Earlier this summer, developer PlayStation Sucker Punch revealed that despite months of rumors to the contrary, no one – not themselves or any other developer – was working on a follow-up either from Sly Cooper Where Infamous franchisees. With the studio now focused on what is most likely a Ghost of Tsushima after, the two franchises that helped it establish a presence as a top PlayStation developer are on ice and will likely remain so for a few more years. And while normally such news would ultimately be disappointing and unsurprising, it only stings one. little a little more than usual because Sly The franchise is now 20 years old.
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus released for PlayStation 2 on September 23, 2002. The titular Sly Cooper comes from a family of master thieves, and with the help of his crew – Bentley, a brain turtle and Murray, the hippomaniac – travels the world to recover the pages of his family’s titular tome of the gang that killed his father and left him an orphan. Like most games at the time featuring an animal protagonist, Sly was a platform game; each of the game’s five core areas contained levels where a key was waiting at the end that would be used to cause Sly to fight the area’s boss and retrieve a page from his family book. These pages would then lead to a new mechanism to improve his repertoire of thieves.
Despite reviews praising it as a solid platformer, the game didn’t sell very well at first, but eventually sold enough copies to join PlayStation’s “Greatest Hits” lineup. With this success came two sequels, both of which sold and reviewed fairly well: 2004’s gang of thieves made Bentley and Murray fully playable characters (swapped through a safehouse at each location) with their own missions as the trio pulled off a series of heists through glory. Honor among thieves, the trilogy closer released in 2005, the trio expanded their gang to reach the Cooper lineage vault, though these characters can only be played for a handful of missions under specific circumstances.
The biggest problem the Sly franchise ended up being that it was often overshadowed by its brothers in arms, Insomniac Games’ Ratchet & Clank and Naughty Dog’s Jack and Daxter. Although the three franchises are grouped together due to their starting common status as standard platforms, Sly was basically the outlier of the trinity, unaided by James and Ratchet aimed at a slightly older audience. Even though their protagonists were a mute (at first) elf with a talkative weasel on his shoulder and a cat with a talking backpack, respectively, these franchises’ focus on guns, a bit of raunchy humor, and a Teen rating were more appealing than the E for everyone the adventures of a raccoon who commits crimes with a turtle and a hippopotamus.
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But while the Sly Cooper The franchise didn’t have the edge of its peers, it made up for that in style. That’s how the games fully embraced the cartoon role by calling each location an “episode,” with a splashy map and title like you’re watching a cartoon after you get home from school. Aside from the cel-shaded cutscenes that gave a brief glimpse of the villain, who was usually an average person who decided to turn to crime out of sheer spite, it was the little things like comic book sound effects that pop up when the enemies are defeated or how footsteps would be accentuated by guitar plucks as they weaved behind guards or along rooftops. Even though stealth and crime games have remained quite in favor in the industry, there is nothing quite like it. Sly Cooper there right now.
After honor among thieves wrapped up an arc on the trilogy, things got… weird for the franchise. Sucker Punch entered the PlayStation 3 era with its superhero saga Infamous, and the question of whether the studio would ever return Sly was answered once and never came back. In 2013, Sanzaru Games brought back the series with Thieves in time, what was…good, from what I remember, but I certainly didn’t play it as much as those previous games. The following year saw a trailer for a CG film adaptation from Rainmaker and Blockade Entertainment which honestly still looks pretty good. (Except Murray, something about his proportions and face.) Unfortunately, it was a film that slowly fell apart before it was finally canceled, thanks in part to the box office failure of Rainmaker . Ratchet & Clank film.
So where does that leave the franchise now? On a game front, currently icy, as previously stated; but there were rumblings in these last years about a tv show in production from PlayStation Studios. Given how hard Sony tries to get its games small screens and silver screens– they make a Gravity Rush movie, of all things, after switch off the studio that created this series – it wouldn’t be out of the question, and it wouldn’t be totally undesirable either, given how Sly has television basically encoded in its DNA. But even though I’m looking forward to it, I think I prefer a new one Sly game first. Like what Flaw apart served as a reminder of what made Ratchet & Clank so special, it would be out of place to bring the Cooper Gang back without giving them another chance to steal players’ hearts through a new game.
You can play at Sly streaming games if you have the Premium level of PlayStation Plus.
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