YMMV / Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

• Badass Decay: In Warrior Within, Kaileena is a formidable Dark Action Girl who can go toe-to-toe with the Prince. Here in The Two Thrones, she gets reduced to a Damsel in Distress who gets captured and killed by the Vizier without displaying any of her combat prowess from the previous game, thanks to a sudden and acute case of getting hit by a catapault and knocked out during the info cutscene.
• Complete Monster: The Vizier. See that page for details.
• Even Better Sequel: It's widely seen as incorporating the best of Sands of Time and Warrior Within, featuring the return of the second game's better combat system while addressing the problems with the Darker and Edgier tone of that game by having the Prince undergo Character Development to deal with his ruthless and vengeful tendencies.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: The game was announced as Prince of Persia 3: Kindred Blades. It was intended to be darker and more dramatic with Kaileena sacrificing herself to save the Prince who was about to be executed, instead of being killed by the Vizier. It was heavily reworked to be Lighter and Softer possibly because of the mixed reception toward the Darker and Edgier direction of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. While The Two Thrones was well received, still as you can see in the comments in the trailer, many fans wished Kindred Blades was made from the end of the Broken Base that liked the tone from Warrior Within.
• Game-Breaker: The swords that the Sand Gate Guards drop give you infinitely replenishing Sand Tanks, meaning you can use your sand powers for as long as you have the sword (as long as you're able to wait the two or so seconds for each Tank to refill). The only "balance" against this is the fact that the swords are extremely fragile, usually breaking after one or two attacks, but you can get around this by just using the Prince's default dagger. Unfortunately, you lose the sword whenever you become the Dark Prince.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This wouldn't be the only time Yuri Lowenthal voiced a character slowly being corrupted by some dark power.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Compared to Warrior Within, the Prince's time powers here are not only fewer (4 versus 6), but are also merely rehashes of the powers from the previous game, and the only differences are the names! See here to know how. Fans weren't pleased at this, also seeing the Time Powers in The Two Thrones as "downgrades" if anything else.
• Special Effect Failure: The graphics have two small but noticeable problems: the Prince's hair at times clips through his face, and Farah's hands have the fingers other than the thumb and the index fused into a single block.
• That One Boss: The last two bosses of the game:
  • The below mentioned Dual Boss of the Twins. One wielding a colossal axe while the other wields a massive sword, they are capable of blocking every one of the player's standard attacks, and you need to activate and complete a tricky Speed Kill sequence to even harm the one with the sword. To make things even worse, you are fighting in a restricted flat surface with no cover or environment to exploit, and the fight happens right after a lengthy Chariot-driving sequence that likely used up most if not all of your Sand.
  • The final boss battle against the Vizier/Zurvan is broken into three phases. The first one's fairly easy: he just goes to your level and you engage on a close, one-on-one showdown, with the boss occasionally taking to the skies to throw statues at you. It's the other two parts of the battle, coupled with the fact that you have to defeat the boss without dying at all, that make him really, really tough for some players.
    • In the second phase, the arena will be filled with circling pieces of rock that will take a good chunk of health out of the Prince and knock him down to the ground, and the lack of Mercy Invincibility means that if you're unlucky enough, you can get hit by multiple chunks and lose a lot of health. The goal is to wall-run up the columns for a chance to hit the boss, but he will more often than not move away, denying you a chance to attack most of the time. And if that wasn't bad enough, you have to watch out for a moving chunk of rock moving along the fringe of the arena, and the penalty for failing the speed kill sequence (which can be a little harder on the Wii version of Rival Swords because you have to shake a controller instead of pressing a button) is that the boss throws you near the center of the arena for a small amount of damage where you can also get hit by a chunk of rock. All of this is definitely going to make some players want to chuck their controller into a wall.
    • If you decided to use up a lot of sand for the second phase, the third phase is going to be a lot of trouble for you. You have to go through a makeshift obstacle course comprising of levitating rocks the boss raises up and the thing is, the boss can knock you down to the arena floor for a fatal fall - and if you don't have any sand to rewind and avoid your doom, you'll have to start the entire battle over from the beginning. So save your sand for that last part!
    • The boss is harder in the Wii port. There's no additional element that adds difficulty, but the Wii remote controls aren't exactly easier. Alternating between dodging and attacking can be tricky as you need to shake the remote which might not respond as fast when trying to dodge at the same time. The speed kill segments require increasingly precise timing, which can be trickier when you have to thrust to initiate it. You also have to be careful then, since you may end up moving the remote to fast and getting the input wrong, forcing you to rewind and use Sand which is crucial to the final part..
• That One Level:
  • The chariot race sequences are regarded as the most frustrating parts of the game due to its Fake Difficulty. Its all too easy to crash on a dangerous curve or a upcoming obstacle if you don't know what is ahead and it doesn't help the chariots themselves are difficult to steer. There are only two of them in the entire game, but the second one is particularly challenging due to taking place between a particularly long and tedious platform puzzle and a Dual Boss with nary a checkpoint between them. Hope you have enough sand tanks stored to rewind back in time.
  • The last Dark Prince sequence has you thrown into a dark, underground dungeon with only a few sand tanks and enemies to replenish your rapidly dwindling health meter.

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