All the wonderful praise you’ve heard aboutPrince of Persia: The Lost Crownis true. It’s a new Metroidvania destined to become a classic, a masterful blend of rewarding exploration, tight platforming, and tough-as-nail boss fights that will push you to the limit. I broke my favorite controller by jamming the parry button too hard in one of the more difficult boss fights and I’m not even mad about it, it’s just that good.
It’s a ton of fun, easily the best Metroidvania since Ori and the Will of the Wisps and, much as I hate to admit it, a more satisfying game than Metroid Dread. Unfortunately, it also makes some poor choices when it comes to character progression that ultimately hold it back from achieving true greatness. There’s a triple-A flavored stink wafting off of it that is so distinctly out of place in a Metroidvania that I can’t help but feel a nearly flawless experience has been tainted by the way Ubisoft makes games.
The basic formula for Metroidvania progression is all here. Sargon gets a new ability, he uses that ability to traverse a new environment, he fights a boss, gets a new power, and uses that power to explore a new environment, rinse and repeat. The lock-and-key structure used in classic Metroidvania level design is utilized well here, even when - and sometimes especially when - the upgrades are as simple as an air dash and adouble jump.
Sometimes exploration will lead you to an amulet, which are customizable combat upgrades that work just like Hollow Knight’s charms. They don’t give you access to new areas, but they will improve your ability to fight. They can be found hidden around the world, awarded after defeating a boss, or they can be purchased from vendors using a currency called Time Crystals, again, just like Hollow Knight. These two mechanics feed into different categories of gameplay - platforming and combat respectively - but they both serve to move you forward through the game and deliver a satisfying sense of progression. So far, so good.
If that was all there was toThe Lost Crown’sprogression system I would have no complaints, but it takes things one step further with the upgrade vendors. This is where you can spend your Time Crystals to improve the power of your amulets, the number of the health potions you can hold, their potency, and, unbelievably, the base stats of your weapons. In an RPG-esque twist, The Lost Crown allows you to farm enemies for Time Crystals, then spend those crystals to incrementally increase the damage you deal. It’s one step removed from the much-maligned gear score that has infected every big-budget game, but it’s a toxic system to the quality of The Lost Crown nonetheless.
Giving you a way to arbitrarily increase your damage output, both through weapon and amulet upgrades, is an uninteresting system for players that undermines the design and difficulty of the game’s combat challenges. The Lost Crown’s boss fights are finely-tuned experiences, meant to be challenging to learn and rewarding to overcome. As the player, you have to trust that the fight has been designed in a way that’s tough but fair. When you introduce a scaling power system, one where you can simply farm easy enemies in order to get stronger, you give the player an unnecessary out. Suddenly, it’s not that you haven’t learned the boss fight, it’s that your character isn’t strong enough to beat it. That type of progression works for lots of games, like Elden Ring, but it has no place in a Metroidvania.
This is fundamentally different from the upgrades in, say, Super Metroid’s energy tanks and missiles. While those upgrades do improve survivability and increase your damage output, they can’t simply be purchased from a vendor using a renewable resource. You have to explore the world to find them, backtrack through old areas with new abilities, and solve puzzles in order to gain power, which aligns with the game’s core design philosophy. Metroidvanias are about mastering the environment, so it’s appropriate that doing so makes you more powerful. And, even then, you can’t incrementally increase the power of Samus’ arm cannon as if it was loot in Destiny 2.
It would be one thing if this was just an optional system in The Lost Crown, a way to bake scaling difficulty options into the gameplay loop, but at a certain point this tacked-on upgrade system starts to invade the entire game.
There are three types of currencies, Time Crystals, Xerxes Coins, and Azure Damascus Ingots, which all feed into the upgrade system. Time Crystals can be farmed from any enemies, and Xerxes Coins are rewards for doing extra-challenging things in platforming sections - like Strawberries in Celeste - but can also be purchased with Time Crystals. Damascus Ingots, which are used for higher-tier upgrades on weapons and amulets, are hidden around the map the way energy tanks and missiles would be in a Metroid game. Instead of just finding upgrades and earning instant rewards, everything has to flow through this totally unnecessary upgrade market.
Note: Perhaps the biggest offender of all are the Memory Shards - a brilliant new mechanic in which you can take a screenshot and automatically attach it to the map to help you retrace your steps easier later on. But because everything has to be tied to progression, you only start with a handful of Memory Shards and have to find more of them scattered throughout the world.
We groan at games like Suicide Squad today because it feels like everything suddenly has to be a looter, but let’s not forget that the first incarnation of creative flattening in triple-A was when everything had to have RPG elements. That has been a largely celebrated trend (look at God of War, for example) but that doesn’t mean every game needs to have a way to level up. The Lost Crown would be better if it stuck closer to traditional Metroidvania design and had forgone the stat increases. I know it’s how Ubisoft makes games, but it shouldn’t have been how it made this one.
Next:Prince Of Persia Nails The Metroidvania Art Of Burying The Double Jump
