It's always really difficult to choose between An Opera of Fear and A Cold Alliance for my favourite Sly 3 episode, but it's safe to say that Flight of Fancy is easily the most nostalgic. Not because it's rooted in my childhood memories (it is) but in the sense that it shares elements with episodes from Sly 2 during a game which presents the gang at the peak of their career. Let's discuss

I think we can all agree that the series very effectively presents the gang's development, not only as individual characters, but also as a team of thieves. Sly 1 shows the gang as teens during their first set of adventures which sprout from Sly's desire for vengeance. They make many mistakes, they don't really have planned heists or jobs - Sly just casually goes into every level breaking shit and then faces off the big baddie - and they surpass their own expectations of themselves to defeat Clockwerk in the end. Then, Sly 2 covers a crucial point in the gang's career. It felt as if up until this point they hadn't truly fucked up so they went into it being very cocky, especially Sly. And when they got their asses handed to them by Neyla, getting separated tested their individual and collective limits.

In Sly 3, the gang has evolved to master thieves, capable enough to feel comfortable recruiting and as such mentoring strangers and also worthy enough to inherit an entire lineage's stolen loot. This is also shown in the missions, which up in scale and spectacle. It's no longer just "follow this villain" or "pickpocket this person". It's a combination of missions we grew accustomed to during Sly 2 like "follow Octavio and do recon under time pressure", or something completely new. Right off the bat, for example, we send a ferris wheel rolling across Venice squashing guards in its way, like this is just a mission not Thunderbeak or something. Every Sly 3 mission evolves explosions, high-tech and the eventual mini boss-fight.

So it's then a bit surprising to see the gang reverting to their sneakier, more subtle ways during Flight of Fancy. That's not to say we don't have explosions and thrill in the episode (the dogfights, Muggshot vs Carmelita, wolf-riding, shooting literal fucking windmills into blimps), but the way they choose to sabotage the competition due to how delicate its internal politics are creates some nostalgia. Paddling around the sewers in a blow-up rowboat and breaking into the pilots' rooms is very Sly 2. It felt like something 18 year old Sly would do. Also, scaling the Baron's castle harks back to Sly 1's platforming and is reminiscent of how small Sly would seem when approaching a villain's daunting lair.

The design choices for the Netherlands seem primitive too, enhanced by the fact that we're in the countryside. I feel like there's that Sly 1 and 2 rule of thumb at play here, where Sucker Punch chose the aesthetic or genre first and then chose the location. For example, they wanted a spooky level in Sly 2 so they chose Prague which would accommodate the genre through its architecture and gothic character. That allowed them to exaggerate a lot in terms of level design. And it's the same for Flight of Fancy, where we have a spooky castle on top of a very cartoony hill and you can hide under haystacks. Oppositely, the rest of the game's levels seem to have departed from the previous entries' design principle (except Kaine Island, which is fully fictional). It feels as if SP chose Venice and wanted to play up how European it is, or the wilderness of the Australian outback but without any radical stylistic choices. The genres are explored through the narrative, not through design.

Lastly, let's close off with some Thieves in Time slander because it wouldn't be a signature me tumblr essay without it. If we really use the entirety of our brain power and manage to look past all of the game's bullshit, one additional flaw would be how it doesn't consider the gang's development when telling its story. I'm not saying that in the series' fourth game the gang should have been infallible or indestructible due to achieving master thief status in Sly 3, but here the mistakes they make feel so unnecessarily stupid and like shit they wouldn't have done even in Sly 1. Falling for Penelope's schtick twice; Sly letting his guard down during the Le Paradox boss fight after the Contessa; whatever the fuck went down in Arabia... yea.

Ashamed to say that i played a part in putting a Youtube Short™ out into the world and now live in constant fear of how the universe will choose to punish me. It’s funny and cute though so make sure to leave a like and subscribe if you haven’t already!

While @inspector-montoya-fox and I work on our Sly 2 discussion, here's a silly highlight from our episode on the first game!

(You can find the podcast on YouTube under the name Safehouse Chats!)

His silly rabbit

nyoom💨

i needed an excuse to dig out my mic and this was as dumb as anything else i’d be doing with it

what are they talking about?

editing the following comic panels For Reasons and I really amused myself just by doing this

unfunny side characters are hidden behind The Box.

thanks everyone for submitting your favourite Toothpick moments i loved reading about them. did you know he is the first mammal villain to not have fur?

hey guys please hit the ask box and let me know what your favourite Toothpick moment is.

hey guys please hit the ask box and let me know what your favourite Toothpick moment is.

let me hop onto this kinda underrated but definitely outdated post for a minute and ask: did Dr Michael PhD know about Clockwerk? it's not like i want the owl to be the ultimate catalyst in Sly's life - he was the end-all be-all for two games, it was time to move on for sure - but at the same time murdering an entire lineage of raccoons isn't um something you stumble upon everyday ?

i know how enticing it can be to want to connect all the dots when writing sequels and i'm so happy SP didn't pull a Roman Bridger told Billy Loomis to become Ghostface with Clockwerk and Dr Michael. actually, when you think about it, Sly 3 resists the urge to bring up Clockwerk in any way, which is very respectable. the way the game connects to the other two is through the aftermath of ClockLa (which is hardly mentioned) and returning villains as new gang members. if we removed those from the equation, Sly 3 could be a standalone entry. it's a very refreshing game after, again, two games that centre around Clockwerk and his subsequent resurrection but it's also a bit jarring to think that he is barely (or not at all?) mentioned during a game that involves two characters who worked for him as well as one who used his own tail feathers. at times it feels like the game is deliberately going out of its way to tiptoe around the subject.

personally, Honour Among Thieves left a lot to be desired, especially as the final episode not only of the game but of the series. more specifically, i love Dr Michael's conversation with Bentley so much but i feel like it was too little too late. i get that it acted as a climax for the 'Bentley wants to step out of Sly's shadow' storyline but the conversation gave birth to so many huge implications that it felt like we were just then getting to the juicy bits. why does Dr Michael have such vitriol for ConnEr Cooper? what happened between the gang members? was ConnEr truly a piece of shit or is it all Dr Michael's perspective? did every Cooper have a Bentley and Murray figure in their life?

whereas the player got to know Neyla through her various appearances throughout Sly 2, Dr Michael's character development is put on pause due to the fact that Sly 3's episodes aren't interconnected via the common thread of "a gang of villains". as a result, many questions arise in the final episode and never get answered. one of them being: what's his connection to Clockwerk? as highlighted in the paragraph above, there are other questions that are easily prioritised over this one because they are pointed at during the conversation with Bentley. that being said, it feels a bit bizarre for Dr Michael to not even bring up Clockwerk once. when he first sees Sly he thinks it's ConnEr, which raises the question 'does he even know about Clockwerk murdering ConnEr in the first place?' that's definitely one possibility. the gang dispersed and when ConnEr settled down as a family man, that's when Clockwerk came into the picture. ok! probable scenario...

... but idk i'm not really buying it. i don't want to be the tin foil hat girlie and i'm truly not, like in terms of narrative logic it makes total sense. but from a consistency standpoint, how can you create a character that is actually portrayed as more of an omnipresent, all-powerful entity, the literal embodiment of evil, to then just have him go *poof* ? Clockwerk is the stain on the Cooper legacy, the Cooper killer and Dr Michael, who prides himself on hating ConnEr so much, has no idea who he is? the evil scientist who is infatuated with the Coopers and creates animal hybrids doesn't know about the owl robot that survives on Cooper hate? mama what are the odds. again, i'm against trying to unnecessarily connect all the dots, but even a mention would suffice. cutscene appearance even. like what if Dr Michael acted as this Judas figure who approached Clockwerk post gang breakup and spilled on how to track down ConnEr or some sort of secret? it would also help flesh out Clockwerk's character posthumously, which i find so clever. this is something discussed on the new episode of Safehouse Chats btw (shameless plug-in sis), where we debate whether or not Clockwerk benefits from being shrouded in total mystery. as for my initial question? i think Dr Michael bottomed for Clockwerk. block me

[ x ]

rare footage of me spewing anti-Carmelita rhetoric. disgusting behaviour on my part. do i regret it? tune in and find out. also no one come for me for my comments on Banjo Kazooie

Our second episode is now live! Come and listen to our discussion of the all-important first game (and how we repeatedly baffle each other with our opinions on it)

cut him some slack he's nocturnal

when asked about the idea of Apollo turning evil, the Dual Destinies developers had this to say:

I'm not sure how the overall story would pan out if they had chosen to go this route, considering all of the other storylines going on in DD and how some of them didn't get the time to develop properly, but this is such an interesting concept for many reasons. Firstly, it'd speak on Apollo's character: this would be the second time he'd be tied to an "evil" attorney and his relationship with this woman could potentially bring about trauma from his time with Kristoph, something we never got to see. How did Apollo react to Kristoph's fall from grace? What was their relationship like prior to Papa Phoenix's return? Papa Phoenix kinda saved Apollo from potentially making a mentor out of a corrupt lawyer, and maybe if this woman was introduced in DD the same wouldn't happen and she'd manipulate him into believing and promoting different ideologies in the courtroom.

Secondly, how was this woman's character mesh/clash with the rest of the cast, and more importantly, Blackquill? Supposing she would have her own firm or work some place which isn't the Wright Anything Agency, she would be Phoenix's rival from the same side of the law, and the closest we've come to seeing that is Kristoph or Calisto Yew, which both have somewhat brief roles in the grand scheme of their respective games. Would she be sarcastic or serious? A pro or an amateur with a careless attitude but an ultimate motive, like Godot? How would she react to Simon Blackquill and the reason behind him being able to prosecute again?

Thing is, Blackquill's situation might have presented the Dark Age of the Law (albeit in a really vague way) but he ended up being a good guy. So I'm assuming this woman would be the opposite: batting for the heroes but being a villain. Personally, the whole Dark Age of the Law storyline was never meant to be explored in this game the way it was. I think Blackquill's situation is an extreme and the straight up absence of logic behind having a prisoner act as a prosecutor doomed the entire concept from the start. If Blackquill was a free man but was facing scrutiny due to rumours of being shady (like Edgeworth in Rise from the Ashes) and we had this woman actually be shady and get off scot-free, then the Dark Age of the Law would be a great storyline about people viewing attorneys as angels and prosecutors as demons, when in reality it all comes down to the people taking on these roles. This could also be interwoven throughout the game in a much more effective way, like for instance if in Academy we had a shortage of students showing interest in becoming prosecutors because of this current public uncertainty on them. But I don't want to get in to too much detail because I think that by now I've expressed how I feel about how DD tries to handle too much and ends up delivering almost nothing. The concept that I'm suggesting is also kinda what we got in SoJ, but against attorneys instead of prosecutors.

Anyway, although this interview is right at the end of the DD art book, I circled back to Apollo's page after reading it and sure enough one of the sketches of the attorney woman is there. It just says Immoral lawyer so I'm assuming that's her, but I could be wrong because I don't see any correlation between this design and Aura's. I think she looks really cool. The central motif behind her design seems to be air or wind, judging by her fan, her little wing/wind hair clip and the strand of hair at the top looking like it's getting blown away. She could use that fan in court and like point with it, or smack someone on the head or blow a gust of wind towards the prosecution with her objection? Love it.

I also took the liberty of tracing her and adding some colour (open for higher quality). I think she'd absolutely gobble it up with the green hair!

Ace attorney is so funny for making a game where you play as a lawyer whose assistant lets him talk to dead people and the only dead person he talks to is a smarter, better lawyer

sly :)