I'm gonna be honest...
Alright, so here's what they did, in what I think as an attempt to trick people- first they changed the name, it's now called Rival Swords, they also changed the rating from M to T. Other than that, it's the same exact game as The Two Thrones, except with motion control. Yeah, and the only place it says that it's the Two Thrones is in small font on the back of the case, it says "Based on The Two Thrones." That's it, and that's really stupid cause it's the same exact game.
They want 50 dollars for this too. Two Thrones is only 20. Why I bought this game instead of TTT, I don't know. I really don't, but I really regret it now. And, the motion controls aren't even worth it. They work but they add nothing at all to the experience.
Okay, yeah the game is still fun to play, it's got cool mechanics and cool acrobatic crap but it's a rip off. I'm warning you, don't buy this.
Now I'm guessing you want to learn about the GAME itself, correct? Well the story starts as the Prince and his girl coming back home, however all of a sudden the ship he's on is attacked and he finds out his city has been corrupted by all these bad guys, you know very little at the start but the story expands.
The gameplay is a whole lot like before, it's heavily based on adventuring and puzzles mixed with a bit of combat. What The Two Thrones tried to introduce was new speed kills which are stealth kills the prince can perform on his enemies. For the most part, they work ok, but it's much easier when done with a gamepad than with the Wii remote which does not work as well as you'd want. In addition to that, you'll fight some boss battles, monsters, race chariots, and of course control time.
If you have played past games you already know that once the prince gets the Dagger, he can control time. Well, once you get this, you'll start with the ability to rewind time, so if you screw up, you get more chances. You'll collect more power ups for this dagger as you progress through the game, but it really helps because the game is chock-full of try-and-die situations, with all the puzzles there are.
The graphics are really showing their age. They were once pretty good, not awesome, but they did the job well done with the smooth framerate (if you were playing on Gamecube or Xbox) and a great design to it. Well, the framerate and design still is pretty good, but this game is now a year and a half old, and belongs to the previous generation of video games so what was said a year and a half ago cannot be said today.
The Wii is supposed to be a next generation console, this couldn't pass on an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3, so why won't developers get their act straight and try to improve the technical qualities of their video games? This makes once-great games seem like a dull and lazy effort, if any effort at all, when ported to "Next Generation" consoles a year and a half later.
The music is still great, it definitely fits the game very well even though it's not something that you'd want to buy a soundtrack too, it works great for the game. What is awesome though, is the voice acting which comes in clear, and all the voice actors lending their voices to this game sure did a fine job doing so. This is the one aspect of the game that does not disappoint.
Now their are a few extras in Rival Swords, but all these extras were in the PS2/GCN/Xbox game before this so don't expect any new content, just expect the extras that were in the game before. It's worth playing through to get these, but at the same time, they're nothing to write home about either. The game comes in at a decent length of about 10 hours, making it a perfect weekend game. It starts of relatively easy, but the difficulty steps up once you gain the ability to become Dark Prince. If this game drops to $20 brand new anytime soon, take my score of 6.1 and bring it up to a 7.5. However, as of now, Ubisoft is demanding $50 for this game, which is $30 more that it should be. If you have never played this game, go buy the Gamecube version for twenty dollars for the best deal, and then go home and enjoy it on your Nintendo Wii.