At last, we have cracked open the Cooper Vault. Sadly, though Sly wished to bring his best friends with him for the adventure, he must continue on alone.

And so, we explore the vault for the game’s final platforming sequence. May it be one for the books.

This is perhaps one of the strongest notes for the platforming in this game to end on. Not only does it feel suitable grandiose to physically traverse the Cooper family history, up to the present day, in playable form, but there’s an underlying tragedy that is felt just as palpably as that grandiosity.

Earlier, back in the Panda King segment, I spoke of Sly’s ancestry as a weight on him, and this level gives that weight a physical presence. As we navigate the traps and obstacles Sly’s ancestors left to keep non-Coopers out of the vault, we can almost feel Sly’s struggle and desire to measure up to the legacy laid out before him. With each ancestor’s trap we overcome, he gets that much closer to proving that he’s a worthy successor to the name.

Yet at the same time, the vault itself has clearly seen better days. What must have once been a beautiful monument to the family line has decayed to ruin over the years. Great stores of wealth and splendor have been left to fester and rot, worthlessly hidden away from the rest of the world, unable to be of use to anyone at all. In that sense, this cave is a tomb as much as it is a vault. It is almost like peeling back a layer of gold on a piece of jewelry, to be greeted by the pyrite core underneath.

While it still remains just as magnificent, there is an element of sorrow that is felt while beholding the place. For that reason, it beautifully encapsulates the themes that rest at the core of the game.

At last, we’ve assembled the full crew necessary to tackle the Cooper Vault job. With Dr. M still squatting on the island, looking to take the fortune for himself, it will be tough. And yet, with the talent we’ve gathered, we just might be able to pull it off…?

Wait. Crap. I remember now. We were in the middle of being crushed to death by a giant mutant. Guess it was just too good to be true.

Or was it?

Of course, Sly gets rescued immediately after we return to the scene from the introduction, but his injuries give us enough of an excuse to give all of our new playable characters a chance to shine, for the most part.

We already mentioned how Dimitri only gets used exactly twice over the entire game, something I was at least aware of even at the time. What somehow escaped me is that the Panda King doesn’t get a playable section at all in the finale, even if he does get a few moments to utilize his fireworks. I’m honestly a little shocked that escaped my notice in the numerous times I’ve played and replayed this game.

Fortunately, all of these sections are exactly the right length where they introduce something new to break up the normal gameplay without overstaying their welcome. It’s a sequence that’s paced well, showing how the cast has come together as a unit.

Now that they’ve gotten us into the vault, we’ll have all of the next episode to collect our inheritance.

Captain LeFwee, this so-called “smartest man on the seven seas”, may have gotten the better of us this day, but we’re nothing if not tenacious. We’ll bite back, and harder.

Let’s give him a show he won’t soon forget.

This particular segment just so happens to have many of my favorite missions in the entire game one after the other. The Kraken fight in particular is a great set piece, where both the Panda King and Sly get to shine. And then to pay it off by letting us play as that same sea monster, turning it against the scurvy dogs that we’ve been fighting this whole time… chef’s kiss.

Speaking of payoffs, Penelope’s duel against LeFwee himself is another, both for her and Bentley’s character arc and the time-honored tradition in pirate fiction of hypercompetent female leads who are roughly twenty times as capable as their male counterparts. There’s no better way to send off a pirate episode than such a daring duel on board a ship out to sea.

With that taken care of, and our final member on the team, we’re ready to finish this game next week.

Our mission to steal back the treasure that rightfully belongs to Dimitri has hit a couple of snags, but that comes as no surprise to the Cooper Gang. We’re used to working under pressure, and this is no different. With cunning, planning, skill, and a hint of luck, even this new LeChuc… I mean LeFwee character is no match for us.

I don’t think it’s possible to include a pirate-themed chapter in a game like Sly Cooper without introducing ship combat and/or treasure hunting with an old-school treasure map. They’re so tightly woven into the setting and genre that we would feel their absence.

Thankfully, both of them were implemented well. It’s shocking how seamless the transition between the sailing overworld map and ship combat is. I can’t imagine how much work went into that detail alone, and that same level of craft is on display for the combat itself. It may be simple in concept and control, but there’s a depth to maneuvering the ship to avoid enemy cannon fire while angling our own cannons between volleys to deal maximum damage. I spent a lot of time battling ships in Honor Among Thieves as a child because it is by far the fastest way to grind the coins needed to purchase all the gadgets for the cast. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were on stream, I would have done so again because I like the mechanic that much.

I’m less hot on the treasure map mechanic, but I’m still overall hot on it. It’s a great recreation of the fantasy that comes from deciphering and following a map to buried treasure. Almost every kid has done that at some point in their adolescence, and I’m no different.

The only weird aspect of this episode is Dimitri’s contribution to it. I never realized it before, but looking back at the footage he’s barely in this episode at all, and it’s supposedly his recruitment mission. Even his actual job feels like an afterthought because the focus is primarily on Bentley and Penelope’s relationship. Ironically, the scene from the thumbnail is the only time he talks in this entire episode.

At least it’s in service to a fun chapter.

Dimitri has finally cashed in on that favor we promised him back in Holland. We’re tasked with recovering the treasure that was stolen from his grandfather when he was still a young man. If we succeed, not only will we repay the favor, but only gain a new member for the Cooper Gang.

We just need to outwit a town of bloodthirsty pirates in order to do so. Can’t be too difficult, can it?

In any other world or setting, an anachronistic pirate adventure starring a modern-day gang of thieves would seem really odd and/or out of place. But for Sly Cooper, and almost specifically Sly Cooper, everyone in the team feels right at home here in Blood Bath Bay. If anything, the cell-shaded graphic and animation style, combined with the charisma of the core cast, work to seamlessly blend the gang into almost any type of setting that the team at Sucker Punch could envision some form of thievery taking place.

And as someone who enjoys pirate fiction, it’s fun seeing all the homages to said fiction. When Sly is jousting with his words the way Guybrush Threepwood does in Monkey Island, it’s easy to feel the reverence that the development team held for this genre. I can almost picture in my head the person in the pre-production room enthusiastically pitching the pirate scenario to the rest of the team when I play these missions.

To top it off, we get some genuinely great moments between Bentley and Penelope in this hub world. Watching them bond, and have a heart-to-heart moment as Penelope gets over her puppy love for Sly and realizes she gets along with Bentley far more, gives both characters what they need to grow and develop.

It’s not the most profound writing in the world, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s good, and that’s all that matters.

This General Tsao character is starting to tick our gang the cluck off. Though his chicken is delicious, he’s in serious need of an attitude adjustment.

Fortunately for us, it’s time for us to give him the wake-up cock-a-doodle-doo of a lifetime. I’m really going to enjoy this.

God, that felt good. Even if the boss fight against the dragon had some technical problems, it’s still a solid setpiece fight that fits the locale. And with that, the Panda King is officially part of the crew.

We have one more person to recruit and one last job before the Cooper Vault heist, so next week we head to pirate country and finish off the team.

Turns out this General Tsao isn’t the fool we all thought he was. With relative ease, he was able to track down our safehouse and steal the computer Bentley used to formulate all of his plans.

This job may have suddenly gotten more complicated, but our goal remains the same. We have a wedding to crash.

Like Penelope, it is easy to argue that the inclusion of the Panda King in the Cooper Gang is redundant because Bentley already knows his way around explosives. And similarly to her, that surface-level reading would ignore what he brings to the group dynamic.

In particular, his history as a direct antagonistic force for Sly back in the first game, and as one of the Fiendish Five who worked together to murder his father. Their shared history is one of bitter resentment, but both of them recognize that it’s been a long time since then, and have opened themselves up to work with each other despite that. Not to say that it’s easy, but that they’re both putting in the effort.

Their past informs their relationship but does not define it. And because of that, they’re able to, albeit reluctantly, transcend it.

It’s a surprise tool that’ll help us later.

Our business in Holland has been completed, and we’ve made contact with the Panda King. If we want his help on the Cooper Vault job, then we need to save his daughter from an illegitimate marriage to a corrupt and egomaniacal feudal lord.

So we have no time to waste and plenty of work to do.

In a game, and arguably a series, that tackles the theme of the past, legacy, and how they affect the people caught up in them, General Tsao makes a very compelling villain. He’s obsessed with both his family’s legacy and his own, attempting to wed Jing King only so that he can add the Panda King’s genetics to his family line in a vile, eugenicist worldview. And naturally, he also believes himself entitled to whatever he wants because of his family line’s alleged superiority.

He’s a cautionary tale about what can happen when someone buys so heavily into the myth that they’re special or unique due entirely to the circumstances surrounding their birth. And yet, in that respect, he and Sly are similar in that they both venerate the families they were born into and strive to be credits to their respective lineages. The difference is that Sly doesn’t assume that he’s a good thief because he’s a Cooper: Rather, he strives to be one of the best thieves around because otherwise he may not stack up to the ones who came before.

As much as it is an honor for Sly to be in the Cooper family, it is just as much of a weight due to the expectations that come with it.

We’ve played with both mono-Red and mono-Black, and they’re both excellent piles of cards, but they aren’t true to the kind of Magic I enjoy playing. As someone who pretends to be an anthropomorphic wolf mind mage on the internet, I’ve always been a blue wizard at heart.

Fortunately for me, blue is almost as easy to build on a budget as red in this format, with even competitive decks running mostly commons and uncommons. Eternal formats like Legacy are already aware of how powerful Delver of Secrets can be, and we have all the tools in Standard to showcase what it can do.

Decklist from MTGGoldfish: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5197227#paper

Just kidding. This deck technically runs a playset of Delver of Secrets, and it can easily become the win condition. At yet, the true all-star of the deck is Haughty Djinn. Like Delver, Djinn is a win condition for the deck that can easily close a game out in a few swings. But even more than that, it gives us a discount on our spells, which means we can cast him on turn 4 and still have mana open to protect him.

The game plan is as simple as it can be. If we can keep Delver, Djinn, or Tolarian Terror on board, and clear the way, we can disrupt our opponent’s early game and destroy them quickly enough to prevent them from getting a late game. We have plenty of ways to churn through our deck to arrive at the cards we need, and once we get them we have ways of making sure our opponent can’t touch them.

Against aggro and midrange, we don’t have too much trouble. We can keep our opponent off tempo while advancing our own board and game plan to quickly outvalue them. The only thing we need to be worried about is making sure that we don’t let a game last too long, otherwise our counterspell suite becomes significantly less effective.

Still, this is blue magic at its best. We blue mages always think we have all the answers. Unfortunately for the other colors, we’re usually right.

It’s time to take on the Black Baron and bring Penelope into the Cooper Gang. I’m sure he’ll be no pushover, but we always find a way to prevail. This time will be no different.

And afterward, Bentley has a proposal for another new recruit… one that even Sly has difficulty processing.

It is easy to discount Penelope and the Panda King both for the simple that they both bring in expertise that Bentley already brings to the table, remote-controlled vehicles and demolitions respectively. And while it’s not incorrect to make that comment, that criticism also ignores what both of these characters bring to the group dynamic.

Penelope highlights the tension that exists between Sly and Bentley, which will be tugged on closer to the end of the game. The game only points it in passing, but Bentley has grown more bold, courageous, and audacious with his plans and schemes. In many ways, he’s starting to come out of Sly’s shadow. And yet, seeing how Penelope swoons over Sly is a not-so-subtle reminder, that he’s still playing second-fiddle to his ally. It’s not enough to make him do anything rash, but it stings, and it does create a minor rift between them.

And the Panda King ties more into the game’s central theme of legacy and being weighed down by the past. It’s part of why we’ve seen so many other familiar faces like Dimitri and Muggshot as well. A major theme of this game is how history can easily weigh us down when we allow it to, or when we fail to move on. Sly and the Panda King are naturally distrustful of each other given their past. It’s kept the Panda King trapped in that moment, and only by accepting that they’re both had time to grow and change is he able to move on.

It’s easy to let history trap you, but you’re far better off learning from it and acknowledging it without letting it define you.