Had great potential, but Sanzaru abandoned the fine writing work of the previous three and dropped the ball. Hard.
Spoilers warnings, of course. I agree with the other issues posted here, The Grizz was terrible, with shitty motivations that flip flopped. Carmelita got super slutified and her character became even more 2 dimensional, if that were possible. The Time Travel thing had a LOT of potential. I had this cool notion in my head that they might, say, create the time tech that made time travel possible, and then waaaaay later, some enemy from the future uses that pandora's box Bently opened to go back and screw with them ,the coopers, and penelope, somehow. It could've been this really wicked cool, terminator esque "future affecting the past" kinda thing. Instead what we're getting is a polished 1st two chapters, and a petered out, slapped together rest of game and story. Where they could've been stylized and clever, they clearly went to "hmmm, what did they do before that made Money? cause that's all we care about" and made it trite and formula. But for my biggest gripe of them all, I will repost my rant about their utter butchery of my favorite Nerdly She-Mouse character in the Game, Penelope.
This was nothing less than the crappiest butchering of a character and a nice, light hearted quirky series and its story that I've seen in a while. This "betrayal" was an element of Penelope's character that she had already resolved with Bentley in the previous game, and had led to great character growth and a way more satisfying love story than that between Sly and Fox. And then the new writers from Sanzaru come in, completely ignore the purity of that canon and butcher both the well-crafted story, and my favorite relationship in the game. Moreover, her reasons for trying to court Bentley away from Sly? To do justice to his potential? That is a complete rehash of the entire pitch of the main villain from Sly 3...and Bentley already worked out his issues on that. This was the shameless act of a shitty, shitty, lazy writer with no regard for the previous, well-told and stylized storytelling already set up. God, this pisses me off. It's not a super serious game, and I get that, but it still had a purity of story and the right balance of semi-serious to campy and meaningful characters with depth and growth over time that Thieves in Time completely shatters, Sly and Carmeletia had an opportunity for their relationship to take a new unique turn at the beginning of the game and instead it just tropes back into the same old now-stale formula from previous games. It was done well then, we didn't need to see it again. This game, and especially this Chapter has really turned me off to the series. I think I'm going to just pull the same thing I did w/ the Star Wars prequels and unacknowledge this game and its entire forced, sloppy, poorly thought out story from the Sly Universe. Sly 1-3's collective narrative is amazing and fun and light and everything good games should be, and I"m just going to cherish that story to my heart and try my best to forget about how this game tried it's best to ruin it. Want my advise, Sanzaru? Reboot. Scrap this whole shitty game from canon and do it right this time. Or honor the franchise and let it rest on the high note it was on before you stuck your grubby greedy fingers into an already perfect pie. Runs off to play some indie games w/ small budgets and amazing stories to detox...thank you, To the Moon
End repost
If they were to take a second crack at doing this right, and completely erase this game's canon, I might, MIGHT give them a chance and part with my hard-earned cash to see it. But Sanzaru has really screwed up a finely crafted serious but not too serious thing Sucker Punch had going. They ruined my fun, and I'll never forget it. If they bring back the old writing staff for the previous games and give this another go or something that shows us they're going to try to be loyal to the gem they inherited, maybe thing about sticking w/ the franchise in the future. But as for this one? Save yourself some heartache, buy the Sly Trilogy and chomp down on their delicious story goodness and awesome old-school (deliciously unforgiving, at times) gameplay. Leave this stinker in the dump where it dragged the serious through.
