my friend just hopped out of a discord call by saying "oh, i gotta go, someone just released a one-hour video essay on a game i've never played before, sly 4". lo and behold i come check my sub feed and what do i see
Feels like the best fix for the setup is Sly finds out someone is erasing his family history, decides Carmelita has enough on her plate as a law enforcer, tries to not involve her in this hoping it will be something he can just nip in the bud and then get back to her(Maybe he even feels bad for being a thorn in her side in the past and doesn’t want this to be another case of her having to deal with his adventures.), but Carmelita follows him anyway and over the course of the story, pieces it all together and ends up helping in the end
@@__-be1gkThank you. Character botching and undoing previous developments with nothing substantial to make up for it(And especially no character consistent reason) are my least favorite things a sequel can do
Or even have that the messing with the changing or the past is messing with Sly himself. I mean, say he has gaps in his memories, even forgetting parts of the past games. Say messing with Riorichi Cooper in the past makes Sly forget the Raleigh world. And he has to re learn how to do certain moves that way. Hell even have him missing on memories from Bentley and Murray. And Carmelita is involved because she loves Sly and is obviously concerned for him.
@@svenbtb I was 100%ing it with the mindset that I do it once, get the Platinum, and promptly *never* do it again. Not planning on returning to it unless I’m doing a full series playthrough, and even then, I might just stop after 3. Hope that clears it up!
Ahh yes, another IP where the lust for more resulted in subpar results. Star Wars at least had some gas left and some characters to explore... At least in some of the shows and in the prequels. But a lot of the problems (rehashing old ideas, trying to disguise them as new, flashy effects covering up the fact that the story underneath is weak, the creators not quite understanding what made the originals great, etc etc) are basically the same in both Sly and Star Wars
I'm surprised you didn't bring up the fact that they purposefully nerf Sly because of his ancestors. Sly's lunge upwards, similar to Sir Galleth's, goes just as high as Galleth's goes. But in his stage, Sly's now is half of what it usually is, to make up for Galleth's sections. Extremely weird choices all around in this game. Happy to see you covered it.
I feel like they missed an easy lay up by not having the final chapter being Sly having to run into his own parents and team up with them (while they don't know who he is) ending of course with him doing that thing from the old Star Trek where he has to let them go off to their deaths or risk ruining time. It pretty much writes itself!
Dang, that sounds incredible. I could seeing them not wanting to step on Sucker Punch’s established tropes by showing Sly’s dad’s face, but considering they changed so much about the existing characters, I’m surprised they didn’t just go for it.
@@CyberDrewanThey had an writing out for his face tho giving he seemed to be at least somewhat tech savvy what with sliding on lasers being his part of the vault. Give me a holo suit/his own disguise.
Same! I was getting that implication too when the ending showed Penelope got away and I feel they would have had her run into Clockwerk in Egypt and she would be the one to help him replace his biological body with machinery and she'd create the Hate Chip for him.
Very unlikely imo considering the game ends on a damn cliffhanger if a new game in the series exist it either is a remake or it completely retcons Thieves from the canon... which to be fair I don't think many fans would be against the idea
There is no way in hell we're ever getting another Sly game unless that terrible looking Sly TV show/movie ever gets off the ground. If that happens, it'll be a reboot and likely be poorly received by fans.
Penelope's heel turn was legitimately so bad that it made me wonder if Ms. Decibel actually hypnotized her to be evil. That way they could always reverse it in a potential Sly 5.
The problem there is, there's no indication that she was hypnotized, and she monologued to herself about her reasons why she turned heel. So she is definitely still self-aware. Whereas the other victims of the mind control were clearly in a trance. Personally, I'd prefer we just pretend this game never happened, instead of trying to fix it in the next game. Which, let's be honest is probably never going to happen. Seeing as the game is now 11 years old.
This was one of the strangest things to happen in the game. I played trough all 4 Sly games back to back and when I reached that boss I just had a massive "huh, whaaaaaaaaaaaaat" moment.
I’ve heard rumors that Sir Raleigh would have been the Boss of the Medieval England level. I mean it would have made sense seeing how Raleigh just wants revenge against for defeating him in the first game. But the writers thought it was best to commit character assassination on Penelope by having her hate Sly for very nonsensical reasons.
I think with the Cooper Clan armor in Ghost of Tsushima, Sucker Punch still retains the rights to the series; they just lent the IP to Sanzaru because they were busy developing Infamous: Second Son.
In a age of sequels and a lot of properties that have overstayed their welcome, I honestly respect Sly 3 for having a message dedicated to moving on in life. Much as I may love certain media franchises, a lot of them are simply not meant to last forever even if they are not that story heavy.
This is how I feel about Mother/Earthbound series. Mother 3 is one of my all time favourite games and it's nice to know that at least one beloved Nintendo series is over and we can focus our attention to other things.
More like bad comics. There are plenty of good ones that don't do this.... unless in this context comic books only refers to main stream DC/Marvel comics and nothing else.
@@LuffyMcDuck I kind of was. It's true that more independent fair can actually have complete story arcs for characters, but the factory-like nature of the Big Two leads to them repeating themselves often, especially with their most popular characters.
Sly 4s biggest story issue is that the main bad guy is such a nobody villain. The fact he has no presence throughout most of the game just for his entire backstory to be "yeah so one time my dad tried to steal a thing and was beat by your dad and got arrested." is a NOTHING backstory. They couldve made his entire family lineage like, a failed arch-enemy to the Cooper clan. Failed skunk thieves throughout time that weren't even known BECAUSE they always failed, and they would show up working with each areas bad guy, maybe we learn it at the start, or the fact skunks keep showing up builds towards the reveal of his failed family clan. Also, they literally nuked Penelopes character from orbit like what was with that?
@StagFiesta He's just Clockwerk background of being a thief who resented not getting the Coopers' infamy only instead of being a cyborg owl he's a "honk honk rival villain version of Sly."
Or... they could have.... you know..... Just had the immortal hate owl be the obvious, pre built, and logical villain in the time travel game................
This video is a perfect jumping off point to discuss how, at least in the modern age, people having an extreme aversion to media series having a definitive end and the developers moving on to other projects instead of just turning the property into another content farm of sequels, spinoffs an extended universe. This game feels like it was made by people who just couldnt let something they loved go.
I just want another platforming focused adventure like the first game. It's an easy contender for one of my favorite games of all-time, but that style only existed for one entry.
Another element that adds to why the Cooper ancestors feel like such non-entities in the game is their gameplay, which just boils down to "Sly, but". Rioichi is just Sly, but he can long-jump. Tennessee is just Sly, but with a gun. Bob is the only one who breaks the system...because he's "Murray, but with Sly's pickpocketing." Salim has the real short stick of the ancestors, as his fast-climb ability is functionally identical to Sly's costume ability to slow time; sure, Salim is faster, but both skills are primarily used for the same type of challenge. And the whole time-travelling aspect, while neat on paper, doesn't really add anything to the core mechanics or level design of the original trilogy. All the environments and challenges just gave me a strong sense of deja vu. "10000 BC" felt like a rehash of "Menace from the North, eh!", it even redoes the lumberjack challenges Bison forces the gang into with Bob's training. "40 Thieves" felt like wandering around Rajan's palace thanks to the similar-feeling architecture, but during the day instead (and yes, I know India is a very different place from Arabia, I'm only saying the games use a very similar art style for both). It's a real shame, since "10000 BC" actually made me interested in what the levels were going to be like moving forward. The Cooper van is stuck in a mishmash of train tracks that were pulled through time with the gang, harshly standing out against the prehistoric ice age they find themselves in. I was expecting more of the same in future levels, with different time periods crashed together. Imagine if the Black Knight's robots were squaring off against Arabian guards (who in this scenario would not be working for Decibel) in some horrible combination of Arabia and England, forcing the Cooper Gang to manipulate the two armies into fighting one another to give themselves a smokescreen to break into the Black Knight's castle. For a game that uses time travel as its main conceit, it's frustrating that it doesn't even _DO_ anything interesting with the idea.
Crazy to think my introduction to Sly was this game, i genuienly loved it back then and it lead me to try the original trilogy Even as a kid the writting on Sly 2 and 3 were just something else I returned to Thieves in Time and was like "huh" At least the gameplay is solid
@@ForrestFox626 it actually is. He literally gave up his entire life and family fortune in order to be with the person he loves. It's an absolute betrayal of the character that he would go back on that. And if he does, doesn't that kind of make him a completely horrible person?
@@ForrestFox626 Well as King said, you can easily make the case that they were both in on it. Besides lying in order to try to make it work ≠ it making sense that he would immediately go back on that. Even if it hypothetically is something he would do (which based on the ending of three, he would not), it still makes him incredibly selfish and manipulative. So they shouldn't have done it either way because it makes the main character incredibly unlikable. Media literacy, it's not hard.
I remember when my friend and I were discussing what the next adventure Sly Cooper adventure would be about. Note that this was back when Infamous was still relatively new. We had this idea that the next game wouldn't explore the past, but the future. Sly's daughter uses her Uncle Bentley's time machine to go back in time and see her father and mother. Originally we thought that it'd be neat to have you play as primarily her, and choose between thieving and Interpol, but now I'd like to change things up. Instead, I like the idea of the revelation that the Cooper legacy lives on. This revelation would force Sly to admit to Carmelita that he never had amnesia, and would put the Cooper legacy into the forefront. Sly 3 explored legacy in a past and present sense. But now, Sly has to really think about his life as a thief, and if it's truly right for him to set his daughter up for such a life. There might not be a Clockwerk anymore, but Sly definitely had his fair share of hardships after Clockwerk's demise. Carmelita would also have to confront this, along with whatever problem followed the daughter back from the future. It still needs a lot of work, but there's SOMETHING here. Finally with the Penelope thing, I can tell you that that reveal was when I truly loathed this game. Every part before that was either disappointing, insulting, or underwhelming, which isn't great, but I could forgive it being just a terrible game. Penelope was one of my favorite characters in 3. She was cute, intelligent, and kind. She was a character who showed her sense of justice and fairplay well before she officially joined your team. When she saw that Bentley was having a low point during the penultimate episode in 3, she helped build him up even though she still had a crush on Sly at the time. Hearing her insult Sly, insult BENTLEY for no reason crossed a line, and insulted the story of Sly Cooper so much, that I actively stopped trying to enjoy the game. There's mediocre gameplay with little mission variety, bad character writing, bad STORY writing that has Sly say "As luck would have it" between every episode, and heck, even bad easter eggs (there's a Clockwerk in some missions, but he looks like a robot in the worst possible way), but Penelope was the final nail in the coffin.
Wanted to add to this comment because I just thought of something. 1. For Penelope have had her be hypnotized. 2. More importantly, this could have given Carmelita a chance to help Bentley through his emotional turmoil. As good as Sly is with relationships, I think that Carmelita's feminine touch could help bring Bentley back to his senses. It could also give the two a chance to actually talk and bounce off one another, because I can't remember any time when the two are actually given the time to talk on-screen (I hope I'm wrong about this, haven't played Sly in over a decade).
I think what dissappoints me most about Sly 4 is that it doesn't scratch the same itch the original trilogy did. And no other game or developer since that really has. I know people point to Assassins Creed as a "Sly but more mature", but those aren't about planning heists and prepping for them. They're about (giving Ubisoft money) parkour and social stealth. Ghost of Tsushima is the closest we have gotten to a new Sly game fittingly enough, but that still didn't scratch my Sly itc (even though it was really good and I can't wait to see what Sucker Punch does next) So I just hope some fresh indie dev is fiddling around with a 3D game engine, played Sly as a kid and REALLY wants to bring those feelings back...
Sucker Punch themselves has basically states that they would not be against the idea of returning to the Sly franchise after their new project (obviously Ghost of Tsushima 2)
@elharvey5032 If SP were to return to Sly, I really hope it won't be a continuation of Thieves in Time. Either we get a direct sequel to Sly 3 or graphical remakes of the trilogy (like Crash and Spyro).
Don’t get me wrong, the Penelope’s twist is one of the absolute worst things I’ve ever seen, and it utterly baffled me for a number of years. But I think I know what they were going for. They wanted to give Sly his own Dr. M. Dr M’s entire character was rooted in being the “Bentley” of the previous generation, the tech genius who ran with Sly’s dad, but he grew to resent Connor and came to believe Connor was simply using him as a pawn rather than respecting him as an equal. I think this was something Sanzaru wanted to explore more in Sly 4, but, obviously, Sly 3 pretty firmly ruled out the possibility of Bentley ever ending up like M by the end. Conveniently however, the same game saw the Cooper Gang recruit another tech genius who just might be able to serve that purpose. Their thought process was essentially “if Bentley won’t follow in Dr. M’s footsteps, what about Penelope?” Looking at Penelope’s motives as presented in Sly 4, she basically echoes about Sly all of Dr. M’s rhetoric about Connor; she claims that Sly was holding her and Bentley back, insists that he only ever saw the rest of the gang as pawns, and her desire to make a profit in weapons dealing reflects the same greed that caused M to waste years of his life obsessively trying to break into the Cooper Vault. I don’t think any of this is unintentional. The twist is still awful, and it still requires you to forget absolutely everything about Penelope’s characterization in Sly 3, but this is what I think they were going for. Or I’m crazy and giving them way too much credit by assuming there was any kind of plan here.
One of the actual best takes on this plot twist I’ve seen. Good on you. Plus didn’t Sly 4 take place 8 years after Sly 3? That’s plenty of time for her to turn on the gang
@@terrabnadia1793 If she was that greed filled she wouldn't have needed to help carry out some supervillain scheme to conquer France and wipe away the Coopers using time travel. Sly was out of action for years she could have easily just talked Bentley into going into big business.
I feel like with how the game ends with her sending postcards to Bentley she was going to come back to the good side and help Bentley/Murray save Sly from the past in the follow up game, we just never got the follow up game
The pain I felt when I accidentally selected the wrong character and wait like 8 mins to leave the hideout and then RE-ENTER the hideout with another long ass load screen. silly sanzu game
Bro what 😂😂 must be a connection issue or something cause I always loaded up in 30 seconds or less and I’m playing this game again right now and haven’t ever waited over a minute with the loading screen
In my personal opinion. Sanzaru games suceeded in delivering the Sly gameplay experience I came to love with the original, but failed totally in the writing department to the point I am questioning if the people who made the game understood SP's characters at all.
Excellent analysis King! You’ve probably seen it, but B-Mask has a set of videos on the trilogy that are amazing too. As the years have gone by I’ve always thought the best direction the story could have gone was to have Carmelita get kidnapped and that be the motivation for Sly to get back in the game. Also thought it would be cool to mature the gameplay a bit in the vein of MGS 5, not turning Sly into a shooter, but having even more emphasis on gadgets and sandbox style episodes where it’s almost in “stages”. Stage 1: you’re on the “outskirts” of the villains “base” trying to get in. Less enemy activity. Stage 2: you’ve gotten in the base and there’s much more enemy activity and even more emphasis on stealth. Some very vague ideas but have always been swirling in my head. Awesome video as always. Always like hearing your analysis. ✌🏻
It only just now occurred to me how weird it is that at no point in the time travel Sly Cooper game where he runs into several of his ancestors do we even see clockwork, who has been menacing the Cooper clan for generations.
I still can't believe what they did to my boy Bentley with Penelope. I really almost quit playing it because it made absolutely no sense for her to be evil all of a sudden. Just another example of more of something doesn't mean it'll be good. *cough cough* HALO *cough cough*.
Sly 4 is the game that made my friends clinch their jaws every time I asked about it. Sly trilogy's loved to the bone around here, like almost everyone played them in their childhood, and the few who touched Thieves in Time were so hurt how bad they managed this game, the name Sanzaru Games being almost like a curse word.
I've come to accept that when a story is over, it's over. With stuff like Spyro and Crash, which doesn't play itself to seriously to character growth, you can always expect a new adventure to make sense. But then you have IPs like Sly that, once they've completed their story, its time to close it. Really, the only reason now I want Sly 5 is for him to get out of Egypt and get back that happy ending he had in 3.
I would have loved a game that was sly reading the stories of his family to his kid with Carmelita and you play through the story, they could pick a few family members to have their own mini arc
Man YT is wild. I haven't thought about sly since early 2000s, rediscovered him here like a month ago and now the algorithm is just trolling me. Lol thanks king. 😂
The character of Bob should have just been called Cooper and have him the first to fight Clockwerk, give us the origin of the clan's feud with the evil owl. It should have been episode one in the game and it would have given the story so much weight. The ancient evil is still a factor and this new villain is using that to try and ruin the Cooper's for his own reasons, only to find out that Clockwerk is no one's partner just pure evil.
I feel like a lot of the problems of this game could have been fixed with having the script go through another draft. I have never seen a video game be damaged so much by a bad story.
40 Thieves was honestly my favorite episode because the game was finally done with dumb drama and twists. All bets were off and the game just does the few things it was good at which was having you do some decently fun missions around a world. Also Salim is goated and like the only character in the game that's actually funny don't @ me
Throughout the video, as you talked about the original trilogy, I had fond and vibrant memories of those three games. When you talked about "Thieves in Time" I had trouble remembering if I had played the game at all.
Honestly, I can't help but feel that even the clue bottles are shoehorned into this game. Like yeah, it's good to bring back some collectables to scour throughout maps for, more side content to look out for once the game is done, but the context behind these in past games is just straight up missing in TIT. In previous games, Bentley would chime in to tell you what these are when you pick one up, and then he'll chime in again to tell you the combination of the vault to unlock the vault, and even explain what you just picked up inside it. In TIT, you get none of that with these clues, all you get is text that just tells you what Bentley would've told you, and heck, once you unlock the safe, you not only just turn dials without any numbers on them, making the clues entirely pointless, but you don't even see the safes even open, you just see them rumble and then you cut to your character picking up the item as though they just pickpocket it off a guard. Not enough effort was put into the return of the clues here.
Imo cluebottles where only good in sly 1 they are far more annoying to collect in big hubs which doesn't help sly 2 or sly 4 case (sly 4 more so since the hubs are bigger than any of the ps2 titles)
I never played any of these games but your love for the originals is going to make me check them out. I'm sorry a series so close to your heart lost its soul.
What an exceptional video👏 You really nailed what made Thieves in Time a trainwreck in contrast to the original Trilogy, highlighting and contrasting details of structure and intent between them. I truly relate in the fact that when I was younger, I too held incredible excitement for another game, not taking the time to consider why I wanted another game or why I loved the trilogy. It took growing up to understand what was wrong with Thieves in time. It was only a few years after the game came out did I start finding myself loathing it. I've never put all my thoughts together in a coherent video, but I've always made my problems known. This video really put to words what I've felt for ages. Truly exceptional work! You seem to have an acute knowledge on the series, Id love to work on something with you Sly Cooper related in the future! Also, side note: I completely agree with your take on the ending to Sly 3. That's how I always saw it. A mutual agreement to put everything aside. I had one guy in my discord server try to tell me that he thought it was gross that both of them were non-consensual and taking advantage of one another- Which is a... weird take away. 😐 I really appreciate this video, keep up the good work! 🔥
Thieves in Time not only confused, disappointed, and left me shocked speechless because of how it missed the mark *SO! MUCH!* , it also indirectly led me back around to the original trilogy, helped me appreciate it more, and both led me to appreciating the PlayStation 2 more as a story telling platform and the creation of my PSN username being a reference to the PS2: I say knowing that I got rid of my PS2 back in October 2020 amidst global COVID-19 quarantining for flimsy reasons that were just as, if not more dumb, than the entirety of Thieves in Time.
As a massive fan of the original Sly trilogy this 100% sums up all my thoughts and feelings about thieves in time. 🎉I remember being so jarred by how different all the characters were and how lacklustre the story felt. Which is a real shame, because you can tell a lot of love and work still went into it. It feels like Sly fanfiction turned into a game. Which is how I like to consider it, really - it exists in its own space, separate from the originals.
Idk i played it after playing through the remastered trilogy on PS3 in my teens and then played this one and really enjoyed it. Granted even then I felt the writing and characterization was off, but that happened (to a much lesser extent) even in the OG trilogy. But the gameplay, levels and style were more than fine.
Something i don't like is the implication on the ending showing Penelope got away and how her tech is reminiscent of Clockwerks. I feel they would have had her run into Clockwerk in Egypt and she would be the one to help him replace his biological body with machinery, and she'd create the Hate Chip for Clockwerk too.
It’s videos like this, an hour long sly 4 analysis out of nowhere, that makes you so good kingk. Now we need a retrospective on the trilogy, no pressure
"I think it's more so that asking for more for more's sake is damaging to our ability to assess why we fell in love with something to begin with" even though I have never played a single Sly game(besides my brother who played sly 4 on the psvita) in my entire life. This is the quote that gets to me everytime I think back on this video. One of the most recent examples of this has to def be Megamind where we are getting more Megamind through a TV show and a movie that doesn't have the same level of budget as the first film. I also believe that this is ALSO the reason why we haven't gotten another F-Zero game for so long because in GX, the GC was powerful for SEGA to pump out everything that they couldn't do in past nintendo consoles
My experience with the Sly series is pretty interesting. I grew up only really watching my friend play Sly games on his PS2 and Sly 4 was the first sly game I owned. I liked Sly 4 because it was "cool" how you could play as these ancestors with different abilities and that's really all I cared about. It's also what I thought the series was about from my surface level experience of it, "cool racoon man breaks into places". I went later after beating it and bought the trilogy and played through that, but it never really hit me how different the trilogy is from 4 until this video.
Having loved the first 3 games only to fizzle out on this one on my vita somewhere in the ol' west chapter, even the gameplay felt kinda lacking--I remember being stealthy was more of a requirement to navigate through the overworld but in this one you could just walk down the street. Glad to know I didn't miss out on anything story-wise either, great video.
As much as I enjoy the original Sly trilogy, I never really did see the "mature" storytelling that's brought up so much by people lately, even the examples provided like, Murray is the hardest to get through character for the original series for me cus his dialogue is kinda that bad for me lol, in every game. The entire series always felt like a late elementary school kinda comic/cartoon age rating in terms of its dialogue, renaissance Disney movies have more bite to them than the series imo, outside stuff like what happens to Bentley in Sly 2 and Sly 3's genuinely good main antagonist. Maybe that disconnect is why I didn't feel as bad of an aversion to 4 as I saw others had (even if it's still clearly the worst with several plot points that are stupid/inexcusable like the Penelope thing lol) Still agree with you on the whole though, it's a great video highlighting what made that original trilogy tick so well, it was really fun setting up the big heist at the end and going through with it, that's something that remains true for me even to this day looking back
You hit the nail on the head regarding how the introduction was handled, I felt the exact same way going into Sly 4. I distinctly recall seeing the teaser trailer for the game and upon seeing Dimitri's atrocious redesign, I knew it was going to be a disaster. I went into it a couple years after its release to give it a fair shake, but it turned out to be much worse than anticipated. When you go from an entry that allowed you to jump in and out of the saferoom as a different character within the span of a couple of seconds into an entry where it takes upwards to TWO MINUTES to do the same, you know something went horribly wrong. The sound design and visual design just feels so cheap too. Hits don't have any real impact and the onomatopes look like they were pasted in haphazardly. What I would've liked to personally see is a Cooper being an antagonist, further driving home the idea that Sly needed to let go of his legacy. Or perhaps see what made Clockwerk, well... Clockwerk. Something that puts the whole series into a different perspective. Anything would've been more interesting than what we got.
Sly 4s plot seemed fine to me. It was my first game. On its own it felt normal. Then playing the old games i slowly started to see things not add up. Was pretty funny but also sad
i think this may already be my favorite video of the year. i feel the exact same way about every point you make and you present it in a very honest and empathetic way throughout. great video!
“Asking more for mores sake is damaging to our ability to assess why we loved something to begin with” Very acute summary of this game and the nature of consuming content over loving art!
I definitely understand the cringe towards the game's Spider-Man like dialogue. It doesn't work for Sly, it doesn't work for Sonic the Hedgehog, and it definitely doesn't work for Nathan Drake. Also, 36:55 KingK that doesn't really matter. It's called voice acting in an animated video game. If the character sounds interesting or authentic, who really cares? You never complain about The Simpsons doing exaggerated stereotypes with voice actors who skin color isn't accurate to their character......do you?
The thing that made Nathan Drake stand out from someone like Lara Croft was that he was an ordinary guy in extraordinary situations. He's just a guy with a knack for history and was running from his past until Uncharted 3 and 4. The games heavily imply that outside of Drake's profound knowledge of history, he's kind of clueless. The fact that most players could know Drake's thoughts on a situation separated him from Lara Croft, who at that point was a mostly silent badass character.
6:30 In all honesty, if they wanted Sly to return back to thievery, they should have written lot better than him having "old itch" like he misses what he used to do in life or that he hears something's up with Thievius Raccoonus or something. Another issue i have with this scene is that Sly comes off as massive dick to Carmelita without even thinking how much it would hurt her. They should have had a scene, where Sly seriously thinks about how this decision could hurt her as he's been together with her for quite some time, but Sly realizes he has no other choice and regrets it, but nope.
I can relate to wanting a sly 4 when i was younger, but it is somewhat ironic that we all missed the underlying theme of sly 3 while asking for sly 4. The trilogy was perfect and throwing sly 4 on top kinda stained the franchise. So personally i just pretend 4 isnt canon 😂
Honestly I feel it’s best to just consider sly 4 non canon since it not only ended on a sour note, but also wasn’t developed by sucker punch , who always intended to leave the series on the third game, which did have satisfying ending, this way i feel would be better fans rather waiting for a new entry to continue 4 that will likely never happen
I guess for me once I realized a few times that "oh, the story's gonna play out like this...aight then", I was ok with whatever the story threw at me and it became a "am I having fun?...yes? cool" type of deal. Cuz certain parts of sly 3's gameplay made me wanna rush thru it since it annoyed me so much, but I did like the story. So I guess I'm more of a gameplay person. I can deal with a story being bleh as long as it's not so bad and I'm still having fun.
Wow! That was a very insightful video! The Sly series is one of my favourite game series but I've never fully understood why I enjoyed them so much. I feel like you were able to perfectly articulate why the Sly trilogy is so unique and why it is still beloved and remembered to this day. It is interesting how when we as fans want more from a series, we can sometimes ignore what makes that series so special.
Really interested examining a game that released purely for no other reason than for fans to have a new game in the series to play, Loved hearing your perspective as a long time Sly Cooper fan talking about how the mission structure and characters compare to the original trilogy.
Sly 4 was.... fine. It was obviously set up by the ending of Sly 3 so it's not like they dragged the franchise out of retirement. Its biggest crime was squandering Clockwerk. It's not as good as the original trilogy but I still had fun and hope they make a new one some day
I watched one episode of Dragon Ball Super, Kuririn has the same crisis of ability that he has in volume 3 of Dragon Ball during the first strongest under the heavens prelims and I was like, how is this a thing? My conclusion, it's just for people who never experienced the original. that's the feeling I'm getting from Sly 4 even though I didn't know it existed until today
Something that annoyed me about the story progression is that the trailers implied dimitri was going to play a major role in the game. My thought was that we'd play as him in the present to take whatever item from the museum we needed to find the next ancestors. But no, he's just in like, two cutscenes and does nothing
What makes seeing a game like this fail hurt so much is all of those random small moments that make you go "Damn... You can tell they REALLY like this series, they just don't know how to be it."
The Penelope twist could've worked. Could've. If they had the mind control villain use her mind control. Like, the game had so much potential. It could've started with Penelope getting kidnapped, had the quests revolve around getting her back for a while, have her be the twist villain in her own stage, then reveal she was being mind controlled by the next villain. It could've had some time fuckery that caused the creation of Clockwork that coincided with a loss of the ability to use the time machine, creating a closed loop. Like, how do you make a time traveling Sly game and not include the metal owl? Like, imagine. You're playing through some mission, things are going well, and out of the blue ol' Work shows up and is just.... There. Only, you can't reveal yourself to him. You can't let him see you. You can't let him learn of the existence of a future "Sly" Cooper, because doing so will make him check the closet during the Thevius Raccoonus heist. You could've had Sly act as a legitimate agent of Interpol. Team up with the legitimate and well known scientist Bentley, hire a pro racer Murray as your driver, and have Carmelita as a full fledged member of the team. Give 'em some banter where Sly pretends to have amnesia and Carmelita pretends to believe him. Throw a twist into the game where you have to abide by the law for most of it 'cause you're technically the fuzz. That, or crime in such a way that your boss doesn't find out. But this? Ugh. Dissappointed.
i never did get a chance to play 4, but hearing about how the different elements not working is facinating. one thing i can say is just how many of the elements should of bin vary easy to write about but missed the mark. carmelita who by the end of 3 still having her sense of justice could go through a entire understanding and revelation on what the copper family does without adding in everything else that they did, that alone is entierly what the writters of the previous games setup. then their is sly, one thing they could easily of done judging from what ive seen from the comments and stuff is truely seeing how much better that his ancestors are at the actions that are in the thievius raccoonus since they were the originator of them, and then not just sly but all the members learn from the ancestors directly to make the group grow, carmelita could easily get the bullet time and could keep some level of affinity between those 2. they could even make this as something of learning from the ancestors as a climatic finally thing of each ep and the end of the game.
Here’s what I’ve come up with to fix the game: Remove the “old itch” reason for sly to go back to thieving. Better writing and characterization. Give the villains more depth. Include more ancestors like Henriette, Slaigh, Thaddeus III and Sly’s father. Make Dimitri and Penelope playable. Speaking of Penelope, have her either be hypnotized by miss decibel’s hypnotic powers and snap penelope out of said hypnosis after the black knight mech battle. Or have her be threatened/blackmailed into working for le paradox and have Sir Raleigh be the villain of episode four instead, thus when Bentley finds out he vows to rescue her from Raleigh’s clutches. In the second phase of the battle, Penelope would be the one fighting Raleigh instead to save Bentley and sly from the fiendish amphibian.
my favorite thing about sly 4 is that circa the lates 2000s during the gap between 3 and thieves and time there was a youtube video titled "sly 4 thieves in time" or something of the like which was just a fan mashing up of scenes from sly games. id like to believe thats where they got the name for the game but idk if thats true or rubbish
You hit the nail on the head. Something you briefly spoke of, the poor minigames, is a less offensive issue than the story but still greatly hampers the flow of the game. When you're forced to do a minigame in Sly 1-3, they are almost always fun, visually and mechanically. The ones in TiT just suck. Made my two playthroughs of this back in the day just atrociously boring.
Short list of what i think being all the problems of the game 1) Tone being too childish and stupid. Sly was meant to be a saga for kids that adults could enjoy, now the story and the villains became so stupid and childish you just wanna facepalm most of the time 2) Shaky framerate. When two or more heavy guards chased you, the framerate would fall under 15. 3) Lack of interesting gadgets and a poorly made menu to go select them 4) Lack of innovation. Maps still feel empty, no secondary missions, no heavy changes in the gameplay 5) And most important, Sly 4 is a game made from fans, but not from masters of their crafts. They're simply not Sucker Punch. SP started from below 0 basically, but they had such huge skill they bounced back after their first fail and ALWAYS made masterpieces. Characters like Tsao or Ottavio shouldn't be working, but everything in their chapters is so well written that they became some of the most iconic villains of the saga.
Rewatched the video 3 times well this is my 3rd bro I like the tempo and stuff of this video plz keep it up man your a legit inspiration to a gamer that eats up all the same games you show lol
You touched on little how Thieves In Time missed the mark on gameplay, but i think it's worth more of a mention specifically with the feel of controls. In the trilogy, Sly and the gang we're light as a feather, being able to change directions at a moments notice and if falling from a heights, they would move again the instant of touched the ground again. This helped make Sly feel as nimble and versatile with his movement as he appeared, and while other playable characters didn't have as many options, they we're still fun to move around with, especially in Sly 3. In Thieves In Time, Sanzaru decided for some odd reason add weight to all of the characters, making them feel more stiff than they should. General movement is not as slick, landing from a bigger fall forces us to wait a second before moving again, and unless you're Sly or one of the ancestors (except Bob), moving around in the hub worlds and other levels is... serviceable sure, but not that fun. Murray for example, while not my first choice, is still pleasant to control in Sly 2 and 3. In Thieves In Time, i dread every moment i have to play as him and wait for a moment i can get hold of Sly, or even any other character, even if they still lack in comparison. It may be Sly and it is, like i said, serviceable, but it is like with things pointed at the video, a step down from what it was.
I wil never turn my back on Sly 4 as it was my first exposure to the series but, over the years even I've come to to realisation that this game has serious flaws and I pain stakingly noticed it when replaying. Till my last breath, Iwill always be holding out for a Sly 5 but I do hope it gets the love and care the series truely deserves.
Despite my myriad issues with Thieves in Time, which pretty much mirror the ones you bring up exaclty, I remember enjoying the good bits a lot. Graphically, I think the game is still one of the best looking on the PS3, and the controls are really smooth too, and I remember enjoying the objectives, as scattershot as they were. Emphasis on remember. In the years since I've also come to understand the trilogy in a more mature light and will always want to revisit them. I don't know how I'll feel if I ever decide to revisit this follow-up.
I hate how this game kinda shits on Sly’s ancestry. The first and 3rd game treat Sly’s ancestors with so much reverence and respect. The whole premise of the first game is trying to save the family heirloom, the written record of his ancestors, and then Sly 4 comes along and makes them one note, one dimensional caricatures. It sucks.
The Sly Cooper series is still one of my favorite game series; and not just for nostalgia reasons. I still fire up my PS2 and play the games when the urge hits me. Never played 'Theives In Time' mainly because SuckerPunch wasn't behind it, and everything I heard about it confirmed my fears. I hope one day SuckerPunch will come back to their brainchild and give us a PROPER Sly 4
Playing Sly 4, I think the time it really sunk in just how little they cared was when I found a bottle floating in midair but still making the clinking noise. Sly's motivations for leaving Carmelita after all they'd gone through were real sus of course, but I just thought it was a fumble, trying to give the game the benefit of the doubt, but man, it was all just so phoned in. It's not a bad GAME per se, but the lack of care really hurts the plot so badly.
my friend just hopped out of a discord call by saying "oh, i gotta go, someone just released a one-hour video essay on a game i've never played before, sly 4". lo and behold i come check my sub feed and what do i see
Feels like the best fix for the setup is Sly finds out someone is erasing his family history, decides Carmelita has enough on her plate as a law enforcer, tries to not involve her in this hoping it will be something he can just nip in the bud and then get back to her(Maybe he even feels bad for being a thorn in her side in the past and doesn’t want this to be another case of her having to deal with his adventures.), but Carmelita follows him anyway and over the course of the story, pieces it all together and ends up helping in the end
still feels tacked on but with how complete sly 3's ending was anything would. Way better if it had to be made though.
@@__-be1gkThank you. Character botching and undoing previous developments with nothing substantial to make up for it(And especially no character consistent reason) are my least favorite things a sequel can do
That does sound like a much better option, much more in character at the very least.
So basically Uncharted 4, but hey it works and it's more in character
Or even have that the messing with the changing or the past is messing with Sly himself.
I mean, say he has gaps in his memories, even forgetting parts of the past games. Say messing with Riorichi Cooper in the past makes Sly forget the Raleigh world. And he has to re learn how to do certain moves that way.
Hell even have him missing on memories from Bentley and Murray. And Carmelita is involved because she loves Sly and is obviously concerned for him.
6:37 it was at this moment, I realized YEARS after (begrudgingly) 100%ing Sly 4: this has the energy of “Somehow, Sly returned.”
How does one begrudgingly 100% a game?
@@svenbtb I was 100%ing it with the mindset that I do it once, get the Platinum, and promptly *never* do it again. Not planning on returning to it unless I’m doing a full series playthrough, and even then, I might just stop after 3.
Hope that clears it up!
@g.u.959 i feel this lol I wanted to do the same thing with sly 4 but only got about 90%
Ahh yes, another IP where the lust for more resulted in subpar results. Star Wars at least had some gas left and some characters to explore... At least in some of the shows and in the prequels. But a lot of the problems (rehashing old ideas, trying to disguise them as new, flashy effects covering up the fact that the story underneath is weak, the creators not quite understanding what made the originals great, etc etc) are basically the same in both Sly and Star Wars
I'm surprised you didn't bring up the fact that they purposefully nerf Sly because of his ancestors.
Sly's lunge upwards, similar to Sir Galleth's, goes just as high as Galleth's goes. But in his stage, Sly's now is half of what it usually is, to make up for Galleth's sections.
Extremely weird choices all around in this game. Happy to see you covered it.
Bentleys hack sections where you use ps move are AWFUL and overly jank/ complicated
I feel like they missed an easy lay up by not having the final chapter being Sly having to run into his own parents and team up with them (while they don't know who he is) ending of course with him doing that thing from the old Star Trek where he has to let them go off to their deaths or risk ruining time. It pretty much writes itself!
Dang, that sounds incredible. I could seeing them not wanting to step on Sucker Punch’s established tropes by showing Sly’s dad’s face, but considering they changed so much about the existing characters, I’m surprised they didn’t just go for it.
@@CyberDrewanThey had an writing out for his face tho giving he seemed to be at least somewhat tech savvy what with sliding on lasers being his part of the vault. Give me a holo suit/his own disguise.
I hate the implication that Penelope might have created Clockwerk.
Same! I was getting that implication too when the ending showed Penelope got away and I feel they would have had her run into Clockwerk in Egypt and she would be the one to help him replace his biological body with machinery and she'd create the Hate Chip for him.
The best thing about thieves in time is that it's not actually called sly 4, leaving the remote possibility of a next game being the actual sly 4
Very unlikely imo considering the game ends on a damn cliffhanger if a new game in the series exist it either is a remake or it completely retcons Thieves from the canon... which to be fair I don't think many fans would be against the idea
There will never be a 4, because the concept of smaller Sony exclusive between the big hits like TloU died with Japan Studio
There is no way in hell we're ever getting another Sly game unless that terrible looking Sly TV show/movie ever gets off the ground. If that happens, it'll be a reboot and likely be poorly received by fans.
@@WaddleDee105 oh god, a modern Sly reboot would absolutely confirm that we are in the worst timeline
Exactly, me and my community make it a point to only ever call it Sly TiT.
Penelope's heel turn was legitimately so bad that it made me wonder if Ms. Decibel actually hypnotized her to be evil. That way they could always reverse it in a potential Sly 5.
Sly 5? They could call it Slive
The problem there is, there's no indication that she was hypnotized, and she monologued to herself about her reasons why she turned heel. So she is definitely still self-aware. Whereas the other victims of the mind control were clearly in a trance. Personally, I'd prefer we just pretend this game never happened, instead of trying to fix it in the next game. Which, let's be honest is probably never going to happen. Seeing as the game is now 11 years old.
This was one of the strangest things to happen in the game. I played trough all 4 Sly games back to back and when I reached that boss I just had a massive "huh, whaaaaaaaaaaaaat" moment.
I’ve heard rumors that Sir Raleigh would have been the Boss of the Medieval England level. I mean it would have made sense seeing how Raleigh just wants revenge against for defeating him in the first game. But the writers thought it was best to commit character assassination on Penelope by having her hate Sly for very nonsensical reasons.
I think with the Cooper Clan armor in Ghost of Tsushima, Sucker Punch still retains the rights to the series; they just lent the IP to Sanzaru because they were busy developing Infamous: Second Son.
In a age of sequels and a lot of properties that have overstayed their welcome, I honestly respect Sly 3 for having a message dedicated to moving on in life. Much as I may love certain media franchises, a lot of them are simply not meant to last forever even if they are not that story heavy.
Sly 3 is truly a perfect ending
I 100 percent agree.
I like those type of messages about to move on on life and do new things
This is how I feel about Mother/Earthbound series. Mother 3 is one of my all time favourite games and it's nice to know that at least one beloved Nintendo series is over and we can focus our attention to other things.
Yeah I agree with your statement but I have to admit I would definitely not be against the idea of trilogy Remake though
Sly 4 is like a direct to VHS sequel. Or Megamind 2 if you need a more recent example.
I didn't know this existed until your comment. My day is ruined and my life worsened as a whole.
Hey now, come on, it wasn't THAT bad. It's at least a competently made game with a budget that isn't two nickels and a piece of string.
Bro megamind 2 was such a random announcement I feel 😂😂😂
@FelisImpurrator i think he was Talking about Megamind 2.
@@itsblitz4437 I'm saying that's way too harsh on Sly 4.
I don't know, KingK. Characters going through the same character arcs over and over again seems pretty true to comic books.
More like bad comics. There are plenty of good ones that don't do this.... unless in this context comic books only refers to main stream DC/Marvel comics and nothing else.
@@LuffyMcDuck I kind of was. It's true that more independent fair can actually have complete story arcs for characters, but the factory-like nature of the Big Two leads to them repeating themselves often, especially with their most popular characters.
*Cries in Spider-Man*
Sly 4s biggest story issue is that the main bad guy is such a nobody villain. The fact he has no presence throughout most of the game just for his entire backstory to be "yeah so one time my dad tried to steal a thing and was beat by your dad and got arrested." is a NOTHING backstory. They couldve made his entire family lineage like, a failed arch-enemy to the Cooper clan. Failed skunk thieves throughout time that weren't even known BECAUSE they always failed, and they would show up working with each areas bad guy, maybe we learn it at the start, or the fact skunks keep showing up builds towards the reveal of his failed family clan.
Also, they literally nuked Penelopes character from orbit like what was with that?
@StagFiesta He's just Clockwerk background of being a thief who resented not getting the Coopers' infamy only instead of being a cyborg owl he's a "honk honk rival villain version of Sly."
Or... they could have.... you know.....
Just had the immortal hate owl be the obvious, pre built, and logical villain in the time travel game................
This video is a perfect jumping off point to discuss how, at least in the modern age, people having an extreme aversion to media series having a definitive end and the developers moving on to other projects instead of just turning the property into another content farm of sequels, spinoffs an extended universe. This game feels like it was made by people who just couldnt let something they loved go.
I do want to see another sly game but I am happy they ended it and sucker punch are doing new things
Yeah I mean sure it would be nice if we had a "proper" sly 4 but you know I'm perfectly fine with Sly staying as a Trilogy in my mind
“asking for more for more’s sake is damaging our ability to assess why we fell in love with something to begin with”, this right here
I just want another platforming focused adventure like the first game. It's an easy contender for one of my favorite games of all-time, but that style only existed for one entry.
Another element that adds to why the Cooper ancestors feel like such non-entities in the game is their gameplay, which just boils down to "Sly, but". Rioichi is just Sly, but he can long-jump. Tennessee is just Sly, but with a gun. Bob is the only one who breaks the system...because he's "Murray, but with Sly's pickpocketing." Salim has the real short stick of the ancestors, as his fast-climb ability is functionally identical to Sly's costume ability to slow time; sure, Salim is faster, but both skills are primarily used for the same type of challenge.
And the whole time-travelling aspect, while neat on paper, doesn't really add anything to the core mechanics or level design of the original trilogy. All the environments and challenges just gave me a strong sense of deja vu. "10000 BC" felt like a rehash of "Menace from the North, eh!", it even redoes the lumberjack challenges Bison forces the gang into with Bob's training. "40 Thieves" felt like wandering around Rajan's palace thanks to the similar-feeling architecture, but during the day instead (and yes, I know India is a very different place from Arabia, I'm only saying the games use a very similar art style for both).
It's a real shame, since "10000 BC" actually made me interested in what the levels were going to be like moving forward. The Cooper van is stuck in a mishmash of train tracks that were pulled through time with the gang, harshly standing out against the prehistoric ice age they find themselves in. I was expecting more of the same in future levels, with different time periods crashed together. Imagine if the Black Knight's robots were squaring off against Arabian guards (who in this scenario would not be working for Decibel) in some horrible combination of Arabia and England, forcing the Cooper Gang to manipulate the two armies into fighting one another to give themselves a smokescreen to break into the Black Knight's castle.
For a game that uses time travel as its main conceit, it's frustrating that it doesn't even _DO_ anything interesting with the idea.
@thetricondon At least Salim was kinda interesting since he was an old and about to retire crime lord. A Cooper who "already won" or was about to win.
Crazy to think my introduction to Sly was this game, i genuienly loved it back then and it lead me to try the original trilogy
Even as a kid the writting on Sly 2 and 3 were just something else
I returned to Thieves in Time and was like "huh"
At least the gameplay is solid
"The old itch came back" is the line I despise the most in the entire series.
Why, it isn't like he actually turned over a new leaf.
@@ForrestFox626 it actually is. He literally gave up his entire life and family fortune in order to be with the person he loves. It's an absolute betrayal of the character that he would go back on that. And if he does, doesn't that kind of make him a completely horrible person?
@@JTR504 He already was for lying to Carmelita
@@ForrestFox626 Well as King said, you can easily make the case that they were both in on it. Besides lying in order to try to make it work ≠ it making sense that he would immediately go back on that. Even if it hypothetically is something he would do (which based on the ending of three, he would not), it still makes him incredibly selfish and manipulative. So they shouldn't have done it either way because it makes the main character incredibly unlikable.
Media literacy, it's not hard.
@@JTR504 He was already unlikable at the end of 3 for me
I remember when my friend and I were discussing what the next adventure Sly Cooper adventure would be about. Note that this was back when Infamous was still relatively new. We had this idea that the next game wouldn't explore the past, but the future. Sly's daughter uses her Uncle Bentley's time machine to go back in time and see her father and mother. Originally we thought that it'd be neat to have you play as primarily her, and choose between thieving and Interpol, but now I'd like to change things up.
Instead, I like the idea of the revelation that the Cooper legacy lives on. This revelation would force Sly to admit to Carmelita that he never had amnesia, and would put the Cooper legacy into the forefront. Sly 3 explored legacy in a past and present sense. But now, Sly has to really think about his life as a thief, and if it's truly right for him to set his daughter up for such a life. There might not be a Clockwerk anymore, but Sly definitely had his fair share of hardships after Clockwerk's demise. Carmelita would also have to confront this, along with whatever problem followed the daughter back from the future. It still needs a lot of work, but there's SOMETHING here.
Finally with the Penelope thing, I can tell you that that reveal was when I truly loathed this game. Every part before that was either disappointing, insulting, or underwhelming, which isn't great, but I could forgive it being just a terrible game. Penelope was one of my favorite characters in 3. She was cute, intelligent, and kind. She was a character who showed her sense of justice and fairplay well before she officially joined your team. When she saw that Bentley was having a low point during the penultimate episode in 3, she helped build him up even though she still had a crush on Sly at the time. Hearing her insult Sly, insult BENTLEY for no reason crossed a line, and insulted the story of Sly Cooper so much, that I actively stopped trying to enjoy the game. There's mediocre gameplay with little mission variety, bad character writing, bad STORY writing that has Sly say "As luck would have it" between every episode, and heck, even bad easter eggs (there's a Clockwerk in some missions, but he looks like a robot in the worst possible way), but Penelope was the final nail in the coffin.
Wanted to add to this comment because I just thought of something.
1. For Penelope have had her be hypnotized.
2. More importantly, this could have given Carmelita a chance to help Bentley through his emotional turmoil. As good as Sly is with relationships, I think that Carmelita's feminine touch could help bring Bentley back to his senses. It could also give the two a chance to actually talk and bounce off one another, because I can't remember any time when the two are actually given the time to talk on-screen (I hope I'm wrong about this, haven't played Sly in over a decade).
I think what dissappoints me most about Sly 4 is that it doesn't scratch the same itch the original trilogy did. And no other game or developer since that really has. I know people point to Assassins Creed as a "Sly but more mature", but those aren't about planning heists and prepping for them. They're about (giving Ubisoft money) parkour and social stealth. Ghost of Tsushima is the closest we have gotten to a new Sly game fittingly enough, but that still didn't scratch my Sly itc (even though it was really good and I can't wait to see what Sucker Punch does next) So I just hope some fresh indie dev is fiddling around with a 3D game engine, played Sly as a kid and REALLY wants to bring those feelings back...
Sucker Punch themselves has basically states that they would not be against the idea of returning to the Sly franchise after their new project (obviously Ghost of Tsushima 2)
@elharvey5032 If SP were to return to Sly, I really hope it won't be a continuation of Thieves in Time. Either we get a direct sequel to Sly 3 or graphical remakes of the trilogy (like Crash and Spyro).
reply months later jumpscare but honestly the closest that has come to any series itching the sly part of brain has been persona 5
Don’t get me wrong, the Penelope’s twist is one of the absolute worst things I’ve ever seen, and it utterly baffled me for a number of years. But I think I know what they were going for.
They wanted to give Sly his own Dr. M.
Dr M’s entire character was rooted in being the “Bentley” of the previous generation, the tech genius who ran with Sly’s dad, but he grew to resent Connor and came to believe Connor was simply using him as a pawn rather than respecting him as an equal.
I think this was something Sanzaru wanted to explore more in Sly 4, but, obviously, Sly 3 pretty firmly ruled out the possibility of Bentley ever ending up like M by the end. Conveniently however, the same game saw the Cooper Gang recruit another tech genius who just might be able to serve that purpose. Their thought process was essentially “if Bentley won’t follow in Dr. M’s footsteps, what about Penelope?”
Looking at Penelope’s motives as presented in Sly 4, she basically echoes about Sly all of Dr. M’s rhetoric about Connor; she claims that Sly was holding her and Bentley back, insists that he only ever saw the rest of the gang as pawns, and her desire to make a profit in weapons dealing reflects the same greed that caused M to waste years of his life obsessively trying to break into the Cooper Vault. I don’t think any of this is unintentional.
The twist is still awful, and it still requires you to forget absolutely everything about Penelope’s characterization in Sly 3, but this is what I think they were going for.
Or I’m crazy and giving them way too much credit by assuming there was any kind of plan here.
One of the actual best takes on this plot twist I’ve seen. Good on you. Plus didn’t Sly 4 take place 8 years after Sly 3? That’s plenty of time for her to turn on the gang
@@terrabnadia1793 If she was that greed filled she wouldn't have needed to help carry out some supervillain scheme to conquer France and wipe away the Coopers using time travel. Sly was out of action for years she could have easily just talked Bentley into going into big business.
I feel like with how the game ends with her sending postcards to Bentley she was going to come back to the good side and help Bentley/Murray save Sly from the past in the follow up game, we just never got the follow up game
The pain I felt when I accidentally selected the wrong character and wait like 8 mins to leave the hideout and then RE-ENTER the hideout with another long ass load screen. silly sanzu game
Bro what 😂😂 must be a connection issue or something cause I always loaded up in 30 seconds or less and I’m playing this game again right now and haven’t ever waited over a minute with the loading screen
In my personal opinion. Sanzaru games suceeded in delivering the Sly gameplay experience I came to love with the original, but failed totally in the writing department to the point I am questioning if the people who made the game understood SP's characters at all.
Excellent analysis King! You’ve probably seen it, but B-Mask has a set of videos on the trilogy that are amazing too.
As the years have gone by I’ve always thought the best direction the story could have gone was to have Carmelita get kidnapped and that be the motivation for Sly to get back in the game. Also thought it would be cool to mature the gameplay a bit in the vein of MGS 5, not turning Sly into a shooter, but having even more emphasis on gadgets and sandbox style episodes where it’s almost in “stages”. Stage 1: you’re on the “outskirts” of the villains “base” trying to get in. Less enemy activity. Stage 2: you’ve gotten in the base and there’s much more enemy activity and even more emphasis on stealth. Some very vague ideas but have always been swirling in my head.
Awesome video as always. Always like hearing your analysis. ✌🏻
It only just now occurred to me how weird it is that at no point in the time travel Sly Cooper game where he runs into several of his ancestors do we even see clockwork, who has been menacing the Cooper clan for generations.
@kollie79 Only kind of. That THING is way too small to be the monstrosity we fought before.
You can actually spot clockwork in episode 4 of mice and mechs I saw him sitting at the top of a tower
@@RedLeif1well it is back in time also 🤷♂️
@@RedLeif1He's growing throughout time
You can spot him stalking you in several levels. It's actually a really nice detail.
The sly franchise will always have a special place in my heart. Thank you for putting into words exactly how I feel looking back.
I still can't believe what they did to my boy Bentley with Penelope. I really almost quit playing it because it made absolutely no sense for her to be evil all of a sudden.
Just another example of more of something doesn't mean it'll be good. *cough cough* HALO *cough cough*.
Sly 4 is the game that made my friends clinch their jaws every time I asked about it. Sly trilogy's loved to the bone around here, like almost everyone played them in their childhood, and the few who touched Thieves in Time were so hurt how bad they managed this game, the name Sanzaru Games being almost like a curse word.
I've come to accept that when a story is over, it's over. With stuff like Spyro and Crash, which doesn't play itself to seriously to character growth, you can always expect a new adventure to make sense. But then you have IPs like Sly that, once they've completed their story, its time to close it. Really, the only reason now I want Sly 5 is for him to get out of Egypt and get back that happy ending he had in 3.
That's really why I want a Sly 5. Sly 4 ending on a cliffhanger sucks so much.
I would have loved a game that was sly reading the stories of his family to his kid with Carmelita and you play through the story, they could pick a few family members to have their own mini arc
Incredible, I've been waiting for you to make a Sly video for ages.
Im still waiting for B-Mask Sly 4 review
@@Tacom4sterYou and me both.
Man YT is wild. I haven't thought about sly since early 2000s, rediscovered him here like a month ago and now the algorithm is just trolling me. Lol thanks king. 😂
The character of Bob should have just been called Cooper and have him the first to fight Clockwerk, give us the origin of the clan's feud with the evil owl. It should have been episode one in the game and it would have given the story so much weight. The ancient evil is still a factor and this new villain is using that to try and ruin the Cooper's for his own reasons, only to find out that Clockwerk is no one's partner just pure evil.
@westonlewis379 They already had Slaigh Cooper if they needed a fat/muscleman character.
I feel like a lot of the problems of this game could have been fixed with having the script go through another draft. I have never seen a video game be damaged so much by a bad story.
40 Thieves was honestly my favorite episode because the game was finally done with dumb drama and twists. All bets were off and the game just does the few things it was good at which was having you do some decently fun missions around a world.
Also Salim is goated and like the only character in the game that's actually funny don't @ me
Throughout the video, as you talked about the original trilogy, I had fond and vibrant memories of those three games.
When you talked about "Thieves in Time" I had trouble remembering if I had played the game at all.
Honestly, I can't help but feel that even the clue bottles are shoehorned into this game. Like yeah, it's good to bring back some collectables to scour throughout maps for, more side content to look out for once the game is done, but the context behind these in past games is just straight up missing in TIT. In previous games, Bentley would chime in to tell you what these are when you pick one up, and then he'll chime in again to tell you the combination of the vault to unlock the vault, and even explain what you just picked up inside it. In TIT, you get none of that with these clues, all you get is text that just tells you what Bentley would've told you, and heck, once you unlock the safe, you not only just turn dials without any numbers on them, making the clues entirely pointless, but you don't even see the safes even open, you just see them rumble and then you cut to your character picking up the item as though they just pickpocket it off a guard. Not enough effort was put into the return of the clues here.
Imo cluebottles where only good in sly 1 they are far more annoying to collect in big hubs which doesn't help sly 2 or sly 4 case (sly 4 more so since the hubs are bigger than any of the ps2 titles)
I never played any of these games but your love for the originals is going to make me check them out. I'm sorry a series so close to your heart lost its soul.
What an exceptional video👏
You really nailed what made Thieves in Time a trainwreck in contrast to the original Trilogy, highlighting and contrasting details of structure and intent between them. I truly relate in the fact that when I was younger, I too held incredible excitement for another game, not taking the time to consider why I wanted another game or why I loved the trilogy. It took growing up to understand what was wrong with Thieves in time. It was only a few years after the game came out did I start finding myself loathing it. I've never put all my thoughts together in a coherent video, but I've always made my problems known.
This video really put to words what I've felt for ages.
Truly exceptional work! You seem to have an acute knowledge on the series, Id love to work on something with you Sly Cooper related in the future!
Also, side note: I completely agree with your take on the ending to Sly 3. That's how I always saw it. A mutual agreement to put everything aside. I had one guy in my discord server try to tell me that he thought it was gross that both of them were non-consensual and taking advantage of one another- Which is a... weird take away. 😐
I really appreciate this video, keep up the good work! 🔥
Both nonconsensual? Seriously? Man, the puritans are getting out of hand.
Didn’t you make 3 videos related to Thieves in Time?
Thieves in Time not only confused, disappointed, and left me shocked speechless because of how it missed the mark *SO! MUCH!* , it also indirectly led me back around to the original trilogy, helped me appreciate it more, and both led me to appreciating the PlayStation 2 more as a story telling platform and the creation of my PSN username being a reference to the PS2: I say knowing that I got rid of my PS2 back in October 2020 amidst global COVID-19 quarantining for flimsy reasons that were just as, if not more dumb, than the entirety of Thieves in Time.
As a massive fan of the original Sly trilogy this 100% sums up all my thoughts and feelings about thieves in time. 🎉I remember being so jarred by how different all the characters were and how lacklustre the story felt. Which is a real shame, because you can tell a lot of love and work still went into it.
It feels like Sly fanfiction turned into a game. Which is how I like to consider it, really - it exists in its own space, separate from the originals.
Idk i played it after playing through the remastered trilogy on PS3 in my teens and then played this one and really enjoyed it.
Granted even then I felt the writing and characterization was off, but that happened (to a much lesser extent) even in the OG trilogy.
But the gameplay, levels and style were more than fine.
While it wasn't B-Mask talking about Thieves in Time, your video resonated with me just as much KingK
I think it would've been better if Sly 4's plot revolved around how Sly defined himself/his identity/his life without being a thief.
One of the best retrospectives of Sly 4 I've ever seen, kudos King
SO CLOSE to 300K subscribers! More than deserved--in fact, seems long overdue to me.
Love ya, KingK
Something i don't like is the implication on the ending showing Penelope got away and how her tech is reminiscent of Clockwerks. I feel they would have had her run into Clockwerk in Egypt and she would be the one to help him replace his biological body with machinery, and she'd create the Hate Chip for Clockwerk too.
I never played Thieves in Time and never really felt like I was missing out. The 2 and 3 will always have a special place in my childhood
Words cannot express how excited I get when I see a new KingK video in the sub feed
It’s videos like this, an hour long sly 4 analysis out of nowhere, that makes you so good kingk. Now we need a retrospective on the trilogy, no pressure
I'm surprised you haven't done any retrospectives of the original Sly trilogy yet. I hope you plan to cover those games at some point in the future!
"I think it's more so that asking for more for more's sake is damaging to our ability to assess why we fell in love with something to begin with"
even though I have never played a single Sly game(besides my brother who played sly 4 on the psvita) in my entire life. This is the quote that gets to me everytime I think back on this video.
One of the most recent examples of this has to def be Megamind where we are getting more Megamind through a TV show and a movie that doesn't have the same level of budget as the first film. I also believe that this is ALSO the reason why we haven't gotten another F-Zero game for so long because in GX, the GC was powerful for SEGA to pump out everything that they couldn't do in past nintendo consoles
Dang, I came to your channel curious if your next project was out, and a review of Sly 4 was a pleasant surprise! Thank you so much!
My experience with the Sly series is pretty interesting. I grew up only really watching my friend play Sly games on his PS2 and Sly 4 was the first sly game I owned. I liked Sly 4 because it was "cool" how you could play as these ancestors with different abilities and that's really all I cared about. It's also what I thought the series was about from my surface level experience of it, "cool racoon man breaks into places". I went later after beating it and bought the trilogy and played through that, but it never really hit me how different the trilogy is from 4 until this video.
Honestly, Sly 4 got me back into loving the damn raccoon so I overall enjoyed it a lot. But I find the video essays on it interesting.
Having loved the first 3 games only to fizzle out on this one on my vita somewhere in the ol' west chapter, even the gameplay felt kinda lacking--I remember being stealthy was more of a requirement to navigate through the overworld but in this one you could just walk down the street. Glad to know I didn't miss out on anything story-wise either, great video.
As much as I enjoy the original Sly trilogy, I never really did see the "mature" storytelling that's brought up so much by people lately, even the examples provided like, Murray is the hardest to get through character for the original series for me cus his dialogue is kinda that bad for me lol, in every game.
The entire series always felt like a late elementary school kinda comic/cartoon age rating in terms of its dialogue, renaissance Disney movies have more bite to them than the series imo, outside stuff like what happens to Bentley in Sly 2 and Sly 3's genuinely good main antagonist. Maybe that disconnect is why I didn't feel as bad of an aversion to 4 as I saw others had (even if it's still clearly the worst with several plot points that are stupid/inexcusable like the Penelope thing lol)
Still agree with you on the whole though, it's a great video highlighting what made that original trilogy tick so well, it was really fun setting up the big heist at the end and going through with it, that's something that remains true for me even to this day looking back
You hit the nail on the head regarding how the introduction was handled, I felt the exact same way going into Sly 4.
I distinctly recall seeing the teaser trailer for the game and upon seeing Dimitri's atrocious redesign, I knew it was going to be a disaster.
I went into it a couple years after its release to give it a fair shake, but it turned out to be much worse than anticipated. When you go from an entry that allowed you to jump in and out of the saferoom as a different character within the span of a couple of seconds into an entry where it takes upwards to TWO MINUTES to do the same, you know something went horribly wrong.
The sound design and visual design just feels so cheap too. Hits don't have any real impact and the onomatopes look like they were pasted in haphazardly.
What I would've liked to personally see is a Cooper being an antagonist, further driving home the idea that Sly needed to let go of his legacy. Or perhaps see what made Clockwerk, well... Clockwerk. Something that puts the whole series into a different perspective. Anything would've been more interesting than what we got.
Sly 4s plot seemed fine to me. It was my first game. On its own it felt normal.
Then playing the old games i slowly started to see things not add up. Was pretty funny but also sad
the idea of him being bored of his life to favor some sneaky sht is a pretty believable premise at least for Coop.
this game is the biggest disappointment i've ever experienced in my entire life
This.
That’s a bit much lol
Just wait till you turn 40
You've had a good life then
Eh, the gameplay was fun enough. Not holding my breath for Sly 5 if that's ever going to be a thing.
i think this may already be my favorite video of the year. i feel the exact same way about every point you make and you present it in a very honest and empathetic way throughout. great video!
“Asking more for mores sake is damaging to our ability to assess why we loved something to begin with” Very acute summary of this game and the nature of consuming content over loving art!
I definitely understand the cringe towards the game's Spider-Man like dialogue. It doesn't work for Sly, it doesn't work for Sonic the Hedgehog, and it definitely doesn't work for Nathan Drake.
Also, 36:55 KingK that doesn't really matter. It's called voice acting in an animated video game. If the character sounds interesting or authentic, who really cares? You never complain about The Simpsons doing exaggerated stereotypes with voice actors who skin color isn't accurate to their character......do you?
The thing that made Nathan Drake stand out from someone like Lara Croft was that he was an ordinary guy in extraordinary situations. He's just a guy with a knack for history and was running from his past until Uncharted 3 and 4. The games heavily imply that outside of Drake's profound knowledge of history, he's kind of clueless. The fact that most players could know Drake's thoughts on a situation separated him from Lara Croft, who at that point was a mostly silent badass character.
6:30 In all honesty, if they wanted Sly to return back to thievery, they should have written lot better than him having "old itch" like he misses what he used to do in life or that he hears something's up with Thievius Raccoonus or something. Another issue i have with this scene is that Sly comes off as massive dick to Carmelita without even thinking how much it would hurt her. They should have had a scene, where Sly seriously thinks about how this decision could hurt her as he's been together with her for quite some time, but Sly realizes he has no other choice and regrets it, but nope.
Respect for using the alternative Sly 3 menu theme in the outro. You rarely hear it outside the game
I can relate to wanting a sly 4 when i was younger, but it is somewhat ironic that we all missed the underlying theme of sly 3 while asking for sly 4. The trilogy was perfect and throwing sly 4 on top kinda stained the franchise. So personally i just pretend 4 isnt canon 😂
Honestly I feel it’s best to just consider sly 4 non canon since it not only ended on a sour note, but also wasn’t developed by sucker punch , who always intended to leave the series on the third game, which did have satisfying ending, this way i feel would be better fans rather waiting for a new entry to continue 4 that will likely never happen
29:30 that's such a good encapsulation of the ancestors across all games and especially in this game
Sly Thieves in Time is basically the forbidden Marvel What If of the Sly universe.
I guess for me once I realized a few times that "oh, the story's gonna play out like this...aight then", I was ok with whatever the story threw at me and it became a "am I having fun?...yes? cool" type of deal. Cuz certain parts of sly 3's gameplay made me wanna rush thru it since it annoyed me so much, but I did like the story. So I guess I'm more of a gameplay person. I can deal with a story being bleh as long as it's not so bad and I'm still having fun.
Wow! That was a very insightful video! The Sly series is one of my favourite game series but I've never fully understood why I enjoyed them so much. I feel like you were able to perfectly articulate why the Sly trilogy is so unique and why it is still beloved and remembered to this day. It is interesting how when we as fans want more from a series, we can sometimes ignore what makes that series so special.
Really interested examining a game that released purely for no other reason than for fans to have a new game in the series to play, Loved hearing your perspective as a long time Sly Cooper fan talking about how the mission structure and characters compare to the original trilogy.
Sly 4 was.... fine. It was obviously set up by the ending of Sly 3 so it's not like they dragged the franchise out of retirement. Its biggest crime was squandering Clockwerk. It's not as good as the original trilogy but I still had fun and hope they make a new one some day
I watched one episode of Dragon Ball Super, Kuririn has the same crisis of ability that he has in volume 3 of Dragon Ball during the first strongest under the heavens prelims and I was like, how is this a thing?
My conclusion, it's just for people who never experienced the original. that's the feeling I'm getting from Sly 4 even though I didn't know it existed until today
Something that annoyed me about the story progression is that the trailers implied dimitri was going to play a major role in the game. My thought was that we'd play as him in the present to take whatever item from the museum we needed to find the next ancestors.
But no, he's just in like, two cutscenes and does nothing
What makes seeing a game like this fail hurt so much is all of those random small moments that make you go "Damn... You can tell they REALLY like this series, they just don't know how to be it."
The Penelope twist could've worked.
Could've.
If they had the mind control villain use her mind control.
Like, the game had so much potential. It could've started with Penelope getting kidnapped, had the quests revolve around getting her back for a while, have her be the twist villain in her own stage, then reveal she was being mind controlled by the next villain.
It could've had some time fuckery that caused the creation of Clockwork that coincided with a loss of the ability to use the time machine, creating a closed loop. Like, how do you make a time traveling Sly game and not include the metal owl?
Like, imagine. You're playing through some mission, things are going well, and out of the blue ol' Work shows up and is just.... There. Only, you can't reveal yourself to him.
You can't let him see you. You can't let him learn of the existence of a future "Sly" Cooper, because doing so will make him check the closet during the Thevius Raccoonus heist.
You could've had Sly act as a legitimate agent of Interpol. Team up with the legitimate and well known scientist Bentley, hire a pro racer Murray as your driver, and have Carmelita as a full fledged member of the team. Give 'em some banter where Sly pretends to have amnesia and Carmelita pretends to believe him. Throw a twist into the game where you have to abide by the law for most of it 'cause you're technically the fuzz.
That, or crime in such a way that your boss doesn't find out.
But this?
Ugh. Dissappointed.
Blud think he Batman on the thumbnail. "I AM VENGEANCE" face ahh boy
i never did get a chance to play 4, but hearing about how the different elements not working is facinating. one thing i can say is just how many of the elements should of bin vary easy to write about but missed the mark. carmelita who by the end of 3 still having her sense of justice could go through a entire understanding and revelation on what the copper family does without adding in everything else that they did, that alone is entierly what the writters of the previous games setup. then their is sly, one thing they could easily of done judging from what ive seen from the comments and stuff is truely seeing how much better that his ancestors are at the actions that are in the thievius raccoonus since they were the originator of them, and then not just sly but all the members learn from the ancestors directly to make the group grow, carmelita could easily get the bullet time and could keep some level of affinity between those 2. they could even make this as something of learning from the ancestors as a climatic finally thing of each ep and the end of the game.
Here’s what I’ve come up with to fix the game:
Remove the “old itch” reason for sly to go back to thieving.
Better writing and characterization.
Give the villains more depth.
Include more ancestors like Henriette, Slaigh, Thaddeus III and Sly’s father.
Make Dimitri and Penelope playable.
Speaking of Penelope, have her either be hypnotized by miss decibel’s hypnotic powers and snap penelope out of said hypnosis after the black knight mech battle.
Or have her be threatened/blackmailed into working for le paradox and have Sir Raleigh be the villain of episode four instead, thus when Bentley finds out he vows to rescue her from Raleigh’s clutches. In the second phase of the battle, Penelope would be the one fighting Raleigh instead to save Bentley and sly from the fiendish amphibian.
On Murray feeling neglected over the addition of Bob in the plot:
The only true neglect Murray was dealt was denying him the harm belly dancer costume
my favorite thing about sly 4 is that circa the lates 2000s during the gap between 3 and thieves and time there was a youtube video titled "sly 4 thieves in time" or something of the like which was just a fan mashing up of scenes from sly games. id like to believe thats where they got the name for the game but idk if thats true or rubbish
I think that maybe a better way to expand on the ancestors would have been for an older Sly telling stories of them to his child
You hit the nail on the head. Something you briefly spoke of, the poor minigames, is a less offensive issue than the story but still greatly hampers the flow of the game. When you're forced to do a minigame in Sly 1-3, they are almost always fun, visually and mechanically. The ones in TiT just suck. Made my two playthroughs of this back in the day just atrociously boring.
Short list of what i think being all the problems of the game
1) Tone being too childish and stupid. Sly was meant to be a saga for kids that adults could enjoy, now the story and the villains became so stupid and childish you just wanna facepalm most of the time
2) Shaky framerate. When two or more heavy guards chased you, the framerate would fall under 15.
3) Lack of interesting gadgets and a poorly made menu to go select them
4) Lack of innovation. Maps still feel empty, no secondary missions, no heavy changes in the gameplay
5) And most important, Sly 4 is a game made from fans, but not from masters of their crafts.
They're simply not Sucker Punch.
SP started from below 0 basically, but they had such huge skill they bounced back after their first fail and ALWAYS made masterpieces.
Characters like Tsao or Ottavio shouldn't be working, but everything in their chapters is so well written that they became some of the most iconic villains of the saga.
Rewatched the video 3 times well this is my 3rd bro I like the tempo and stuff of this video plz keep it up man your a legit inspiration to a gamer that eats up all the same games you show lol
Whew just what I needed after a long week
You come back after months of hiding and you do my FAVORITE series of all time - LETS GOOOOO KING 👑
I love to see this series being talked about.
Extremely well said.
You touched on little how Thieves In Time missed the mark on gameplay, but i think it's worth more of a mention specifically with the feel of controls.
In the trilogy, Sly and the gang we're light as a feather, being able to change directions at a moments notice and if falling from a heights, they would move again the instant of touched the ground again. This helped make Sly feel as nimble and versatile with his movement as he appeared, and while other playable characters didn't have as many options, they we're still fun to move around with, especially in Sly 3.
In Thieves In Time, Sanzaru decided for some odd reason add weight to all of the characters, making them feel more stiff than they should. General movement is not as slick, landing from a bigger fall forces us to wait a second before moving again, and unless you're Sly or one of the ancestors (except Bob), moving around in the hub worlds and other levels is... serviceable sure, but not that fun. Murray for example, while not my first choice, is still pleasant to control in Sly 2 and 3. In Thieves In Time, i dread every moment i have to play as him and wait for a moment i can get hold of Sly, or even any other character, even if they still lack in comparison.
It may be Sly and it is, like i said, serviceable, but it is like with things pointed at the video, a step down from what it was.
I wil never turn my back on Sly 4 as it was my first exposure to the series but, over the years even I've come to to realisation that this game has serious flaws and I pain stakingly noticed it when replaying.
Till my last breath, Iwill always be holding out for a Sly 5 but I do hope it gets the love and care the series truely deserves.
Still waiting for Sly 5… for a million years.
*Me Dies at age 90*
Love that it took 2 days for youtube to tell me that you'd posted a new video -_- either way, a banger video!
Your voice and tone are so soothing and relaxing...
Despite my myriad issues with Thieves in Time, which pretty much mirror the ones you bring up exaclty, I remember enjoying the good bits a lot. Graphically, I think the game is still one of the best looking on the PS3, and the controls are really smooth too, and I remember enjoying the objectives, as scattershot as they were. Emphasis on remember. In the years since I've also come to understand the trilogy in a more mature light and will always want to revisit them. I don't know how I'll feel if I ever decide to revisit this follow-up.
I hate how this game kinda shits on Sly’s ancestry. The first and 3rd game treat Sly’s ancestors with so much reverence and respect. The whole premise of the first game is trying to save the family heirloom, the written record of his ancestors, and then Sly 4 comes along and makes them one note, one dimensional caricatures. It sucks.
Kinda wish you had to so a modern day heist in between each mission with security getting tighter and tighter as you break back in to the museum
Bob…was as far as I made it in Thieves in Time. I was bored prior to Bob, but it was that episode where I finally gave the game a rest.
The Sly Cooper series is still one of my favorite game series; and not just for nostalgia reasons.
I still fire up my PS2 and play the games when the urge hits me.
Never played 'Theives In Time' mainly because SuckerPunch wasn't behind it, and everything I heard about it confirmed my fears.
I hope one day SuckerPunch will come back to their brainchild and give us a PROPER Sly 4
Playing Sly 4, I think the time it really sunk in just how little they cared was when I found a bottle floating in midair but still making the clinking noise. Sly's motivations for leaving Carmelita after all they'd gone through were real sus of course, but I just thought it was a fumble, trying to give the game the benefit of the doubt, but man, it was all just so phoned in. It's not a bad GAME per se, but the lack of care really hurts the plot so badly.