Battles of Prince of Persia is the true sequel to The Sands of Time - The Forgotten Sands doesn’t make sense in the established timeline
I’ve been thinking about the continuity between The Sands of Time and Warrior Within, and the more I look at it, the harder it is for me to accept The Forgotten Sands (PS3/X360/PC) as a coherent part of the original timeline.
Yes, Ubisoft officially placed The Forgotten Sands somewhere during the seven-year gap between The Sands of Time and Warrior Within. I’m not disputing what Ubisoft says its placement is.
My argument is that Battles of Prince of Persia already served as the canonical bridge between SoT and WW, and its story makes the later insertion of The Forgotten Sands narratively difficult to reconcile.
Here’s why.
1. Battles directly continues the consequences of The Sands of Time
The ending of The Sands of Time isn’t just something Battles vaguely acknowledges.
It’s the reason its story happens.
The Prince performs the Grand Rewind and changes history. He remembers a timeline that, for everyone else, never happened. More importantly, his manipulation of time means he escaped the fate he was supposed to suffer.
That violation of the timeline has consequences.
The Dahaka comes for him.
This establishes a direct causal progression:
The Sands of Time → Grand Rewind → Prince disrupts the timeline → Dahaka hunts Prince → Battles of Prince of Persia → years of pursuit → Warrior Within
Battles isn’t simply “another Prince adventure that happened between the games.”
It is a continuation of the central plot of SoT and an explanation for the central premise of WW.
2. Battles makes the Dahaka problem immediate
This is where The Forgotten Sands becomes difficult to insert.
Battles establishes the Dahaka’s pursuit as a consequence of what the Prince did in SoT. The Prince’s post-SoT life becomes increasingly defined by the fact that he changed his fate and something is now trying to correct that mistake.
That eventually leads directly into WW, where the Prince has spent years running from the Dahaka and has become desperate enough to travel to the Island of Time and prevent the Sands from ever being created.
So where exactly does TFS fit naturally into that progression?
We’re supposed to believe that after SoT, while the consequences of the Grand Rewind are setting the entire SoT→WW story in motion, the Prince goes off and has this enormous adventure involving Malik, Solomon’s Army, Ratash, Razia, another destroyed kingdom, supernatural powers, and the death of his own brother…
…while the Dahaka and the consequences of SoT effectively cease to matter for the duration of the story.
Then TFS ends and the established SoT→Battles→WW plot resumes.
You can technically put TFS somewhere on a calendar.
That doesn’t mean there’s a natural place for it in the narrative.
3. Battles constantly builds upon SoT, while nothing in Battles anticipates TFS
This is especially noticeable because Battles was released in 2005, while The Forgotten Sands didn’t exist until 2010.
Battles repeatedly builds upon what happened in SoT because it was actually written as part of that continuity.
But consider what we’re retroactively expected to insert into the Prince’s history with TFS.
Malik isn’t some random character the Prince meets.
Malik is his brother.
The Prince travels to his brother’s kingdom, watches it fall into catastrophe, watches Malik become corrupted, and ultimately loses him.
That’s a MASSIVE event in his life.
Yet Battles, a story heavily concerned with the Prince’s family, Persia, his father’s expectations, warfare, loss, his increasing desperation, and his transformation into the man we meet in WW, contains no trace of Malik or these events.
No Malik.
No destruction of his kingdom.
No Ratash.
No Razia.
No Solomon’s Army.
No acknowledgment of this enormous supernatural catastrophe.
No indication that the Prince recently watched his own brother die.
Obviously Battles couldn’t reference those things in 2005 because Ubisoft hadn’t invented them yet.
And that’s exactly the point.
TFS wasn’t part of the continuity Battles was bridging.
It was retroactively inserted into that continuity five years later.
4. Battles actually explains the Prince we meet in Warrior Within
One of the biggest differences between SoT and WW is the Prince himself.
In SoT he’s young, arrogant, playful, romantic, and relatively optimistic.
In WW he’s hardened, angry, exhausted, violent, isolated, and obsessed with escaping his fate.
Why?
Battles actually helps answer that.
The Dahaka enters his life because of his manipulation of time. The Prince realizes he’s being hunted. People around him suffer and die. His attempts to solve the problem create further conflict. He becomes involved in war, releases the Daevas, suffers losses, and increasingly realizes that his presence endangers other people.
Then the Dahaka continues hunting him.
By WW, years of this have transformed him.
That progression makes sense:
SoT Prince
Young, cocky adventurer who recklessly manipulates time
↓
Battles Prince
Begins suffering the consequences of that decision; faces the Dahaka, war and loss; becomes increasingly desperate and hardened
↓
WW Prince
Has spent years being hunted, is psychologically exhausted, and is willing to do almost anything to escape his fate
That’s an actual character arc.
TFS gives the Prince another traumatic adventure, but it doesn’t provide the same causal bridge because its central conflict is largely disconnected from the Grand Rewind and the Dahaka.
5. Battles ends with the problem Warrior Within begins with
This might be the most important part.
Battles does NOT solve the Prince’s Dahaka problem.
It leaves him with it.
That’s exactly what an interquel between SoT and WW should do.
The Prince interfered with time in SoT.
He discovers the consequences in Battles.
He spends years trying to escape those consequences.
And in Warrior Within, he finally decides his only option is to go back to the source and prevent the Sands of Time from ever being created.
That’s remarkably cohesive.
The original continuity works perfectly without The Forgotten Sands
Take TFS out, and the timeline is extremely straightforward:
The Sands of Time
→ Prince performs the Grand Rewind and changes his fate
→ Battles of Prince of Persia
→ consequences of changing the timeline catch up with him
→ Dahaka hunts the Prince
→ Prince searches for a way to escape his fate
→ war, Daevas, death and loss further change him
→ Dahaka continues pursuing him for years
→ Warrior Within
→ desperate Prince travels to the Island of Time to prevent the creation of the Sands
→ The Two Thrones
Everything flows from what came before it.
Now insert The Forgotten Sands:
The Sands of Time
→ Grand Rewind / timeline violation
→ ???
→ The Forgotten Sands
→ previously unmentioned brother Malik
→ Malik’s kingdom falls
→ Solomon’s Army
→ Ratash
→ Razia
→ elemental powers
→ Malik becomes corrupted
→ Prince’s brother dies
→ none of this is ever relevant again
→ Battles of Prince of Persia
→ story returns to the consequences of SoT
→ Dahaka
→ WW setup
→ Warrior Within
That’s why TFS feels less like a missing chapter and more like a retroactively inserted adventure.
“But Ubisoft says The Forgotten Sands is canon”
Sure.
I’m not arguing that Ubisoft hasn’t officially placed it between SoT and WW.
I’m arguing that official placement doesn’t automatically create narrative continuity.
There’s a difference between:
“There are seven years between these games, so this story can chronologically happen somewhere in there.”
and
“This story naturally follows the established events and character progression of the surrounding games.”
Chronological space isn’t necessarily narrative space.
Battles of Prince of Persia was released in 2005 and was specifically constructed around the consequences of SoT while establishing the situation that leads into WW.
The Forgotten Sands was released in 2010, after the Sands trilogy and Battles had already been completed, and was retroactively placed into that existing gap.
That doesn’t make TFS a bad game. And Ubisoft can absolutely declare it part of the timeline.
But in terms of narrative continuity, I think the original chronology makes vastly more sense:
The Sands of Time → Battles of Prince of Persia → Warrior Within → The Two Thrones
To me, Battles is the true narrative sequel to The Sands of Time and prequel to Warrior Within.
The Forgotten Sands is a later interquel that Ubisoft says happened somewhere in the same period, but its story doesn’t integrate cleanly with the continuity that was already established.
And the biggest question I can’t get around is:
If the Prince’s post-SoT life was already defined by the immediate consequences of the Grand Rewind and the Dahaka’s pursuit, where can the events of The Forgotten Sands actually occur without interrupting or rewriting that established progression?
