Sly Cooper


Sly Cooper is a series of stealth action-adventure video games created by Sucker Punch Productions and owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The series follows the adventures of Sly Cooper, an anthropomorphic raccoon and master thief, along with his two partners in crime, Bentley the turtle and Murray the hippopotamus, all of whom are pursued by Sly's love interest, Inspector Carmelita Fox. Sanzaru Games developed the fourth game and remastered the original trilogy for the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Vita in a compilation titled The Sly Collection.
Sly Cooper himself has become one of the most popular PlayStation video game characters, and has appeared in other Sony games such as crossover games PlayStation Move Heroes and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. Both an animated feature film and television series based on the series have also been in development, though neither have come to fruition.

Common elements

Gameplay

The games are primarily in third person. The player controls Sly or one of his companions through many missions of several levels, relying mostly on stealth to avoid encounters and alarms while collecting treasures or other items. Sly is very agile, and is able to use many of the features of the architecture for stealth, indicated to the player by a blue glow, explained in-game as a visible manifestation of Sly's "thief senses." For example, Sly can perch on the top of sharp points, climb up pipes, sneak along a narrow ledge, walk across a tight rope, zipline down a rope, or use his cane to swing from hooks. Sly also uses his cane to defeat foes, although it makes a noise that may attract other foes. He prefers to use sneak attacks when possible because of his little endurance. Due to his heritage, Sly has a number of special moves that he learns through the games that can also increase his stealth or speed, or allow him to eliminate foes silently. The player also may play as Bentley with his gadgets, or Murray with his strength, and many minor companions in the third game. There are also mini-games scattered throughout the gameplay.
Each game is broken into a series of heists, and to accomplish the heist, Sly and his gang must complete several missions. In the first game, each mission was located on a level accessed from the main hub level, while the second, third, and fourth games used a non-linear, open world approach to have various missions located around the same large level. There is typically a boss fight at the end of each heist as the conclusion to the mission.

Setting and characters

The Sly Cooper series takes place in a fictionalized version of the real world that's populated by anthropomorphic animals, with film noir and comic book motifs as well as the presence of super-science and magic. The main protagonist, a young adult raccoon named Sly Cooper, is the latest descendant in a line of master thieves. The Cooper Clan is notorious for only stealing from other thieves, and passes down their expert techniques from generation to generation in a book called the "Thievius Raccoonus." While the Coopers have accumulated a massive hoard of wealth, Sly places greater value on his friendship with his partners-in-crime, whom he met growing up in an orphanage together: Bentley, a turtle who acts as brains of the gang; and Murray, a hippo, who acts as the brawn and the getaway driver of the team van. The trio, known as the Cooper Gang, perform elaborate heists across the world, often taking down large and dangerous organized crime groups. On their travels they are pursued by Sly's love interest, Inspector Carmelita Fox of Interpol.

Major characters

  • Sly Cooper is an antiheroic young adult gentleman thief raccoon. He is part of a long line of master thieves who specialize in robbing other criminals rather than innocent people, making them vigilantes. As a child, he witnessed the violent murder of his father at the hands of a group known as the Fiendish Five. They stole the Thievius Raccoonus, which holds the secrets of the Cooper clan's master thief moves. He was forced into an orphanage, where he met his best friends, Bentley and Murray. Sly is the nimblest member of the gang and performs the most missions. He uses a hooked cane, a family heirloom, as a multi-purpose tool. Sly is cunning and extremely athletic and can perform feats such as walking on wires, landing on small points, sliding on vines, and falling from great heights. He is also able to disguise himself in order to access restricted areas and is a competent fighter.
  • Bentley is the brains of the gang. He is a turtle who is skilled with computers, gadgets, and explosives, and generally helps with reconnaissance and mission planning while Sly is out in the field. In Sly 2, Bentley decides to help out in the field, but, later on, his legs are injured under the jaws of Clock-La, so he is forced into a wheelchair, which he handily equips with gadgets; he has since become more relaxed and confident in his abilities and himself. It is also stated that he co-constructed a time machine along with his ex-girlfriend, Penelope, which serves as the key object in the third and fourth games. He is the current guardian of the Thievius Raccoonus, having been entrusted to him by Sly.
  • Murray is the muscle of the Gang and Sly's full-time wheelman and part-time burden, in charge of driving the Cooper Gang's van to various locations. As a large pink hippopotamus, he is amazingly strong. He often ventures to the field on missions requiring such strength. When Bentley is injured in Sly 2, he blames himself and leaves the Gang to the Australian Outback, looking for a more peaceful state of mind, but eventually returns when Bentley is attacked by Italian crime mob leader Don Octavio, one of the Cooper Gang enemies. It is stated that he has developed a more serious personality, though he remains a happy-go-lucky hippo.
  • Inspector Carmelita Montoya Fox is a member of Interpol, as well as Sly's main complicated love interest. She is a red fox who has her mind set on capturing Sly and his crew, but also demonstrates romantic feelings for him, which Sly often uses to escape capture at the last minute. In the fourth game, Carmelita begins to help out the Cooper gang by aiding them in recovering the disappearing pages of the Thievius Raccoonus. This is when she begins to soften up and develop feelings for Sly. She uses a shock pistol as her weapon of choice, which contains powerful blasts and a target lock.

    Recurring characters

  • Clockwerk is the main antagonist of Sly 1 and the posthumous overarching antagonist of Sly 2. He is a Eurasian eagle-owl who was turned into a cyborg after being initially fueled by his hatred and jealousy for the Cooper Clan and their thieving reputation as great thieves. Determined to outlive the Coopers and eventually wipe them all out, he replaced his body with machinery so that he could live much longer than any normal being. He was first defeated in the Krak-Karov Volcano in Russia by Sly at the end of the first game, but his body survived the lava and was placed in the Cairo Museum, where it was stolen by the Klaww Gang, setting up the events of Sly 2. Although Clockwerk himself does not actually appear in the second game, the parts of his body are the driving force behind the Cooper Gang's actions, taking down the Klaww Gang to retrieve all of them and ultimately destroy them. But the parts all ultimately end up in the hands of the Klaww Gang's leader, Arpeggio, and Clockwerk is rebuilt before Neyla joins herself with the Clockwerk frame to become "Clock-La." However, the new Clock-La was short-lived and defeated shortly afterward by Sly and Carmelita.
  • Muggshot is a lilac-colored American Bulldog who is one of the supporting antagonists of Sly 1, featured in the second level. He grew up as the runt of the litter, regularly picked on by the bigger dogs. Inspired by watching gangster movies, he eventually decided to work out in order to grow as strong as possible so that he could defeat all the bullies and never be picked on again. However, due to being entirely focused on brawn, he conversely did little to advance his knowledge and is thus notoriously unintelligent. He was defeated by Sly in the first game and arrested, briefly seen in issue #2 of the comics as an inmate at Heathrow Prison, before returning for the third game, where he was a supporting villain in the third episode. It is revealed that after escaping jail, Muggshot became a highly trained and lethal pilot in the annual ACES Competition, run by the Black Baron, where his team was the runner-up in the previous year and the current year. Bentley deduced that, in order for the Cooper Gang to have a better chance at beating the Black Baron, Muggshot had to be removed from the competition. Thus, Bentley tricked Muggshot into running into Carmelita, who defeated and arrested him. He returned once more in the animated promotional short for the fourth game, "Timing is Everything," where he stole an antique golden watch, but was once again thwarted by the Cooper Gang and arrested by Carmelita.
  • The Panda King is a panda and one of the supporting antagonists of Sly 1, featured in the fourth level. He grew up fascinated with the art of fireworks, but when he attempted to present his own fireworks to the noblemen, they rejected him due to his poor social status. He gained revenge by using fireworks as tools for destruction and ran an extortion ring of robbing small villages under the threat of burying them alive in avalanches caused by fireworks before Sly defeated him. Later, when Bentley determined that they needed someone with knowledge of more powerful explosives for the Cooper Vault job in Sly 3, he recommended the Panda King. Sly at first vehemently refused - as the Panda King had been involved in the brutal murder of his parents - but Bentley convinced him that there was no other choice. The Panda King agreed to join them if they first helped rescue his daughter from General Tsao, who had kidnapped her and planned to marry her. They succeeded, and after the Cooper Vault job, the Panda King returned to China.
  • Dimitri Lousteau is a French marine iguana who speaks in slang. He started out as a young painter whose unique art style was heavily criticized and rejected by the artistic community, forcing him to turn to forgery before opening a nightclub on the west side of Paris. His first role in the series was as a supporting villain in the second game, as the first member of the Klaww Gang to be defeated by the Cooper Gang. He later returned in the third game, beginning his role as a supporting protagonist after he joins the Cooper Gang to help them with the Cooper Vault job. He returns for a much smaller role in the fourth game, left with the duty of guarding their Paris hideout and the Thievius Raccoonus while they travel through time, and thus only appears in the cutscenes.
  • Penelope is a Dutch mouse, one of the supporting protagonists of Sly 3, and the secondary antagonist of Sly 4. Bentley eventually discovered her online while researching potential pilots and mechanics that the team might need for the Cooper Vault job in Sly 3. She challenged them to impress her by defeating her boss, the Black Baron, only to find that Penelope was the Black Baron. Defeated and exposed, she joined the gang and eventually formed a romantic bond with Bentley, after initially being attracted to Sly. However, she turned against them in the fourth game after she came to believe that Sly and his values of "honor" were a bad influence on Bentley, believing that she and Bentley together could rule the world through weapons design and trade. Thus, she joined forces with Cyrille Le Paradox, with the promise of eventually defeating Sly and getting Bentley all to herself. After her second disguise, the Black Knight was exposed, Bentley was initially devastated by her betrayal, but eventually came to terms with it and defeated her in combat, using one of her own mechanical suits against her. Although she was initially arrested and placed in a maximum security prison like the rest of the villains, she was the only one who escaped, under mysterious circumstances. Bentley notes in the epilogue that she has been committing a wide variety of crimes all over Europe, leaving her calling card at the scene of each crime and that he has also been receiving mysterious postcards from her, hinting at her possible return in the future installment.