SDA logo

Released in December 2005, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is the final game in the Sands of Time trilogy. On a cue from its fans, Ubisoft brought back Yuri Lowenthal, the actor who voiced the Prince in the first game, and they didn't try to make the hero completely dark and foreboding this time. The game starts off where Warrior Within ends; the Prince returns with Kaileena to his home city of Babylon, only to realize his previous actions were not exactly for the greater good.

 

Category Note: Rival Swords, the Wii version, is not considered a separate category because it's almost identical to the other versions.

100% hard difficulty: 2:24:24 by Justin Salamon, done in 22 segments.

Get Flash to see this player.

Author's comments:

The first thing I'd like to say is "wow" ... this was my first big speedrun project, and I'm now aware of how much effort actually goes into creating a quality speedrun of a lengthy game. I put a lot of time into this run ... I wanted it to be as close to perfect as I could get, and besides a couple small mistakes here and there I think I was successful. Overall, I worked on this run just over 3 months, both planning and running it.

It was difficult planning segment breaks because each save costs about 9 seconds. Obviously, I wanted to keep the segment count low, but I also had to account for all the difficult tricks in the game. At the end of my planning for the run, I'm positive I came up with the best possible segment breaks ... actually very similar to how Fluffy broke up his run, except I put in extra saves before each boss fight and one before the Hanging Gardens (very difficult segment). So, my run has 3 more segments than his ... 22-19.

Fluffy's run was timed at 2:38:07 ... however, timing for his run stopped after the Vizier fight, and didn't count the dark prince part. His actual time is around 2:43:35. I found this out while timing each of my segments, while comparing them to his run. Before doing any official timing, I originally thought I had a time just under 2:19 because my run is 19:10 faster than Fluffy's (and I was comparing it to his 2:38 time) ... but turns out my final time is 2:24:25. I originally set a goal to improve Fluffy's run by 15 minutes, so I definitely surpassed my initial goal. Other tricks came about as I worked on the run, so that's reason enough why my goal was achieved.

I want to thank everyone who supported me during my running of this game. Thanks to everyone who posted in my thread for this run ... you're help/encouragement/suggestions were greatly appreciated. Thanks to fluffy for his previous run ... it served as a valuable tool for planning my run. I'd also like to thank the few people who had valuable tricks posted on YouTube ... biggest thanks to TI2ophy for his ultimate glitch (which I refer to as the drop glitch) which altogether probably saved me 4-5 minutes through the entirety of the run. Also, thank you to the SDA staff for your hard work and the time you put into running this site. Keep up the good work!

And that's it! Hope you enjoy the run.

Single-segment 100% easy difficulty: 2:34:15 by Justin Salamon.

Get Flash to see this player.

Author's comments:

This run was a living nightmare. Honestly, I've had really bad nightmares from trying to complete a successful SS run of this game. When I actually finished this run, I literally felt like I had just won the lottery. No joke, I'm not even joking. There is reason why this game has taken over 3 years to finally get a SS run ... and that reason is bugs, evil glitches, and random game freezes. This game was not meant to be played in a single session ... and the minute you sit down and try to speedrun this game in a single session, the game will mess with your head and screw you over. It is a nightmare, and I'm glad to be out of it.

OK, now that I've described the hell that is SS running this game, let me get on to my miracle run ...

I choose to do this on easy difficulty basically because I knew getting a decent SS run was going to be extremely hard, so I needed all the help I could get. Easy difficulty isn't really too different from the hard difficulty ... differences are that enemy attacks don't do as much damage to you, and your attacks on certain enemies will do more damage to them. Since there really isn't too much combat in this game, it's not really a big time saver. Enemy AI doesn't change AT ALL ... in fact, I had more difficulties around archers on easy than I did on hard.

This is a 100% run ... so I close every gate and get every life upgrade. Because I previously just finished my 100% segmented run of this game on hard I already knew the route and it was easy to know where I was going at all times.

I was amazed that I didn't have any problems at all with the speed kills. Because much of this game is relied heavily on motion control, there is always the risk that the game will not read control movement correctly. This happens so much, but thankfully I was able to get through this whole run without any major problems.

After I completed the run, I was initially disappointed because I remembered only the big mistakes I had throughout the run. But when I went back and re-watched the run, I realized I executed so many difficult tricks flawlessly and the brilliant moments definitely outweighed the ugly moments (which were often caused by bugs and glitches in the game).

The final time of the run is 2:34:15 which is over 9 minutes faster than Fluffy's 100% segmented run on Hard (he was timed at finishing in 2:38:07, but timing stopped after he killed the Vizier. His time was actually 2:43:35) and is about 10 minutes slower than my 100% segmented run on Hard. A perfect SS run would be around 2:30, but that will probably never be reached. If I had enough patience to try to improve this run I could realistically get below 2:32 ... but it's not worth it. I already have a great run. This run is really something spectacular when you look past the few ugly parts, and I'm sure anyone that watches this run will agree.

Here are some highlights of the run. What I list here are any big mistakes or any areas of greatness. I do want to point out that the first hour of the run is by far the most difficult part. More archers are in the first part of the game, and they can definitely screw up many parts of the run (you'll see in this run). Most of the mistakes and ugly parts of the run happen in the first half of the run ... so be prepared for that. The highlight of the run is from 1:59-2:02 ... 3 minutes of awesomeness that could never be replicated again in a SS run.

10:40 - had a little bit of a problem here. Anytime you're around archers, they seem to ALWAYS mess you up ... I also had issues with the motion controls jumping off the wall here. Cost about 10 seconds total

22:50 - this is the ugliest part of the whole run, and the sad thing is it wasn't even my fault. This game is just so buggy and you can see it wouldn't let me jump correctly here. I'm perfectly aligned, there's no reason why I should be jumping at an angle ... but this problem seems to happen quite a bit. Thankfully this is the ONLY real ugly part of the run ... cost 25 seconds.

23:25 - these enemies always get in the way ... nothing I could really do

29:32 - this was just a case of bad luck with the archer

30:08 - this is the first use of the drop glitch which saves about a minute. This glitch can be very frustrating ... it takes a couple tries to get it, but I'll take it for a SS run

40:56 - an above average first boss fight

53:55 - this trick is VERY hard to do but I was able to get on my first attempt. Normally it takes about 15-20 seconds longer to do this in a SS run

1:05:18 - flawless execution of the drop glitch ... I think this is the quickest I've ever done this part, and to do it in a SS run is unbelievable

1:09:13 - this is the first true mistake in the run that was entirely my fault. I got caught on the wall after opening the door with the switch and I should have realized that I was going to be cutting it close to making it under the door. I should have slowed down time here. This mistake cost me 18 seconds

1:12:13 - OK, this is where I really need to explain myself. There is a BIG glitch in the game where if you don't die before climbing up the ledge at 1:14:56 the game will FREEZE, and it sucks big time. I tried so many ways to get around this freeze, but the only thing that worked was I had to die somewhere previous to that point. So that's why I die intentionally here. It's right after a checkpoint so I only lose 15 seconds, and again, it's the ONLY way I could get through the freeze.

1:13:49 - another case of an archer completely screwing up my run. This is just bad luck and cost me about 20 seconds

1:15:56 - an average boss fight here. She is such a pain (notice how she kicked me to the lower level at the very beginning ... my goodness)

1:28:30 - this is one of the hardest places to do the drop glitch ... I was VERY surprised it only took two attempts to get it

1:36:03 - here's another bug in the game ... see how I disappeared into that shutter? This has happened to me quite a few times, and when it does happen it is impossible to jump correctly off the next shutter. Thankfully I was barely able to rewind time back to the platform I started my wallrun from, or this run would have been over.

1:36:40 - PERFECT execution of this trick which saves so much time it's ridiculous. For all the bad things that have happened in this run, it's perfectly executed tricks like this one which makes up for all that lost time

1:47:22 - can you believe it? This is a 30 second boss fight?!?!? This was blazing fast ... the fastest I've ever beaten these guys (mostly because it's on easy LOL)

1:57:11 - I had a complete brain fart here. For some reason I didn't think I had enough sands to use the "winds of sands" which would have beaten these two enemies in about 4 seconds. Rather, I spend about 20 seconds killing them the old-fashioned way. I should have saved 16 seconds here

1:59:10 - OK, this is the most beautiful part of the run. This drop glitch here skips a cutscene and some platforming, and saves me about half a minute. But the thing is, this is EXTREMELY difficult to do. If you do the glitch any later on the ledge, you'll trigger the cutscene. If you do the glitch any sooner on the ledge, you'll fall down into the abyss. In my attempts of doing this trick in my segmented run I had failed attempts about 90% of the time doing this trick here, just to give an idea of how hard this is. And if you do screw the trick up, it's almost impossible to recover from ... you might as well trigger the cutscene if you miss.

1:59:31 - this is actually my favorite/luckiest part of the run. I questioned whether or not to put this trick in, because doing this causes the game to freeze 50% of the time when you go to close the sand gate. I took the risk and it paid off ... the game didn't freeze!! You'll notice I take a few seconds to line myself up on the pole because you have to be in the perfect position to make the jump off the wall and onto the ledge by the sand gate. It's not too hard to pull off if you know exactly how to line yourself up. This trick saves about 1:15 because it skips a crazy long cutscene

2:01:10 - Because I was nailing tricks perfectly over the previous couple minutes, I decided to pick up a secondary weapon to do the drop glitch here. And I worked perfectly, AGAIN!! ... however, my luck ran out because I struggled with the drop glitch from 2:03:08-2:03:19

2:10:16 - jumping between the pillars here saves almost a minute. Although I make it look easy in this SS run, this trick is actually VERY hard to pull off. It takes about 7 jumps to get up to the second floor, and many times when you get to the top you won't be able to grab the ledge. If this happens, you're dead, because you won't be able to rewind time far enough to get back to the starting point to re-position yourself. This was really risky to put in a SS run.

2:13:00 - I needed sand, so I stayed to fight some enemies to get some sand ... but this fight took a lot longer than I wanted it to.

Basically the rest of the run went very, very well. I had an almost flawless Vizier fight starting at 2:30:14 and the final part with the Dark prince is really easy.

Return to the Game List, the FAQ, or the Home Page.