Sands of Time was cool to young me at the time of release, but now finally getting past the first hour as an adult and finishing the other seven, I feel empty and irritated.
The simple story could be told in 60 seconds, and the bulk of the time spent in the game does not provide forward motion to the plot. In fact nearly all progression happens in the first 30 and last 10 minutes of the game. The rest is a lot of platforming and "cooperative" puzzle solving, including formulaic and unfair combat.
I'm a big Dark Souls fan so difficulty is not the problem for me here. It's that once you are knocked down, you can pretty much kiss the rest of the fight goodbye considering the NPCs will trade swipes at you just often enough that you can't physically get up and move before being beaten down again. So 90% of the time, being knocked to the ground is equivalent to a loss. You can sometimes use the dagger mechanic to get up but this mistake-forgiveness system is not as fun as it sounds.
It starts to feel like the dagger mechanic was the devs' lazy way of making up for their unbalanced and awkward game design. Instead of enjoying satisfying and rewarding gameplay, you're just given a million chances to slog through a disagreeable enemy encounter or restrictively directed platforming sequence. You're torturing yourself and then hitting rewind just to suffer it again. Then the Prince will say, "No no that's not right". If only the people who made the game told themselves this more often, we would have a more fluid and honest game in front of us.
The simple story could be told in 60 seconds, and the bulk of the time spent in the game does not provide forward motion to the plot. In fact nearly all progression happens in the first 30 and last 10 minutes of the game. The rest is a lot of platforming and "cooperative" puzzle solving, including formulaic and unfair combat.
I'm a big Dark Souls fan so difficulty is not the problem for me here. It's that once you are knocked down, you can pretty much kiss the rest of the fight goodbye considering the NPCs will trade swipes at you just often enough that you can't physically get up and move before being beaten down again. So 90% of the time, being knocked to the ground is equivalent to a loss. You can sometimes use the dagger mechanic to get up but this mistake-forgiveness system is not as fun as it sounds.
It starts to feel like the dagger mechanic was the devs' lazy way of making up for their unbalanced and awkward game design. Instead of enjoying satisfying and rewarding gameplay, you're just given a million chances to slog through a disagreeable enemy encounter or restrictively directed platforming sequence. You're torturing yourself and then hitting rewind just to suffer it again. Then the Prince will say, "No no that's not right". If only the people who made the game told themselves this more often, we would have a more fluid and honest game in front of us.