Video Game / Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time

It's about time!

The fourth game in the Sly Cooper series, and the first not to be done by Sucker Punch. Instead it was done by Sanzaru Games, who were the head of the Sly Collection (a HD port of the original trilogy).

A return to the series after an eight year hiatus. Set somewhere after the events of Honor Among Thieves, Sly and the gang reunite when the pages of the Thievius Raccoonus start to go blank. Someone's messing with the timeline and targeting the Cooper clan. The gang, armed with a time machine, intends to find out who and stop them.

The game is notable for having a very controversial Plot Twist and ending, so beware of spoilers.

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Bentley-san, though the bamboo forest is dense, tropes flow through it without effort:

• Anachronism Stew:
  • Noted in Chapter 3. While mostly subverted with what Sly and Le Paradox's forces brought along to the past, the Ice Age apparently was noted to occur merely thousands of years before the present as opposed to millions; dinosaurs were still alive; and upon first glance in the hubworld, the natives already knew how to write long before the first documented scripts from Ancient Egypt.
  • Some of the collectible treasures screw around with this, too, presumably justified by time travel shenanigans, or else things that did not exist show up hundreds and thousands of years before they should. In the Ice Age, you can find "Slytunkhamen's Vase." How it existed thousands of years before said Cooper was born is just plain baffling. In Cotton Mouth Bluff, you can find Muggshot's Coin, the last remnant of his Mesa City empire... before said empire even existed. In Ancient Arabia, you can find Puffin's Cookie Jar, which is stated to be the one Sly, Bentley, and Murray stole when they were at the orphanage, 1,000 years before they were even born. Was the cookie jar passed down for that long?
  • Bentley states that Henriette Cooper, Sly's pirate ancestor, found Sinbad's hoard of treasure in 1616. In real life, however, The Golden Age of Piracy didn't begin until the 1650s and lasted until the mid-1720s. Going by how elements people most associate with pirates such as the Jolly Roger flag were most prominent in the early eighteenth century, it would've made more sense for 1716 to be the year she found Sinbad's hoard instead.
• "Arabian Nights" Days: "40 Thieves", which takes place in Ancient Arabia.
• Art Shift: The interlude cutscenes often swap between all sorts of art styles (usually when a Cooper ancestor recalls how they ended up foiled by the resident villain), including crayons, cave paintings, and traditional animation.
• Bad Boss: Toothpick, who shoots one of his mooks by accident and threatens another mook when he tells Toothpick to watch where he is pointing his weapon. To say nothing of cutting their benefits and forcing them to work overtime.
• Badass in Distress: Sly, Bentley, and Murray are captured by Toothpick at one point in "Go West, Young Raccoon." The trio are eventually saved by Carmelita Fox and "Tennessee Kid" Cooper. Carmelita previously gets kidnapped this way and gets saved by Tennessee.
• Bittersweet Ending: More "bitter" than "sweet"; Le Paradox and his crooks are arrested and sent to prison (and Toothpick is soon run over and killed by a train), but Sly disappears and winds up in Ancient Egypt, while Penelope escapes from prison.
• Blade Lock: Sly and Le Paradox do this in the final boss fight.
• Block Puzzle: A pretty simple one is one of the obstacles Sly overcomes when breaking Tennessee out of prison.
• Boss-Only Level: The final mission of Chapter 4 consists of only a three-stage boss battle against Penelope. Justified, as it's a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against her for selling them all out to Le Paradox, breaking Bentley's heart, and plotting to murder Sly and Murray out of jealousy.
• Book Ends: The game’s first and last missions are both set in Paris.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: El Jefe does the shush gesture at the screen just before he jumps Rioichi.
• The Cameo: Clank appears as one of the treasures found in the game, and Daxter also appears.
• Call-Back: In Bentley's fight against Penelope, he will sometimes taunt, "That mech design is so 2005!", which is the year of release of Sly 3.
• Chekhov M.I.A.: Penelope vanished at the start of the game. She returns in the fourth episode as the Black Knight.
• Clothes Make the Superman: Sly obtains various "disguises" that grant him unique abilities.
  • The Samurai armor lets him deflect fireballs back at whatever shot at him and gives him an immunity to fire.
  • The Jailbird outfit gives him a ball and chain that can be used to smash through objects as well as used to walk through laser fields.
  • The Sabretooth skin lets him pounce on specific targets.
  • The Archer outfit allows him to use the baskets of arrows to shoot arrows, obviously. Some arrows have ropes attached to them, which can be shot to targets in order to walk across them.
  • The Thief outfit lets him slow down time as well as give him a massive scimitar for destroying obstacles.
• Conqueror from the Future: The villains have no trouble setting up in their respective eras.
• Continuity Nod:
  • When wearing the samurai armor to sneak past one of the guards in Japan, Sly refers to himself as "Major Muggshot", a reference to one of the villains from the first (and later third) game.
  • In rescuing one of the Forty Thieves from Ms. Decibel's hypnosis, Bentley mentions that he once saw a device just like it in Prague once. Upon rescuing another, Bentley then outright mentions how Murray was briefly made Brainwashed and Crazy by The Contessa's Psychic Powers.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Murray's necklace just happens to date back to the Ice Age, specifically in a region that one of Sly's ancestors occupied, and which has been taken over by one of the bad guy's henchmen.
  • Likewise, The Grizz's crown (which looks like a dead ringer for St. Edward's Crown) dates back to Medieval England in the year 1301, which is where another one of Sly's ancestors can be found.
  • And of course a gold coin Carmelita just happened to have picked up as evidence back in the museum dates back to Arabia, where Sly's Ancestor Salim needs help.
  • Lampshaded by Sly, repeatedly commenting on their remarkable luck.
• Demoted to Extra: Dimitri, who goes from playable character to informant for the gang as they time travel. Which is strange seeing that he has his old voice actor in the credits.
• Denser and Wackier: While the franchise always had goofy moments, this game heavily ramps up the zaniness that occurs with it's scenarios, ranging from Murray seducing a room filled with guards by disguising himself as a geisha, Sly stealing a shipment of a corrupt sherrif's lolipops in order to get himself thrown in prison, and an elephant gaining hyponotic powers due to a trumpet getting stuck in her nose.
• Derailing Love Interests:
  • Penelope undergoes a Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome, likely to give Bentley some form of personal conflict and justify how the Big Bad got access to his time machine project.
  • Strangely, both Sly and Carmelita suffer from this. Both of them were happily living as an Official Couple, but then Sly returns to the thief life for rather arbitrary reasons and does not appear to treat Carmelita's own feelings about his betrayal seriously. Meanwhile, Carmelita is made way bitchier and can come off as unreasonable in certain scenes. Generally, both characters handle the whole thing as if they were immature teenagers instead of serious adults, seemingly just to add some unnecessary drama to the plot, although they do seem to reconcile by the end.
• Developer's Foresight: One upgrade you can buy for Sly is the Flash Bomb, which is a Smoke Bomb but with more smoke. However, you can't really tell it causes a flash... until the final level, which has a dark room. Although there's literally no reason to throw a Flash Bomb in this room, if you do so, the entire screen turns white as a result.
• Didn't We Use This Joke Already?:
  • If Sly's terrible Italian accent in the last game wasn't enough, the gag ends up getting repeated in Chapter 4 during the "Juggling Act" mission, with a very subtle response from Bentley:
    Sly: How does this sound for a stage name? "The Amazing Cooperoni!" Eh? Eh? Right? It's good.
    Bentley: It sounds like bad Italian takeout.
  • And it's used again when Sly had to impersonate a delivery boy for Miss Decibel and Le Paradox... in ancient Arabia. Le Paradox understandably asks the "delivery boy" if there's something wrong with his voice.
• Disney Villain Death: Subverted with Le Paradox, thus making him the first Final Boss in the Sly series to not die.
• Distracted by the Sexy: A mission in Chapter 1 has Murray disguising himself as "Madame Geisha" and managing to distract some guards. A much later mission in Chapter 5 sees Carmelita Fox performing a belly dance (with great reluctance) to distract some guards while the rest of the team unlocks a gate.
• Distressed Dude:
  • Toothpick locks up Sly, Bentley and Murray at one point in the game, requiring Tennessee Kid Cooper and Carmelita to rescue them.
  • All the Cooper Ancestors except for Salim are captured at the beginning of each episode. Sir Galleth deserves this the most, since he gets captured by the Moat Monster and has to be saved by Carmelita, much to his humiliation.
• Dwindling Party: In the final mission, Bentley and Murray recruit the ancestors to help them get their canes back, and to rescue Sly and Carmelita. After each ancestor's segment, they end up returning back to their respective eras.
• Easter Egg:
  • Clockwerk can be seen in various areas in every episode as shown here. Also related to this is the "Dragon Claw" item which has a short message scratched into the bottom of it: "Clockwerk was here."
  • Sanzaru's monkey head logo design can be seen as a decorative emblem for attentive players to spot, including a streetlight in Paris, Toothpick's belt buckle, and Sly's backpack.
• Even Mooks Have Loved Ones: Played for Laughs in "Of Mice and Mechs". There's a mission where you have to spy on enemy Mooks for information, and said goons constantly talk about their married lives, taking their children to the park, and even ask for advice on how to meet women. What makes it funny is said mooks are clattering wolf robots.
• Face–Heel Turn: Turns out the Black Knight is Penelope, who believes Sly is wasting Bentley's potential.
• Fanservice: Carmelita with the belly dancing, plus certain camera angles.
• Fat Flex: One of Murray's idle animations has him flex to a fitter body shape...before his stomach plops out, causing his belt to fall off and pulling it back up in embarrassment.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The tutorial mission has a few good ones. Villains encountered later in the game are chatting with the museum owner in Sly's infiltration and the big blueprint for Le Paradox's time blimp seen much later in the game appears just before Bentley's hacking tutorial.
  • One of the treasures you can find in Episode 3 is a pair of ice skates labeled as Grizz's Skates. Guess what happens in his boss fight...
  • There are several hints to the true identity of the Black Knight in the Episode "Of Mice and Mechs":
    • The title of the episode itself is a subtle hint of what is to come: Penelope, a mouse, created the machines and turned against the Cooper Gang.
    • The Black Knight's armor has what looks like an icon of a mouse on it. As in, Penelope Mouse, for the icon is a silhouette of Penelope herself.
    • When Bentley researches information on the Black Knight, he finds no information. In the same Episode beforehand, Penelope is brought up again as Bentley wonders where she is once again. Penelope herself is in the medieval era, disguising herself as the Black Knight.
    • This isn't the first time that Penelope went under an alias with the word "Black" in the title. The last time was in the third Sly game under the alias "The Black Baron". As a Call-Back, it's mentioned on occasion during loading screens.
    • The text color of the Black Knight is purple, the same color of Penelope.
    • It's foreshadowed as far back as the intro cutscene: A blueprint of the Black Knight can be seen on a wall in Penelope's room after she disappears when Bentley searches for her.
• Friend-or-Idol Decision: Bentley is truly torn between sitting out the fight with the Black Knight aka Penelope, and assisting Sly and his gang in the Knight's defeat. In the end, Bentley shows up just in the nick of time, and remarks he realized that his family is more important to him than his personal problems, and they could have been hurt by his inaction.
• Friend Versus Lover: The second half of the fourth chapter becomes this, with Bentley having to choose between his True Companions Sly and Murray, or his evil girlfriend Penelope. He chooses Sly and Murray, and burns bridges with Penelope for her greed and lack of gratitude towards them.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: On a number of occasions, the van's time machine breaks or certain characters run off on their own as part of the story. The "Time Travel" to other periods and "Replay Jobs" menu in the hideout is completely unaffected and said characters are available in other locations to replay jobs or just futz around with.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Le Paradox's rat guards.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: El Jefe. Sly even lampshaded this.
• Guest-Star Party Member: While Sly, Bentley, Murray and Carmelita, eventually can be selected in each era, each of Sly's ancestors can only be played in the era they're specifically from, for obvious reasons.
• Hailfire Peaks: Gungathal Valley and Clan of the Cave Raccoon.
• Heroic BSoD: Bentley falls into this upon realizing that the reason Penelope had vanished in the beginning was because she IS the Black Knight in the Middle Ages episode and had sold out the Cooper Gang to Le Paradox. Needless to say, he took it really hard, tucking inside his shell, but eventually uses his newfound hatred of Penelope to get over his heartbreak and save his best friends from her.
• History Repeats: A member of the Cooper Gang who's a technological genius deciding to go rogue because of growing resentment towards their leader? Yep, it looks like Sly now has his own Dr. M.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Le Paradox's father planned to steal something and frame Sly's father for it. Only to get there after Sly's dad had already stolen it, getting caught by the police and having it pinned on him instead of the other way around.
• Hypocritical Humor: Near the end with Tennessee Kid of all people commenting on how Sir Galleth has a strange way of speaking while using one of his "southern" expressions.
• An Ice Person: In his boss battle, The Grizz has the ability to send out ice waves that freeze Murray.
• Idiot Ball: Sly leaves a calling card after stealing the artifact in the tutorial. Even if Carmelita hadn't walked in, that would have ruined his relationship with her by blowing his amnesia cover.
• Indy Ploy: In Chapter 4, the mission briefing is pretty short since Bentley is inactive and nobody has really come up with a plan other than "storm the castle and kill Penelope". The team decides that they'll have to make up the plan as they go along.
• Infodump: The optional opening cutscene has Sly summarize the ending to Sly 3, followed by going into his relationship and history with Carmelita, then giving us a description on Bentley and what he's been up to since the end of the third game, then doing the same for Murray, before finally going into describing the reason behind the heist that makes up the prologue. All of this takes about five minutes.
• Interface Spoiler: Every character, as you know, has a color associated with them. The Black Knight's color is pink, which was Penelope's color in Sly 3.
• Ironic Hell: El Jefe is a heavy smoker of Cuban cigars. Once he's arrested, he does time rolling Cuban cigars and is not allowed to smoke them.

• It's Personal: Once Sly learns the truth about Penelope, he has sworn that he will kill her for her actions against his ancestors, breaking Bentley's heart, and being an Ungrateful Bitch.
• I "Uh" You, Too: Towards the end of the game:
  Carmelita: Sly... I...
  Sly: I know. Me too.
• Jerkass: Le Paradox. He doesn't treat his men well such as not paying The Grizz, likely planning to get rid of Penelope, not letting Ms. Decibel on the ship near the end of the game, and furthermore just being a snobbish jerk to Sly Cooper's friends and ancestors by ruining time and trying to kill them.
• Kick the Dog: Penelope finishes her Yandere gloating by stating that Bentley is "cute when he's being dumb". He takes great offense to it.
• Latex Perfection: This is how Dimitri disguised himself as Sly in the trailer.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: While the first three games have very short loading times, Thieves in Time can occasionally get painfully slow while loading. The game has a Loading Screen that tracks your progression and gives some hints or lore, but it gets boring quick.
• Matrix Raining Code: Numbers rain down in the little loading screens that appear before and after Bentley's hacking minigames.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The last/main name of the Big Bad Le Paradox, guess what he's trying to do. If you guessed: "Change history so that he is royalty" and the Coopers never existed, you are correct.
  • Despite Sly's joking about El Jefe meaning "Big Baby", it actually means "The Boss". In a story sense, he's the boss of his men, while in a meta sense, he's the boss of the chapter.
  • The Black Knight, who is the false identity of Penelope, who also was the Black Baron.
  • Ms. Decibel is a sound-based villain.
• Medieval European Fantasy: "Of Mice and Mechs", set in Medieval England.
• Misplaced Wildlife: "40 Thieves", set in Ancient Arabia, features Siamese Cats, a native breed of Thailand, as Guards. This can be explained away, as "the Orient," while commonly referring to Asia, can include The Middle East. The Grenade Baboons are less dubious, for baboons can be found in both Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
• Monstrous Scenery: Throughout each level, Clockwerk, the villain of the first game, can be seen in the background of the scenery, watching you.
• Musical Nod: The music during the side-scrolling version of Bentley's hacking sequences uses the same music as his one hacking game in the first game.
• Never Found the Body: Sly's friends refuse to believe he is dead when he disappears at the end of the game. Of course, this is an example where the character is ultimately revealed to be alive in the same game.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Sir Galleth unplugs a huge plug thinking it would "slay" the 3-headed robot dragon. It doesn't, it ACTIVATES it.
• Noodle Incident: Sly mentions the time Murray won a burrito eating contest. The only thing commented on it was that it was a bad memory and that Bentley couldn't enter the van for a month.
• "Not So Different" Remark: After years of thinking all criminals are the same, Carmelita acknowledges in the cutscene "You Choppy" that after fighting alongside Sly and his friends, she's realized they have a strong sense of morality just as she does.
  Carmelita: We aren't really so different. We both fight for justice: we just do it from opposite sides of the law.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Multiple times throughout the game, Murray turns down food. At first, he does it in Chapter 3 after Bentley sends in Bob to climb an ice wall despite Murray's insistence that he can do it himself, and he later does so in the cutscene after Chapter 5. In the final cutscene of the game, Murray turns down an ice cream, pie, and cake after Sly's disappearance.
  • During the final cutscene, after Dimitri finds out that Sly is gone, he turns off his music and sulks in his room.
• Painful Adhesive Removal: In the animated companion short "Sly Cooper: Timing is Everything", Carmelita Fox is captured and restrained in a supply closet by Mugshot and his men. Sly Cooper finds her and pulls of piece of tape on her mouth. Cue in her loud scream followed by her growling at Cooper for being well Cooper.
• Pass the Popcorn: In the opening cutscene, while Bentley describes the words of the Thievius Raccoonus disappearing off of the pages and his plan to investigate the cause, Murray is eating from a bag of popcorn.
• Press X to Not Die: The Le Paradox boss fight relies on quick time commands during the sword/cane fight portions.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The piano piece Ms. Decibel plays during "Heavy Metal Meltdown" contains snippets of "Rule, Britannia."
• Rapid-Fire "No!": The Grizz to Murray just prior to his boss fight.
  The Grizz: I'm tired of you Cooper chumps, Le Paradox, everybody! All I ever really wanted to do... is skate - that's right.
  Murray: [confused] Uh okay...
  The Grizz: No, no, no, no, no, it ain't okay!
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Towards the end, Sly tells Le Paradox that he's a complete idiot for messing with his ancestors in the first place, and that he could've avoided everything bad that happened to him in the game and lived his life in peace in the present as a billionaire thief.
  Sly: You had it made. You could have been the biggest thief of all time, but you had to target my ancestors and blow your own cover. You exposed your operation because of your ego! No Cooper would have done that. And for the record, can you really say you stole the canes? Seems like your "friends" did all the real work.
• Red Herring: You can see Clockwerk in various points of each in the hub worlds; he has absolutely nothing to do with the plot, and is basically an Easter Egg.
• Redemption Rejection: Bentley points out to Penelope that Le Paradox is just using her, and would cut her strings when finished, clearly trying to convince her to rejoin the people who care about her. She refuses spitefully and attacks him in her Villainous Breakdown, leading to the Cooper Gang kicking her out in retaliation.
• Replay Mode: The Cooper Gang's van allows you to play older missions again through the "Replay Jobs" option. Meanwhile, cutscenes and Chalk Talks (the presentations Bentley does in each chapter) are available for your viewing pleasure in the Extras menu. Naturally, your selections in these menus are increased as you encounter them in the story proper.
• Ripple Effect Indicator: The plot is kicked off by Bentley seeing the words written in the Thievius Raccoonus literally vanishing off their pages.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: The Thievius Raccoonus is being erased because the Cooper ancestors who wrote them are being interfered with. This has no effect on any of the skills Sly learned from the book.
• Save the Villain: At the climax, when the blimp is beginning to crash, Sly chooses to save Le Paradox instead of letting him fall to his death. Le Paradox repays Sly by stealing his paraglider and leaving him to die.
• Scenery Porn: Dear lord, Sanzaru Games really worked hard on the backgrounds.
• Sequel Hook: The ending has Sly missing, and everybody in the gang trying to find him. The secret ending reveals that Sly is still alive, but because of the rift in time that Le Paradox created, he's trapped in Ancient Egypt, not to mention Penelope escaping prison in the end credits and sending postcards to Bentley.
• Ship Sinking: Penelope Jumping Off the Slippery Slope leads to her and Bentley breaking up for good. Darkly lampshaded when, before the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots portion of her boss fight, Penelope tells Bentley it's time to make their breakup official.
• Shout-Out: To Back to the Future, as it involves time travel and a time traveling vehicle. When the Cooper Gang makes their first time jump, Murray speeds the van up and vanishes, leaving behind flaming tire trails just like the time Delorean. It even leaves behind a spinning license plate.
• Show Some Leg: Carmelita takes one for the team by doing a belly dance to distract some guards in Arabia. She's not happy about it either. Seeing how the rest of the guys take a glance to see the show they're not as upset as she is.
  Sly: Possibly your best plan ever, Bentley.
• Smelly Skunk: Le Paradox. A lot of characters have brought up his odor problem. And yet, he uses it to his advantage, providing... ammunition for the gas guns his mooks carry.
• Snap Back: If you choose to go back to a previous time period, the respective Cooper from said time period is not only still playable, but still HAS his cane despite it being stolen in an earlier cutscene.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: At least half the dialogue between Bentley and Sly.
• Soft Water: The only reason why Le Paradox didn't die after losing his stolen parachute was because he conveniently fell into a river.
• Stealth Pun:
  • After Penelope's betrayal is revealed, Bentley falls into a Heroic BSoD, hides in his shell, and won't come out. In other words, Bentley "won't come out of his shell."
  • Rioichi's Sushi Restaurant has doors with locks that are only opened by having a specific Sushi knife. In other words, these doors are operated on a Blade Lock.
• Stopped Numbering Sequels: Notice the lack of a 4 in the title.
• Storming the Castle: "Of Mice and Mechs" ends with the Cooper Gang storming a castle occupied by the Black Knight in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. This is because the Black Knight is Penelope, now a homicidal Gold Digger and yandere who wants Sly and Murray (and probably anyone else close to Bentley) dead. Sly has already made it clear to Sir Galleth after The Reveal that he intends to kill her, while Galleth points out that Penelope's crimes would warrant execution in the 14th century for treason, and they should be the ones to do it.

• Symbol Swearing: This is how the steer react during the sarsaparilla serving portion of the "Saloon Bug" job if they're close to losing their patience at the counter.
• Technobabble: Bentley as usual is the source of this, though he gets bonus points for mentioning a "Gravity Encabulator" as one of the components of the time machine, a reference to the "turboencabulator" In-Joke among real life electrical engineers.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Penelope betraying her former allies, and breaking Bentley's heart was enough for Sly to declare war on them.
• Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: Thieves in Time takes the destination programming route, programming being done via analyzing an object from the specified time period. They were quite lucky to be able to find objects that were not only from the correct era, but even right down to the exact year, month, and day needed.
• Time Travel for Fun and Profit: Plan of all of the villains.
• Tragic Keepsake: In the final cutscene, Carmelita, while continuing the hunt for Sly, finds the photo he always kept around of himself kissing her, charred but intact.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The montage at the end of Bentley's promotional animated short showed the picture of Penelope he keeps in his binocucom defaced, spoiling her Face–Heel Turn as well as the outcome of it.
• Trap Is the Only Option: Sly and Bentley recognize that Carmelita sitting right in the middle of an empty room is an obvious set up, but Sly can't just leave Carmelita, and springing the trap does distract Le Paradox long enough for the Cooper Ancestors to take back their canes.
• Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: After Penelope is busted as the Black Knight, Sir Galleth tells Sly that the main way to deal with traitors like this one is to storm their stronghold (a castle in this case) and kill the traitor. Sly reluctantly agrees, admitting Penelope deserves to be killed for manipulating Bentley.
• Tron Lines: A lot of these can be found throughout the game, most noticeably the giant fish ad in "Turning Japanese".
• Trophy Room: There are trophy rooms in each hideout, consisting of treasures and trophies collected throughout the game. The ones you get from vaults have effects on the gameplay.
• Villain Has a Point: Penelope is technically right in that Bentley could be using his intelligence to accomplish far greater things than working for a thief, something Bentley even acknowledges. This does not in any way excuse their actions, though.
• The Web Always Existed: Not only are you able to access ThiefNet during ages where even electricity had not yet been discovered, but you are also somehow able to instantaneously teleport your purchases to you, whenever and wherever you may be. Though this might have something to do with the communicator Bentley made.
• Wham Episode: The mission "Shell Shocked Heart". Bentley is following the Black Knight, only to discover that it's Penelope, his girlfriend. She's undergone a Face–Heel Turn that makes poor Bentley go into a Heroic BSoD and hide himself under his shell.
• The Wild West: Cotton Mouth Bluff, the setting of "Go West, Young Raccoon."
• Wutai: "Turning Japanese", which takes place in Feudal Japan.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: This is how Sir Galleth speaks.
• You Don't Look Like You: Many of the characters have undergone some visual tweaks with the change in console generations, but Clockwerk has been radically redesigned from how they looked in Thevius Raccoonus, to the point you might not realize it's them when first spotted. Most notably he looks much more like an owl this time around. Compare this and this.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Some of the abilities you can buy are rather... odd. Sly and Murray need to buy the ability to run while charging their attacks, Sly needs to buy the ability to run while on a rope, and Bentley needs to buy the ability to kick his bombs (despite said move only requiring you to do Bentley's regular kick attack while next to a bomb).
• You Monster!: Sir Galleth says a 14th century variant when he charges at Penelope in rage.
  Galleth: I'll sally forth and smash that mechanical monstrosity!
• You Need a Breath Mint: Red-Eye, the coyote gunslinger from the "Grand Key Larceny" mission. After telling Carmelita that she has to kiss him if she loses the shooting competition, Carmelita remarks that his breath smells like "fermented gym socks."

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