A new Prince of Persia game has just been revealed and it features a black protagonist. Most fans seem to be fine with this decision. But, as anyone exposed to Twitter for too long could have predicted, there were also those who saw things differently...
The Prince of Persia community have been divided by the new game The Lost Crown. But why is it so divisive? Well, there are many who are simply disappointed by the game itself, but there are others with far uglier criticisms.
We can sympathize with those who are disappointed by the gameplay; Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown looks like a mobile game, but it costs $50 (Editor's Note: The author of this piece is not into 2D games). As one user put it: "How are this guy's moves less fluid than the original game from 1989?"
But we have a lot less time for those disappointed by the race of the main character, Sargon:
Prince of Persia or Africa?!
— pyskol furgy (@PSforGamer) June 12, 2023
Excluding those who genuinely just want to see more Middle Eastern representation in games, we can say a lot of this stuff is just plain old racism. And so, in our own small way, we'd like to combat this attitude by giving some traction to a Reddit thread on the Prince of Persia board that addressed the issue.
- We highly recommend the Prince of Persia graphic novels .
Why Sargon Being Black Doesn't Matter
When The Lost Crown was revealed at Ubisoft Forward the most upvoted thread in the Prince of Persia subreddit was not the gameplay preview, instead it was a thread discussing the race of the main character. Now, thankfully, the vast majority of those who responded had some great points from the deep lore of PoP, and we think the naysayers could take a read.
As u/erluti pointed out, in the Prince of Persia comic there is a preface that explicitly states there's no canonical look for the Prince. An even more obvious objection was made by u/ConnorOfAstora: Sargon is not the Prince, he is an entirely new character that everyone assumes is the Prince. So you see, Sargon isn't even the titular Persian!
But, for the sake of balance, we do want to also highlight those who seem to be making good faith criticism against the character design, like u/Peter_Piper_69-96:
Why can’t they just make the character Iranian? Remove the British accent, and have him speak Farsi from time to time. Have him voiced by a Persian guy. If they’re cool doing that for all the assassins creed games, why can’t they do that for Prince of Persia. I just want Iranian representation in todays pop culture.
We'll see how the conversation develops.
Where do you stand on Sargon? Do you even have an opinion, or were you too turned off by the gameplay to care?
Speaking of recent reveals from Ubisoft Forward: