Sly Cooper General Topic

You know in hindsight, as much as my libido enjoyed this, I have no idea how Sanzaru Games got away with this, and I feel like this was a sign that the wrong people were developing the game.

It's one thing that the dance is there. It's another that the mini-game is repetitive and overlong. The animations don't even seem to change much and Carmelita is clearly hating it. The humor isn't anything to write home about.

It's hard to make a belly-dancing scene boring but they succeeded with flying colors.

What's really twisted though is I just remembered that - really - this is the first time Carmelita has officially helped the gang. The concept for this game is brilliant and its premise allows Carmelita to actively help out prior to the final chapter. It's either participate in the Cooper-plots or be stuck in another time period.

But it's squandered by this game's writers going for the lowest-hanging fruit available to them.

Edited by Soble on Aug 30th 2019 at 1:35:46 AM

A Youtuber call B-Mask did a retrospective Sly Cooper Trilogy looking back to how the games were made what went on behind the scenes the characters and how the story works in three parts if your a Sly fan you should watch. Part 1

B-Mask confirmed he'll do a continuation that covers Thieves in Time. I figure he'll look at it strictly from a development point of view since others have already gone over its plot.

Anyway, it doesn't look like the cartoon or movie or whatever's gotten off the ground.

I watched the first two parts some time ago. Good stuff. Covered a lot I didn't know about the games.

While I do feel that the ending is a bit overly hopeful, as there's been plenty of times where people want to revive franchises they worked on and loved and fans make a big demand for it yet companies won't budge, I still want to see Sly Cooper come back. I feel that it's a special series with a very lovable cast of characters, and that it could still stand even today.

The mission where Sly and the gang wipe out an entire lemonade bar of baddies is still my favorite mission in the series.

The one where you play as Carmelita and take out Muggshot is a close-second.

Overshadowed By Controversy Cleanup said ending examples no longer count and should be moved to Audience-Alienating Ending. So for Thieves in Time should it's Overshadowed just be about the Penelope twist as it contributed to the ending backlash (setting the plot in motion and leaving an unresolved Sequel Hook meaning no payoff for the controversy).

Is it the case that since it was announce it's getting no sequels that has overshadowed the prior? Or is it shifted so it's less about the ending than the mishandling of the series?

I'll go with the Penelope twist tainting the game to fans such the ending backlash didn't change much (even if it's AAE) unless I hear anything in three days per Three-Day Rule.

I do agree that Sly needs to come back with a new entry that either retcons the events of Thieves in Time, or continues from where that game left off with a redemption arc for Penelope. They really did her dirty in Thieves in Time.

It's wild to think that it's been now longer from the release of Thieves in Time than what was the waiting period between that and Sly 3. Somehow in my mind Thieves in Time feels more 'recent' than the third game felt at the time.

Our perception of time is that it’s increasingly shorter the more of it we experience.

When I was in first grade, one year was literally 1/6 of the time I had been alive. Now? One year is a mere 1/27, and shrinking.

So even though we know explicitly that it’s been longer since Ti T came out than the time between HAT and Ti T, our experience feels shorter.

If you told kid me that the ps2 Ratchet & Clank games, or Jak games, all cane out only one or two years apart, I’d call you a lying liar who lies. Now I can look up the release date and marvel at how obscenely fast standard development times were back then.

Or take KH 3 and FFXV and the delays they got once Squeenix started honing in on release windows and even specific dates - a very common statement at the end of their productions was “We’ve been waiting X years, what’s a one month delay at this point?”

Edited by TheAirman on Feb 22nd 2022 at 11:01:20 AM

Yes.

There was this one Twitter post someone made that says “What you think is Final Fantasy 20 years ago” and next to it is a pic of either I or IV, and then it says “Final Fantasy actually 20 years ago” and next to that is a pic of X.

One has to remember that the Wii U turns 10 this year, despite it only being one generation ago.

I saw somebody mention that the first Guitar Hero is 17 years old. That sure threw me in for a loop.

Anyway, since I don't think there's anything Sly related in development in the gaming side of things, I'm curious to see if any of the planned movie or TV series projects are ever going to get out of Development Hell. With the likes of Arcane and The Cuphead Show! gathering positive responses recently, I'd perhaps focus my resources towards the TV show if I had any saying power in the matter.

There were multiple supposed leaks from last year saying there's a new Sly game in the works, but even if they were true, I wouldn't stress over them for now.

I'm really curious about the TV show. I assume there was some work done on it because they were already promoting release dates for the seasons and had some promo art ready (basically the movie models, but with brighter coloring, Bentley with full glasses, and reskinned Murray looking more like his game self). But I'm wondering if there are finished scripts, voice recordings, storyboards, or even animations somewhere. It would be a tremendous waste if they just halted production.

In any case, I'd prefer to just start over with a TV show. New animation (preferably 2D), a more faithful take on the cast, and tone and format that actually do justice to them.

I was told to take this question to Sly Cooper fans

The following (spoiler-heavy) Ass Pull example was deleted from YMMV.Sly Cooper Thieves In Time as it had the following Foreshadowing:

The Ass Pull wasn't their Face–Heel Turn which was foreshadowed, but it was their motives and personality behind it which contradict everything shown/established about them the prior game and seemingly the flimsy explanation this game gives. Is that not enough to count? Character Derailment and Fan-Disliked Explanation are already listed under their respective pages covering this, those or and anything else a better fit for this issue?

While it might have been a complete character assassination, it was a pretty clearly telegraphed character assassination, and thus not an Ass Pull.

Edited by Xeroop on Mar 1st 2022 at 9:41:05 PM

Moved the points to Fan-Disliked Explanation then.

Thinking about the comparisons made with Prince Hans, worth noting is why the Hans twist was better received (it didn't overshadow the rest Frozen which was very successful despite the twists divisiveness).

• Hans was high-functioning enough it was plausible he would have been able to hide his true nature while Penelope was so over-the-top evil and the their Evil Plan so poorly thought out it's unbelievable they were faking their prior niceness or falling to such between games.
• Han's betrayal was thematically relevant to the movies theme of what true love entails, while Penelope had it seemingly just for the sake of a twist (they might have put more thought into writing it plausibly otherwise).

With that, thoughts about revising the twist to such? Penelope had the same backstory of Sly and friends of being an orphan, but didn't have any such companionship growing up giving her a Freudian Excuse for being so messed up. She was still genuinely nice enough to develop genuine camaraderie with the Cooper Gang, but their (save Bentley's) perceived failure to save her from the pirates caused her to turn against them and become obsessive with Bentley. She'd be played as a Shadow Archetype as Sly representing what he's be if he never allowed caring for others to change them for the better, and represents his conflict regarding his relapsing to crime despite their love interest. It would end ambiguously on if she could be redeemed. How much of an improvement would that be?

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Mar 2nd 2022 at 11:57:45 AM

I think just not ending on Penelope being a ripe villain would be enough, regardless of the explanation.

I don't necessarily hate the idea of Penelope being a villain (or even a rival), but the execution was VERY sloppy.

To celebrate the franchise's 20th anniversary, they're releasing some new official merch. Basically, a tribute poster by OG artist Dev Madan, a new T-shirt, and a new plushie.

The whole "Penelope as a villain" is still one of the worst and stupidest twists I can think of in recent gaming memory. I can't find the post, but someone on Reddit absolutely SHREDDED that whole thing explaing why it and many other aspects of the game just fundamentally didn't work at all from a story POV.

Edit: Parallel/Alternate Univereses and people fix everything.

Edited by doomrider7 on Sep 24th 2022 at 12:44:31 PM

That new poster looks fantastic.

Ehh, people often forget she was the Black Baron. Personally I feel it's all about shipping than anything else.

No people remember that. They also remember that the whole persona was crafted to get around age restrictions for the dogfight competition, her initial infatuation/schoolgirl crush on Sly, and her moving from that towards Bentley when she realized that she had much better chemistry with him than Sly due to shared interests.

It's less shipping and more of a completely pointless and unnecessary Happy Ending Override where a lot of the characters act...out of character.

Edited by doomrider7 on Sep 26th 2022 at 5:47:55 AM

I WANT SLY 5. (Where hopefully the Penelope bullshit will be retconed.)

And I want the Sly games on PS 4.

And I kinda want that Sly plushie. Maybe not the poster, but only because I really don't have any place to hang it right now.

I think it would’ve been so much better if Penelope was working as a spy for the Cooper Gang with her boss fight basically being her and Sly deceiving Le Paradox into thinking she truly is betraying her friends.