izigame.me

After 300 hours of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, playing a prince of Persia game is like eating a chocolate cake on the body of a good-looking woman.
Sands of Time feels like the videogame adaptation of a lost animated Disney movie from the 90s. The story isn't deep or clever, and it doesn't have any pretensions of such, but it is pleasant and charming. I replayed this last year and still mostly loved it. It was a favorite of mine, replayed it trading off with my wife’s boyfriend.
The platforming is some of the best I’ve ever played. The animations are so smooth and I’ve always compared the controls to Tony Hawk—they’re so intuitive they become second nature almost immediately. It's not especially complex or challenging, but then it's not supposed to be. The designers want you to stop and think, but they don't want you to get stuck for a long time. There was only one puzzle where I thought the solution was unnecessarily oblique, and led to a rather tedious bout of trial and error. Usually, the game maintains an engaging pace and you always feel like you're making progress.
The story was pretty good. The prince and Farah had really great chemistry and dialogue together. The prince had a great character arc, and was humanly flawed. His monologues are pretty endearing. Farah is a great character as well.
I always loved that instead of a complex plot they put their focus on Farrah and the Prince’s relationship as they move from hostility to feuding friendship to something more, the banter was the best of the experience for me. The characters are by a wide margin the best part of the game, and I think are why it's remembered so fondly.

Sands had the best character of any game I’ve ever played. And I don’t mean character as a person, but as the personality of the game. All the well spoken dialogue, the elegant movement, the picturesque backdrops of a huge castle under a starry sky. I particularly loved the music: my current strong love for Eastern music probably has roots in how much Sands of Time musics impacted on me as a kid.
And what about combat mechanics? True, there aren't button combos, but animations were way better than the sequels. There are special animations that trigger only near enemies. This helped combat to feel like a fluid dance. Enemies are clearly distincted by strengths and weaknesses and you needed to use different approaches. You can do 2 different kinds of parry and counterattack with a super satisfying animation.
And the most important thing is that you NEEDED TO USE THE DAGGER in order to really finish an enemy. It was so perfect because you also had to think if you can open your guard for absorbing the enemy or it was better to keep fighting with the risk of reviving an already dead enemy. Also, daggers animations were incredible especially when you try to absorb an enemy positioned a couple steps of distance back from you.
I don't know. I loved all the series but this little game had some sort of magic that wasn't present in the others.
Sands of Time is in the heart of players not just for a crazy ton of new mechanics or an incredible soundtrack, but also for the little details, like the animations, or the fact that you see the prince clothes go in pieces and get ruined, one piece by one, through the entire adventure, making you really connect with the hero and the struggle he faces in order to save the world. Little touches that were completely forgotten in the sequels.
I don't think that this is really just nostalgia. What the heck are you waiting for?!
9/10