Missed storytelling opportunities
Brief thought about Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, which I’m enjoying. The gameplay is good, which is to say it basically executes on the Sands of Time formula without any unfortunate aesthetic decisions. However, and I need to play Sands of Time again because I haven’t since 2003, the storytelling seems less good. The story itself is fine, but so much of the dialog is expository that it’s hard to get too interested.
Here’s what made me think this: there’s a sequence where a huge monster is hopping from tower to tower on this palace, shooting some kind of energy bolts that are turning the balconies you’re standing on into rubble. (The actual gameplay is less tense than you’d expect from that; the monster carefully waits for you to progress before destroying more level geometry.) Periodically the Prince finds a place to re-enter the palace and hopefully lose the monster, but eventually he has to exit and there it is again.
After this happens a few times, the monster suddenly gives up and hops to some other part of the palace, and the Prince says (paraphrasing) “Where’s it going? It must be after Malik’s medallion! I have to get there first!” So OK, that explains why the monster’s gone (without having to kill it yet) and tells me what I’m going to be doing next.
But wasn’t the Prince just going flat-out for several minutes to avoid imminent death? Maybe it would characterize the guy better if he had some kind of non-plot-related reaction. You could go any number of ways with this: it would be funny if the Prince half-heartedly yelled after the monster “Get back here! I’m not done with you!”, and/or he could take a moment to sit down and catch his breath before realizing why he has to keep moving.
Again, it’s fine like it is, but if you’re going to bother animating and voicing these cutscenes, it seems like it would be a good opportunity to make me care about the character, which I mostly don’t — he could be Lara Croft and it wouldn’t make much difference to the way I’m taking in the game.
