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Gotta Go Fast: the Obligatory Sonic the Hedgehog Thread!
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- animal people chaotix cronic the hemp hog jun senoue gives no fuciks knuckles sanic sega slide the ferret someone still loves you yuji naka sonic team sonic the hedgehog sonko the fastdog sponcon the hotdog stealth thread about fangames suckin on a chili dog taxman thread about fangames tonic the ginhog
I was hoping Amy in Sonic Origins Plus would play like she did in Sonic Advance, not mainly yet another clone of Sonic who can spin dash and whatnot with a midair hammer attack analogous to the midair attack Sonic himself has in Sonic 3. Throwing hammers is cool, I guess, but the way she gets around isn't different, making most of the gameplay as Amy the same as the other characters. Dangit. Kinda wish I hadn't spent the $10 on the plus expansion now
EDIT: Oh yeah, I can request refunds on Steam, even for DLC. Submitted
EDIT: Oh yeah, I can request refunds on Steam, even for DLC. Submitted
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric has so thoroughly broken my brain that my instinctual reaction to seeing this trailer was "oh wow, they made a sonic boom game with mickey mouse" but to be fair my instinct with any Mickey Mouse game with "Illusion" in the title is "ah yes, like the sega games".
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
Turns out that Sonic Frontiers game is pretty good. Started playing it at like 10 PM last night just for the heck of it and stayed up until 4 AM when I cleared Khronos Island.
Despite drawing a lot of comparisons to Breath of the Wild for obvious aesthetic similarities, I think it looks and feels a little more like Shadow of the Colossus, to the point where if you liked that game I'd recommend it, and for people who thought it was too slow I'd definitely recommend it. I don't know to what degree the Nier games were a direct inspiration, but you can definitely feel a presence and shared sensibility as well. About the only thing that really feels like Breath of the Wild is that there are stationary towers to climb that unlock a little bit of progress in the game.
It's interesting, and even on that first island there's still a lot I haven't done, but for the most part it took me less time to get used to what the game is doing than I thought it would. That said, while the game provides a more open-ended combat system giving Sonic more tools with which to engage with enemies, the sacrifices done to this absolutely come at the expense of established basic movement conventions. The light speed dash is a default ability, and to use it you have to tap the left stick. Given how the series has frequently used the light dash (placing lines of rings over pits, something you see more of in the remade sub-levels taken from the 3D series's history -- mostly segments from Generations in this early part of the game) I think that's an abhorrent choice. Fortunately I haven't found too many cases where I've needed to use it.
I've always had my misgivings about open-ended Sonic game design, that it tends to be a bit too aimless and unstructured -- that is, that you should go into most such experiments looking only to experiment with physics puzzles and not accomplish any sort of linear goals in the process -- and I don't think my opinion on this has fully changed. While completing map marker challenges does develop the world by producing more rails for semi-automated fast travel, a lot of the placement of gimmicks is piecemeal. Usually the way to interact with them is obvious or easy enough to fudge your way around, but if you make a mistake in the process of navigating some of these longer diversions, getting back to the start can be a hassle. Maybe as a result of the control scheme being so different from the series, the process of navigating these structures tends to be heavily polarized between either incredibly basic or astoundingly non-intuitive. Running along surfaces makes a bit more sense than it did in Lost World, though, but that's not a particularly high bar to clear.
Thinking long and hard about what game in the series I'm most reminded of I'm finding myself settling on Chaotix. The control scheme makes changes that fight against series tradition but gives the player a surprisingly robust set of movement tools, the game is built around exploring a dense area that opens up with more game progression (compared to other games, where an act is a new range of space in an area to traverse, Chaotix's levels appear to be the same spaces, progressively built up with more enemies, gimmicks, and structures), and the area where most of the gameplay happens to occur mostly is set up to feed you into shorter challenge areas (in Chaotix, special stages; in Frontiers, the cyberspace levels) that give you the ability to unlock chaos emeralds (well, chaos rings in Chaotix). The obvious difference is that taking into account the development pressures with shifting platforms and the short shelf life of its eventual destination, the 32X, Chaotix never had the chance to build its envisioned components into a coherent whole. Frontiers, while rarely hiding the sources it is derivative from, is a game that feels like a product of a consistent vision that was able to properly develop into a game where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
That may be the surprising thing about Frontiers -- this is a game that by all accounts sounds like a profoundly maximalist design, but it isn't. It might meander in its expression (something that comes with the territory with more open-ended structure like this) but its world still has focus in what it expresses.
Lastly, I do think that the voice direction for Roger Craig Smith missed the mark a little bit. I get the more serious, dramatic voice but it's in a range that feels just that's low enough to be a tiny bit unnatural. It clashes with what's been for the past decade or so a very consistent register that he's performed Sonic in, and which, for that matter, is pretty comparable to what his predecessors have as well. In fact, it also feels lower than his natural speaking voice, and thus still feels affected, clashing with the justification for the change in direction. I haven't yet listened to the Retronauts episode about this -- I'm most of a year behind, and haven't dropped my backlog to listen to it because I've only just now started playing it -- but I imagine Stu here has dropped a reference to the muppet voices joke from Family Guy.
Despite drawing a lot of comparisons to Breath of the Wild for obvious aesthetic similarities, I think it looks and feels a little more like Shadow of the Colossus, to the point where if you liked that game I'd recommend it, and for people who thought it was too slow I'd definitely recommend it. I don't know to what degree the Nier games were a direct inspiration, but you can definitely feel a presence and shared sensibility as well. About the only thing that really feels like Breath of the Wild is that there are stationary towers to climb that unlock a little bit of progress in the game.
It's interesting, and even on that first island there's still a lot I haven't done, but for the most part it took me less time to get used to what the game is doing than I thought it would. That said, while the game provides a more open-ended combat system giving Sonic more tools with which to engage with enemies, the sacrifices done to this absolutely come at the expense of established basic movement conventions. The light speed dash is a default ability, and to use it you have to tap the left stick. Given how the series has frequently used the light dash (placing lines of rings over pits, something you see more of in the remade sub-levels taken from the 3D series's history -- mostly segments from Generations in this early part of the game) I think that's an abhorrent choice. Fortunately I haven't found too many cases where I've needed to use it.
I've always had my misgivings about open-ended Sonic game design, that it tends to be a bit too aimless and unstructured -- that is, that you should go into most such experiments looking only to experiment with physics puzzles and not accomplish any sort of linear goals in the process -- and I don't think my opinion on this has fully changed. While completing map marker challenges does develop the world by producing more rails for semi-automated fast travel, a lot of the placement of gimmicks is piecemeal. Usually the way to interact with them is obvious or easy enough to fudge your way around, but if you make a mistake in the process of navigating some of these longer diversions, getting back to the start can be a hassle. Maybe as a result of the control scheme being so different from the series, the process of navigating these structures tends to be heavily polarized between either incredibly basic or astoundingly non-intuitive. Running along surfaces makes a bit more sense than it did in Lost World, though, but that's not a particularly high bar to clear.
Thinking long and hard about what game in the series I'm most reminded of I'm finding myself settling on Chaotix. The control scheme makes changes that fight against series tradition but gives the player a surprisingly robust set of movement tools, the game is built around exploring a dense area that opens up with more game progression (compared to other games, where an act is a new range of space in an area to traverse, Chaotix's levels appear to be the same spaces, progressively built up with more enemies, gimmicks, and structures), and the area where most of the gameplay happens to occur mostly is set up to feed you into shorter challenge areas (in Chaotix, special stages; in Frontiers, the cyberspace levels) that give you the ability to unlock chaos emeralds (well, chaos rings in Chaotix). The obvious difference is that taking into account the development pressures with shifting platforms and the short shelf life of its eventual destination, the 32X, Chaotix never had the chance to build its envisioned components into a coherent whole. Frontiers, while rarely hiding the sources it is derivative from, is a game that feels like a product of a consistent vision that was able to properly develop into a game where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
That may be the surprising thing about Frontiers -- this is a game that by all accounts sounds like a profoundly maximalist design, but it isn't. It might meander in its expression (something that comes with the territory with more open-ended structure like this) but its world still has focus in what it expresses.
Lastly, I do think that the voice direction for Roger Craig Smith missed the mark a little bit. I get the more serious, dramatic voice but it's in a range that feels just that's low enough to be a tiny bit unnatural. It clashes with what's been for the past decade or so a very consistent register that he's performed Sonic in, and which, for that matter, is pretty comparable to what his predecessors have as well. In fact, it also feels lower than his natural speaking voice, and thus still feels affected, clashing with the justification for the change in direction. I haven't yet listened to the Retronauts episode about this -- I'm most of a year behind, and haven't dropped my backlog to listen to it because I've only just now started playing it -- but I imagine Stu here has dropped a reference to the muppet voices joke from Family Guy.
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
More thoughts: yeah, this game isn't much like Breath of the Wild at all. In BOTW you would see something and you'd go to it, and usually you'd do that by going where the thing is and, if you had to, climbing some surfaces. Generally your routes to get to places were pretty direct, because Link, especially with his abilities, was very powerful relative to the environment (nearly everything was climbable and what wasn't was trivialized with Revali's gale), though not particularly fast.
This is largely a puzzle game, inasmuch as most of the design of an area is to see stuff like you might in BOTW, and then trying to figure out from all the layouts what exactly it is you're supposed to do. It's not always a very oblique challenge, but you'll see stuff in the air and try to figure out what paths you need to take in order to get to any of them. The more of an area that you've cleaned up, the more of a puzzle the remaining collectible stuff tends to be, because if it was direct a-to-b travel you'd have probably picked it up already. You have to pay attention to very subtle environmental cues, in a way that even BOTW didn't require. And I fuckin love it; I never see an open-world game this interested in not giving the player any direction about routing; even sparkly-highlighted stuff is pretty subtle compared to most of the genre. Given what I hear other people love Dark Souls for, I finally have my Dark Souls.
Also, speaking of which, I appreciate that when you get owned by one of the boss creatures the game goes out of its way to tell you what it thinks you did wrong (TBH, it's usually pretty correct on that front). I always forget that the parry is something you can hold and it blocks everything.
Controversial opinion: the default aerial drag value is set too high and should be reduced.
This is largely a puzzle game, inasmuch as most of the design of an area is to see stuff like you might in BOTW, and then trying to figure out from all the layouts what exactly it is you're supposed to do. It's not always a very oblique challenge, but you'll see stuff in the air and try to figure out what paths you need to take in order to get to any of them. The more of an area that you've cleaned up, the more of a puzzle the remaining collectible stuff tends to be, because if it was direct a-to-b travel you'd have probably picked it up already. You have to pay attention to very subtle environmental cues, in a way that even BOTW didn't require. And I fuckin love it; I never see an open-world game this interested in not giving the player any direction about routing; even sparkly-highlighted stuff is pretty subtle compared to most of the genre. Given what I hear other people love Dark Souls for, I finally have my Dark Souls.
Also, speaking of which, I appreciate that when you get owned by one of the boss creatures the game goes out of its way to tell you what it thinks you did wrong (TBH, it's usually pretty correct on that front). I always forget that the parry is something you can hold and it blocks everything.
Controversial opinion: the default aerial drag value is set too high and should be reduced.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
I'm planning on picking this up for our Japan trip in October. I was originally thinking that I'd prefer the better graphics of the Xbox, but this really seems like a nice game to just dive into on a long flight and the long train rides.
I definitely agree about the controls. I've had trouble coming back to it because it's a fair bit more complicated than what my muscle memory is used to from Sonic, so I'm having to re-acclimate myself to them.
On an unrelated but on-topic note:
On an unrelated but on-topic note:
ICYMI:
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
Going to be having that on in the background while I'm working I think. I actually never bothered to pick up the DLC (Knuckles in Sonic CD hasn't carried that much appeal to me, playable Amy isn't interesting enough from a mechanical perspective to get me to drop the money, and my sold-out software copy of Sonic Adventure DX has made re-releases of the game gear games a fairly irrelevant addition -- though I may well get a Switch copy at some point. You seen that new limited edition release they're putting out through Pix'n'Love? It's a little tempting, I won't lie, though a part of me would rather get the Japanese SA2 10th anniversary pack if I were to get any of these special editions).
I don't believe I have, no.
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
I don't intend to get it for multiple reasons (not least of which it is intended for European customers) but it's got a 96-page art book and a cool but useless case! Only EUR80
Oh, that does look nice...
Digging that case, too.
Digging that case, too.
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
Beat the game! Clocked about 35 hours doing 100% completion, and added a little more onto that to do some time attacking. More thoughts:
There are really two main gameplay cycles on the overworld areas. The first is the one that's heavily derivative of Shadow of the Colossus, where you take on large bosses and defeat them to get gear tokens. Those gear tokens then get redeemed to access cyberspace levels, which are basically this game's take on special stages, interpreted through the same ideas as Sonic Colors' Sonic Simulator -- which is to say that nearly every level is copied from a previous source, a combination of several SA2 full stages and portions of those from Unleashed and Generations. These then grant you keys to unlock the chaos emeralds, which will eventually lead you to the boss. It makes a lot more sense than Sonic Simulator, though; the layer of indirection between cyberspace giving you keys which you collect enough of to unlock an emerald may start sounding like Donkey Kong 64's tons of different in-game currencies but there wasn't another good way to do it because of the degree to which the use of the emeralds is part of the game's plot. Sonic Colors' placement of the emeralds doesn't hold up well to narrative scrutiny (how did they get into...an arcade game? that's owned by Eggman? where he isn't taking advantage of their power to stop Sonic??) but Frontiers doesn't have the luxury of handwaving it away; "why are the emeralds where they are" is one of the core questions the game's plot is concerned with answering.
Speaking of cyberspace, though, Sonic Retro's page on Cyber Space has a mostly complete list of sources, but it misses a few references. In particular: 1-3 is based on the 2D segments from Windmill Isle Act 2, 2-3 is the 2D segments from (Unleashed) Rooftop Run (at least up until the drop through the tower), 3-4 is based on part of Windmill Isle Act 3 (although, weirdly, the second part of that stage doesn't show up here but in a transition area between islands; the rest more resembles some 2D sections of Lost World's Tropical Coast 3 and Lava Mountain 2), and 3-5 is based on Savannah Citadel Act 2. Others are more debatable: 4-2 is probably supposed to be the 3D segments of Speed Highway Act 2 (the wall-run is unmistakable) but seems like a pretty loose interpretation, and 4-3 is probably 3D segments of Seaside Hill Act 2 (I see a few split paths that look similar and what looks like the transition point to the kart segment, but there have been a lot of changes made including extra rails and ziplines). 4-7 might be the first half of Radical Highway (the second part, focused on the bridge section, occurred much earlier in the game) and 4-8 seems to my eye like it's built from other parts of Seaside Hill Act 2, but both have been much more heavily edited and altered from the source material than nearly every other stage. 4-5 and 4-9, oddly, don't have any obvious antecedents (though 4-9 can't help but resemble the intro to City Escape; I'd also seen a youtube comment suggesting that 4-5 might be based on Cool Edge DLC levels but it's an especially loose adaptation if so, and the only cyberspace stage based on a DLC level if we took that for granted).
Before getting into the second gameplay cycle, I should note that while comparisons to Breath of the Wild are overstated -- I think most of the ways in which this game resemble that one are ones in which BOTW broke from aspects of series tradition and instead took inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus, so that's a more obvious, more direct, and frankly more salient comparison -- there is one thing that feels directly inspired by it. The map-visibility tower climbs and korok collection mini-challenges are combined into the puzzle/technical-challenges that reveal map completion in this game. These aren't terribly complicated for the most part -- like the korok challenges, they tend to be pretty basic skills tests and usually only take one or two tries to complete properly -- but revealing the map is the first step to wider game completion. My understanding that even this is more like BOTW's influences (i.e., Far Cry) than directly anything from BOTW as the map reveal doesn't simply show extra pieces of territory but also is key to revealing all the stuff to be interacted with in those areas, like the aforementioned titans and cyberspace entrances, as well as character tokens and interactions, which are the core of the second gameplay loop.
This is apparently where my experience differs heavily from just about everyone else's. This challenge is extremely open-ended and I loved just about every dang minute of it. I also liked the way that it developed across the game. In the first island? Memory tokens are easy to find, usually kept near the ground, and so it's easy to wander around and find the structures leading to them. This early in the game you're going to be more focused on figuring out the titans and unlocking emeralds; the token requirements stay low. The second island spreads them out more, makes the different areas a little harder to get to, and definitely has you spending a lot more time tracing out the structures to figure out where they begin and end. And this trains you to start thinking more about the structures in the other two main islands (the third and fifth, as the fourth breaks this pace, more story-focused), and you spend more time hacking and trying to get around the structures. Other people apparently (based on the retronauts episode, which I have listened to completely! and I'm certainly convinced nobody on that podcast beat Sonic Unleashed) don't like the third island because there are a lot more segments where the camera perspective switches to 2D. And to be fair, I've been fairly critical of those 2D segments (they're a key part of why Colors landed worse for me) because they screw up the handling and make Sonic slower. When they've eliminated an entire potential source of controller mishaps by getting rid of a dimension, they should be making Sonic able to handle looser, not tighter! He genuinely feels too slow in 2D, especially in this game! But what's great about that island is that you can nearly always ignore it. Rather than starting from the beginning of any of these segments, you can frequently start from the end, or chain one memory token grab into multiple, because they tend to be close together and it's much easier to recognize the telltale signs of where one of these micro-levels end. And what I love about this is that all of this reinforces the storyline up until this point. In the first island, the story is mostly about exploring the island and trying to figure out what's going on. In the second, you start thinking about its purposes and how things got put where they are. By the third, you're actively seeking to commandeer parts of it, and by the final island you're working to break it over your knee. And what I love is that is also what I was doing while I was playing the game. People point out that the story this time is a little weightier than it has been, but what I really appreciate is that the actual moment-to-moment interactions with the game help to reinforce it; there was a lot of thought put into the way the game actually feeds into it.
That's not to say this loop is above criticism -- the low draw distance is disappointing and when you can configure the level of aerial deceleration Sonic has but not that graphical setting, the game has an obvious flaw in that gameplay loop. It's too easy to lose track of where the structures begin and end simply because the game does not provide access to that information depending on your position and camera angles.
It does feel a lot like Mario Odyssey, though, because tokens are about as readily available as the moons were, your intuition about where they are is probably correct, but actually reaching them may require an indirect route across a number of gimmicked areas if you don't try to work backwards.
Moments outside of these loops, however, tend to be pretty crap. The laser puzzle isn't terribly hard but it is a very unintuitive thing to control by the standards of Sonic (even by the standards of the rest of *this* game, where most of the abstract challenges tend to be things like 'press the dodge button a bunch of times'). The orb-moving crane is so simplistic as to be laughable. The pinball takes too long on the hardest difficulty.
While I don't think this is as deeply inspired by BOTW as some people make it out to be, it's funny that this game feels like it's built out of a pretty strong list of influential Japanese games from the last let's say 15-20 years. If you photoshopped Sonic into a screenshot of Shadow of the Colossus, you could probably convince people who have played this game you're showing them a screenshot. There's also a pretty significant debt to Nier, I'd argue, both in tone and theme, though this is understandably more friendly to children. Mario Odyssey I already mentioned. Hell, even Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga get surprisingly direct references. You'd expect, given that, that there'd be something somewhere that feels like Katamari, but surprisingly I didn't get much out of it. The game still manages to feel like a coherent whole regardless, not just a patched-together list of influences. That's the benefit of an original, emotionally authentic story I guess?
Which is not to say that I loved everything about the story. The need to bring in references to all the other games gets exhausting. It's practically on the level of Family Guy. Hell, you could make a Family Guy style joke out of all the callbacks by capturing footage of these "remember that time when" bits and then cutting to each of the respective games glitching out somewhere, and god do I hope someone has done this.
I also think it's weird that they've tried to explain what the story of the chaos emeralds is when we've already had that established in Sonic Origins. All those emeralds? They held the world in place and kept that Dark Gaia fellow from escaping and causing havok on the world. That's what these emeralds do, sort of the opposite of the master emerald which keeps a different continent in the air. That was consistent with Sonic Advance 3, where the emeralds were used to do something similar. Now they're, uh, from space. Somehow. But the master emerald isn't, that was there the whole time. Weird, inconsistent, and kind of jarring that they'd make all these superficial references to, like, everything, but then forget that.
But who knows. About an hour and a half ago they dropped a new story update and maybe that's got something to do with it. The side characters are, apparently, playable.
There are really two main gameplay cycles on the overworld areas. The first is the one that's heavily derivative of Shadow of the Colossus, where you take on large bosses and defeat them to get gear tokens. Those gear tokens then get redeemed to access cyberspace levels, which are basically this game's take on special stages, interpreted through the same ideas as Sonic Colors' Sonic Simulator -- which is to say that nearly every level is copied from a previous source, a combination of several SA2 full stages and portions of those from Unleashed and Generations. These then grant you keys to unlock the chaos emeralds, which will eventually lead you to the boss. It makes a lot more sense than Sonic Simulator, though; the layer of indirection between cyberspace giving you keys which you collect enough of to unlock an emerald may start sounding like Donkey Kong 64's tons of different in-game currencies but there wasn't another good way to do it because of the degree to which the use of the emeralds is part of the game's plot. Sonic Colors' placement of the emeralds doesn't hold up well to narrative scrutiny (how did they get into...an arcade game? that's owned by Eggman? where he isn't taking advantage of their power to stop Sonic??) but Frontiers doesn't have the luxury of handwaving it away; "why are the emeralds where they are" is one of the core questions the game's plot is concerned with answering.
Speaking of cyberspace, though, Sonic Retro's page on Cyber Space has a mostly complete list of sources, but it misses a few references. In particular: 1-3 is based on the 2D segments from Windmill Isle Act 2, 2-3 is the 2D segments from (Unleashed) Rooftop Run (at least up until the drop through the tower), 3-4 is based on part of Windmill Isle Act 3 (although, weirdly, the second part of that stage doesn't show up here but in a transition area between islands; the rest more resembles some 2D sections of Lost World's Tropical Coast 3 and Lava Mountain 2), and 3-5 is based on Savannah Citadel Act 2. Others are more debatable: 4-2 is probably supposed to be the 3D segments of Speed Highway Act 2 (the wall-run is unmistakable) but seems like a pretty loose interpretation, and 4-3 is probably 3D segments of Seaside Hill Act 2 (I see a few split paths that look similar and what looks like the transition point to the kart segment, but there have been a lot of changes made including extra rails and ziplines). 4-7 might be the first half of Radical Highway (the second part, focused on the bridge section, occurred much earlier in the game) and 4-8 seems to my eye like it's built from other parts of Seaside Hill Act 2, but both have been much more heavily edited and altered from the source material than nearly every other stage. 4-5 and 4-9, oddly, don't have any obvious antecedents (though 4-9 can't help but resemble the intro to City Escape; I'd also seen a youtube comment suggesting that 4-5 might be based on Cool Edge DLC levels but it's an especially loose adaptation if so, and the only cyberspace stage based on a DLC level if we took that for granted).
Before getting into the second gameplay cycle, I should note that while comparisons to Breath of the Wild are overstated -- I think most of the ways in which this game resemble that one are ones in which BOTW broke from aspects of series tradition and instead took inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus, so that's a more obvious, more direct, and frankly more salient comparison -- there is one thing that feels directly inspired by it. The map-visibility tower climbs and korok collection mini-challenges are combined into the puzzle/technical-challenges that reveal map completion in this game. These aren't terribly complicated for the most part -- like the korok challenges, they tend to be pretty basic skills tests and usually only take one or two tries to complete properly -- but revealing the map is the first step to wider game completion. My understanding that even this is more like BOTW's influences (i.e., Far Cry) than directly anything from BOTW as the map reveal doesn't simply show extra pieces of territory but also is key to revealing all the stuff to be interacted with in those areas, like the aforementioned titans and cyberspace entrances, as well as character tokens and interactions, which are the core of the second gameplay loop.
This is apparently where my experience differs heavily from just about everyone else's. This challenge is extremely open-ended and I loved just about every dang minute of it. I also liked the way that it developed across the game. In the first island? Memory tokens are easy to find, usually kept near the ground, and so it's easy to wander around and find the structures leading to them. This early in the game you're going to be more focused on figuring out the titans and unlocking emeralds; the token requirements stay low. The second island spreads them out more, makes the different areas a little harder to get to, and definitely has you spending a lot more time tracing out the structures to figure out where they begin and end. And this trains you to start thinking more about the structures in the other two main islands (the third and fifth, as the fourth breaks this pace, more story-focused), and you spend more time hacking and trying to get around the structures. Other people apparently (based on the retronauts episode, which I have listened to completely! and I'm certainly convinced nobody on that podcast beat Sonic Unleashed) don't like the third island because there are a lot more segments where the camera perspective switches to 2D. And to be fair, I've been fairly critical of those 2D segments (they're a key part of why Colors landed worse for me) because they screw up the handling and make Sonic slower. When they've eliminated an entire potential source of controller mishaps by getting rid of a dimension, they should be making Sonic able to handle looser, not tighter! He genuinely feels too slow in 2D, especially in this game! But what's great about that island is that you can nearly always ignore it. Rather than starting from the beginning of any of these segments, you can frequently start from the end, or chain one memory token grab into multiple, because they tend to be close together and it's much easier to recognize the telltale signs of where one of these micro-levels end. And what I love about this is that all of this reinforces the storyline up until this point. In the first island, the story is mostly about exploring the island and trying to figure out what's going on. In the second, you start thinking about its purposes and how things got put where they are. By the third, you're actively seeking to commandeer parts of it, and by the final island you're working to break it over your knee. And what I love is that is also what I was doing while I was playing the game. People point out that the story this time is a little weightier than it has been, but what I really appreciate is that the actual moment-to-moment interactions with the game help to reinforce it; there was a lot of thought put into the way the game actually feeds into it.
That's not to say this loop is above criticism -- the low draw distance is disappointing and when you can configure the level of aerial deceleration Sonic has but not that graphical setting, the game has an obvious flaw in that gameplay loop. It's too easy to lose track of where the structures begin and end simply because the game does not provide access to that information depending on your position and camera angles.
It does feel a lot like Mario Odyssey, though, because tokens are about as readily available as the moons were, your intuition about where they are is probably correct, but actually reaching them may require an indirect route across a number of gimmicked areas if you don't try to work backwards.
Moments outside of these loops, however, tend to be pretty crap. The laser puzzle isn't terribly hard but it is a very unintuitive thing to control by the standards of Sonic (even by the standards of the rest of *this* game, where most of the abstract challenges tend to be things like 'press the dodge button a bunch of times'). The orb-moving crane is so simplistic as to be laughable. The pinball takes too long on the hardest difficulty.
While I don't think this is as deeply inspired by BOTW as some people make it out to be, it's funny that this game feels like it's built out of a pretty strong list of influential Japanese games from the last let's say 15-20 years. If you photoshopped Sonic into a screenshot of Shadow of the Colossus, you could probably convince people who have played this game you're showing them a screenshot. There's also a pretty significant debt to Nier, I'd argue, both in tone and theme, though this is understandably more friendly to children. Mario Odyssey I already mentioned. Hell, even Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga get surprisingly direct references. You'd expect, given that, that there'd be something somewhere that feels like Katamari, but surprisingly I didn't get much out of it. The game still manages to feel like a coherent whole regardless, not just a patched-together list of influences. That's the benefit of an original, emotionally authentic story I guess?
Which is not to say that I loved everything about the story. The need to bring in references to all the other games gets exhausting. It's practically on the level of Family Guy. Hell, you could make a Family Guy style joke out of all the callbacks by capturing footage of these "remember that time when" bits and then cutting to each of the respective games glitching out somewhere, and god do I hope someone has done this.
I also think it's weird that they've tried to explain what the story of the chaos emeralds is when we've already had that established in Sonic Origins. All those emeralds? They held the world in place and kept that Dark Gaia fellow from escaping and causing havok on the world. That's what these emeralds do, sort of the opposite of the master emerald which keeps a different continent in the air. That was consistent with Sonic Advance 3, where the emeralds were used to do something similar. Now they're, uh, from space. Somehow. But the master emerald isn't, that was there the whole time. Weird, inconsistent, and kind of jarring that they'd make all these superficial references to, like, everything, but then forget that.
But who knows. About an hour and a half ago they dropped a new story update and maybe that's got something to do with it. The side characters are, apparently, playable.
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
OK this new update isn't just more story.
It's incredibly hard
And I want you to understand, I'm the one saying this.
I'm the guy who has the deathless tutorial for Eggmanland in Sonic Unleashed
And I'm telling you, it's incredibly hard
I absolutely fuckin love it. Glorious.
It's incredibly hard
And I want you to understand, I'm the one saying this.
I'm the guy who has the deathless tutorial for Eggmanland in Sonic Unleashed
And I'm telling you, it's incredibly hard
I absolutely fuckin love it. Glorious.
Oh, wonderful. "You dare to wish to play as someone other than Sonic again? Then suffer."
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
I mean, granted, I am playing on hard. If you play on easy they give you a ton more balloons and stuff for when you're doing the vertical climbing sections. Saw a guy who had a video claiming to be the whole story in 2 hours and I was deeply confused until I saw all the stuff they add to make it easier.
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muteKi
Geno Cidecity
I've yet to see anyone play this mode on anything but easy. There's a part about 2/3 of the way up the third tower in this update where I didn't know what to do. I think the answer is to do the auto-cyloop (press y) around the buttplug-looking things after doing a homing attack on them. Presumably this spawns a spring or something similar allowing you to transition between areas.
Since you can just *barely* make a homing attack to the second buttplug from where the first is, I presumed that might be what you have to do. Having lowered the difficulty down to easy to make it past that segment, I've encountered that plug in other places that makes it clear that abilities with cyloop effect are to be used to activate at least some of them.
Since you can just *barely* make a homing attack to the second buttplug from where the first is, I presumed that might be what you have to do. Having lowered the difficulty down to easy to make it past that segment, I've encountered that plug in other places that makes it clear that abilities with cyloop effect are to be used to activate at least some of them.
Oh, good to know. I consider myself a B-rank player in most 3D Sonics, even if my end-of-stage ranks may say otherwise.
And that was when there was only one or two buttons.
And that was when there was only one or two buttons.
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
To be clear, everyone playing on easy has a bunch of springs and balloons added to these towers for more straightforward homing attacks. I'm pointing this out specifically because on hard, they're not there and what I presume to be the planned means of progress is obtuse.
Everything else has been tough but fair I'd say, just unforgiving
Everything else has been tough but fair I'd say, just unforgiving
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
Such is the nature of posting at 4AM but I should be clear that I meant the fourth tower rather than the third. Blue Vivacity has a youtube video about the DLC and it shows off most of what you have to do on that tower. Indeed, if you home attack on the buttplug-lookin things a few times you generate the ability to do the auto-cyloop (note that you really do want all of Sonic's abilities unlocked for this content), which generates springs on the circular rail tracks, which you then can take to the next section. After two of those a third buttplug turns on some fans.
I don't think you're ever required to interact with them before this, though you're able to interact with them in lower-stakes settings after finishing the tower.
Once I understood that was what you needed to do, the fourth tower was just as easy to complete as the first three (not terribly, though notably more so than the base game)
I don't think you're ever required to interact with them before this, though you're able to interact with them in lower-stakes settings after finishing the tower.
Once I understood that was what you needed to do, the fourth tower was just as easy to complete as the first three (not terribly, though notably more so than the base game)
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
Rather than simply let this be, they've decided that once again they must overspecify the writing. *Roger Craig Smith voice* this is just like that time I was racing ryo hazuki around the after burner aircraft carrier and everyone demanded I explain why I was in a car
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
As I posted on the sidebar there's video of the ending of Sonic Superstars and it's exactly what you expect
People give the game grief for not being a pixel-based game but I'm sorry I can't share their opinion because the model they are using for Tails is perfect and I need them to keep using it. All the characters look good but this is the first time the charm and cuteness of Tails's original art has, I think, been adequately captured in a game. They fuckin nailed it.
People give the game grief for not being a pixel-based game but I'm sorry I can't share their opinion because the model they are using for Tails is perfect and I need them to keep using it. All the characters look good but this is the first time the charm and cuteness of Tails's original art has, I think, been adequately captured in a game. They fuckin nailed it.
I heard the bosses compared to Sonic 4, which... with a few exceptions, stand out as my least favorite part of those games by a pretty good margin.
muteKi
Geno Cidecity
Similar principles in many cases, but I think they're overall significantly better. I thought Oil Desert's was a cool boss, for example, on some levels conceptually (I love the idea of a robot just built up haphazardly from a lot of garbage) but didn't have enough stuff to do. Bosses tend to be more engaging, more along the lines of what you'd get in some of the Sonic CD bosses, so a bit more mechanically tied into concepts from each level and designed to do more than just have you bop them on the head 8 times in a row as was common for a lot of Sonic 2 and 3.
I mean I think S4:E1 has pretty awful bosses that are bland and uninspired -- trust me, I got the 'clear egg station zone without taking a hit' achievement, I know from the S4:E1 bosses. S4:E2 has bosses that are significantly more inventive and novel, but I don't think they do as good job of being compelling and interesting fights to the degree this game's are. I give several of those bosses goodwill on the basis of being cool-on-paper to make up for the fact they don't always have interesting attacks. The bosses here are a lot more interesting, and emerald powers also mean you have a number of extra ways to deal with them (for most act 1 bosses I almost always use avatar to quickly take out their third phase).
If I compare the bosses to S4:E2, it's that they're constructed from a similar ethos but are significantly more compelling to actually play. Those bosses, done right.
I mean I think S4:E1 has pretty awful bosses that are bland and uninspired -- trust me, I got the 'clear egg station zone without taking a hit' achievement, I know from the S4:E1 bosses. S4:E2 has bosses that are significantly more inventive and novel, but I don't think they do as good job of being compelling and interesting fights to the degree this game's are. I give several of those bosses goodwill on the basis of being cool-on-paper to make up for the fact they don't always have interesting attacks. The bosses here are a lot more interesting, and emerald powers also mean you have a number of extra ways to deal with them (for most act 1 bosses I almost always use avatar to quickly take out their third phase).
If I compare the bosses to S4:E2, it's that they're constructed from a similar ethos but are significantly more compelling to actually play. Those bosses, done right.