Cunning, Devious – Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus – Part 2

The clever raccoon had been busy, infiltrating the eye of the storm to take out Raleigh the frog at its source, swiping his section of the legendary Thievius Raccoonus. And with him dealt with, we’ve set our sights upon Mesa City and its musclehead master, Muggshot.

Let’s show him why you never skip leg day.

Since it was a topic of conversation in the stream, I went ahead a looked up how the vaults, and the powerups we unlock by opening them, work under the hood mechanically. According to the Sly fan wiki, I was correct in saying that the codes for each vault were fixed. Since Bentley’s VA has to record lines for each of them, and since they often take the context of the level into account, it only makes sense for them to be fixed.

However, the contents of each vault are not fixed, at least not by location. Instead, the abilities we get are allocated in a fixed order, checking for what we already have unlocked and giving us the next item on the list, and this check is performed when we load into a level. The exception is the third vault for every hub world, where we’re instead given the ability to scan for clues and breakables in that hub’s levels. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that since Ms. Ruby’s and the Panda King’s hub worlds each contain only four vaults, meaning that we can only reap that reward for a single level in each of them. That seems like a paltry reward, but then again we don’t really make much use of the powers anyway.

Something else that I mentioned was how awkward it can be to play through Ms. Ruby’s stage knowing what I know now, compared to what I knew way back in 2002. In particular, the fact that we as a western civilization misappropriated a lot from the “Vodou” belief system that originated in Haiti. It’s admittedly nothing new, and hardly the game’s fault since 2002 wasn’t an era where that type of cultural sensitivity was the norm. Even I made the mistake of calling it an organized religion in the stream when it’s more of a loose coalition of centuries-old traditions. Still, it’s worth pointing out and calling out so that we don’t repeat those mistakes.