The Sly Cooper trilogy is well renowned for having surprisingly good stories and very likeable, well-written characters. Several people have taken a stab at analyzing the characters of the games, but in all my research (and by that, I mean Googling “sly cooper analysis”), I haven’t seen anybody talking about the central theme that holds the trilogy together. That theme is the idea of legacy. I’d like to think it’s because I’m some god of analysis who’s the first to notice this, but it’s much more likely that the theme is so obvious nobody ever talks about it. However, the series does some very interesting things with the theme. Each game in the series examines the idea of legacy in a different way, and if you pay attention to those themes you can see the pattern that lays out the arc of Sly himself and how he grows as a character throughout the series.

Starting with the first game, we can get an idea of how it deals with legacy right from its starting premise. Sly’s parents are murdered and his family’s book that details their history is stolen. This sets up the idea of reclaiming a legacy that has been lost, and it’s an idea that reoccurs throughout the game. Each villain you face has a reputation they’ve earned through working in the Fiendish Five, but they’ve also recently drawn back into hiding. Infiltrating their bases, we see that they’ve all gone back to their roots. Raleigh is engaging in piracy, Muggshot is running an illicit casino, Mz. Ruby is raising an army of the dead, and Panda King is working on a new firework technique. In a way, the villains lost something when they joined the Fiendish Five, their own identities, the things that made them great criminals in the first place. Their legacies, in other words, and the game details them trying to get that back. The only one that doesn’t fit this mold is Clockwerk, presumably because his whole identity is trying to outdo the Coopers, and he kinda already did that. The gameplay continues to reinforce the theme. Every time a vault is opened, we receive not only a new technique, but another page of the precious book and a description of the ancestor who invented it. The game never lets us forget that we’re part of a larger history, and as our move pool grows, we feel more and more that we are reclaiming that history. The game ends with the book restored, the legacy reclaimed, and Sly looking toward the future.

Which leads nicely into the second game. Sly 2’s way of looking at legacy is once again found as early as the starting premise. Sly is hunting down the Clockwerk parts to destroy them, so that he and his descendants will never again have to worry about their greatest foe. From this, we can surmise that Sly 2 is examining the idea of securing a legacy, of making sure that it will continue into the future. Again, we see the same thing with each of the villains. Unlike the first game, where you get the idea that each of the villains’ schemes were very recent, each villain here has a well-established operation that’s been going on for a long time. They fight us because their operations are running much smoother with the Clockwerk parts, and they don’t want us stealing them because it would end their schemes. Their legacies would be destroyed, in other words, and thus they’re fighting for the same reason we are, to secure them. The gameplay doesn’t reflect the theme as well as the first game did, however there are a couple of noteworthy things. For one thing, the game being open world instead of linear hallways gives a feeling of more freedom, and combined with the heist setup it feels more like we’re doing our own work to continue the legacy, and less like we’re picking up the pieces left by others. The Thevius Raccoonus is also shoved in our face every time a job is completed, further reinforcing the feeling that we’re continuing the Cooper lineage. The game ends with the Clockwerk parts destroyed, Sly’s future secured, and ready to get to his next job.

Before we go into Sly 3, though, there’s something that needs to be pointed out. Looking back over the previous two games’ themes, we can see a pattern start to emerge. The first theme, reclaiming legacy, is primarily focused on the present. The legacy is lost, so we can’t really look to the past, and it needs to be found before we can start worrying about the future. The second theme is much more blatant about what timeframe it’s sitting in, that being the future. The only one missing is past, and spoiler warning that’s the timeframe Sly 3’s theme is focused on. Now, all you smart little children out there might have noticed that something seems a bit out of order. The themes go present, future, then past. The reason becomes clear when we look at how Sly 3 handle’s its theme, and the concept of the past.

Sly 3’s plot involves Sly trying to break into his family’s secret vault, and he states in the beginning that his reason for doing so is to see how he compares to his ancestors. It’s clear Sly 3 is about living up to your legacy, trying to be worthy of the name you carry. We again see the theme in several of the villains. Octavio is an opera singer who became a mob boss, just because the mob were the only people who liked his singing. The Black Baron is really Penelope, trying to live up to a reputation she’d inadvertently created. General Tsao’s whole character is based around living his legacy to the fullest, and LeFwee is very obviously caught up in his reputation as the smartest man on the seven seas. The gameplay is similar to Sly 2, so it doesn’t really add to the theme, but I think it’s time to talk about what I find most interesting about Sly 3. It’s the theme of the trilogy that represents the past, yet this is the game in the trilogy that is the least concerned with Sly’s ancestry. Unlike previous games, where each goal and each villain had personal connections to Sly or his history, Sly 3’s villains have little to do with Sly himself. Only the overarching goal of getting into the vault connects to Sly personally, nothing that you actually do to achieve that goal matters to Sly’s legacy. In other words, despite being the game that thematically should have the most focus on Sly’s legacy, it ends up having the least.

Believe it or not, this is a natural progression from the previous games. Sly 1 had named ancestors to find in almost every level. Sly 2 dialed it back a bit, rarely mentioning Sly’s legacy, but it still made it clear that you were part of a larger history. Sly 3 is just the natural endpoint of that. The question is, why? Why would you build the series’ themes to a point where you focus on the past, while also building the series in such a way that Sly’s past becomes less and less relevant? The reason why is, I think, best illustrated by the job complete screen in Sly 3. It no longer writes into the Thevius Raccoonus like in Sly 2. Instead, you just get a picture of the member who did the job, and that’s the key. Sly 3 ultimately ends with Sly realizing that he doesn’t need to live up to his legacy. He doesn’t need to concern himself with his ancestors, he just needs to focus on living his life. That is Sly’s character arc, and you can see it outlined in the themes of each game. He begins by trying to reclaim his legacy, and it’s given a lot of focus and takes up much of his thoughts. After he reclaims his legacy, he realizes his job isn’t done, and begins working to secure it. Along the way, he cares less about his ancestry and more about the family he’s created for himself. When he finally does get around to actually thinking about his legacy, he’s grown to a point where he doesn’t really need it, and at the end of it all he realizes that and gives up his legacy to start living his own life. It’s really cool how you can see that progression from the very first game.

Obviously, I can’t speak for the developers here. It’s very possible that they had no clue what they were going to do after the first game in terms of story. For all I know, everything I’ve said is just paranoid rambling looking for meaning that isn’t actually there, because I’d rather analyze the deeper meaning of a game about cartoon animals than work on my research paper, but I’d like to think I’ve got something going here. I guess my ultimate point is that Sly Cooper is a series that was more tightly written than frankly it had any right to be. It was a great trilogy that had a perfect ending.

And then Sly 4 screwed everything up.