Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (video game)

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What is one grain of sand in the desert? What is one grain of sand in the storm?

"Most people think time is like a river, that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of time, and I can tell you - they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm. You may wonder who I am and why I say this. Sit down, and I will tell you a tale like none you have ever heard..."

The first game in a Continuity Reboot series of the Prince of Persia games, released in 2003, well-known for popularizing Le Parkour moves as a refinement to the Platformer genre. Followed by Prince of Persia: Warrior Within.

The Prince is a young man accompanying his father to an Indian-like kingdom, whose Vizier betrayed them to the Prince's armies. Among the spoils of that kingdom is a large hourglass called "The Sands of Time" and a dagger that the Prince claims. The Vizier then tricks the Prince into opening the hourglass and unleashing the curse of the sands upon the land. Confused over what happened, he finds himself in the company of Farah, a princess of the kingdom he just ransacked and who has knowledge of what he has done, and has to go fix what he broke.

Tropes used in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time include:

The Game

• Action Girl: Farah.
• Adventure Narrator Syndrome: The Prince in The Sands of Time will occasionally gripe about Farah and her attitude, or reminisce about his love for her. This gets lampshaded twice, by the Prince himself, no less. "Why am I talking to myself?"
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Farah surely had known about the dagger's time-twisting power before the adventure began, but after the Reset Button is pressed, she believes that the whole story told by the Prince could be nothing but a fairy-tale.
• Armor Is Useless: The Prince takes the same amount of damage both before and after he removes his armor.
• Character Development: The plot of the original Sands of Time is fairly bare-bones, with more focus on the relationship between the Prince and Farah.
• Claustrophobia: The Prince mentions this in the first game. It doesn't come up much.
• Clothing Damage: The Sands of Time starts with Sleeves Are for Wimps (one at a time) and goes all the way up to Shirtless Scene.
• Dawn Attack:

Nizam: Words won't stop our enemies once they're armed with Alamutian blades. We attack at dawn.

• Eleventh-Hour Superpower: Both inverted and played straight. The Prince loses the Dagger of Time, meaning no more rewinding, but does get a sword that One Hit Kills all enemies.
• Escort Mission: Much of the time, you work with Farah, but it isn't as frustrating as most other examples because Farah is very competent with a simple bow, so she can slow down the creatures while you hack away at them.
• Guide Dang It The penultimate battle is against the Shadow. Hitting him damages yourself as well as him, and even though you have way more hit points you die as he does. You defeat him by sheathing your sword, a move that was available from the beginning of the game, but is suicidal against every other enemy.
• Literally Shattered Lives: The game allows you to use one unit of sand to freeze a target for destruction with the Prince's normal sword.
• Literary Agent Hypothesis: Sands of Time sets it up as though the Prince is retelling his story to the player; hence, whenever the player dies, we hear the prince going, "No, wait, that wasn't how it happened, hold on...".
• Mind Screw: Some of the visions as you get further into the game, showing the death of the princess as well as of the prince himself, even though they don't happen that way. It is the first time in the game that the visions start to steer you wrong.
• Mundane Utility: Throughout, the Prince uses the Dagger of Time's rewind feature to evade death and save the day. At the end of the game, he uses it to... kiss a girl without her knowing.
• No Flow in CGI: Averted: the Prince's long hair and poofy sleeves and pants react fairly realistically to his movements.
• Nostalgic Narrator
• Second-Hour Superpower: The Dagger of Time.
• Self-Made Orphan: The Prince's father is a boss. Guess what happens.
• Standard Hero Reward: Subverted. The Prince and Farah fall in love during the game, but when time is reset at the end, her memory of their adventure is erased. When he tries to kiss her at the end of the game, she pushes him away, saying she owes him gratitude, but nothing more. Of course, he then reverses time so she doesn't remember it.
• Unreliable Narrator: This happens whenever Prince narrates his (permanent) deaths.
  • "Wait, that's not what happened..."
• Unwitting Pawn: The Shah and Prince. They are convinced by the Vizier of India to invade India for no good reason outside of "Fortune and Glory", while the Vizier helps them in exchange for his choice picks from the Maharajah's treasure chamber. Needless to say, the Shah immediately agrees to this offer from a man who is offering to betray his sovereign and his nation to an invader and who in fact SOLICITED his betrayal to a random party and who can be assumed to have a powerful ulterior motive, and invades India. As a result, a Sand Apocalypse happens.
• Vague Age: It's hard to tell how old the Prince is.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: The only hint towards the Vizier's plan until the end is his coughing up blood in some cutscenes, implying he's suffering from a disease, possibly tuberculosis.

Sands of Time trilogy

• Anachronism Stew: Averted in The Sands of Time. According to the description, the events take place in 9 century Persia. The rest of the games, and the movie, on the other hand...
• Artifact of Doom: The Dagger of Time.
• Benevolent Architecture: An uncanny amount of the scenery is implausibly handy for jumping/climbing/hanging/swinging/free-running around on. Which is lucky, since there's a distinct imbalance in the ratios of really-high-places to staircases/ladders/jetpacks, smooth stable floors vs. fatal drops, etc.
• Blue Eyes: The Prince character.
• Book Ends: The beginning of Sands of Time with the ending of The Two Thrones, bookending the entire trilogy.
• Chekhov's Gun: With a delayed firing until the following game, where in Sands of Time Farah gave the Prince her pendant that kept her safe during the Sand curse. He used the pendant as part of his armor in Warrior Within, and once the time gates are opened, it gives him the same time manipulation powers.
• Colossus Climb: Several bosses in Warrior Within and The Two Thrones.
• The Corruption: The Sands of Time.
• Counter Attack: Plenty of it in the Sands of Time trilogy. In combat, the Prince is able to counter most enemy attacks and deal them a devastating blow. However, enemies can sometimes counter the counter attack, forcing the Prince to block or counter the enemy's counter attack. There are instances where the Prince and his opponent will exchange half a dozen counter attacks before one misses their timing and gets hit.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: The Prince is able to grab hold of specific ledges and bars to move around the area. In certain cutscenes though, he is shown to be capable of much more elaborate maneuvers. This style was actually moved into Assassin's Creed made by the same people, where you can literally grab onto almost anything.
  • Sands of Time features the worst example, where in one cutscene the Prince runs down a wall to survive what would otherwise be a fatal drop. Seen here
• Damage Over Time: In Warrior Within and The Two Thrones, the player slowly loses health while playing as the Sand Wraith or the Dark Prince.
• Darker and Edgier: Warrior Within, then toned down in the next game.
• Deadpan Snarker: The Sands of Time trilogy Prince. The Dark Prince is an absolute master of this, as evidenced by his response when the Prince sees people being herded toward the arena below.

Prince: I should do something. Dark Prince: Go ahead, fall to your death. That'll be of great use to them.

• Death Course: Lots.
• Dialog During Gameplay: From the Sands of Time trilogy onwards.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Prince is surprisingly competent at this. In the canon ending of Warrior Within, he kills both the Empress of Time and the unstoppable beast that makes sure the timeline stays correct. In The Two Thrones, he kills a god of time.
• Dramatic Wind: There's always some wind blowing in the land of the Ahura.
• Enemy Within + Enemy Without
• Evil Chancellor: The Vizier. He's even named properly, though the movie Vizier is named Nizam instead.
• If I Had a Nickel: Recurs in the form: "If I had some sands for every time someone said that to me..."
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The Prince in The Sands of Time also qualifies, more Jerkass with less (but still present) gold in the second game and, finally, both Jerkass and Jerk with a Heart of Gold at once in the third. With both voice actors.
• Joke Item:
  • The Two Thrones had several unlockable examples.
  • Warrior Within also had them; however, they were usually hidden in secret weapon racks, so it was possible to miss them all together.
• Kill It with Water: The Dahaka.
• Living Legend: The Prince toils in obscurity (well, as much obscurity as any prince can achieve) during The Sands of Time and Warrior Within, but he returns to his home and becomes beloved by the people as a liberating hero in The Two Thrones.
• Magic A Is Magic A: The usage of time powers is very clearly outlined that you can't exist in two places at the same time, merely move through time. The Sand Wraith mask is explicitly the only way to circumvent that rule.
• Mental Time Travel: The "rewind" feature or the Sands of Time series.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The Prince's repeated attempts to change the past tend to make things worse. When he gets called out on it by his darker self, he realizes that he can't and instead tries to fix things in the present.
• Pop Star Composer: Stuart Chatwood, multi-instrumentalist and former bassist for The Tea Party, wrote the soundtracks to all the Prince of Persia games made by Ubisoft.
• Power Glows: The Sands of Time, complete with a lampshade hanging. More subtly with the Dagger of Time.
• Reset Button: A key part of the story and gameplay in the Sands of Time trilogy. Done well because some are aware of the reset and others are not.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: The Sands of Time series is practically made of this trope. In the first game, the Prince accidentally releases the Sands of Time... so he and Farah (a princess) try to fix it. In the second, he fights fate... and wins. In the third, the Vizier turns himself into a god... so the Prince and Farah kill him, even though he's supposed to be unkillable.
• Scenery Porn: The Sands of Time series has this as well.
• Sealed Army in a Can: Pretty much any major army from The Sands of Time onwards. At some point, one of the characters will even warn everyone present about what will happen when said army is released. Naturally, no one listens.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Central to the plot of the first two Sands of Time games, then subverted in the third game, when the Prince realizes that each of his attempts to do this have caused more problems than they solved, and decides to accept his fate.
  • In the second and third game, this is played near Deconstruction he isn't only the one who created the sands of time, dooming himself, but also avoiding their creation, he also doomed his kingdom.
• Sheathe Your Sword: Both the original game and The Two Thrones have sequences requiring you to do this.
• Shirtless Scene: The Prince, quite a bit. Starting with progressive Clothing Damage in the first game, but in The Two Thrones, he spends about 90 percent of the game without his shirt.
• Shout-Out:
  • On the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 versions of The Forgotten Sands, through uPlay, you can unlock Ezio's (from Assassin's Creed 2) costume for use in the game.
  • During one of the featurettes for the Next-Gen game, Producer Ben Mattes mentions that the Prince doesn't "smolder with generic rage".
  • Kicking 20 enemies off cliffs in The Forgotten Sands nets you a trophy named This Is Persia.
• Stripperiffic: All female characters, at one point or another (particularly the women in Warrior Within).
  • Elika is about the only character who doesn't have such an outfit, though her clothes are torn in several places.
  • Justified with Farah, what with the whole "being captured and taken as a slave" thing...
• Take Your Time: In the Sands of Time trilogy, some ledges can support the Prince indefinitely, but collapse immediately after he steps off them.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: It's never exactly clear how time travel/manipulation works in the Sands of Time trilogy.

"Most people think time is like a river, that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of time, and I can tell you - they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm."

• Trilogy Creep: The Sands of Time storyline got a fourth installment, conveniently about the time the film is released.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Throw the Sands of Time Prince down pits or into spikes as many times as you like! You've still go the necessary time-rewinding sand, right?
• Warrior Prince
• You Already Changed the Past: See Stable Time Loop above.
• You Can't Fight Fate: A running theme that is subverted and finally double-subverted throughout the Sands trilogy, but it's best defined in Two Thrones. Every single thing the Prince has tried to prevent from happening in The Sands of Time and Warrior Within comes to pass in the third game, except one: Farah lives. The Prince accepts it in the end. Similarly, Shadee and Kaileena know their actions are futile but go against the time-line anyway. However, Kaileena's motivations are ret-conned into "I knew this would happen all along and all my actions were to make sure it did."
• You Get Knocked Down, You Get Back Up Again: Averted; in the Sands of Time series, enemies can and will attack you while you're down. Fortunately, you can rewind time, block while on your back, or perform a roll to swipe at their feet and get back up.