A bit of an recurring Idiot Ball event concerning the Clothing Damage: In Sands of Time, The Prince is wounded after The fight with his undead father, resulting in him tearing off his sleeve and using it as a makeshift bandage. That pretty little piece of fabric was all that stood between his time-twisting adventure and bleeding out, getting a nasty case of gangrene and having to amputate his arm. Later on in the game, he notices that his other sleeve has torn slightly, and dramatically removes it and casts it off. Has it ever occurred to him that he might be injured again and heed that sleeve to bandage himself? And later on, an egregious example: After losing one of his spaulders, he gets rid of his armour, revealing that his chest is covered in bloody scrapes. If he got all those scrapes with a thick leather breastplate, what does he think will happen with nothing but exposed skin?
When the Prince removes the second sleeve, it's pretty close to coming off completely. A disconnected sleeve would be useless and very distracting. As for the breastplate, maybe he got the scrapes from landing wrong during his parkour or his fall into the prison, and he removed it simply so he can move easier. After all, it's not like leather armor is weightless or perfectly flexible.
This reminds me of something else. Before falling into the prison in the first place, the game gives you not one, but two Sand Pools to recharge your dagger. This also follows a lengthy fight, in which the Prince is likely to have sucked up all the enemies for sand, and even if he used it all up again anyway there are still the pools for recharging. Now, if your time-rewinding dagger is perfectly functional, why would you completely ignore it and let yourself take a nasty fall down a shaft that, given how high a player can fall before dying, should logically kill you?
From the way the Prince tried to get up after the fall, I got the feeling he got knocked out from the fall. The Dagger of Time can only rewind time up to ten seconds, so if he's out for more than that, the Dagger won't do much good. Alternatively, Gameplay and Story Segregation.
