Board Thread:Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time discussion/@comment-70.118.175.85-20130324190846/@comment-75.132.129.213-20130531034540

Aside from the loading times, this was really the only thing that bothered me about the entire game.

First off, the "twist" was literally a non-twist. From the opening cutscene, you know that 1) Penelope and Bentley are working on a time-machine, 2) Somewhere along the line, Penelope up and vanishes without a trace, and 3) After she vanishes, some unknown entity is going back in time and erasing the Cooper clan from existence.  Heck, even one of the loading screen tips in the game is "Penelope once disguised herself as the Black Baron" as if to yell at the gamers, "Hey, remember how Penelope wore a disguise in Sly 3 and vanished at the start of this game?  Maybe she'll come back in another disuise in this game!"  Maybe it was just coincidental, but the second I saw that the primary grunts of the Big Bad were rats, my first thought was that it was Penelope was the mastermind behind it all.

Second, it makes no sense. So she joins the Cooper Gang because she wants to get in Sly's non-pants in Sly 3, and now a few years later she hates him enough to want to erase his existence from history? Whaaaaaat? If she thought Sly was holding Bentley back, why wouldn't she have killed him then? She couldn't have gotten any closer to him than she was during the events of Sly 3, so why does she have to go with this super-villain-esque absurd plot years after the fact? And that's not even getting into the whole problem with the time travel paradox that she unfurls with the plan (if the Cooper Clan never exists, then Sly doesn't exist.  If Sly doesn't exist, he can't start Bentley and Murray down the thieving path.  Without that, Penelope never meets Bentley.)

Third, honestly, it just comes off as incredibly lazy writing. Obviously the goal was to cut the Cooper Gang down to bare-bones after how absurdly large it got after Sly 3. Most of those characters are easy to cast-off since they were supposed to be one-off anyway, but Penelope creates a problem since she's a love interest for Bentley after the end of Sly 3, so they have to do some serious work to get her out of the group. Honestly I think they missed the most obvious option, which was cut Dimitri from the game entirely, make the first mission of the game rescuing Penelope for Le Paradox (who had kidnapped her to get his own time machine made), and then Penelope takes Dimitri's "role" in the game - small as it is.

Quite frankly, I wouldn't even have had as big an issue with the betrayal if they at least made her the mastermind behind the entire scheme. But no, not only does she betray the Cooper Gang, but she does it as the role of a pawn. Heck, even if they would've given her better motivations it would've at least made sense, but "Sly made Bentley a goodie-goodie" falls well short of expectations.