Off the Shelf Media

It’s time to be upfront about my biases. Sly Cooper is one of my favorite game series of all time. It was a birthday gift from my older brother for my 8th birthday so the member berries have been planted and writing about this game is giving me all the feels. That being said, I will try to be objective about the cons of this game, even if it kills my inner child. 

Gameplay: 2

You play as a sneaky raccoon. That already has me sold. It’s a lot of rinse, wash, repeat throughout the levels but the game has enough special missions to keep you interested. There is a sub-level where to fight off the crabs. Multiple racing mini-games and the one where you defend your partner Murrary with a turret as he tries to get one of the keys you need to advance in the game. 

It’s fun being sneaky and attacking an enemy from behind but some missions are genuinely aggravating to this day. I’m looking at you, Mz Ruby!

This entire section feels like a chore. There are missions where you fight ghosts on a boat, or you have to avoid chickens running at you with bombs. If you get hit once, you have to start all over. 

Don’t even get me started on her boss fight. It turns into a DDR game where the timing on the buttons doesn’t work as well because the game is from 2002 on the PS2. If you know, you know. 

Other than that, the game isn’t difficult. It does a good job of using Bently as the game guide telling you what to do. Even if most of the time it’s “Jump and press the O Button.” It’s a game meant for kids so what do you expect? 

The game is split up into six sections. The first is Paris, where you are introduced to Sly and it serves as the game’s tutorial. 

Then, it breaks into four boss zones where you have to find keys to open some doors to get to an area where you need more keys to fight the boss. Each zone consists of seven levels plus a boss fight. 

Then, the final stage is linear where you go from mission to mission and finish the game. It’s formulaic but for 2002, it worked and fit the mold of similar games of its time. 

The replay value is high. Each level has 20 clue bottles you have to find. Once you find them, you unlock the safe which gives you different thief abilities in the form of pages of the Thievius Raccoonus. The Thievius Raccoonus is a collection of techniques and lessons learned from Sly’s ancestors. Think of it as a thieving 101 guide. One turns you invisible, another makes your hat a bomb, and most give you some sort of attack move. 

It is a 1-hit and you’re dead type of game, but if you get 100 coins, you get a silver lucky charm. Get 100 more and you receive a gold lucky charm, giving you up to three times to get hit before it takes a life. 

All that being said, the game has a high replay value, and some of the missions I’ll play multiple times just because they are fun. 

If you still aren’t sold, there’s a mechanic where you can nod Sly and Bentley’s heads yes or no when they are talking to each other. That alone is a detail I’ve never seen in any other game, and I still play with it to this day when I replay the game. 

Story: 1

I’ll say it again…you play as a sneaky RACCOON! The animal choice was so perfect. Raccoons have a thief mask built-in on their faces. The story practically writes itself. But you aren’t stealing trash, dear reader, oh no no! You are a thief stealing from other thieves. In fact, you are stealing back what the thieves stole from you so they could become better thieves. A true anti-hero that hasn’t been seen since Shadow the Hedgehog. 

So who is Sly Cooper? 

Sly is a slick raccoon looking to restore his family’s honor by getting back the pages of Thievius Raccoonus. Sly comes from a long line of raccoon thieves, and they do what any thief does. They wrote a diary to pass down to the next generation of thieves. 

The Cooper gang has had one villain throughout their history, and that’s Clockwerk. He’s a mechanical bird surviving thousands of years trying to destroy the Coopers. Why? Well, we never find out. The game never tells us why an immortal robot bird wants to destroy a family of raccoons. 

Clockwerk formed the Fiendish Five to destroy the Coopers and steal their legacy, The Thievius Raccoonus. 

That means Sly’s origin story isn’t a happy one. When Sly was a kid, the Fiendish Five broke into his house, killed his parents, and split the book into five sections so they could wreak havoc all over the world and become master criminals. 

Quick sidebar on plothole #1. If Sly was a kid and the guidebook on becoming a master thief was stolen, how did he become a thief? Where did he learn? You know it wasn’t from his orphanage friends Bentley or Murray. It makes no sense how Sly has thieving abilities without the knowledge from the book. 

That’s kind of it for the story. It doesn’t go much beyond that. The Fiendish Five don’t work together. There’s no thread connecting the gang other than the Coopers. 

Raleigh the Frog is in the Welch Triangle, the Panda King is in China, Mugshot is in Las Vegas, and so on. Their criminal plans don’t mix bringing us to plot hole #2. The villains have no plan or motivation outside of Clockwerk. 

Raleigh has a storm machine in the Welch Triangle because he can loot the ships that wreck there…okay. He also knows where Mugshot is and tells you after you beat him because the plot needs to progress. Mugshot runs a criminal casino that has no guests. How is he even a thief? The Panda King launches fireworks and destroys villages. Not sure why he needed the Thievius Raccoonus for that either. 

In fact, why do any of them need the pages? Once you beat a boss, you unlock a new ability, but nobody in the previous stage used it. So why did they need the pages? It’s like nobody in the writer’s room stopped to ask why these criminals are working together. 

Raleigh could have been stealing the treasure and laundering it through Mugshot’s casino and the cops couldn’t investigate because they were under a voodoo spell by Mz Ruby. If all that failed, the Panda King could blow them up with rockets. See, it’s not that hard!  Instead, they all work independently and don’t use or need the pages they stole to make their evil plans work in the first place. 

A piece of my childhood soul died writing that because I love this game. 

The game tries to give Clockwerk a mysterious backstory other than spelling his name funny and to be fair it does work. It does create intrigue and makes me, as a player, want to know more about his motivation. Why does he have a grudge against the Coopers? How old is he, and how has he survived so long? How did a giant bird become a robot? You know, the hits. 

The disappointing thing is that he doesn’t need the other four to do anything. He could have killed the Coopers without them and taken the book for himself. 

Overall, the story is messy because the chapters don’t blend and mix well enough. It’s a straightforward revenge and redemption tale with an intriguing main villain that makes you want to play another game, and that’s good enough for me. 

Atmosphere: 2

The game looks great, even for 2002. The animation style was ahead of its time and Sucker Punch did a great job in making every level and world look unique towards the narrative. China has a lot of blue and grey. Vegas has a lot of orange and brown. Hati is shades of Green and Clockwerk’s level is lava red and fiery. 

Each world and level has its unique features, characteristics, details, and easter eggs. 

For example, when you raid the police station in Paris, you can see WANTED Posters for the Panda King and Mz Ruby. On Raleigh’s levels, you can see paintings of his ancestors on the walls, which is hilarious. As a diehard fan, it’s fun to see what you originally missed when you play the game again. 

The sounds you make when you break open a box or a bottle are satisfying. The sound Sly makes when he falls into lava is somehow exactly what I’d expect a raccoon to sound like if they fell into lava. 

Then, there’s the cutscenes. They are the highlight of the game. I’ve played this game for over 200 hours over the years and I’ve never skipped a cutscene. The scenes are well-edited and entertaining, and they give you everything you need to know about the world you are about to enter. 

Value: 2

This game was $50 upon release and I think that’s a ripoff even for 2002. In the same year, we saw Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Kingdom Hearts, and Age of Mythology released and those are all longer games with more content. If Sly was $30, I’d say it’s well worth every penny. 

Eventually, it did come out on the ‘Greatest Hits’ series that PS2 used to do and that brought the price down to $30. If you waited, I’d say you got the bang for your buck. 

That being said, I have played this game over and over and over again. I’ve beaten this game in a day. I’ve gotten to the Mugshot boss fight in 2 hours. I’ve beaten this game for friends and I’d play it again today if given the chance. 

This game may have cost $50 on release, but I got $5,000 worth of playtime out of it. And that makes the value high. 

Duration: 0

It’s a short game. It includes 35 or so levels in total, but they fly by fast if you know what you’re doing. Clockweks levels cut playtime down a lot since you can’t explore the world and there are no bottles or mini-games. It’s straight through to the end of the game. 

If you try hard enough, you can 100% the game in 10 hours. 

Total Score: 7/10

In my heart, this is a 10/10 game but if I look at it objectively the story isn’t as well-thought-out as it should be. That flaw takes away from the runtime which devalues the game as a whole bringing me to a strong 7/10. 

The success of the game was enough for three sequels that took the franchise to new heights.  Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus act as a strong foundation with a few flaws. It still stands tall as a classic in the PS2 era and fans are still begging for new games to this day, myself included. 

That’ll do it in this review. If you’re into retro gaming like I am, you should check out my MVP Baseball 2005 review. A true classic that inspired MLB videogames for years to come. I’ll see ya there, but until then, y’all take care.