breasts; you marry Farah, the virtuous childhood crush with the less revealing top and slimmer figure. Warrior Within absolutely conflates sexiness with evil (with both Kaileena and Shahdee), and while The Two Thrones doesn’t go quite so obviously far overboard, it still operates under the same presumption as it draws out these threads to their conclusion.
I don’t want to get too tangled up trying to critique the story of The Two Thrones since that would require an even more detailed look at the game than what I already have here, but I will discuss the ending since it has to do with the treatment of Kaileena: After the vizier is defeated but before the final confrontation with the Dark Prince (before that final victory and the prince looping us back to Sands of Time before the credits), Kaileena returns, sort of. The Sands of Time take her shape again, and the prince gives her the Dagger of Time, which she kind of absorbs. Somehow, she’s still a coherent presence within the Sands and can speak with the prince, announcing that she plans to go find her place in another world. She tells the prince that he is “free” and that “[his] journey is at an end” and then dissipates.
This scene raises a lot of questions, maybe especially the casual mention of other worlds. I said before that the new Rival Swords PSP content seems to retcon the function of the health upgrade rooms in Sands of Time to have been the direct intervention of the Empress of Time on the prince’s behalf, but there’s a fair amount of similar stuff even in just the base game. The vizier was led to Babylon to find Kaileena by the Dagger of Time itself, which was previously just a secondary receptacle for the Sands and that allowed its wielder to harness their power but which now seems to have some vague will of its own. Also, the Sands no longer seem to transform everyone quite so indiscriminately like they did at Azad (though an early cutscene even in that first game does emphasize human survivors); there are a lot of untransformed citizens of Babylon to be rescued in this game. The transformed creatures can now speak and seem to be sentient, and, as previously mentioned, Kaileena can apparently manifest from the Sands and can communicate as well. I’m unsure how big of an issue this stuff actually is. The Two Thrones isn’t unique as a piece of media that looks backward to fill in “gaps” creatively, to perhaps make the whole series look grander and more thoughtfully constructed in retrospect despite a (potential) lack of original intentionality regarding future installments or developments.
I think a lot of this stuff qualifies as Nerd Shit, probably, where the game itself passes the vibe check superficially and only the truly pedantic will start asking questions like “Why didn’t Kaileena say something in Sands of Time if she could communicate as the Sands?” You could argue that she didn’t communicate with the prince in Sands of Time because she didn’t actually know him yet, but that answer doesn’t make sense given that she could always see the timeline and its variations and would presumably know about the events of the later games before they happened. Or maybe she’d been transformed into the Sands for too long in that original version of the events where she died on the Island of Time long ago, whereas being more freshly dispersed in The Two Thrones meant she wasn’t as… settled?
It’s just very convenient that there’s this comfortable solution to the Sands being released that doesn’t require rewinding time, right? Since we’ve decided that’s a bad thing. This also conveniently solves the problem of the prince being romantically entangled with two women since one of them, who once fought against her fated death and transformation so fiercely, has had a personality transplant between games, decided this is her fate and good enough ultimately, and then leaves for… space. In this case, at least, the prince is still dodging the consequences of his actions, technically. But it’s all ok since he has Farah and since we are returned to the warm embrace of The Sands of Time once more!
Ironically, Sands of Time is the game from the trilogy that I least want to play again, when I consider the possibility. Warrior Within and The Two Thrones (which I am increasingly convinced is probably about as janky as Warrior Within, though just not game-breakingly so) might be rougher, but I like their gameplay so much more. If Sands of Time is the Farah of the trilogy and the other two games are spiritually Kaileena, then I guess at least my taste is consistent. There was nearly a year-long break between “Day Three” and “Day Four” of this piece, plus some extra days spent on a full additional replay I’m not counting because this “diaries” format has failed and I’m abandoning it forever after this essay, but the prospect of replaying The Two Thrones, or maybe Warrior Within, to try to wrap all this up actually didn’t strike me as such a bad thing. I started that second replay of The Two Thrones not long after reaching maximum frustration finishing the previous playthrough, and yet I found the game charismatic in a really tactile way all over again. It’s not just nostalgia that makes it worth revisiting—This is a good game. Not in necessarily every respect all the time, and certainly not if you approach it like I have with an eye trained on its inconsistencies or bits of awkwardness as a mediator between two wildly different previous titles, but it is overall, in the end.
What I wasn’t expecting when I
started this project was just how hard it would be to find certain images I
wanted to use—namely a particular wallpaper of a mildly seductive-looking Warrior
Within Kaileena that I’m pretty sure I have on a USB stick somewhere around
here. It is remarkably hard to find that image online now using Google.
Actually, I couldn’t find it, or at least not from a site I felt
comfortable clicking on. I ended up using a different image of Kaileena for my
above edit. For the Farah image, I had similar trouble and resorted to a Blogger
site called… “Anime Feet.” (And then I found the Kaileena image, too
late, on the Giant Bomb wiki, so maybe this is just an indictment of Google?)
