Sly Cooper

About

Sly Cooper (shortened as Sly) is an platform stealth video game series exclusive to the Sony PlayStation consoles. The first three games of the series were developed by Sucker Punch Productions starting in 2002, while the fourth and so far final game was made by Sanzaru Games in 2013.

History

Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2002. The sequel, Sly 2: Band of Thieves, was released in 2004 and featured notably different gameplay than its predecessor, which would be retained in the third game of the trilogy, Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves in 2005, and much later the follow-up Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time in 2013. All four games generated generally positive critical reviews.

Movie

A teaser for a feature film based on the series, featuring wildly different character designs, was released in 2014. Since then, nothing more has been heard about the project, which appears to have been cancelled due to the poor performance of the Ratchet and Clank movie released in 2016.

Summary

The series follows the titular Sly Cooper, an honorable professional thief and the last living member of a long historical family line of such criminals dating all the way back to prehistory. Sly is accompanied throughout the games by his two best friends and accomplices Bentley, a turtle, and Murray, a hippopotamus, and constantly pursued by Inspector Carmelita Fox, who is his love interest despite her constant efforts to imprison him.

As a child, Sly witnessed the murder of his father at the hands of rival criminal mastermind Clockwerk, an immortal mechanical owl, and his subordinates, exacting revenge against whom forms the plotline of the first game, at the end of which Clockwerk is killed. However, his mechanical components are salvaged and placed in a museum where they are later stolen by the antagonists of the second game, who wish to rebuild and take possession of his body. At the climax of Band of Thieves, this is succeeded by the traitorous Neyla (or "Clock-La" as she hence calls herself), who severely injures Bentley during the final battle before being killed, leaving him in a wheelchair for the rest of the series.

The third game revolves around recovering the contents of the newly discovered "Cooper Vault", where innumerable treasures plundered by all the previous generations of the Cooper family are contained, located within an island fortress controlled by the villainous Dr. M, a former associate of Sly Cooper's father. Most of the game is framed as a flashback experienced by Sly near the end of the storyline at a moment where it appears he is about to be killed by Dr. M, and details the recruitment of four additional allies to the Cooper gang in preparation for the island heist: the Guru, an Aboriginal shaman who had mentored Murray while he was separated from the gang in-between games, Penelope, a mouse mechanic who becomes Bentley's love interest, the Panda King, a reformed antagonist from the first game, and Dimitri, a reformed antagonist from the second game. At the end of the game, Sly is injured during the final battle with Dr. M and appears to suffer amnesia, which Carmelita Fox takes advantage of to start a new life with him, although the final shot indicates that he is actually faking his memory loss.

Honor Among Thieves was designed to conclude the trilogy, but as is so often the case, fan demand lead to the eventual creation of another sequel by different developers. Thieves in Time involves the pages of the "Thievius Raccoonus" book, recovered throughout the first game, being stolen via means of time travel, and long-deceased ancestors of Sly Cooper being recruited by the same means to help get them back. A key plot point involves Penelope being revealed as a villain who has supplied the other antagonists with the means of time travel as invented by herself and Bentley in the time since the third game.
During the climax, Sly Cooper vanishes and is revealed in a credits scene to be stranded in ancient Egypt.

Online Presence and Fandom

The series is considered a very popular subject for furries for obvious reasons. Inspector Carmelita Fox is a very popular subject in fan art, erotic or otherwise.

The storyline and writing of Thieves in Time were received very negatively by many fans, primarily due to Penelope's character arc as well as the unresolved cliffhanger ending.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References