Prince of Persia is My Favorite Thing

Release Date: 2008
Developer: Ubisoft
Genre: Action-Adventure, Platformer
# of Players: 1

The game starts out with your main character, a nameless adventurer, looking for his donkey in the desert. The game is based on an area of Persia and around the  Zoroastrianism religion. While the main protagonist is looking for his donkey, he comes across an Ahura named Elika. The Ahura people have forsaken the god of light, Ormazd, and tried to release the god of darkness, Ahriman. Upon his escape, Ahriman wants to take over the entire universe.

After the two main characters meet, they must work together to send Ahriman back to the Tree of Life. Elika informs the protagonist that they must return the areas of the land back to their former state. Now you must travel to the different areas of the land while fighting off the four main bad guys The Hunter, The Warrior, The Alchemist, and The Concubine. You must defeat each of these characters four times and then you have a final three part battle against each of them. After you have healed all the areas, you must go back to the temple and defeat Ahriman himself.

The game was alright, but I do have some issues with it. The game should have come up with more original characters. You have to fight each character of total of five times and only The Warrior's battles change more than just the surrounding. Another thing that bothered me was that the final showdown with Ahriman was just a simple sidescrolling platform level. Another issue is the length of the game. When I get a game I like to see what achievements there are for the game. There is an achievement for beating the game in under twelve hours. My initial thought is that you can only get this achievement if you know exactly where you are going and have played the game before. When I finally beat the game, I got the achievement. I am pretty sure that I even let the game sit for a while when I made a meal or had to go and do something. I am glad that I only ended up paying three dollars for this game due to its shortness.

Now for my biggest issue with the game. I will warn you that this contains spoilers about the ending. You spend all this time trying to heal the lands and throughout getting to know Elika, you learn that she died and her father gave Ahriman the land in order for her to be brought back to life. Elika keeps telling the main protagonist the importance of bringing the lands back together and healing them. After you go through the trouble of defeating Ahriman, Elika dies. The credits roll and it shows you taking Elika out of the temple and placing her on an altar. You then go to the four trees of light and destroy them, thus giving the land back to Ahriman so that Elika can live again. Therefore, the last twelve hours are pointless and everything is back to where it was at the beginning of the game.

Overall, I enjoyed the game for what it is. I am glad that it was only three dollars. I would not want to pay more than ten for this game due to how short it is. I will say that there is downloadable content, but I never played it. I do know that it is an epilogue to the game, so it may address the crappy ending. Also I would have liked a reuniting with his donkey, Farah at the end, but that is just being nit-picky.