A Tale of Three Trilogies: Band of Thieves

With the benefit of hindsight the idea of comparing cathedrals with videogames was kinda lame, even though I wasn’t the first to do it. The relationship is there, I think. In fact, I think it’s feasible to compare any game space with a livable one if it’s livable enough. There are so many triple A games trying to look real today that I have colleagues whose only job is tracing that relationship.

But at the end of the day, videogames are nothing more than an elaborate illusion of code, programming and subroutines, and any pretension of freedom that a sandbox can offer is going to clash sooner or later with it. Victor Navarro spent an entire book talking about the ways in which that sense of freedom coluded with developer’s intention. The alluring possibility of creating alternative fictional worlds is ever present, and motivates many to keep on playing, or exploring, os seeking new boundaries within the gameworld. In a way, playing open world games invites us to challenge our perspectives, to stop by and avoid turning back to the real world. It’s a primordial, primitive impulse, motivated by many factors. Many of them can be traced back to our colonial, imperialist roots. but others can come from sincere desires of communicating with people. In other words, some players play because they want control, but others play because they want to communicate.

Every one of us has express these impulses when they pick up the pad and start going beyond the horizon, either literally or through its systems, missions and skill trees. I don’t think one disposition is inherently worse than the other, pero I don’t think that they reveal any essential truth about the masucline of feminine condition. I do believe that, over the years, a lot of emphasis has been put on control, and nowadays it’s mostly gatekept by heteronormative players. But I still think that you can find it in the wild, coming from anyone that has played Mario or anything remotely popular from the past. But the games from 2000 onwards wanted to be seen as mature, sophisticated, not necesarilly more serious but at least more respectable. And what many open world games that I’ve played have told me is that keeping on insisting on that paradigm is starting to become a thing of the past.

I have a suspicion that the stereotype that Japan is behind the times started because, while every studio started to work on cinematics and complex narratives at the same time, on the Pacific side of things there was a deepening of the same gameplay tenets that had been popular from years back. It’s obvious that that’s a false impression, as there were many Japanese developers working on new ideas at the time, but I don’t think they were being recognized at the time. Instead, all the attention was given to Rockstar and similar teams. Though it’s a bit embarrasing to go back to some, the texts of the time were obsessed with exploring the cities of Grand Theft Auto, Driver or True Crime. Even when a Japanese game tried to do similar things (Yakuza came out in 2005), they were rapidly dismissed as more rigid, less realistic.

I’m spending so much time explaining this because to make clear how Sly Racoon 2: Band of Thieves fights against these impulses and avoids making its world seem infinite. Although throughout the adventure you explore bigger maps and get access to more and more “content” than the one offered by the first title, you can tell there’s some resistance to opening up. Being able to play with the whole team instead of just Sly, you’re able to participate in more interactions than ever, but they’re always contained within the streets and roofs of the levels. Although each world has its own personality and they allow you to sneak around in original ways, almost everything unique to them limits itself to the tasks that you need to resolve. It’s not like you had any reason to avoid these missions, as no one would want to get away from the fun that they provide. It’s possible that many of them will make you do the same things again, but they will always come with some unexpected twist, some particular mechanic that makes the interaction specific and original. In a way, it’s Sucker Punch visible effort to test the limits of its engine what encapsulates the sheer breadth of this game.

The whole game sits on a delicate balance of offering new options while maintaining the old ones, in increasingly complicated missions. Either because settings become more intricate or because your abilities are becoming more and more interesting. Sucker Punch has a whiteboard with several ideas and concepts that orbit around the premise of a furry cast and they have structured them around a specific order, making sure that it’s as intuitive as possible. Sometimes it’s not as graceful a structure as one would like, like when you’ve got to stop in the middle of a mission to buy the gliding ability. Nevertheless, it’s surprising how many missions you can face without buying anything at all. Generally, choosing to discard anything from the ThiefNet, missions become a lot harder. But the game is flexible enough to let you play without spending a lot of money, because the original movement set is solid enough. You expect that from Sly himself because he comes from the previous title, but the fact that you can find it with Bentley and Murray is nothing sort of amazing.

In the beginning, the promise of exploring cities like Paris and an airship is the typical you can find in any work, not just the platformer genre. Then, after realizing that I could play around with thugs and the objects of the street so much, I remembered Hitman, though the world itself may not look like it. But after buying my first skills, I realized what Ardwyw made me see more clearly — this is Mission Impossible, if MI starred a furry Lupin. It’s that realization, coupled with the enjoyment of each particular mission, what made me appreciate Band of Thieves so much.

If the first game’s journey adhered to the expectations and customs of the platformer, albeit twisted in new ways, Band of Thieves feels like untreated territory, in which everything feels new and impermanent. Though there’s a basic movement set, its weight on the general plot works less as a guiding thread and more like background noise. It’s difficult for me to imagine a player who starts from this game, though I can imagine them getting very amused by the activities and the jumping and the stealing. Then they’ll begin doing missions, and luckily, they’ll start to get a grip on the intricacies of their skills. And then they’ll face the missions that subvert their already learnt skills and invite them to think about this game in a different light.

I don’t think there’s a game on this Earth that can keep a sense of novelty for long, especially if it attempts to be long. But following the example of Band of Thieves can be really helpful. In a way that many few games achieve, they have made me think about the design of it all, about the importance of planning what needs to be ahead of the player. Most games tend to start from a basic mechanics or verbs, and attempt to examine its permutations in increasingly complex ways. That’s the classic way to do it, the one that’s with working for decades and still works in many cases. But Band of Thieves starts from the same premises that came before in the early entry, and instead of permutating them, makes new ones up that work in increasingly messy ways. Games that try to do this are rightly accused to burst the toybox of the player without offering any depth in the process, but in my opinion, it’s a a tactic that can lead to great narrative outcomes if applied correctly and bravely. Sly 2 shows, just like similar games from the time like Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, that it’s possible to create original stories with the right implementation and without following design conventins blindly.

I also like Sly 2 for other reasons. It’s very well written, and manages to be funny and intimate in a way much like Avatar: The Last Airbender or Gargoyles. But above all else, I like it because it transpires emotion and agitation for all the new things it’s trying to do. Independently of it’s triple A condition, this game lies on the same sonic vibration that Half-Life and Doom rest. There’s a willingness to try things, to test ideas and check what would happen if they included this mechanic in this mission during this level. And though sometimes the test can prove wrong, the fact that they usually do it successfully is nothing sort of astonishing.

In a way, Sly 2 takes heed of the same tensions and anxieties Ratchet & Clank y Jak were also showing as the unofficial spokepeople of the console. All these faced the same fear of wanting to offer something new and to answer the question of what would be popular in the new year. if Jak was the most insecure of them all by far, and Ratchet seemed like it veered one way of the other depending on the day, Sly is an example of what can be achieved if one puts cuation aside and start improvising, with a goal in mind firmly set of course. In a way that feels planned, Sly‘s design philosophy reflects the one of its characters, white glove thiefs that are used to improvising. As it happend with the best stories of this genre, seeing them succeed is usually the best part. And here you have the option of seeing them win again and again, with only a couple of mistakes along the way. The collectible bottles, for example, feel kinda superflous now, and the enemies tend to offer a similar pattern no matter which world you visit. But that’s minimal.

I could keep talking about Sly and what I like so much about its characters, about the warmth that Murray sends to me or how ingenous and cleve Bentley’s plans are, how fun the tension between Carmelita and Sly is, or how any villain of the day shows so much personality. But I’ve got to stop at some point, and I don’t want to bore you in the process. For the time being, all I want to say is that, if you want to come back to any of these games and don’t have much time, try the Sly ones.

Originally published at http://laeradelvideojuego.wordpress.com on August 30, 2021.