I mean fair, but also I’m just incredibly bad at Geography.
Unwards, to more swamp crime.
Zodi Plays: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus [10] Snake
Video Length: 16:11
In today’s episode we tackle two stages, the first of which is full of ghost cats! The stage is full of these gravestones that generator ghosts, three as a limit, and instantly replenish the ghost supply when one is killed. Or rekilled, as it may be. Smash the gravestone and the ghosts stop coming. Easy enough, and the level has a ton of iterative platforming challenges involving these that I actually kinda like. Taking away from this is the fact that for some reason Haiti just doesn’t agree with me, and I get my face knocked off at basically almost every opportunity. It’s quite difficult! This stage also has 40 clues again. I knew it wouldn’t last but goodness that’s a lot of bottles. At least they’re hidden rather interestingly, which is something that I appreciate. This stage also features an interesting security feature; rotating pillars with security lasers on it. Not too complicated to deal with, but potentially frustrating. I can see these being a huge trouble when I go to do the Master Thief Sprints… Anyway, the reward for getting all the clues here is a more modern entry, which Bentley can take advantage of! He’s upgraded our binocucom so that we can actually see enemy names and information. It’s mostly just extra jokes, which I’m always for, and I’ll be sure to show them all off when next I can.
The second level is far more constrained and yet still just as vast? It’s got 30 clues, and like the last one hides them pretty interestingly (and in plain sight. I have no idea how I missed that one). The most interesting part of this level is that for the most part, it’s basically just a rail grinding level. You slide along on the vines and stuff, making forward progress. In other games where it’s near impossible to actually climb back up the grind rail this would make collection pretty frustrating, but due to the homing nature of Sly’s thief abilities it’s incredibly easy to climb back up a grind rail and get stuff. The real problem comes at the end of the stage, where the beast of the swamp appears!
A huge snake begins chasing us, giving us the final mascot platformer trope Sly has yet to hit. Running away with something huge and dangerous following behind you. However, Sly has some things in place that remove a lot of the things that make this type of gameplay feel bad. For one, you’re on the rail walkable vines or swinging from hooks and stuff, so your movement is entirely binary. You go forward or backward, so there’s no real chance of getting confused and getting run over. Secondly, if you do get run over by the snake you don’t die instantly unless you lack a lucky charm. You just get sent flying, which I appreciate. The snake also isn’t rubber banded at all, you can easily outrun the snake and not have any degree of trouble with it. The only real concern is that, due to how the rail movement works, it becomes a little harder to hit the clues that ARE here, and if you miss them you have to restart or die. Once we’re done with the snake that’s the whole level, giving us access to the safe as well as the treasure key. Our reward is the Blueprints…which I’m realizing is a terrible reward given the order I did the levels in. You’ll see why next time.
But yeah. With all that said, I hope you enjoyed! See you guys next time for when we delve ever further into the swamp.
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Out of curiosity does giant snake monster have a bio thing to pull up?
Nope, not that I’m aware. It and the bosses don’t have one (though I’m sure that won’t stop me from checking later on).
thats honestly kinda disappointing.
Happy New Year toot
Zodi Plays: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus [11] Swamp Games
Video Length: 16:40
In this video, we head off to the second half of Mz Ruby’s hideout after getting some help from mean old Mr Giant Snake. Not what I expected, but it could of gone worse! There are three levels on this side, and um…only one of them is an actual standard stage, though at least it’s a fun one with some great art design and interesting (if…slightly confusing at the time) platforming challenges to deal with. Also getting all the clues on this one caused me to die, a lot. This is also the stage where Mz Ruby yells at us about us being here. Unlike the others however, she is ACTUALLY talk to us using mental powers and not an intercom system. Creepy! Enemy wise this stage also introduces the last new one we’ll see in Haiti, the skeleton turtle that throws it’s own head at you like a bomb and then regrows it’s head. The enemies in Haiti are very weird. After getting all 40 clues our reward is the more advanced time slow, letting us keep time slowed for as long as the button is held. Not the best ability by any means, but it has it’s uses. We’ll see one soon enough, actually!
The second stage today is a minigame of sorts, and perhaps the most obvious a sufferer of “we just didn’t have ideas for pages so we made this a minigame” yet. We are riding a skiff with a gun attached, going through what feels like it could of been a reasonably put together sneaking level, shooting our way through ghost generators and turtle skeletons. There isn’t really much to talk about on this one as there is no reward beyond the Treasure Key. The third level we do today is even less interesting, in that we just have to beat up a bunch of chickens while avoiding roosters with bombs. This is actually REALLY difficult, but using the time slow power makes it a lot more manageable. It also makes the minigame take way too long in terms of like, time elapsed in real time, so I speed it up to make it more reasonable to watch. Having fulfilled the ghost’s desire for gumbo, we get the final treasure key for Mz Ruby’s hideout.
All in all Haiti is an interesting place, it’s just a shame that it’s so heavy with minigames. That plus the fact that this is a jungle which makes it hard to have like, actual sneaking opportunities around, makes it the weakest part of the game, I feel. It’s still good don’t get me wrong, it’s just far less than we’ve come to expect from the last two hubs. At any rate, this’ll be it for today. Join us next time for when we face down Mz Ruby herself! And also go around collecting all the enemy information we haven’t seen yet.
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It’s time to go wrestle a crocodilaggator.
Zodi Plays: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus [12] Dance Battle
Video length: 8:14
Yeah this is a short one. Would of been shorter, but I put all the enemy spying from previous levels in this one! Which was intentional of course, and not just because I kept forgetting to do so. We spy on all the enemies, and it’s a bunch of good jokes all around. Personal favorite is HP Squidcraft. Anyway, moving on to the violence time.
Mz Ruby’s boss arena is cool, a gigantic skull fortress that raises up and down. We’ve gotta leap from tooth to tooth, avoiding getting bitten. We jump down to initiate the fight with the very cheesy Mz Ruby, and…it begins. She teleports away and after some pretty good banter, it’s time for the fight to truly begin. And by fight I mean dance minigame. That’s right, like many a wizard in video games, she loves throwing out magical Playstation buttons. In this case Sly has to dodge them to the beat of the song…a song that is linked to the loading, and as such is slightly desynced because of the faster loading times on the PS4 version. Which is the only reason I fail any part of this because it’s all entirely memory based, it never changes, and the timing (while tight) is pretty easy to hit. After you finish the dance battle, you actually get to fight her…for all of one hit. She does try to tail smash you but otherwise she has no attacks, and after three rounds of this she’s defeated. While I do find it neat that such a huge, relatively beefy looking character goes down like a lightweight because she IS a magic user and thus not really that good at taking hits, it’s…definitely not what ANY of you were expecting, I’m pretty sure. I know I wasn’t the first time, and it’s always been really weird to me that this is how they decided to have her fight play out. I think it’s an alright thing, but…boy is it weird, of a different sort of weird than Muggshot’s vampire lair.
Anyway, Mz Ruby falls, and she points us towards China to face the Panda King, the next criminal on our non lethal hit list. The page we get from Mz Ruby is the page from Slytunkamen, who is one of the coolest ancestors who gives us potentially one of the most broken abilities in the game, but we’ll discuss that next time. We escape from Haiti and allow Carmalita to arrest Mz Ruby, and prepare for our next adventure. Hope you all enjoyed, I’ll see you next time in China.
I really like the style of this battle, as well as Mz Ruby’s actress hamming up the entire thing. It’s just too bad the actual fight is a QTE, and a poorly done one at that. It’s also a shame that the background music kinda drowns out the voice volume in this one, because I love Sly’s goofy dodge noises.
The fun thing about Sly’s dodging sounds is that, just like Mz Ruby requested, he IS repeating what she said. Zig Zag, Voo Doo.
Also yeah Mz Ruby’s voice actress is probably best or second best in this game, villain wise. Which is good but also kinda sad. This first game has some…rough edges.
Let’s go to China!
Zodi Plays: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus [13] Fire In the Sky
Video Length: 19:59
Today, we head off to the Kunlun Mountains (and not Kowlun like I say in the video oops) to infiltrate the Panda King’s fireworks factory/martial artist training dojo, and on the way we learn a bit about the King. His is an interesting story, of a person so filled with anger that he turned to a life of crime. Everyone is in their own way motivated by anger (except Raleigh) and it’s a shame that they all went down this path, since they could of been good person. This is kind of a running theme with Sly Cooper, that people who are criminals (well, bad criminals) could of been good people. Or good criminals, that too. It’s just an interesting thing to think about. Let’s talk about China proper now.
So, in terms of aesthetic and enemies and what not, China feels like a step back in the right direction after Haiti…and is also a good deal easier than Haiti on the enemy front as a result. Maybe it’s just because they have SO elaborate actions, but the minions in China are super easy to deal with. Not that I’m complaining. Additionally, the clue bottles are probably hid the best and most interestingly here of all levels, and the amount of clue bottles in each stage is an actual reasonable amount instead of an over abundance of them. And of course, since we’re back to sneaking around Actual Places, it feels way more like the other hub worlds, giving us the feeling of a sneaky thief infiltrating a huge compound to smash and grab our way through it. China is fantastic and probably my favorite of all the hub worlds as a result of all this. Also the panda bear paw icon coins are the best designed, I think.
Level wise I don’t have much to talk about. The approach level is fascinating in that the majority of the clue bottles are placed after the safe, but given our reward (I’ll talk about that in a bit) it’s kind of okay! The only other thing worth mentioning on this one is that uh…the Panda King outright kills an entire village of people in front of us and there’s no real way to get around that. Second level is us infiltrating a training ground for the martial arts people, and the security system being used as the training equipment is a cool little touch that I really enjoy. So I guess Sly is at least that level of martially trained. Our reward for this one is the pit equivalent of the water safety tips. Good to know!
The most important thing we need to talk about is the invisibility power, balanced by the fact that we cannot move at all during it. Jumping breaks it, you cannot attack at all unless you let go of the thief button. It’s a reasonable power that’s actually fairly balanced. Oh wait the first level of China gives you the ability to move while invisible. Now, you DO move slow, and the restrictions still apply with regards to jumping and attacking, but as far as actual security systems and searchlight guards though the game is over now. If you have the time you can and will just sneak past them without concern. It’s a really powerful ability and…having the upgrade be in the very first level you can do after getting it is an interesting way to do it. But I also kinda like it because of reasons that’ll be made clear in a couple weeks or so. But yeah, invisibility is, unsurprisingly, as powerful as you’d expect it to be in a sneaking game. Go figure.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed. I’ll see you guys next time for more kung fu hustling.
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Almost forgot to upload this because it’s too cold.
Zodi Plays: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus [14] Stealth Mode
Video Length: 19:22
Starting us off today, we jump right into a turret section! Those nunchuck monkey boys show up here, and we’ve gotta protect Murray from them with a firework spitting turret. As far as difficulty goes this is actually easier than the Muggshot turret section, since there’s less places for Murray to fall back on and get stuck in and the enemies are less troublesome until the end, where a bunch of searchlight guards attack Murray in a row due to alarms. There’s no explosives, nothing to fake you out into almost killing Murray, it’s just shooting baddies until the alarm runs out. The only weird part about this one is that if an enemy appears behind Murray, he’ll run FORWARD…and once the enemy is defeated, he’ll backtrack and then continue on with going forward once more. It’s silly.
The next stage is really cool, and is the tutorial for the invisibility power! As such there’s many instances where it’s useful, such as conveyor belts and searchlight guards that face towards you and are too agile to just be normally sneaked by. Of course, having the page that lets us walk while invisible makes almost all of these INCREDIBLY easy, to the point where you almost would want to put that reward at the end of this stage…but also doing that might actually make the reward useless for reasons we’ll get into later. So having the stealth improvement be in China’s first level is a good idea, overall, even if it is a balance killer. Anyway this stage is one of my favorites because it involves a lot of jumping around laser security systems, which is basically always my favorite part of this game. Acrobatically dodging around security beams Mission Impossible style really sells the idea of being a sneaky, master thief. Even when you mess up and graze a laser. There’s 30 clue bottles in this one, and they’re all hidden fairly well (especially that last one!) but the reward is just blueprints which isn’t that big a deal.
After that it’s time to go into the second half of the hub, where we learn we’re gonna have to ride a bunch of fireworks up to where the Panda King is training. Shouldn’t be TOO dangerous. And then it’s time to do a level, since while I COULD finish the video now, I decided to make this episode jam packed with what essentially amounts to filler content since most of it is minigames. This time we revisit the racing minigame, and much like the turret section this version is less difficult and more boring. The track may be different, but the ice slicks don’t really do much to alter the controls and the vehicles you’re up against are all the same vaguely Chinese aesthetic with nothing unique about them. So the only positives the first racing game had, are gone. Sweet. I speed this up, and then decide to take on one more level because I’m a madwoman.
The next, and final level we tackle today, is a return to the laser skiff. Blasting our way through the Panda King’s firework production area is more compelling than Haiti was, but it’s still kiiinda lame. Since it’d be cool to sneak along all these conveyor belts and stuff, I think. At least it’s a return of the nunchuck monkey boys, bringing that full circle. This is also, surprisingly, the stage where the Panda King sends out a personal message for us. It is as you’d expect prim and proper. Dear employees; kill that raccoon, bye. Aaah Panda King. His voice acting is…sure a thing. Anyway, the one thing I noticed about this stage that is actually really strange is that…we’re on a hover craft. But the conveyor belt still moves us. What is up with that? Anyway, the end bit has a whole bunch of Andre’s throwing orb boys at us and it’s not the most compelling gameplay in the world but is at least decent enough a challenge. We end with chipping away at a very large rock that takes way too long to destroy, and get us a key.
Well that was a jam packed, action heavy Sly Cooper video. Hope you all enjoyed, I’ll see you guys next time for more martial art crimes.
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I try to think up funny little opener bits here but today I’ve got nothing. Video. Watch. Enjoy.
Zodi Plays: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus [15] Kung Fu Panda
Video Length: 10:45
Okay! So, in today’s episode we finish the final level of China and then go fight the Panda King himself. China REALLY went fast, in part due to last video having four bloody levels in it. But yeah, lets get a move on. The first level is the return of Carmelita Fox, the second and far more difficult chase level. In this one she never really STOPS chasing after you, though you get the occasional brief reprieve from her now far more accurate stun pistol shots. She also does some leading of her shots in harder platforming areas too! All in all this level is REALLY fun, though in the back of my mine I’m thinking “oh god this is going to be a thing isn’t it” with regards to the Master Thief Sprint. But of course, more on those later. After getting all the clues and getting to the safe, we reveal…Bentley doesn’t know how to open this one. But why? Because it’s written in quote “an owl dialect” that he cannot translate until we beat the avian responsible for it.
Bentley for the love of good it’s just Russian. Pick up a dictionary.
Anyway, moving on to the Panda King fight himself. We ride the fire works to his mountain top temple and face the fiery bear in mortal kombat, a deadly dance of agility vs raw power and the ability to throw fireballs at us. I’m hyping it up here but the Panda King is genuinely the easiest boss in the game, you can easily dodge around his fire balls on your approach to him (and even have indestructible hiding spots to hide) and once you get into melee range with him, dodging around his various martial art moves is just as easy. Fiery Wheel, Palms of Thunder, and Booming Chop are the three moves he does, only adding the second two after you beat him down a bit. All of them are animated well…but also extensively, giving you ample time to just smack him in the face repeatedly with your cane. He drops like a sack of hammers, the only villain Sly has shown any real hate for (because he murdered people directly in front of him). Bentley pipes up to say the laser skiffs we’ve had to deal with all source their metal from a specific metal in Russia, so that’s where we’re off to next time. We also get one of our pages back, giving us some tech to upgrade the van with. Nice, that’ll help out nicely.
Hope you all enjoyed! Next time…the actual finale of the game before we get into the bonus master thief sprint and bonus reward stuff!
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its interesting that out of all the fiendish five only two didn’t suffer from something in there childhood that filled them with rage. The frog just suffered from boredom and Clockwork who has gone way past anger or resentment into something else.
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It’s time for a special double length (for this series) video. It’s finale time folks!
Zodi Plays: Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus [16] [FINALE] The Cold Heart of Hate
Video Length: 26:29
In today’s episode, we head off to Russia to tackle our final foe and the leader of the Fiendish Five, Clockwerk. An owl of great size and greater majesty, with not much information about himself. But looking at the various Thievious Raccoonus pages, Sly notices something. In each image of his ancestors, a strange bird like figure can be seen in them. Could this be Clockwerk, the cybernetically enhanced owl that’s been hunting the Cooper clan for generations? And if it is…how’d he survive for this long? These thoughts linger on his mind as we make our way up to the final level, trigger finger itching to get some shooting done with our fancy new turret.
So yeah lets talk about Russia for a bit. Unlike the other hub worlds, this one…does not have a hub. It’s a series of levels one after another, a straight shot to the end of the game. And, sadly, most are minigames. But because of the presentation of the levels and how they actually play it, it doesn’t actually come off all that bad actually. They actually justify a lot of what we do, a lot more than they did in the other worlds of the game. It’s actually rather refreshing. So let’s go over the challenges we’ll be facing today.
The first level is of course a turret segment, where we’re controlling the turret on top of the van. We’ve gotta shoot down landmines, robotic falcons that harass us, and falling rocks. None of these are all THAT dangerous, but you do only have one hit like in any other game mode, barring a future minigame and lucky charms. After we blast our way through with the turret, Murray breaks it by driving a little poorer than usual, and we get our next challenge. I said these are better explained and justified, and they are, but this one is perhaps…the weirdest. We’ve gotta smash computers so we can gain access to the information that’ll let us get further into the facility. We do this by running over computers that fall randomly from the ceiling as Bentley does some hacking. What makes this difficult is that horrible lava monsters appear and they’re hungry for computer monitors! There’s only enough for one side to get 60, but the amount of leeway due to just how many computers there are makes this incredibly easy. Also we can punch the lava monsters with the van’s cool ram.
Getting through that, we end up in the first actual sneaking segment of the world! We’ve gotta do some tricky jumping and sneaking to get up to a barrel so we can sneak past some of those death turrets. But for once we’re not just sneaking to get a key. It’s to save Carmelita, who’s been taken by Clockwerk off screen. It’s obviously a trap, but Sly respects his Inspector Zenigatta type figure so we’ve gotta save her. We get inside and surprise it’s very clearly a trap. Clockwerk gloats and begins pumping in deadly neurotoxin. Guess it’s up to Bentley to do some quick hacking to get us out of this mess! The hacking minigame is actually kind of cool, a twin stick shooter where we need to collect yellow bits while destroying the green bits, all while avoiding ramming into any green (which chips away at our shield) and avoiding the owl based security system that is indestructible and shoots insta death shurikens at us. It is overall not the best in terms of gameplay because it’s finicky and kind of annoying since if you die you need to restart the whole thing, but otherwise it’s fun. We save Sly, who slaves Carmelita, and it’s time to press onwards.
Carmelita, correctly, decides that it’s time for an Enemy Mine situation since the giant robot death owl tried to kill her too. However, at the last second a robo falcon attacks! Sly tries to smash it, and for I think the only time in the entire series actually, the falcon manages to snatch the cane and fly off with it! Carmelita takes it out, but the cane lands up near the top of this giant machine. A machine we had to traverse anyway, but now it’s more dangerous since we don’t actually have our singular means of attacking! Of course we won’t actually be controlling Sly for this part since this is the return of the classic first person turret segment, though this time we’re in control of Carmelita and sending support down for Sly. It’s actually not that bad, and Carmelita’s bazooka (she finally admits there is no way this isn’t a genuinely overly destructive stun gun) is actually pretty cool to use. Not that it’s different from any of the others, but aesthetic wise it’s fun to be doing the sniping she was so fond of doing while she chased us. After this it’s time for the second, more actiony platforming section with Sly that I actually really like. Sly’s actual moments of platforming in this level are all a test of his general abilities and our ability to execute them, and they’re all really good feeling too. Having done some of the Master Thief Sprints, this level feels like a sort of primer on how to do those; take acceptable but otherwise scary risks and go as fast and hard as possible. It’s one of the only timed missions I’ve seen in a game like this that doesn’t feel overtly stressful, and it actually feels pretty rewarding to run through. We get to the top of Clockwerk’s deathray tower and pick up Carmelita’s jetpack, and it’s time for the final boss.
The jetpack controls decently, though it defaults to airplane controls of up=down which is super annoying so I’ve had to change that off screen (so you don’t get spoiled that there is a jetpack, sigh) but otherwise feels really good to control. The fight against Clockwerk is interesting in that you cannot actually destroy him yourself, Carmelita’s gotta snipe at him from a distance to weaken a part of him briefly, letting to hammer down on him. As we fight, Clockwerk explains a bit about what his deal is. He is in fact that ancient of an owl, having replaced his body with mechanical parts to defeat the Cooper clan. He’s been fighting, and killing, Cooper family members for centuries, fueled by jealousy and hate. It’s actually really cool, if entirely messed up and out of left field given how sympathetic every boss has been other than Rayleigh. But it’s actually a really cool origin that gives this final boss fight some pretty high stakes, since this guy hasn’t just killed our parents. He’s killed basically everyone in our family! There are three phases to this fight, the first two being pure shooter parts and the third being an actually really stylish “run up to Clockwerk’s lava sunk body through a series of security beams to smash him in the face” and it’s a really cool finish. It’s the only boss to actually incorporate the sneaking elements of the game to it’s boss fight, and it’s really fun to see. It’s also kinda stressful because if you don’t do it in time Clockwerk revives and you have to do phase two again.
With Clockwerk defeated (and pretty cleanly just straight up killed) the truce with Carmelita is over. But true to her word, she gives us a ten second head start. Which Sly makes incredibly good use of in a really good ending that I’m surprised more series with this type of relationship between the lead and his somewhat antagonistic love interest haven’t done. Sly and the gang run off as Carmelita screams for her own style of revenge justice, as we reflect on our adventures. Sly’s done more than just inherit his family name, he’s earned it. So in a way the Fiendish Five actually did him a favor. Now it’s time for further adventures…by which we mean getting the last page so we can get the last ending cutscene, and we can show the credits properly. The final page gives us an utterly broken power that disables every guard in the stage, which’ll probably help us a little on the Master Thief Sprints I still need to do. We get our final coda of Sly deciding it’s time to do his own thief adventures, adding them to the book. The future’s gonna be great. And after the credits…we get a cheeky little bonus scene (this happens after anything that triggers the credits, not just this scene). And that’s the end…for the most part.
I’ll give me full complete thoughts on how I felt all this went when I’m done the final bonus videos, but I think it’s safe to say this was incredibly fun, and incredibly worth doing. A big part of why I wanted to do this game was to see if it still held up, if it still had that feeling of “the best animal mascot platformer” and to me at least, it definitely does. While it’s not perfect, the game oozes with style and the gameplay is incredibly solid, even if there are a bit more minigames than one would like. It was a joy to play through this, and other than the Master Thief Sprints was basically a walk in the park. So yeah, I hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did. Thanks for watching and all that fun stuff, and especially thanks to all my cool patreon folks.
Speaking of next time, as said we’ve still got the bonus stuff to do, which I will be doing as best I can. As I said in video I’ve got a vacation to scenic My Dad’s House soon, which means I’ll be away from my PS3 and PS2 so if I don’t finish all the Master Thief Sprints twice so I can get both the run complete and the director’s commentary, we uh…won’t have any updates for like a month! I’ll do my best to get that done in the…gosh thresish days I’ve got left until it’s vacation time. Hell yeah. Even if I can’t get all the bonus material recorded before leaving for vacation though don’t worry. I’ll still be around, and will still probably be uploading (I intend to bring over my capture unit because my Dad has an XBone and there’s a few games I’ve been meaning to try for that first impression series I do. I’ve been wanting to sink my teeth into some of these!). But yeah, hiatus time potentially due to a cool vacation that I definitely feel is earned at this point. After that, it’s time for a return to Kirby, with Kirby’s Dreamland 2. That’ll be super fun. But yeah, again I hope you enjoyed, I’ll see you all next time.
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Out of curiosity are you planning on eventually doing any of the other Sly cooper games?
It’s definitely a thing I’ve got in mind for the future. I don’t have any IMMEDIATE plans, but I’ll definitely be doing all of them at some point. I love this series.
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As those of you who remember things for longer than a month may recall, my vacation ends tomorrow! That said, because I will be immediately getting back to work, don’t expect an update video wise on Friday or Monday, but NEXT Friday I’ll be shooting for 100% for the bonus videos. I’m still deciding how I should divide them up, and would definitely love some input on that.
To me, dividing them up into two videos, one that shows all the Master Thief Sprints and one that shows all the commentary tracks we unlock for that, plus the final unlockables, seems reasonable to me. What all does everyone else think?
Sounds good.
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Change of plans, we’re doing it all today!
Zodi Plays: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus [B1] Master Thief
Video Length: 1:20:05. You read that right.
So, as it turns out, making two basically hour long videos, one of which just shows me doing the Master Thief Sprints and the rest that show all the commentary, is a little silly since I don’t actually have any footage to put under the commentary video. So I decided to mash em up together, where the commentary for each stage plays over the footage of it’s Master Thief Sprint. This’ll let you guys see some of my failed runs, to get a better idea of just how precise these things want me to be. And boy do they want you to be PRECISE as all heck, some of these are basically designed to be beaten with sub 1 second left, and there’s not a lot that can be done to improve your time beyond just executing as machinelike as possible.
When doing these sprints, you do get to keep any Lucky Charms you find AFTER starting the trial, but any you get beforehand are removed. Additionally, when spotted by security systems not only does it activate their damaging state, it also makes your time start counting down twice as fast until the alarm is destroyed. In basically every instance this can happen, it’s an outright death sentence for the run. There are a few where it happens and I’m able to eke out a win though. Other than there, there isn’t really any mechanical difference between going through the stage normally and the Master Thief Sprint. It’s just, as said, a high level of skill required to pass. Of all these stages, only two or three of them have “shortcuts” that are places you can skip some degree of level to go faster, and of these one of them feels like they basically require you to use it to get it.
So, what do we get for doing all of this? Well, each stage beaten gives us Director’s Commentary for one. The commentary is…not so much a sequential series of commentary but instead a random assortment of people who worked on it walking about each level while playing through it themselves, but it’s all audio so we don’t get to see that, and only the China levels have clear signs of it being played by the developers. That said, they’re fairly insightful to some of the things in Sly, and occasionally really funny. My favorite is the one in China, where Bentley’s voice actor comments on the difficulties of getting into Serious but not too Serious character mode, when most of what he has to say is sort of generic tutorial stuff.
Of course, that’s not all we get for clearing this challenge. For getting all the Master Thief Sprints done, we obtain the Making Of video, wherein we see a lot of old footage of the game (got imagine having to collect FIFTYish clues in each stage!) and see some concept art, while they talk about the game and sort of hype it up. The main highlight for me here is where they make a note that they do try to make the game accessible, but have challenges for even the most pro of pros. Given what I just went through, I can say they succeeded at this. And finally, for 100% clear of everything, we get access to those commercials I talked about. I love them, they’re ridiculous, and also we get outtakes that are mostly the raccoon actor being difficult.
With that all said and done, that is the end for Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. Thank you all for joining me on this crime spree, and apologies for the month long vacation during it all. I had wanted to get it all finished before hand, but work was a slog. With that in mind, I’m gonna take a brief bit of time off while I prepare for the next one. So join us next Friday for the beginning of the next LP, Kirby’s Dreamland 2!
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And we’re officially done. @moderators you can put this in the done LP place, but keep it open in case anyone has anything to say.
New LP is here!: Kirby’s Dream Land 2!
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