#and I really want to play Sonic Unleashed at some point

[essycogany]

Rare But Not So Rare Sonic Moments

Flaws

This may get controversial.

I welcome anyone else’s view point on this topic. If you don’t agree I’m okay with that. Just because I have a different perspective doesn’t make what I think right or wrong. You don’t have to change your mind. Whatever your opinion is, I respect it. Besides, it’s fun to have different views on something we both love. It gives us a way to see different sides of the coin.

Disclaimer: I’m a person who didn’t grow up with this franchise and only recently got into in early 2022. I have no biases towards any version of this character. Making my opinions about his characterizations mixed.

By the way, I’ll only use Sonic games as examples (for the most part) because this analysis would be too long if I talked about other medias.

In short. Most of his flaws do stir into different medias as well. To be honest, Sonic’s other variants aren’t as different as some may think, but that’s my hot take.

Times The Blue Blur Messed Up

Riders: Sonic lunched Amy along with Eggman into the air with his wind abilities. While knowing Amy’s safety would be at risk. Then left her. Which was the reason she was so angry and aggressive afterwards. He didn’t ever apologize either.

06: Exchanged a chaos emerald for Elise even after Tails warned Sonic not to.

Unleashed: Was distracted by taunting Eggman.

Sonic: “Well, this is new. Showing remorse Eggman? If you played nice, I wouldn’t have to break all your toys.”

Then became the Werehog. All because he wanted to boost his ego.

Secret Rings: Shahra used Sonic to collect the world rings for Erazar Djinn. Even though it should’ve been expected because she said, “They use to work together.” Ended up not being true.

Black Night: Was tricked into helping Merlina who wanted to create a world that would last forever.

Lost World: Tails once again tried to warn Mr.Impatient about the conch in Eggman’s hand, but kicked it anyways. Then warned Sonic about another trap, he didn’t listen, ended up getting the fox captured instead.

Frontiers: Accidentally helped free The End despite Knuckles and Sage’s suspensions. If his friends, Eggman, and Sage didn’t help him…..Well, it’s in the villain's name.

Side Note: In Secret Rings, Black night, and Frontiers Sonic was rude at points.

Sonic Sassiness

Sonic Sassiness Part 2

Sonic’s Overall Flaws/Mistakes

Some may be from his general characterizations throughout his history.

Sonic rushes into things without a second thought. (Impulsiveness) Sonic can be too reckless, brash, or not take situations seriously.

He’s impatient. (Which was his core trait since his idle animation in Sonic 1)

He doesn’t listen to his friends warnings. Sonic can be too cocky at the wrong moments. He causes or contributes to world ending consequences. The blue blur can also be too trusting and naive.

Sonic doesn’t worry about his own physical or mental state and internalizes his emotions. He isn’t able to express himself very well. Therefore doesn’t put the right words together when speaking sometimes.

Sonic can be stubborn and a bit of a jerk.

Sage: “You are short tempered and short sided.”

And that’s about it. If I missed anything, feel free to let me know.

My Thoughts

A few of these can be seen as Sonic’s strength and weaknesses. Like his willingness to harm himself if it means to save his friends.

The reason Sonic never learns from his mistakes in the games is because he gets away with them. Which is not a good or bad thing per say. (Besides Sonic Riders. There’s no excuse for that.)

The stories never really given him an arc. But I don’t think Sonic’s a perfect or flawless character. If the examples I’ve shown are evidence of anything.

I’d say he’s static, but not consistently. Most static characters I’ve seen rarely stays static anyways.

I also don’t believe Sonic himself thinks he’s perfect. Sonic probably thinks he doesn’t have to change because he’s so sure he should be able to manage things without issue. Everything does eventually go his way. Why should he change?

I do understand Sonic influences people, but why can’t there be a balance? It’s been done plenty of times with other characters. In books, movies, and tv shows. Animated and live-action.

Movie!Sonic in Sonic 2 inspired both Knuckles and Tails. Helping them better themselves with advice and encouragement. While also going through his own arc of growing up and being responsible.

Tails:“You’ve inspired me. To leave my village. To find you and help you on your mission.”

Despite him learning how to slow down and plan things out, Prime!Sonic also inspires the different variants of his friends. Thorn, Dread, and Nine. Helping them grow into becoming better people.

Even in Unleashed Sonic was at his most mature, but it was only after his cocky attitude got him into trouble. So, yes. Inspirational characters can have flaws.

I’ll just say this

Everyone has their own views on how Sonic should be characterized, drawn, played, voiced, animated, and showcase.

It’s fine if you don’t like a curtain interpretation of a character, but to say the character (Especially if they weren’t very consistent in the first place) isn’t acting like themselves now, it’s really hard to argue what self there is to come back to. Because even in the games there are so many different selves for these characters in their own canon universe. From Classic to Adventure, Unleashed, Colors, and Frontiers. (If that makes any sense)

It’s hard to find one place to be in because Sonic’s been in too many places at once. He shouldn’t be held down to one characterization if he’s already been all over the place from the beginning of his existence.

AKA Sonic’s first two shows ever. TAOSTH and SATAM. In both shows Sonic had flaws as well, but never learned from them. Which means he’s been like this from the start. Like everything else about this franchise, his personality is an ongoing experiment that’ll probably never be solved. And I kind of love that. Even if it can be stressful and has it’s own up’s and down’s

All of these unique stories from the games, comics, tv shows, and movies people grew up with are what made this franchise so popular. This is the main reason I became a Sonic fan. Because I learned so much about characterization from this franchise and how to love the different variations of its characters. Finding an appreciation for each of them.

Conclusion

Everyone’s opinions are valid at the end of the day. At least we all have a version of this character we can love and appreciate. Whether you agree or not I’m grateful you’ve made it all the way to the end. You’re a trooper!

Stay Creative! 💜

[askagamedev]

I feel like I or someone else asked you this, but do you think that gameplay will ever get to the point where it looks like the fancy prerendered cutscenes? Even the outstanding visuals we have now, don't really look like say, Sonic Unleashed's opening cinematic from.....Christ, 2008 was really 15 years ago. Anyway, Is there a way to match that that look in style and fidelity or is it just kind of a "physics" thing where that's basically not possible? What stops that if that's the case.

I don't believe that gameplay will ever look like fancy prerendered cutscenes because gameplay has certain needs that cutscenes do not, and cutscenes have certain needs that gameplay does not. Here's what I mean.

When you're watching a cinematic in a game like Spider-Man, what are you seeing on screen? Usually what you want to see is Spider-Man doing some amazing, spectacular action. Something like this:

Note how closely pulled-in the camera is, so that you can see all the details of Spider-Man's body and posing. The camera zooms in to see him narrow his eyes. Look at how the camera movement can barely frame him, conveying how fast he is moving. You're not looking for where to go next, because it's all pre-planned out for you - the purpose of this short cinematic is to tell a story - Spider-Man has to get out of here quickly.

Let's compare that to what you see on screen when you are playing Spider-Man:

See how the camera is framing everything very differently? Spider-Man takes up a very small amount of the screen. The vast majority of the information being conveyed here is showing the player exactly where Spider-Man is going and how fast he is getting there. We're seeing him move acrobatically through the air, but we're not seeing his emotions or his face. We're focusing on what matters - navigating through the city to wherever we (as the player) want him to go.

The needs of gameplay are different than the needs of cinematics. Even if the technology improves to the point where everything is beautiful and gorgeous, it still won't look the same because the purpose of regular gameplay and the purpose of cinematics is different. Gameplay visualizes the things the player needs to see and engage with at any given time. Cinematics visualize the aspects of the story that the designers want to tell. Even if the tech can do it, the purpose of the visualization isn't the same so it won't happen.

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Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[ouroborosorder]

Can you tell me more about the negators mapping to fighting game character archetypes? I don’t know much about fgc archetypes but I love UU and this sounds super interesting.

alright so groundwork. Totsuka is a massive fighting game fan. UU is fucking full of references to street fighter already, and he's said before that he wanted to make a manga about fighting games. Dude loves them, so I'm not saying this baselessly. It's to the point where my conspiracy theory is that this started as a hypothetical fighting game roster.

I'll just go through the first few in order and then some notables:

Andy - Shoto. A mixed fighter who specializes at having good tools for any distance. Usually featuring a long-range projectile (parts bullet), a wide reaching mid-screen poke (Crescent series), and an approach option (Fucking flying.) Also, many Shotos have an "install" form, where they unleash a dormant power and transform into a more dangerous, aggressive version of themselves. Come on, dude has a Victor install. Also, "cocky immortal" is a very common fighting game archetype narratively, and one of my personal favorites tbh.

Fuuko - Setplay debuff character. Usually relies on defensive play, mixups, and pokes. When you come to understand the target well enough, you can push your luck, find their pressure point, and land a single glancing hit that applies a debuff that allows you to steamroll the opponent. And like. Falling in love with the opponent and then using that love to understand them is exactly how Fuuko fights. Characters like Londrekia from Under Night are a good touchstone here.

Shen - Chinese stereotype martial artist. This is a common thing in fighting games. Also, they tend to focus really heavily on mixups, forcing the opponent into making bad calls by faking one move and going for another - finding the truth through untruth, as it were.

Void - Bigbody close-range brawler. The dude literally walks into the boxing ring dressed like Balrog from Street Fighter. I mean, come on.

Gina - This is where my theory gets Weird but bear with me. Gina is the bigbody grappler. Grapplers in fighters are slow-moving, highly defensive, and focus primarily on forcing pressure by existing. Grapplers are scary because they don't have to change their position at all to force you to have to play differently. Plus, Gina is associated with her big barrier around her at all times that limits her movement and would make her hitbox larger. Also, her giant Unchange hands are a phenomenal grappler tool. Also, when fighters try to be subversive and make a grappler that isn't a massive guy, they almost always do it by making it a small girl who plays identical to a big guy.

Top - Obligatory rushdown fighter. His new 101 interpretation feels basically tailor-made for rushdown play tbh. Give him a rekka series and we're fucking good.

Rip - Motherfucking CHARGE CHARACTER BABY. This one is entirely because Rip literally has Guile's flash kick and a sonic boom, he does them on screen.

Phil - Full screen zoner. Also the amount of fighting games that have just one extremely weird robot character is absurd, he's basically tailor made to be the obligatory One Robot.

Billy - Copycat fighter. These aren't common anymore, but used to be more common back when sprites were frequent and tracing over another character's sprites was way faster than making a new animation. A character whose entire premise is using other fighters' moves, copying their abilities into an entirely new kit. Mechanically, these characters tend to have weird, disparate kits with a lot of unique options that otherwise would never be on a kit together, allowing them to adapt their playstyle to be the exact perfect enemy to whoever they're facing. Also "bouncing gunslinger" is a very very common fighting game trope, since fighters tend to balance out guns' innate power with weird firing angles.

Juiz - Midrange bait and punish swordfighter. Prioritizes pokes from every angle, allowing you to react and punish everything your opponent can do. Usually calm-collected fencers personality-wise. Maps perfectly to Unjustice's idea - wait until you know what your opponent's intent is, then negate their Justice.

Julia - Protege character who takes after two other members of the cast - being Fuuko and Juiz. Their fighting style usually is a mix of the two, combining their best aspects, copying their moves exactly sometimes, with their own unique aspects in there to show her own persona growing alongside their influence.

Latla - Actively a reference to Rose from Street Fighter. So. Rose from Street Fighter.

Backs - Joke character. You lose to this in bracket, you're going to be posting some real scrubquotes shit.

I can do this for almost every single Negator in the entire manga. The only characters I can't find easy maps to are Chikara, Sean, Tella, Ichico, Lucy, and whatever Unchaste's name was. (this may change if Unchaste actually ever appears again.) But they're all not fighters anyway, they're all support characters or literal children dying of an incurable disease.

[the-heart-of-a-monster]

hi hello i haven’t played sonic unleashed but i watched gameplay years and years ago but its been a minute so bear with me here

so i stayed up all night reading through this entire comic in one sitting and i absolutely adore the way you showed the panel borders distorting and even becoming monstrous themselves as Shadow reaches his breaking point (which is symbolically shown through the icy walls fracturing around them during his and Sonic’s argument leading up to the fight) and the way the influence of Dark Gaia becomes more prominent as purple flames to emanate from him, growing more and more vivid

and then the rising action reaches a fever pitch when Sonic says he has no heart and we see Shadow finally reach his breaking point when the borders of the panel shatter around him

and while he processes this the borders soften (although not entirely) and we see Sonic realize the mistake he made and his regret, but it’s already too late because we can see the color red slowly start to overtake the borders as Shadow is overcome with rage

and we can see the red borders turn to pink and the glimpses of pink in Shadow’s text bubbles take over completely as the force that’s corrupting him takes control of him in this vulnerable state

it tries falteringly to communicate with Sonic, a desperate plea for him to fix what was broken and to make Gaia whole again

in this moment Dark Gaia as an entity is effectively lashing out and it latches onto Shadow’s rage here especially because that’s something it can empathize with, or at the very least something it recognizes given its own circumstances. Dark Gaia seems to understand (at least within the constraints of its limitations as one part of a whole) that it is fundamentally broken and in order to make that right it wants to be “fixed” but it doesn’t know how and it can’t really do that on its own

I don’t know if Dark Gaia even knows that it can’t mend itself by itself and if its just sort of reacting to the cosmic existential horror that is being split into two separate entities (i’d be cranky too if that happened to me regardless of whether or not i was some sort of ancient deity)

but then in a pivotal moment, Sonic reaches out to Shadow, to Dark Gaia, and the borders straighten out once more. They’re still pink mind you, but Sonic has managed to ground Shadow/Dark Gaia or at least shock him long enough to absorb the darkness within.

Sonic promises that the lies stop here and that he and Shadow/Dark Gaia are going to make this right together and in an eruption of purple flames, we cut to Shadow’s time on the ARK.

It’s a brilliant transition and the pay off for this moment is amazing as it was set up spectacularly via foreshadowing (ha get it) in earlier issues of the comic.

The technical aspects of the comic continue to blow me away during this sequence as we as readers are able to measure the passage of time through the timestamps in the upper righthand corner of each panel.

We see Shadow’s turbulent upbringing and the unrelenting kindness that Maria showed him. We see how his unpredictable powers affected his life aboard the ARK and how his struggles mirror the ones Sonic has been grappling with throughout the comic.

We even see Shadow start to embrace his own innate capacity for violence at one point and not in a good way. After months of testing, covered in blood, Shadow calls himself a monster and to the reader (and perhaps even Shadow himself given the abstract nature of the background in this panel) At this point it’s not immediately clear exactly what he’s done, but the blood is a pretty good indicator that it can’t be good.

Finally, reality sinks in when someone begins to shout and Shadow sees the look on Maria’s face. As members of G.U.N. close in on him with their arms outstretched to seize him, Shadow’s body language (particularly his ears and his face) tell us that Shadow is horrified by what he’s become and so he runs.

Maria calls after him, desperately trying to quell his fears and I love the framing of Maria in the next page and how she stands in the doorway, surrounded by light while Shadow is hunched over in the darkness, staring at the hands that he used to take away the lives of those soldiers.

Shadow is crying when Maria approaches him and places a hand on his shoulder. The light and the dark meet and with tears in her eyes, Maria utters the very same words that were spoken earlier in the comic when Shadow comforted Sonic (well not the very same because they’re speaking german here but i digress)

Color returns to the pages anew and just like Sonic, we see Maria in a brand new light both symbolically and literally. All of this happens before the purple flames we saw earlier can even dissipate and when they do we see him holding Shadow, cradling the ultimate lifeform to his chest.

As we return to the present, the background gradually returns, fading in from swathes of blue. Sonic expresses his remorse for his blatant misunderstanding of Shadow’s character, crying as he holds him close.

With Shadow in his arms, Sonic restores the chaos emerald and through the chaos emerald we’re able to catch a glimpse of Sonic’s daytime form shining through and we see that at the end of the day, he’s still Sonic the Hedgehog in spite of all these changes as he and Shadow exchange a friendly glance and the scene ends.

Have I mentioned how much I love this comic? I literally cannot stop talking about this comic. The fact that you’ve been working on it for 6 years is just incredible. Thank you so much for all your hard work. I love what you’ve done with the story. This is one of my all time favorite fan works and I will never shut up about it.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading my hastily made analysis on issue 7. I love your work. I don’t really know how to end this so yeah *fucking dies*

this is so wonderfully said thank you so much augh im so happy people appreciate the complex subtext i put into my art ♥

also man. that really happened issue 7 huh. time flies. i remember drwing that scene like it was yesterday

[skaruresonic]

I was going to make a broader overarching point about how IDW's version of the characters seem more interested in virtue-signalling than in proving their goodness through their deeds, but I got a bit tuckered out. Anyway. Tl;dr for the wall of text ahead: the games still win in this regard. By a landslide.

In Unleashed, Sonic can accept a sidequest from a little Mazuri girl named Yaya. Normally, Yaya is shy, perhaps even nonverbal, and will flee if you attempt to talk to her. It's rare to see her during the day, so when you spot her out in the open, cowering but attempting to communicate to the best of her ability, it's a clue that she wants something badly enough to risk her fears. After several false starts, Yaya manages to ask Sonic to get her a chocolate sundae. She doesn't explain why, nor do you immediately receive a reward when you give it to her. It's only later, after Yaya's mother recovers, that you learn the reason for her odd request. Mom was sick, and Yaya wanted to give her a sundae to help make her feel better. Despite avoiding you until now, she managed to swallow her fears for the sake of her mother.

It's sweet, as well as a humanizing moment for Yaya, her mother, and Sonic. As a good deed, it's nothing grand. Giving someone food when they're sick isn't nearly as lofty as air-dropping food to a nation in need, certainly, but in Unleashed, you at least see the tangible effect you've had on the people you helped. You just brightened the day of a mother and her daughter.

Through sidequests like these, Unleashed shows us that no act of kindness, however small or inconsequential seeming, is wasted.

Conversely, one of the... myriad reasons this panel rubs me the wrong way is that it achieves almost the opposite effect. The people of Mazuri are instead objectified. They're a monolith, a statistic, to help polish the Restoration's reputation to a sterling sheen. In this regard, they might as well be props.

We hear about this aid nearly secondhand, as it's something Silver, Blaze, and Jewel intend to do but haven't yet. All the scene is intended to do is make the Restoration look good, as though by mere dint of being called the Restoration, we couldn't put 2 and 2 together and figure it out.

The one time we're informed of their humanitarian aid, we're not shown it. So really, what was the point of bringing it up, if not to stroke the heroes' self-righteous boner?

Inaccuracies to the games aside (which is par for the course for the book), there's all sorts of... unsavory implications at play here. Blaze "was touring" Sonic's world when she happened upon Mazuri's plight. Because we're not given much detail other than "poor crops this season," we have to assume Blaze took some initiative to ease the situation.

Take a moment to think about this. Blaze hails from a water world. How would she know what constitutes sufficient crop failure to warrant shipping aid to a completely different clime than the one she's most familiar with? How does she know what "poor crop season" looks like in Mazuri? How does she know she doesn't have any biases about the way people in Mazuri should approach their agriculture? Does she understand they eat more than just crops, and sell fruit and broiled ibanga as well as confections? If this is her first time touring Sonic's world, how does she approach the government of its denizens? Did she do this respectfully? Did she confer with Mazuri's Elders? Did the people seek her help? Did they say Out Loud With Their Mouths that they'd accept her help, or did she presume their needs? We don't receive answers to any of those questions. She "was touring" the area when she saw a problem worth correcting. The thought starts and ends there. The people of Mazuri do not merit a voice or agency in the matter, because all that really matters here is that you know how virtuous Blaze, Jewel, and Silver are for helping the less fortunate in their time of need. (Which is really ironic, considering Surge calls Sonic out for speaking over her and Kit when they're standing right in front of him in the exact same issue.)

Add the connotations that Flynn frequently describes Blaze as "the imperial princess of the Sol Empire" instead of "duchess" or "guardian of the Sol Emeralds"... Marry them with the implication that she's butting into the business of a foreign nation when we don't know the specifics of their plight, they're just Objects to show us how virtuous our heroes are, and this whole onion of suckage starts to reek.

[doggendoodle]

It's especially interested how bad the Minecraft movie feels when you compare it to other video game movies nowadays.

Like. For example, the Mario movie in concept was simple. Adapt the basic structure of what a Mario platformer is (person gets kidnapped and Mario saves them) with Mario's alternate backstory of being from Brooklyn as an excuse to make him an easier viewpoint character. And Super Mario is THE video game franchise so it's an easy money grab.

Except they didn't make an easy money grab. They made a kid's movie that respected the kids who play the games, they made references to the games and incorporated them into the movie in a way that enhanced the story, and they did this while still understanding the spirit of the franchise.

Mario and DK being rivals but still coming together to fight a greater evil. The Bros.' relationship being the emotional core of the movie. Bowser being portrayed perfectly as a goofy yet still threatening villain. They even incorporated Mario Kart into the story without it feeling tacked on. They took the world of Mario seriously and treated it with respect - they made a world that's goofy and charming but still lived-in, without making it edgy or "realistic" just to "appeal" to adults.

Most people apologising to Minecraft Story Mode are probably doing it as a joke, but like. They already understood this and worked through it. Even in the first game which features a grand adventure, the adventurers are people from the world of Minecraft, and the epic invasion was a horror unleashed by accident, like the Wither it's based on.

Later episodes and seasons play more into the inherent fantastical elements of Minecraft, with the Far Lands and the End as eldritch, alien places. They also reference the community aspects of Minecraft: power-hungry server admins, fan-created games like Spleef, fantastical redstone contraptions, even the Minecraft YouTuber murder mystery.

And even being a movie instead of an episodic game isn't an automatic death sentence - hell, if you really wanted to stick to the base game of Minecraft, you could showcase the joy of exploration that is a much more common and more core experience than big epic boss fights.

That moment in the trailer, where there's a log floating in the broken tree and the boy reaches out for it? The one at the start where they're looking around at the world and the camera lets us see the surroundings? Those are great moments, because that's how it feels to play Minecraft. I've seen and heard kids play the game, I know that's still how they experience it. If you're going to make it into an epic, make it into an epic journey and show off the world. The vistas we've seen do genuinely look gorgeous, like someone transplanted

Even the visual design plays into this. The weirdly realistic mobs Detective Pikachu/Sonic style do not work. Detective Pikachu still looks uncanny to me, but the world of Pokémon is meant to be similar to the human world, and Pokémon are meant to be animals. The world of Sonic is Earth, and the redone design for Sonic and the other animal characters is beautiful; it really does feel like Sonic exists in a world overlaid on ours, more fantastical but still in reach.

The Minecraft movie trying to have its blocky cake and eat it too just feels like a shoddy compromise. The wolf howling at the moon doesn't look epic or awe-inspiring, it looks bad - in fact it's not even on model. They deliberately made it look blockier, for some reason. The invading piglins have realistic armour, and clothes, but their bodies are desperately trying to fit the voxel shapes and it all feels at odds. And of course the pink sheep and llama look god awful.

Combined with the human characters being Regular Humans, it feels more like some random friend group making a home movie than a fucking big budget production - and honestly, it loses some of the fun and appeal of portal fantasy.

I will say, it does look like they will visit the Nether at some point.

[ID: screenshot from the trailer. The scene is dark and lit by lava waterfalls originating above the frame, but the scenery resembles a Bastion. There are several piglins staring at the young male main character, whose head is peeking into frame. End ID]

Given they're shooting for the "marauding piglin" angle it's probably too much to ask, but the scene cuts away at this point instead of transitioning into that standard shot where all the mobs roar at the main character, so part of me is hoping that maybe this scene won't be at the climax, and we'll get to actually experience the piglins as nuanced mobs.

[moomingitz]

Been thinking about this recently, when it comes to how people have view games in the Sonic franchise and their expectations of them even all the way back in the 2000s. I honestly believe the price the games originally retailed for has a lot to do with it. I'm saying this as someone who came in late to play the most prominent "dark age" Sonic games, and the games that came after them. And I'm only referring to the console games here, not the handheld ones.

The first time I played Sonic 06 was back in 2013. I bought it brand new and still sealed for $10, and I did it because I wanted to get an actual informed opinion of the game, and as a strange curiosity in general. The game is definitely unfinished and very buggy. However, I did get some enjoyment from it(even if not for the intended reasons), I actually liked the cutscenes for most of the part, and I do see some redeeming qualities underneath it's scuffed to hell surface. But, again, I only paid $10 for it, so not really a loss for me. But when it originally came out, it was not only $60, it was also this big grand anniversary game, meant to be a drastic new direction and refresh of the franchise, and it was released on then-next gen consoles. So I think you can start to see a more full picture of what I'm trying to get at, here.

Same thing also applies to the games that I think are good, or at least better. Sonic 06 wasn't the only Sonic game I played for the first time around that time. Before 06, I bought and played Colors in late 2012 for around $15. While I still believe that it's a good game, it's very short and doesn't have much else to do after you beat the main story. I don't think it has enough content to justify the price it originally retailed for.

The lack of a significant amount of content offered outside of the base games is honestly why I miss games like Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. Whether these games have actually aged well or not, there was so much you could do on the side. I would play these games religiously growing up, wanting to find and unlock everything I could do. I even %100 completed SA2 at one point. Sonic Adventure gives you hub worlds to explore and mess around in, and the Gamecube port even gives you the Gamegear games to unlock. In SA2 you could unlock costumes/skins for characters in 2 Player VS. mode and unlock other characters to play in it, among other things you could also unlock by completing missions and getting emblems. SA2 even had a timed boss rush. And, of course, both games had the Chao gardens.

It might be something of a meme to demand the Chao Gardens make a return. But fans, me included, want them back for a very good reason. Not only is it fun and relaxing to raise Chao and customize them to your liking, but the Chao gardens incentivize you to replay stages in order to find things like certain small animals to use for your Chao, or to scrounge up rings to buy things at the market.

As someone who played both Sonic Adventure games, when both their Dreamcast and following Gamecube ports originally came out, I really do feel like both the base games, and the amount of content provided outside of them, made them worth the price tag they had during their initial releases. The only games that have been able to scratch that kind of itch for me afterward is Unleashed and Generations. And before anyone asks; I can't comment on Frontiers gameplay wise because I still haven't played it yet.

[scruffyplayssonic]

Are the ArchieSonic comics actually an 80's/90's syndicated cartoon? Episode 63: Clip show to set up two-part finale 

Welcome back to my look at the ArchieSonic comic series, and how it shared a lot of the same story tropes as a typical ‘80s or ‘90s syndicated cartoon! Well it’s taken me a long time to get here - I first started this series back in December of 2022! But we’re almost at the end of our investigation at long last.

Episode 63: Clip show to set up two-part finale 

This is a trope you see in media from time to time - they’ll make the second-to-last story of the series a clip show, recapping what happened earlier in the season. This serves two purposes - to catch viewers up on what’s happened so far, and also to save the crew time and budget that they can put towards making a spectacular finale instead. That said, the first purpose is probably a little rarer these days as almost all shows that have a serialised story will have a “Previously on…” segment at the beginning of each episode, and a longer one that recaps the entire season for the finale. Some shows really lean hard into this - take Supernatural for example, which set all 15 of its season finales to the music of, “Carry on My Wayward Son,” by Kansas.

In my opinion, the best ever pre-series finale clip show was done by Avatar: The Last Airbender. Instead of doing a typical clip show that re-used footage from previous episodes, Team Avatar attended a play that retold the story of their adventures up until this point. This episode leaned heavily into a lot of the show’s memes, such as the play acknowledging that it would be best to skip over The Great Divide, what most fanss feel is the worst episode of the series. Aang and friends were upset with the way the actors on stage were portraying them, with Aang being outraged he was being played by a bald woman, Sokka annoyed that his actor’s jokes weren’t funny, and Zuko and Katara insisting that they don’t spend all day long talking about honour and hope, respectively.

The only exception was Toph, who was delighted to be portrayed by a gigantic buff dude who overcame his blindness by using echo-location screaming.

But what about in ArchieSonic? Sure, we had clip shows. And we had a number of different stories one could count as series finales. But we didn’t really get a pre-finale clip show episode. So what did we get instead?

While it wasn’t in the final ever-published issue of Sonic the Hedgehog, the story “Panic in the Sky,” which ran in issues 284 - 287, more or less serves as a finale to the series. I’ll go into that more when I get to it. Today I want to talk about the issue that came before those, Sonic #283. Taking place right before the climax of the Sonic Unleashed adaptation, at this point of the story the Freedom Fighters had managed to get their hands on all the Chaos Emeralds and Gaia Temple keys, and were preparing to launch their plan to restore the planet. Rather than visiting each of the Gaia Temples across the world one at a time like in the game, the Freedom Fighters planned to take advantage of the Gaia Gate to access all the temples at once from a central location. The idea was that they could quickly slip inside via the gate, avoiding Eggman’s armies that were guarding the temples and restoring the planet before Eggman even realised what was happening. But to do this they needed help, so Sonic and Sally did a Discord call with their friends and allies around the world. 

This had the benefit of also acting as an almost-clipshow for the readers, catching them up with what had been happening and preparing them for the climax. 

Everyone in the call agreed to help and the Freedom Fighters signed off in good spirits, confident that they had managed to pull one over on Eggman. However…

Tails Doll was able to spy on the broadcast without the Freedom Fighters realising it, and so Eggman quickly found out about their secret plan.

While initially furious that the Freedom Fighters had tried to trick him, Eggman quickly realised he could turn their plans against them and got to work hosting his own secret Zoom call.

How did this turn out for everyone? I’ll get into that next episode!

There was of course another story that was originally intended to be the grand finale for ArchieSonic, and that was the Endgame arc that took place in Sonic #47 - 50. While the series obviously didn’t end there, I feel like we should have a look at that one too. So did we get a clip show in the previous issue, Sonic #46? Well… not really. 

The closest we got was Uncle Chuck presenting video evidence to the Freedom Fighters that Robotnik had sabotaged his original roboticiser design. Notably this included footage of Sonic’s own father being roboticised, which bizarrely Sonic didn’t seem to notice or comment on.

That seems like quite an oversight. Who wrote this anyway? Three guesses it’s-

…oh. Well, I was partially right at least. 😛

While this issue wasn’t really a clip show, it did have a lot of set up for the Endgame arc.

This included the resolution of Knuckles’ quest to find King Acorn’s missing sword that could supposedly restore his health…

…the introduction of the Wolfpack Freedom Fighters (who had previously only been seen in SatAM and were making their first appearance in the comics)...

…and the revelation that there might be a spy among us.

Sorry, I had to. 😛 Seriously though, the suggestion that someone among the various Freedom Fighter groups might be a traitor was a pretty serious allegation, especially right before the big Endgame event the readers knew was coming. And there were numerous candidates for who the traitor could be.

Geoffrey pointed the finger at Uncle Chuck, whose spy network had failed to notice the coming of the Death Egg and had already had one confirmed traitor working for them.

Antoine accused Geoffrey, who he claimed had stolen the D’Coolette family’s legacy of the Rebel Underground.

Also, the way he attempted to execute Sonic just for punching him in the face certainly didn’t make him look any less suspicious.

And then there was Drago, a new character who had been introduced in that same issue, who wasn’t even part of the SatAM Wolfpack, and who apparently had a habit of wandering off unsupervised. Hmmmm…

HMMMMMMMM.

But wait! The following issue hit us with the possibility that Sonic himself might possibly be the traitor! …more on that later though. For now, let's finish our discussion of #46 with my very favourite moment:

Leave it to the dragon to have the sick burn! :D

One other clipshow that I wanted to address - and haven’t previously in either of the other two episodes I dedicated to this topic - comes from Sonic #72.

I think I did bring this one up at some point in a different topic, but not in the context of a clipshow episode. This story was about King Max making a broadcast to his people only for the airwaves to be hacked to instead show a pirated broadcast telling the life story of the late Dr. Robotnik.

This clipshow wasn’t set prior to a finale, but rather just before the beginning of a new era in the comic - the rise of Robo-Robotnik (or as he would later be called, Dr. Eggman). This was very cleverly done if you ask me.

It not only reminded the readers of Robotnik’s backstory but also of his encounter with Robo-Robotnik back in Sonic #22, hinting at who the new villain’s real identity so that the big reveal in #75 didn’t feel like it came out of nowhere. On top of that the clipshow also foreshadowed things to come in the next year or two in the comic, such as the return of Overlanders to the planet, and specifically, Robotnik’s brother.

Well played, Karl Bollers!

Are there any other clip shows that I missed, in this episode or any of the previous ones? Let me know in the comments! Next time I’m going to start wrapping things up, because it’s finally time to talk about the two-part four-part finale! See you then!

[vioyume]

Sonic's dark era was really onto something, it just needed some major fine tuning when it comes to game play and some of the writing. It's also the era with the most stunning cut scenes.

Obviously the biggest turning point was 06 and that made Sega afraid to try anything that ambitious again (Mostly because they shot their own foot in speeding up development and cutting the team in half). You can clearly see what the team wanted the game to be, the story can leave an impact if you ignore the glitchy and questionable game play. There is a reason why some people like the game, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them.

Though the games after it were overall decent, I think Unleashed was good game play (and content) wise, and Black Knight was good for story. Though that can be debatable. Everything afterwards was meh in my opinion until Frontiers (I'm looking forward for what this era will offer, and frontiers still has its flaws). Forces has nothing to offer besides the concept of Eggman taking over and Sonic being imprisoned for barely half the game.

Sonic doesn't need a big story line for every game, and I am one to play games for story/world building. The characters themselves can carry a simple plot if written well. The classics era is proof of that, while the story is pretty straight forward, the manuals with the little character info cards gets you engaged in the world and imagine how these characters will react with their surroundings.

I don't know where I'm going with this. All I'm saying is that the dark era of modern sonic had more meat than the games afterwards. I liked Colors, but Sonic was mostly "ha ha baldy nose hair, right Tails?" while not really convincing me to play more of the game, also one of the missed opportunities to have him fight Tails. Still a charming game if you only care for the game aspect of it, but it's pretty safe.

[joshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

Another Sonic twitter thread thing I saw but it's random questions this time

There's nothing I love more than talking about Sonic the Hedgehog after all.

I got into Sonic because when I was too young to even remember anything in any detail my family had a Mega Drive with Sonic 1-3, and I mean I played them a lot. I don't think I could tell you my thoughts on it then though because I was like pre-toddler age lol. Probably thought it was the coolest shit ever. As opposed to today where I still think that but like I'm way more autistic about it.

Quotes and themes are different things and I also don't know if by theme they mean music or like thematic shit so uhhh. Uncertainty of intention means I'll relegate myself to just quote, which is hard - in a series with so many iconic lines how do you pick just one? But I do think "what you see is what you get - just a guy that loves adventure!" as well as "do I need a reason to want to help out a friend?" are both very good lines that portray Sonic himself very very nicely. I'll go with those. Not strictly a final answer and I could probably make a whole post on just this question, but we'll leave it on the two mentioned.

Out-of-game I think Yuji Uekawa's adventure era artwork is my favourite, I think for in-game art styles I'm between Unleashed, Colours, and Mania.

I'll keep it simple just make him and Mario have a fucking platformer crossover or even like an RPG or something, anything that's not the Olympics.

You know my answer was very easily Live and Learn until Sonic Frontiers came out lol. Now it's Find Your Flame quite handily. Shit fucks harder than god.

A couple different pieces of Sonic media have entertained the idea of Silver attaining some sort of like heightened state of power, like ESP Silver from Runners and I think he's in Speed Simulator too - I'm curious about how far along he goes with that. A much younger Josh who cared marginally more about power scaling was interested in the idea of Silver becoming the strongest character in the series even. I think there was an animation in the Lythero Silver Campaign video (I've been meaning to watch this but that's neither here nor there) showing base Silver fighting Super Sonic. I'm kind of interested in that. How far does base Silver go if he's that aforementioned ESP Silver or whatever. Can he thoroughly whoop the likes of Knuckles or Blaze eventually? Perhaps even Shadow or Sonic? We're going with roughly that.

Of the 4 listed here I'd certainly say the OVA, it's just by far my favourite. SatAM has some props for its fandom significance but I find it boring, X has some props for being the most game-faithful but it's kind of crap, OVA is just dope. Even extending it to what's come out since I'd still stick with the OVA.

I used to be able to reliably name a decent amount of Sonic fanartists but unfortunately my mind has consistently blanked on that front recently. Official as a qualification lets me get away with saying Yuji Uekawa though so we'll stick to that. Jack Lawrence's IDW art is also really nice, particularly in Scrapnik Island.

I don't like blue shoes Tails at all lol. Like I think the argument amongst people that do like it is it makes him and Sonic compliment each other better but Sonic lacks orange on his colour palette so I just don't agree at all. Giving them the shared red is a lot more effective.

For least favourite I could point to various points in Archie's history as well as Prime pretty confidently, and stretching it the likes of Chronicles and Underground and stuff but I'd need to play more of them. Favourite I've got the very simple storybook games and Unleashed answer, we've seen it all before, although Frontiers has a pretty great Sonic too.

I don't want to skip any out of principal but also just so particularly don't care for Sonic ships that I've kinda got nothing here. I guess gun to my head I like Sonic and Knuckles' dynamic a lot but I don't need that to go romantic or anything so like, you know?

I just want multiple playable characters from the get-go and all of them to be as fleshed out as Sonic is, really.

There's definitely a lot of little things I can say but definitely the main one for me is less busywork tasks around the island. Pressing switches or parrying items or running in a hamster wheel, a lot of that stuff doesn't really play to the strengths of the gameplay, and I'd like them to work to correct and improve upon that I suppose.

Like the entire Mania and SA2 and 06 and Unleashed soundtracks. We'll go Crisis City specifically.

I have a lot of opinions on the Sonic series and its representation in Smash and that could also be a post of its own honestly, but just taking the question by itself I want Eggman a ton.

"Limited to teams" is such a leading-question type approach to this, L. Anyway yeah no variety is good. I understand the desire to stick to the teams we know, and certainly I think it's important to get those core things down before making a game where Sonic, Charmy and Omega are a team - but yk the cast is so expansive that letting them bounce off of the more unique faces is fun.

They cooked.

"Mainline" is quite the distinction here - I'd love to see more spinoffs handed to other studios even just to have spinoffs coming out, but I think for mainline I like seeing how Sonic Team evolves and where they're taking the series. I can imagine other studios making good Sonic games certainly, but that mainline clarification leaves me wanting to say nah honestly.

I have a somewhat decent amount but I mean that doesn't lend itself well to this type of post. I still like my Sonic has some old shack on Christmas Island where he keeps random sentimental junk from his adventures though.

Unleashed so easily it's not even funny.

Comics and just external media in general being included actually widens the net a lot because Archie and IDW both have a ton of good stories (haven't sonic the comic'd yet sorry lol) and I adore the OVA too but once again I'd point to your storybook games, Unleashed in particular, as well as Adventure 2. The Sonic 2 into 3&K overarching narrative is also very effective despite how simple it is.

Not an artist rip. Idk though the muzzle or something feels good to draw and harder to fuck up than the quills or something.

Honestly I could think about this one for a while too, but I think the one that always comes to mind - and this isn't even so much a cherished memory as just a sort of unforgettable one that I always go back to and think is kind of cool - one day when I was a kid, my brother and I walked to our school that was less than 2 minutes away, at the door were told the school was closed that day because a thunderstorm the previous night had done some fuckery or whatever, and then we went home and had the day off. And the particular thing we did is play Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity for most of the day. We'd owned it for a while at that point but the Riders games are pretty complicated for children even when they're as streamlined as ZG was, so we never really knew how to play it and frequently came dead last against the CPUs. It was this day off school where we really grinded the fuck out of it and just, got good at the game. Won a ton of rings and bought new extreme gear with them and shit, it was just a really memorable day for whatever reason. It's maybe not the most special, but it's what comes to mind when I think of cool Sonic memories I have.

Anyway that's all lol.

[beevean]

Kinda on topic of blorbofication of Prime Sonic, but what is it with some media adaptations trying to insinuate that Sonic being cool/badass is an exception and not the norm. Like, yeah yeah, perfect people are boring and failure makes characters more "relatable" these days but do we really need it to this extent?

It's the belief that a character that is primarily cool is "flat" and thus "boring" and thus needs character development to be deep and compelling and relatable. It's a very... modern Western mentality.

Now admittedly I also sometimes smile at Sonic being painted as this exceptional being, like in Unleashed where he could simply resist Dark Gaia's influence without even being aware of it. But Sonic is effortlessly cool, and he's meant to be an ideal. Sonic is not meant to evoke feelings of "oh he's just like me", he's meant to evoke feelings of "oh wow I want to be like him! I want to meet him! Oh he's so cool, I love playing as him!". Let's not forget that, that Sonic was born as a videogame mascot so there is always that inherent factor of controlling a cool character and stepping in their shoes. You want a relatable character? Tails is literally right here.

Of course, videogames =/= comics and cartoons, so I understand the need to tweak the character a little to emphasize his flaws and create more conflict - as it's often said here, Sonic in the games is a flat character who mostly improves other people's lives, but to be honest, I doubt you can do that for a whole show. I don't think it's a stretch to make the connection between "Sonic in X was fairly faithful to his game counterpart" and "Sonic in X barely appeared and left most of the conflict to Chris and the others" (disclaimer: I never watched S3). But Prime goes way beyond what was necessary, to the point that he barely feels like Sonic anymore: he's more like a fandom take on Sonic. Hint hint.

[thelediz]

I haven't watched Sonic prime bc something in me went "egh, no" after the first three minutes but when I heard abt Nines I immediately though about how you said Tails could be incredibly dangerous and his relationship with Sonic raised him out of a bad path hehe. I just kind of gauge Sonic and Pokemon stuff through your worldbuilding now lol I can't help it

Asides from that, I wanted to ask your thoughts abt Sonic's relationship with Gaia! You've mentioned you had Thoughts abt it in a couple of posts and it stuck to my mind bc I've always thoughts of Chip as a very one-off character (as in, I like him, but I've never thought of the Gaia mythos outside the context of Unleashed) but since you made a point of highlighting environmentalism in the Lost Prince I'd honestly really love to hear however much or however little you've thought on his relationship with the personification of the planet (both of them, even!)

Let me reassure you that "egh no" is a perfectly valid reaction to any media. Especially the first three minutes of ANY episode.

As to Sonic and environmentalism - honey, don't tempt a 90s kid.

I would argue that finding a balance with nature and sustainability has been part of the Sonic franchise since AT LEAST Sonic CD, if not the very beginning. And Sonic himself has been a literal force of nature since his inception, you just don't get into it very often because his ACTUAL purpose is to show off how the Mega Drive can go very fast with lots of colours, stop thinking about it so much.

(And you are skirting DANGEROUSLY close to my going on a gushing rant about why I love this franchise and the whole concept of controlled chaos. I shall try to contain myself.)

First off. I repeat: the actual purpose of Sonic the Hedgehog was to show off the capabilities of the Mega Drive and the technical skill of Sonic Team. Play any Sonic game on any platform (except 06, Lost World, and Boom, which all had Other Issues) and you will see how that team pushes the hardware to its absolute limit without causing problems. These people are skilled developers and they want you to know about it.

Now let me get madcap about character symbolism and worldbuilding.

Now, there's obviously the whole thing about Robotnik/Eggman being evil technology and polluting the environment, yes, yes, par for the course with half the other villains created in the 90s.

But the thing that made the Sonic franchise different is that Sonic never had any issue with technology AS A CONCEPT. He flies a bi-plane, Tails is an inventor himself, the good future as depicted by the Sonic franchise ALWAYS incorporates both technology and nature, and the whole idea of using chaos as a power source is basically code for sustainable engineering and renewable energy, because CHAOS ITSELF is as natural and inescapable as the sun and the wind and the only way we're going to lose them as a resource is if we -

Okay.

Stop.

Come back to the point.

Sonic's relationship with Gaia and the environment. Great.

Short point to be taken as a given, but which I can understand newer fans not realising because of the world they grew up in: the Sonic franchise, since its inception, has carried a theme of sustainability. You can take this to extremes by pointing out some vaguely anarcho-environmentalist takes about freeing captured animals, but I think it's more about the theming.

Every Sonic game starts in Green Hill Zone or a close equivalent: they're always lush and green and beautiful, and the deeper into Eggman's territory you get, the less naturalism you see. Eggman has gotten better about pollution, but he is always destroying nature in favour of machines. He uses and abuses the resources he finds until they cease to be visible, if not wiped out entirely. He has no thought about what he's going to do when these resources run out. He has no interest in how his desires impact the rest of the world. He just wants to build his theme park, staffed by robots, and anyone who disrupts that plan is impinging on HIS DREAMS and -

-cough-

Anyway.

Meanwhile, while Sonic and Tails use resources, they do so in measured ways, and only ever enough for their needs. In fact, in games like Sonic Colours, the resources (wisps) are actively forcing themselves on Sonic to be used. They transform him, and he just kind of goes along with it.

Because (and this is where I begin to actually answer your question), Sonic is a force of nature himself.

There are many versions of early Sonic lore, and you can take whichever one works for you, but in some of them, Sonic's first appearance in the world was him just... wandering lost in the woods, with no memory and no idea how he got there. He just appeared.

A spirit that appears when influence is needed on the world

Similarly, in most franchises these days, Sonic doesn't... live anywhere. He wanders the earth, he goes where the wind takes him, he isn't trying to do good, necessarily, he just stops the spread of bad when he sees it. In most current franchises, even when he DOES have a fixed address, it's... weird. Basically just a place for him to get out of the rain and store his strange collection of Stuff. Because he doesn't and isn't supposed to exist in the way of 'normal' people. He just is.

A lot of this is tied up in Sonic's relationship to Chaos, but I'd argue that nature and creation are inherently chaotic things. Have you ever seen what happens when a rose or blackberry bush is allowed to grow on its own? Madness! Trees will grow wherever they want, dandelions think a scrap of dirt in concrete is a wonderful spot to start a family, animals don't care about this concept of personal property that you have, and the human body doesn't give a damn about your 'schedule', it has NEEDS, dammit, and YOU ARE NOT PROVIDING THEM.

Go drink something. When was the last time you felt sunlight?

Anyway.

Even in the franchise, Sonic is unique among the characters for his relationship to chaos. All three male hedgehogs can use Chaos Emeralds to turn Super, but Shadow is artificial, and there is an argument that Silver is Shadow's son (don't @ me, I'm not invested and I don't want to get into it. Just accept the Dragon Ball Z reference and move on). Sonic is still an anomaly.

ALSO. Since Sonic Adventure, Chaos has been tied to emotion, and Sonic represents the positive side of that. The Water God Chaos represents the negative side of it. When they do battle, and positivity wins, neither side is destroyed. They just calm down and go away. You can't destroy emotion, you can only -

STOP.

So. If we agree that chaos is a part of nature, and Sonic is inherently tied to chaos, then you can see how Sonic can be read as a LITERAL force of nature. He exists to exert nature's influence and re-establish balance by being a positive chaotic force on the world.

And that's why he can also be inherently problematic because sometimes humans need nature to be controlled in order to live safely and SERIOUSLY LEDIZ STOP

The Adventure series made the subtext supertext, and Unleashed happily made it TEXT, but it's always been there. Sonic has always disrupted manEggman's march over the environment with nothing but his speed and natural resources.

Chip was a one-off character, but he is the continuation of a discussion enforced by Chaos, and then Shadow, and in many ways Metal Sonic, and Merlina, and lately followed up by Sage: personifications of how humans and their technology can disrupt and be disrupted by natural forces. Sonic's continuing triumph over these forces is a reminder that with good intent and effort, we can find a way to survive and maintain a sustainable future.

-DEEP BREATH AS WE EMERGE FROM THE THEORY MINES-

Watch me defend the Sega mandate about who can have a Super form with this madcap theory of mine

Listen to me get all cultural studies about how this ties Sonic into the storybook series because fairytales are implicitly tied to nature fables

The point is, Sonic is tied to nature, and so whenever the planet OR technology is personified, in any way, shape, or form, he WILL have a relationship with it.

And I will go back in my box now, thank you for not getting upset with my ramblings, please.

[spinningbuster98]

We're finally at the end of the line guys: Mega Man X8

So I personally like to think of X8 as like the Sonic Unleashed of Mega Man

It came out right after X7, which in turn had come out after X6. I'm pretty sure fans were sick and tired of the X series at this point, and with Battle Network pretty much stealing the scene as the most popular series at the time, not to mention the Zero series doing pretty much everything the X series should have been doing but better, I guess Capcom was already preparing itself to pull the plug on the series

X8 is one of the worst selling games in the franchise, partly also due to apparently Capcom not making many copies of it, perhaps because they were expecting this game to be a failure.

This game is so relatively "obscure" that I shit you not I have seen fans literally mistake it for X7

No really I've seen people claim they've never played it but say that they don't have to because they can tell it sucks because "it's 3D like X7" or "it's got Axl".

Hell once on Reddit I saw someone go on a small rant about how this game sucks because of the 3D sections etc, only for another guy to chime in and notice that he was mistaking this game for X7, to which the other guy said something along the lines of "What aren't they the same?"

With time some of the fandom gave the game a chance and plenty of fans ended up loving it, while others not so much because, very much like Sonic Unleashed, this game has some intrusive gimmicks that not everyone will enjoy

Let me just start by making something clear: this game is way better than X7 and X6. A fuckton better. Hell I'd say it's better than X5 too.

However it's certainly not perfect so I will try to both praise and criticize it whenever I deem it necessary

To start off though hot damn I love this opening stage! It's one of my favorites in the franchise

From the energetic OST which screams "the boys are back in action!", to the level switching between X,Axl and Zero to both introduce you to their respective styles and show off their friendly banter, to the crab Maverick that you fight throughout the stage damaging it a little bit each time, this level just oozes personality!

Oh and yeah: Noah's Park. Paradise Lost as a subtitle. Jakob Elevator, y'know like Jakob's ladder?

X8 has a thing for religious references and...yeah it's a bit stupid because spoilers but it kinda wants to be "deep" about it but it just ends up sounding a bit pretentious.

I don't agree however with singleing out this game specifically for their use, after all the Zero series also has plenty of references to various mythologies (though I feel that there they're less obnoxious since they're mostly for the cool factor, not because the games are trying to look deep because of them), not to mention the look of Sera's final form in Legends 2

[nemirambles]

Sonic Frontiers - Maybe The Most Important Sonic Game Ever Made

INTRO:

It has been a little over a year since the release of Sonic Frontiers. I’ve likely dumped more time into this game than most Sonic games. I was extremely skeptical about the release of this game. It was rather difficult being a fan of Sonic at the time, it still is arguably, with every showing of the game it just led to more skepticism and dooming. I couldn’t tell if I should be excited or not as I did want this to be good but who’s to say with Sonic, y’know. Eventually the game did release and well, I will vividly remember my first experience with it. Watching the game finally unlock at like 11 AM and taking it all in was so great. Kronos was a great intro island and hearing Undefeatable was insane. I hadn’t felt this sort of hype and joy since I played Unleashed years ago. I no life’d the game and finished it in like 18 or so hours. I thoroughly enjoyed Frontiers start to finish although there were some hiccups here and there. But do I still feel the same about it now? Absolutely not.

Dirt tastes better when you’re hungry. If this interests you, keep reading as this will be a sort of in-depth-ish review of Sonic Frontiers. There’s a lot to cover and it might be a bit messy but I’ll try my best.

OPEN ZONE:

The Basics:

This is gonna be a bit of a difficult thing to talk about but I’m gonna try my best here. Sonic games famously have added gimmicks to their games to help pad out the run time. It’s no surprise to anyone that making giant maps to blast through is rather difficult. Even making multiple maps for characters who aren’t that fast is a lot of work. This is why Mario games will give you multiple objectives for singular maps in a lot of his 3D entries. So for Sonic Frontiers, the padding for this game is the open zone. I want to clarify that this is NOT open world. Open zone refers to having a large open play area but not exactly being an open world. It’s more akin to something like Super Mario Galaxy than it is something like Breath Of The Wild. You don’t have absolute freedom here, just some decently large maps with multiple objectives for thingamabobs you need to collect, like a collect-a-thon!

But how does it actually turn out? It’s… polarizing. Frontiers throws you into these giant playpens of rails, springs and enemies where you’re going from set piece to set piece as you collect these memory tokens. These memory tokens act as your way to progress through the game as you need to hit certain requirements in order to progress the story. These tokens are scattered about everywhere and despite that, they’re still a chore to collect. You’ll need about 150-ish tokens for each island which means you more or less need to go through 150 of these little set pieces or get a bundle of tokens randomly by cylooping. I think enemies can drop them too at times as well. The little segments you need to do are immensely boring. This game takes Sonic's automation issues and makes it worse.

You’re gonna be going through automatic set pieces over and over. Grind this rail and watch this little thing as you basically mindlessly hold down boost. There’s gonna be times where you have to sometimes press an extra button or two but these are really unengaging. Exploring the map in general isn’t all that fun really. Part of what makes Sonic fun is optimizing routes to get from point A to point B but there isn’t anything like that here. There’s not much to really optimize given the fact that these segments don’t take any time and don’t have much of any depth. The most you can do is find ways to try and skip these segments and once you have the tokens, you have them. The objective isn’t there anymore. Same thing for all the other things in the hub world. That kind of just leaves the open zone to be nothing but busy work padding to make sure you don’t just blitz the game.

It should also be noted that playing Frontiers without anything like the spindash or maintaining speed when jumping enabled makes traversal much less fun. However when you do have these tools, it’s a lot more manageable and enjoyable. The thing is that you won’t have spindash unless you unlock it when you have a new save. You either need to S rank a bunch of action chain challenges or you have to get it automatically from playing the Another Story campaign which is on the final island. This sucks for a plethora of reasons because this tool is maybe some of the most fun you’ll have in this game and it’ll just be inaccessible to a lot of players starting out.

Personally, if you're on PC and haven't played Frontiers before and you'd want to, I’d encourage using a cheat to unlock spindash from the start it if you’re going through the game for the first time. I'd also encourage making sure you tweak the settings to make momentum conservation stronger while also tweaking the "bounce height" option to change how far you can fling yourself with the "bump jump" ability.

The aforementioned "bump jump" ability. The localization refers to it as "bounce height" for some reason, not realizing that Sonic has a built in bounce via his stomp follow up.

The spindash and momentum being retained won’t make these memory token segments more fun per say but getting from objective to objective ends up being quite fun when you need to go across the map to meet up with Tails or something. I guess I should also mention that the spindash is less of a burst of speed like previous games and more like a sort of "moon jump" that's also tied to the boost gauge. When you use the spindash, you get a lot of speed but it dips momentarily meaning that it likely isn't designed to be a consistent source of speed like the boost. This thing is for flinging and flying and as such it's not really affected by gravity. There isn't any momentum really applied here, you just kinda go flying. Not saying that this is a bad thing but it is something to note.

But there’s also challenges to do in the open zone! You have things like action chains, koco challenges and these puzzles to unlock the map. The puzzles are just fine. None of them are that fun or difficult but I find the tetris and path puzzles enjoyable enough to where I don’t mind doing those. I actually enjoyed the action chains a lot because it gives you a goal to grind towards much like a traditional Sonic game. You don’t have an objective to work towards that’s just gone, just your own limit on self improvement and your skills. The koco challenges do fall into the camp of being things you do once and never again but I will say that doing them is quite fun and a welcome challenge compared to the piss easy game that Frontiers generally is.

Side Tangent; The M Word:

Sonic Frontiers is a game that lacks the traditional 2D Sonic momentum. You don't really gain speed going down hills or anything like that. While I do find it very weird that a open zone game like this was conceptualized without proper momentum or ball physics or insert buzzword here, I can't help but feel like complaining about it at this point is missing what the game is trying to do. Frontiers is leaning more to be a precision platformer it seems, being more of what the boost games wanted to be. Very fast with split second reaction checks. The spindash isn't like a normal spindash, it's more used for platforming and specifically launching yourself. It's a new function for the ability and they utilize it quite well in the context of this game. I think in general, Sonic Team has done very well with the platforming game design of Frontiers by the end of it.

If you add regular momentum to Frontiers, it gets quite boring to be frank. The game isn't made around it. But when you simply add an option that gives more freedom of movement while still keeping it controlled enough to fit in the game, it's pretty fun. I think this is one of those things where you just need to accept where Frontiers decides to deviate rather than knocking on it for not being more of what we haven't gotten in maybe 30 something years. Even Adventure 1 didn't have proper momentum physics. While momentum to Sonic, in my mind, is what jumping is to Mario… that hasn't been the series goal for quite some time now and maybe it's time to move on from that…? I dunno, maybe this is a really hot take but it's starting to be more of how I feel.

More Of The Same:

I was going to originally break down what each island was about but I honestly don’t see much of a point to. Whereas with something like Sonic Unleashed or Sonic 3, where each level has some different defining gimmick, these islands do not. They might as well be the same location with a new coat of paint on each. You traverse them the same way and progress the same way. The only thing that changes is that each location gets bigger and more annoying to navigate if you don’t have the spindash. This is ignoring Rhea which is basically just one giant set piece but you actually do something interesting and different here so I appreciate it for what it is while being a good moment in the story.

The guardians you fight on these islands don’t even feel particularly unique to them either. If you switch Asura and Strider, what really changes? They compliment the location just about as much as any other guardian. The only exception I can think of here is Shark who uniquely needs to be somewhere with sand so it can traverse through it. This is the only guardian in the game actually themed after the location. Any other one can fit pretty much anywhere else. I guess now is as good a time as any to also mention the new open world gameplay that comes with update 3.

It’s more of the same. The only real compliment I can give is that I actually find the new challenge towers very fun to climb. It’s a tense situation that honestly isn’t as challenging as most would lead you to believe. I heard some people say that update 2 was just this extremely difficult thing where you had to restart your save file if you failed and in the nicest way possible I just wanna say that if you believed this or felt like this was what you needed to do, you are very very bad at Sonic Frontiers. And that's okay! Just don't pretend it's a genuine design issue when in reality you just suck!

As for the new characters… they’re… definitely there! I don’t have much to say about them when it comes to platforming and traversal, they are fine. I'll speak on their combat later when I get to that segment of the blog, but as for the platforming that they go through, it looks like total shit.

It's mildly fun but a visual eyesore. Update 3 in general completely shat the bed in terms of immersive visuals because what the hell man.

Island Art Direction and Storytelling

I suppose now is also a good time to talk about the actual aesthetic of the islands and to be honest, I like Frontiers’ art direction. I generally think a lot of the things here look really cool. My main huge complaint though is a noticeable lack of it. Frontiers is not that good with its environmental storytelling and we really have no idea what’s going on with these ancients. We were given reasons as to why it’s so weird and barren yes but those are reasons crafted from the game being empty. You see things like houses but never anything like transpiration, cities, important social structures or anything like that.

Photo mode is genuinely a blast!

While this might feel like a lame nitpick I feel like it’s important for Sonic games to really immerse you in the world and its inhabitants. Unleashed felt immersive. The Adventure games also felt immersive. The Classic games felt immersive too. Sonic 2 and 3 have so many structures and locations that probe at the mind and make you wonder how it got there. It makes you curious about the inhabitants and the world they lived in.

Frontiers just doesn’t do this. There’s weird unexplainable structures and such sure but unlike a game like Sonic 3 or Unleashed, these never really contribute much to the gameplay or how you get around. You don’t have crumbling statues that block off your path really. You don’t have any temples you go inside of to explore. You don’t have any sort of amusement parks to blaze through. What would an alien festival look like? How would Sonic interact with it? How would he interact with their transportation? Are there any buildings built to utilize the chaos emeralds in day to day life? You never even use the chaos emeralds for any sort of utility in Frontiers to power a building or whatever, it’s purely for combat.

When you make a world more alive with more content and more proof of existence, this will inherently give Sonic more to do as well. But that’s the issue, this world isn’t lived in and doesn’t invoke any sort of imagination and as a result we don’t get any fun Island exclusive gameplay that plays off these concepts since they simply don’t exist. It’s a really huge missed opportunity that I wish Sonic Team focused more on. I would’ve taken smaller, more content dense islands with real history over giant plains with nothing to do and nothing to see.

Because Ice Cap is the only snowy area, it is the only place where a set piece like this can work. They used the location to it's advantage to create a unique scenario that no other stage could do!

It’s also a given but I really hate these floating platforms littered around. They don’t blend with the scenery very well and since none of them are themed around the islands it gets very tiring to look at them very quickly. Sonic Team has been doing this drag and drop block placement shit for years now and it’s both disappointing and embarrassing to see them keep up this tradition with Frontiers, especially seeing mods that at the very least theme the platforms.

The "Reimagined Platforms" mod created by Davihhh seeks to solve this issue.

I know that it’s usually bad faith to say “oh but look at these mods!” when discussing game quality as modders often get as much time as they want and foresight to see the issues with a game, but these platforms are just glaringly bad even as a first draft.

COMBAT:

A Sonic Boom with no charge motion? Impossible.

For some reason or another, Sonic Team decided that the new Sonic game ought to be a character action game which is honestly something I’m all for. I’m not an extreme action game fan, I’ve pretty much only played the Kingdom Hearts series, Metal Gear Rising and some DMC. BUT I have played a lot of fighting games and love that genre which I feel is a pretty close relative to the action game genre. I’m also 19, creeping up on 20 at the time of writing which means that I grew up in the Flash era of the internet so a lot of my tastes for what Sonic should be came from a lot of DBZ inspired Sonic content. When I saw Sonic shooting ki blasts and battling giant monsters in the trailer, I was extremely excited for what this would bring. So how did Frontiers do in this department? 

Combat Variety:

Poorly. If it wasn’t for DMC 2 and Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep, I’d be able to easily put Sonic Frontiers down as the worst action game combat I’ve ever experienced. This isn’t due to it not being as deep as something like DMC though. I have no issue with simple gameplay, I’d expect it from Sonic, the issue comes from a lack of experience and direction. Frontiers suffers from a lot of core issues. First let's talk about its offensive options. Frontiers has a basic combo system where you mash out a button and you get a finisher. You can select what the specific finisher is by holding a direction on your control stick. As you go through the game, you unlock abilities on a skill tree using skill points that you get from killing enemies or randomly getting it when you cyloop.

You can also cancel some of these attacks by inputting a defensive action like parry or dodging. With this combined it’ll allow you to extend combos for longer than usual since you’re constantly going into specials that restart your position in a combo. This is actually really cool as it allows for the player to get a lot of freedom in how they choose to beat up the enemy. But there’s just one small issue. None of these attacks provide any real utility for maybe 95% of the game.

Fancy combo right? I think so at least. But I didn't really make a lot of, if any, meaningful decisions here. I was more or less just choosing what flashy cinematics to do. I could've done hurricane kick into cross slash over and over again to infinitely juggle them and melt their HP and it would've had the same result pretty much. It's a combat system that basically relies on how cool you personally want to feel as a player which is fine and all but being cool is made cooler when you have restrictions and things to keep in mind.

Using something like KH2 for example, when I do combos in KH2, I’m doing combos that are specific to the context and situation that I’m currently in. Not every boss falls for the same strategy. Now this is different from there being optimal combos. Even KH2 has strategies that stay dominant, but it’s not about avoiding a dominant strategy, it’s about making the player make meaningful decisions that will influence what tools they decide to use on enemies. One thing that heavily influences gameplay is how many enemies you have to fight.

Action games often give you a crowd of baddies to defeat and you'll need to pick them off or weave between them in order to avoid being harmed. Frontiers has none of that. You're always fighting enemies one on one unless it's something specific like the foot ninja enemies you can find in the overworld. These enemies DO make you switch up your strategy through needing to cyloop them to break their defense but once you knock them into the air it's business as usual.

I will say though that utilizing the cyloop in combat versus a crowd is rather cumbersome due to the fact that you want to stay mobile in combat and you’ll need to circle around enemies who are also mobile while hoping the terrain is flat enough as to not break your trail. You also go quite slow if you aren’t boosting while cylooping and honestly good luck trying to keep a tight cyloop circle when you’re going at 90 miles per hour. But outside of that, that’s really it for ways to deal with crowds. There is a combo ender that knocks enemies up however.

This is should be a good tool to have because these jobber enemies can’t follow you into the air, however you don’t actually have a convenient way to follow up once you’ve popped enemies up there due to the immense amount of hitstop you suffer when attacking enemies and combo finishers have even more hitstop and slow down which means even though they’re defensive cancelable, it’s not that quick. Your best bet honestly is just using the spin kick on a guy to knock him in the air and then do a parry cancel so you can juggle him. That way the other enemies can’t bother you and they can’t decide to defend themselves. Also note that for some strange reason parry is laggier if you don’t hold a direction when releasing it.

Defensive Options:

On the note of defensive options, they’re bad. I wanna take a moment to say that I think the infinite parry isn’t a bad idea on paper. I think where it messes up is that it has no risk/reward. Parry is a zero risk/extreme reward option no matter how long you hold it. Personally I think if the slowdown you gain from a parry was relative to how long you held it, i.e. you do a perfect parry and you get max slowdown and when you do a 5 second long parry you get no slowdown. This way you encourage people to learn to parry more precisely if they want more slowdown. It’s a kids game, I think the mechanics being easy to understand and utilize is fine so long as they beg for exploration and help children problem solve. 

Speaking of slowdown, that mechanic is also not particularly great in my opinion. Whenever you parry a physical attack, the game does this cinematic to emphasize the parry while slowing down time to allow Sonic to attack. This is a neat little idea and feature but when you do it repeatedly it can become quite repetitive and causes some interactions to be really awkward, especially when attack hitboxes don’t actually disable despite being parried.

You also have a dodge maneuver. It has minor invincibility frames and can only be done either left or right and attacking at what seems to be any point during the animation will cause the zigzag attack. There isn’t much to say about it outside of the fact that it’s not really useful at all outside of canceling attacks considering Sonic has such incredible speed that simply boosting in any direction works better.

Minor Things:

There’s some other minor things too like how you can’t really naturally change targets due to there not being a normal targeting system. You have to hit something and then press a bumper to target the next thing that corresponds with the direction your bumper is. The combat is also very… sticky. This is due in part to the excessive hitstop on everything but also due to how they handle inputs. I don’t really know how the game deals with inputs exactly but the buffer here seems to be something where the game stores an input no matter how much time passes. A good example can be found with Amy. Her homing attack has a slight delay for whatever reason but if you double tap the button to try and force it out, she’ll attack after she homing attacks which is nearly a full second later. Another example is with Sonic where if you hold down R2 and just happen to press X when near an enemy that will also lock you into an attack. This nasty sticky control issue permeates throughout the entire game and makes the combat feel way way worse.

But now that this is the groundwork the team is going with, how do they actually design around it?

Enemy Design:

Enemies in Frontiers range from brain numbing to irritating with only a few ever really being fun to fight. Unlike a game like KH2 where Sora has multiple ways to deal with enemies and for enemies to force specific interactions, Sonic has a much more restricted tool set that requires more outside the box solutions to. You don’t have magic or anything like that. This isn’t exactly a bad thing though as Sonic is still a platformer at heart so making him do platforming adjacent challenges while battling an enemy is welcome. The issue for me is that a lot of these aren’t fun. I wanna talk about the fun ones first though, Sumo, the Ninja series, Asura and Ghost.

Ghost just literally sort of appears at the last island and it starts draining rings from you and you need to complete a platforming segment in order to get it to stop. It’s stressful, random and actually amazing. Sure it’s guaranteed damage but it’s guaranteed damage in a game where you can avoid taking damage and farm health as much as you want so I mean hey, it is what it is.

Sumo is another fun enemy that makes you bounce off these walls in order to gain up lots of speed to slam yourself into them so they’ll go flying into electric walls. It’s not a deep fight at all but it does make you try to position yourself properly and it feels extremely satisfying to pull off a good slam.

Asura slams down one of it’s arms and you’ll need to run up them, hit the little weak points at the top, be knocked down to the bottom and then rinse repeat as it gets a bit harder with each arm. Except you actually don’t need to get knocked down. If you hold parry while the explosion cinematic plays, you’ll stay in the air where you can then maneuver your way over to the other weak points, skipping the first part of the phase entirely.

Last but not least is Ninja and its clones which are what I believe the only guardians you can juggle like a regular enemy, opening them up for a lot of combo potential. They aren’t particularly difficult but it is very fun to just see how you can beat the shit out of them.

Contrast these with something like Fortress. When fighting Fortress, you ride some grind rails and then you start hitting it. That’s kinda like Squid, where you run along a path and start to hit it. What happens if you don’t kill it in time? Well you just have to chase it down again. Is it particularly difficult or engaging? No. There’s also bosses like Spider.

For Spider, you need to cyloop its legs in order to make its main body vulnerable. Afterwards, you have to play a skydiving segment where you need to go through these rings in order to make it vulnerable, again, and then you’re allowed to beat up on the Spider. You are forced to do this every single time. The issue with these 3 is that the time it takes to make them fully vulnerable is independent of player skill. There is no way to become better at chasing down Fortress or Squid unless you literally just do a drive by which I doubt was the intended design. These are spectacle fights that lose their luster shortly after doing them the first few times and it becomes boring.

With the positive examples I listed, the amount of time it takes to do them is up to the player and there’s clear places to make optimizations. It never feels like there’s just dead time where you’re just waiting for things to get interesting whereas in a lot of Frontiers’ mini bosses, that’s what they feel like. Wasting time. And if they aren’t wasting time it’s usually because you’re tearing right through them. I’m also gonna take a moment to mention Wolf and Shark. I didn’t use those two as specific examples because it’s honestly just too easy of an out and everyone knows they’re terrible. After a while I almost just wanted to avoid enemy encounters all together because it would generally be more of the same old same old.

But I think it’s also meaningful to analyze why enemies are like this. While in a game like KH2, you have limited movement with set options that developers either know you have or expect you to have. Arenas are small, closed in spaces where you can’t really just run away without going into a new room entirely if you even can. Contrast this to Frontiers where like I mentioned before, Sonic has much higher movement along with this being a giant open area where he can come and go as he pleases. There’s also the fact that you need to factor in the variable speeds that players will have due to speed being tied to a level system along with all the customizable stats there are for Sonic. There’s just quite a lot of factors that you have to keep in mind when designing challenges for Sonic so it makes sense as to why it’s like this. It needs to be broad and unspecific in what it wants from the player because the range of variables at play are also generally broad and unspecific. This is why Cyberspace has its own Sonic preset, designing around them all would be nearly impossible. But before getting into ways I think this could be handled going forward, we need to address the giant titan sized elephant in the room.

Titan Design:

One of the absolute highlights of this game when it launched. When you saw people talk about how Sonic was back, these titan fights were at the forefront. Sonic leans fully into more shonen inspirations as the heavy metal and rock music in the back pumps you up. These fights were and still are great spectacle battles that I still find cool after the fact. The issue unfortunately being just how easy they are. “Punch punch stomp” is the name of the game here and works as pretty much THE dominant strategy. There is never a reason to do anything else. Even on the hardest section of the game, Master King’s trial, it is still extremely easy. But maybe easy isn’t the right word, poorly designed might be more like it.

Giganto:

Giganto’s hitboxes do not align up with his animations very well at all. This spinning attack isn’t meant to be parried as he does it but a bit after, towards the end of the animation. When you knock him down with a cinematic, he’ll often get up with an attack that you can parry, leading for an easy loop until his second phase if you know the pattern that he swings in which is the same every single time. These swings do not have hitboxes that line up with where he swings and sometimes where it feels like something should connect, it doesn’t quite do it. Once you get into this second phase, it becomes a bit harder because now he has these lasers on his back that will hurt you when he turns for a spin. Don’t worry though since you can avoid this by standing perfectly still. He also has a laser beam attack he can do which forces you to lose some rings as it happens, meaning you don’t want to let him do this often.

But of course, you can simply get in, cyloop him and then start punching and stomping. He’ll try to retaliate after you cyloop him with this weird janky animation but you can simply parry it and be fine. 

Wyvern:

The Wyvern is a fight that has cool spectacle. You kind of just parry the missile, parry its attacks and then whale on it. It’s an extremely flat and braindead fight that only really has its spectacle to carry it. There really isn’t anything much else to say here except it’s extremely hard to tell when exactly you need to parry its attacks when you’re timing them because the hitboxes both don’t align very well and don’t even really make sense depending on the animation. Good luck trying to parry the missiles with perfect parry in the second phase when you have all this screen pollution going on by the way. This fight blows.

Knight:

Knight is my favorite titan fight in the game and it’s probably the one with the most mechanical depth. You start out the fight by just beating on it. I think what you’re supposed to do is try and cut Knight off as he spins around the arena but I’m not too sure. This is just what works for me. After beating up on him he’ll try to counter attack but much like Giganto you can simply parry this and get back to gaping him. The camera does not function well in this fight and sometimes his counterattacks are really janky and ambiguous or they simply don’t work properly.

Sometimes he’ll put up his shield to defend himself and if you beat on it enough, it’ll initiate a sequence where you ride their shield, avoid missiles and have to hit them in the face with the shield. This is actually a really cool segment but this isn’t exactly how you’re supposed to do the fight. In reality, you need to hit the shield, press R1 to change your lock on to the Knight and then start hitting him again. This is honestly really weird game design to see so late into the game. Rather than the game punishing you and trying to make you test your options if just pressing the button isn’t working, it rewards you with a spectacle segment that you can’t see otherwise which then gives you an opening on the boss.

In the second phase, you’ll need to parry the shield that is flying around the arena and send it towards the Knight. I find this to be a very cute way to make the second phase more interesting and I wish the other titan fights had gimmicks like this as well.

Supreme/The End:

Supreme is a fight that exists. Both versions of Supreme are pushovers that have little to no challenge. I beat the new Supreme on my second try and the original Supreme on my first without even knowing how it works and I’d honestly say my only one loss to the new Supreme was that I didn’t think my rings would just not replenish after the first phase of the fight. Since they made it clear that this wasn’t gonna be leisurely I decided to play the game the way that it had asked me to when doing Master King’s challenge and then this happened.

Absolutely pathetic. It would be really easy for you to see this and say "well you can just choose NOT to do this" but this arguement is anti-game design as hell and super ignorant. If something is this easy to discover and use, it is a flaw on the game design and deserves to be critiqued. Yes, it is true that you can simply not do it, but why does the game allow you to in the first place? If the next Sonic game had a "instantly win the game and unlock everything button" would it be perfectly fine because you can choose to not do it? No, it's insulting to the developers and it's insulting to people who put in the work to actually experience what you've ignored. Games are well crafted experiences where developers vaguely guide you down it without holding your hand too much. Having ways to effectively skip these experiences in extremely easy ways isn't a good thing.

Why did I decide to do this? Well the "punch punch stomp" strategy was literally the only way I was getting through those titan trials. I felt like that was the way that most people were getting through them, so I just assumed Sonic Team knew this and designed around that. That and I had a small pool of rings so I wasn't going to really take my time. So I ended up getting what you saw above. I already knew that cylooping would boost the damage you did but I had absolutely zero idea that it stacked and I have no idea why it would even stack in the first place. I don't really have too much else to say, both fights are easy.

The End, the original from the base game is maybe my favorite part of the game. I don't have a deep explanation on why or anything like that, I just found it really fun and I'm sad that they basically made it the non-canon final boss/ending with this new DLC.

Wrap Up:

There honestly isn’t much else to say about these fights. They’re fairly braindead spectacle driven fights that don’t last long and can be brute forced through with ease. Personally I feel as though the spectacle of a fight should come from not only what the boss can do but what the player is made to do in response to the boss’ actions. But I understand WHY they’re so simple. These are meant to be cathartic moments for the player to have them really feel the power of Super Sonic. I’m perfectly fine with this. The issue is that it’s just not that fun when you have it all figured out. I think part of what makes boss fights great for me personally is the feeling you get when you finally overcome these impossible odds. When the cool cinematic you see works as a reward for your hard work. There’s no hard work here. Just flashing lights and one time thrills. I hope going forward we can get fights that strike a balance of cool but still interactive to where they feel rewarding to beat.

Suggestions To Improve Combat:

So I wanna say this first before I offer up any suggestions or things to think about. I am not a professional game designer and I do not think I know any better than the people in charge. I simply have opinions on what I think could make a more fun gameplay experience. Any design ideas I offer up here have many many ripples on the overall game that I simply just can’t go over every nook and cranny of because when you pop one pimple in the game design hill, many more arise in response. This is just speculative and spitballing.

That out of the way, I think Frontiers needs a more heavy handed “combat mode” for Frontiers. Through being near an enemy and pressing both the bumper buttons, Sonic will enter a locked on state. Pressing the right stick will cause the lock-on to move to whichever direction you inputted the stick in. Pressing the bumpers again will make Sonic exit this lock-on state and resume back to normal gameplay.

In lock-on mode, his movement is restricted to be slower as the camera locks onto whoever he’s locked onto. Pressing R1 makes him put up his guard where he’ll take slight chip damage whenever he blocks an attack. Inputting a direction while having your guard up will cause Sonic to roll in the direction you input. Pressing R1 while moving will automatically initiate a roll with invincibility frames. Pressing one of the face buttons will cause Sonic to do specific parries depending on the button. Speed parry, power parry and replenish parry. These parries have a window of just 5 frames so you’ll generally need to know what you’re doing for max reward with these..

Speed functions like the parry we currently have in the game, allowing Sonic to slow down time in order to beat up on opponents. Power parry will cause an instant kill to an enemy who’s under 20% health through a QTE segment similar to Sonic Unleashed, bosses not included of course. Replenish parry utilizes a new mechanic called the “phantom meter”. There’s a sort of meter system in the game with phantom rush and quick cyloop but I don’t think these add much. Under this new mechanic, Sonic has a secondary meter that he spends in order to use his special attacks. Each attack has a cost that’s relative to its damage. This means now you cannot just mash cross slash because you’ll run out of the resource it needs. You can refill this meter either slowly through attacking the enemy or by using the new replenish parry. By putting your nuts on the line, you’ll gain a significant amount of phantom meter back.

Under this new system, you might’ve realized that defensive cancels are gone. Nonsense! There’s just a new mechanic to sort of emulate what that used to be, Phantom Cancels. For just 10% of your phantom meter, you can cancel any attack instantly so long as it hits an enemy. Into what? Whatever you want. You’re put into a completely actionable state after this. Think of Guilty Gear’s roman cancel system. This now simply prevents enemies from being comboed forever as you will eventually need to end the combo and now you must consider how much meter you burn on cancels.

Is this system perfect? Probably not, there could be a plethora of issues with it but I can’t test these ideas so I won’t know myself. But it should address concerns with combat feeling a bit too braindead. This doesn’t address enemy design since I don’t really want to get into how I’d redesign every enemy to fit under these systems but with a more limited control scheme and more precise control over the character that ignores level stats and customized settings should make a Sonic that’s easier to design around for enemy encounters.

Combat Concerns:

I had a concern when I asked for input on this idea and got told that there shouldn’t be a sort of “combat mode” for the game but I regret to inform them and anyone else worried that the game already does have a combat mode. It’s just automatic. Sonic already gets into a new state where quick steps become dodges and his idle changes so the game already has something like this. I think making a separate mode also helps with navigation since at times when you’re trying to do something in the open zone near an enemy who’s a part of a set piece, you will be forced to attack them. Making a manual mode for attacking and such fixes this issue as well.

Going Forward With Combat:

I don’t really know if I trust Sonic Team with combat going forward. Based on how they addressed difficulty concerns in the final DLC. It seems that their idea for a challenge is just “more harder = more strict, more faster, more stronger” which can contribute to difficulty but when that’s all your challenge really has to offer it shows me that you aren’t really sure how to design a good action challenge. I hope that in the next game, if they return to this combat formula, they can find developers who are a bit more experienced with how action games are supposed to be.

CYBERSPACE:

Oh look, my favorite parts of the game. Kind of. Cyberspace brings a more traditional experience to Sonic Frontiers where you go through stages that are pretty much stages you’ve played before but worse. To keep it brief since I’ve already said so much and there are things I rather talk about that I ought to get to, Cyberspace is rather boring for a majority of the game. For some reason, Sonic’s physics feel awful in both 2D and 3D with him feeling extremely slow in both. I’ve been told that Sonic’s speed in Cyberspace 3D is actually higher and that it’s an FOV difference that’s making it seem slower. I would like to direct you to this comparison.

It was brought to my attention that the Unleashed clip skips the QTE trigger which means Sonic's speed isn't capped but considering that Frontiers has no QTE trigger at all, the comparison still works in my opinion.

Anyways the 2D sections are pretty bad too. They feel abysmally slow and none of the layouts are particularly fun. Making a 2D Sonic game that’s less fun to play than Sonic Rush is an achievement that Sonic Team should probably not be praised for but lowering the bar from the floor to hell is quite impressive in my book. The spindash once again does make some of these issues better but again this isn’t something every player will have or had at the time of playing. The main Cyberspace levels I really do enjoy are the ones that actually take from the Adventure series. I think that Frontiers Sonic controls rather comfortably in Sonic Adventure level layouts and I wished there were more in the game because I had a lot of genuine fun with them. The new levels brought in for the DLC were also ones that I found extremely fun. The DLC just straight up gives you the spindash so you have it for these levels as they’re designed around it.

There’s a lot of ramps to launch yourself from with a plethora of alternate routes to take along with many objectives to do. The only issue is that these stages can feel rather cluttered and like they rely too heavily on the player just flinging themselves around. One level in particular has moon gravity for some reason and while it was cool to fly off for a while, trying to do what the level wanted got kind of slow and boring since it took so long to land. Other levels can just be a pain to navigate because it just becomes hard to know exactly where to go. Other than this though, I found these levels to be quite fun.

WRITING:

For Sonic Frontiers, Ian Flynn was brought on to write the story. You may know Ian from his work on Archie and IDW Sonic comics. He’s sort of held as this golden standard for Sonic writing and while I think that’s absolutely insanely incorrect for the comics, he wrote Frontiers’ character dialogue pretty decently for the most part. I don’t think there are really any large stand out lines to me that come off lazy or bad. At worst it’s just kind of boring. The plot for Frontiers goes as follows. Eggman fucks around some ancient ruins at some unknown island and is trapped in CyberSpace. For plot reasons, the Chaos Emeralds are suddenly at these islands. Sonic and friends follow the signal but are then shot down where they’re all trapped in CyberSpace. Sonic promptly escapes because plot and is deemed “The Key” by a mysterious totally not evil sky voice. He then has to travel through CyberSpace in order to collect keys to unlock Chaos Emerald vaults.

But as it turns out, everytime he goes into CyberSpace, he gets slightly more corrupted.

Why? Because the plot demands drama.

So after Sonic gets all the emeralds, he has to fight a Titan and go off to the next island where he rinses and repeats for a while. Around the latter half, he ends up pretty much dying after the corruption becomes too much to bear and he’s trapped in CyberSpace. His friends then huddle and make a friendship circle to bring him back to life so he can… continue to corrupt himself through interacting with CyberSpace. And then he fights the last Titan and then The End which is an allegory for death. Was the concept of death weaved throughout the narrative in order to make this sort of thing make sense? No. By the way the moon isn’t really a moon. The characters see it as something different. Ignore the fact that this fact is literally never brought up once until the DLC technically and serves no real value.

This plot sure is awesome! The dark era is back!

Character Writing:

For the most part. Sonic feels fine here. He’s not overly wordy or preachy like he is in the comics. His responses are snappy and he has a nice sarcasm to him that I think Roger brings out really well with his new voice performance. Two lines in particular I like are his goal ring joke and his initial response when Tails asks if he’s a burden.

The goal ring one is actually a nice bit of humor that this game really severely lacks where the Tails conversation is just really real. That might be a weird compliment to give a Sonic game because this is a series about brightly colored furries but it just felt like that genuine response you’d get from any real life person who really cares for you. I’ve had these same sorts of interactions with people and Sonic’s response really hits the mark here. But let’s get onto more specifics.

Amy:

Amy is unfortunately probably at her most boring here. She’s my favorite character in the series so it does hurt a bit to say that I didn’t enjoy her here not that much. The reason why I love Amy so much is that she’s not a character with a sort of larger than life character. She’s not some mystical force that goes with the wind or a child super genius or the last of her tribe or a tube baby. She’s just a girl who gets by using her compassion and ability to bring the heart out of characters. She’s compassionate and more down to earth than other characters with a determination and will that pushes her well into the tier with her peers, even being able to keep up with Sonic.

This doesn’t really get to shine here. A lot of her tomboy-ish spunk is gone and she doesn’t really have anyone to bounce off of but Sonic so she’s not really bringing the heart out of anyone really. Her romantic interest in Sonic also seems to not even be mentioned here weirdly enough. She gets set up but she doesn’t get any actual time in the game to really shine. I feel like maybe she should’ve been reserved more towards the end of the game so she could bond with Sage and help her understand love. Part of Amy’s character here is that she wants to share her love with the world and it feels weird that the character who needed that the most, Sage, wasn’t given any from her. This could’ve been a great moment to help humanize her as she began to warm up to others and realize her emotions. Alas, we don’t get that so fuck it I guess.

Knuckles:

I really enjoy Knuckles’ character in this. His story is about him feeling alone knowing that he’s the last of his kind and he’s doomed to just guard the master emerald. While I did say I enjoy Knuckles in this game, it’s not because of his story. A complaint that I have with this game’s writing is that they’ll sort of create issues that just aren’t there. Knuckles is the guardian of the master emerald, yes, but it’s not like he was missing out on game appearances because he had to be there so this arc feels kinda out of nowhere.

Knuckles has basically not missed a single adventure since his introduction in the series apart from Unleashed and I think Colors? It feels weird to make an arc around this when it wasn’t an issue before so why would it be an issue now? He made time for a hoverboard competition and sees Rouge often enough to get her flowers but he’s really alone, right? There’s also some parts where he feels sentimental about the island due to it being linked to him and his people, which is an alright idea in concept but it’s hard to care with how much we already don’t care about the ancients.

 Knuckles has fun dialogue with Sonic and their friendship feels genuine, but outside of that I can’t help but feel like this just wasn’t that great of a direction for him. 

Tails:

Tails is another example of this story kinda presenting solutions to issues that aren’t there. In Frontiers, his character arc is that he feels as though he’s a burden to Sonic. While I think the actual dialogue in this is well written, I can’t get behind why this happened. A few things in this story really seem to bend to the will of the fanbase for better or for worse which I’ll go over later but as it pertains to Tails, it’s for the worse. Tails says that “Whenever there's a crisis I'm either running away or standing on the sidelines! You're always rescuing me when all I do is follow you around!” which is just… does this count as character assassination? Tails saved Sonic’s life, he saved Station Square, he fought Chaos, he helped take down Metal Overlord, he built the Extreme Gear that his team uses in Riders, he was a key player in 06 when Sonic died, he was helping Sonic get around the globe in Unleashed, he was the one who built the god damn translator for the wisps.

Tails is REALLY important and he KNOWS he’s important. He had this same exact arc back in Adventure 1. He even got a bit of a complex in Colors and Lost World about just how smart he is and honestly he’s not even wrong for that. But because he had this one weird slip up in Forces that people would not shut up about I guess Ian felt it was necessary to give a little “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again”. It blows. I can’t really say much outside of that since that more or less just is Tails in this game unfortunately.

Sage:

Sage man. Sage is a character archetype that I enjoy very much, which are characters who learn to be human, so it disappoints me a lot that Sage’s first appearance did her pretty badly. Sage not telling Sonic what’s going on honestly felt kind of contrived. She constantly states that Sonic is the enemy and that she’s not supposed to help him while also going out of her way to protect his friends and even him by just telling him to get lost. She trapped them in Cyber Space so whenever The End got out, they would be safe. It can be assumed she tried to do the same for Sonic also but he broke out because plot.

So for the rest of the game Sage is more or less just probing Sonic for no real reason while trying to make him leave the island. The reason this bothers me is because I can’t quite grasp why she would want this. Just like hear me out. Sage notices that there’s something wrong with the island. She then traps Eggman in CyberSpace to protect him from it. But later in the game she notes that there’s something that’s trying to get out of CyberSpace. So why would she lock him in there? She’s also given the task to get Eggman out of CyberSpace but barely makes mention of the fact that she locked him in there to protect him.

But she’s also trying to prevent Sonic from letting his friends out which would in turn let Eggman out which would... accomplish what she’s trying to do. What is her goal? Also just a side thing but it’s weird because Knuckles, Amy and Tails are somehow trapped between CyberSpace and reality but Eggman seems to be fully there. Sonic was told that his memories form Cyber Space and the reason he could get out was due to just sort of “following his memories”, but if that’s the case why couldn’t Eggman do the same and why do they literally share a memory of a place neither of them have been to?

Anyways, back to Sage. Sage’s motivation sucks, her plan makes no sense and she doesn’t really add anything to the story. The worst cutscene in the game also belongs to her. I can’t believe they really gave Sage and Eggman ZERO scenes to truly show their bond and then gave her a flashback scene of her reflecting on their time together. It’s just fucking scenes of him yapping off to her about getting him out of CyberSpace as they just stand around statically as if the game had zero animation budget.

Overall Writing:

Man the writing here just… isn’t great. It’s super contrived, character arcs either feel like they’re pandering, are misplaced or just unfulfilled. The concept of death is barely present in the story. Sure, the ancients died but like… it isn’t really used in an interesting way. The End is kind of like “oh I killed the ancients and now I’m gonna kill YOU” but for what purpose? The End is so sudden and out of nowhere that characters don’t even have time to process that it’s coming. You could say that the fact it just appears adds to how much like death in life, it happens randomly and unpredictably. But all sorts of deities just sort of randomly appear in Sonic so I don’t really know. The End ends up being as much of a symbol for death as something like Biolizard, i.e not at all. The connection wouldn’t really even be there if not for there being a statement in a stream saying so.

Supposed translation of this livestream.

Ironically, another game starring a moon uses the concept of death to much greater effect, that game being Majora’s Mask. Majora has imminent death linger over you for the entire game. You see how it affects people and even affects you as you play through it. Even Sonic Unleashed, a game that isn’t really even about death, has moments where you see people try to triumph over their despair of everything going to shit with a sort of unbreakable optimism. Sonic’s main highlight in that game being his unbreakable will and inability to give up.

This isn’t to say that Frontiers doesn’t have good points or that that unbreakable will isn’t there of course. One of the best scenes in the game is from Sonic being on his deathbed and feeling the full force of the cyber corruption. He limps onward, barely able to walk. Sage appears to ask him why he persists despite every sign saying not to, to which he gives a deep breath, smirks and continues pushing on. That is a great scene. He doesn’t give some wordy response, he doesn’t beat her over the head with his morals, he just remembers his friends and that’s enough to push him through.

I also feel like Sonic’s final line before battling The End was also good… even if it doesn’t make sense in context.

“He took your home world... He took your lives... Are you going to let him do it all over again?! I need your help. We can end this! Please!!”

Who’s he saying this to? Absolutely nobody. But it’s still a nice line. The DLC does revamp the ending but it feels more like something someone would write to try and fix the story more than anything else. It’s crammed with all sorts of things that don’t really add anything to the story and feels more like they tried to band-aid fix what people saw wrong with the original ending. A complaint people had with the game was that Sonic didn’t actually get a new cyber form akin to how he used to get exclusive forms for the storybook games. So they decided to give him a new form through learning to control his cyber corruption by proving himself through trials given to him by the ancients.

That’s cool and all but… how? I’m not trying to be nitpicky or whatever but surely I’m not the only one curious as to how a corruption that is given to you through interacting with CyberSpace can somehow be harnessed into a power and even a new form. But whatever, at least we get a cool new form– …and it’s just Super Sonic with blue eyes while the more unique design is used only for a cutscene. Godspeed, Sonic Team.

Another complaint was that the other characters weren’t involved as much so they got hammered in. I guess I should talk about the pilots of the titans but there isn’t really anything to say. They existed and they got washed by The End. None of them really have any character depth. They don’t really add much but they sure are there.

Overall, the narrative of Frontiers feels like a mess that tries too hard to address issues that fans had without realizing that fans honestly don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about sometimes. Ironically I feel like listening to them and jumbo-stuffing the ending didn’t really help it out much. I heavily prefer the original ending, Sage’s sacrifice was a great way to conclude her arc even if her character was poorly done. It felt more emotional and a bit less like bullshit plot armor or convenience coming through to give fan service. The shmup was also great. It’s a good ending.

If the writing section of this feels messy, that’s because I had a lot of thoughts about Frontiers’ writing but I quite struggled with putting them down. There’s so much to talk about with so many threads you can go on to really question the choices made but I just can’t do it all. From how weirdly unexplained CyberSpace is, to why the Ancients look the way they do, to why the emeralds just magically appeared at the islands… There’s just a lot to cover. Hopefully this wasn’t too incomprehensible. If it was, sorry.

QUICK POINT RAPID FIRE:

There’s some stuff I wanna mention here but they’re kinda like loose leaf notes so here’s just a quick rapid fire of some takes I wanna throw out.

It Sounds Nice:

The music in Frontiers ranges from fine to fantastic. While the start of Kronos and pacing of the music was phenomenal, I cannot remember a grand majority of the open zone tracks outside of their final more triumphant versions. While I appreciate the ambition to create like 7 different orchestral tracks for each phase of the island, I can't help but feel like it wasn’t fully worth it considering many of them are just alright. The CyberSpace tracks are also alright mostly. A large amount of them aren’t too amazing and they feel rather detached to the stages they’re applied to. They became much much better in the DLC.No opinion on the new character themes in the DLC. It is okay. The Titan music is fantastic, zero complaints. 

Pretty Lights:

The lighting in this game is marvelous. I genuinely love how the CyberSpace stages look and Frontiers has some genuinely beautiful landscapes. The VFX work here is also amazing. They didn’t skip out on making sure these effects looked as good as possible. The cutscene animation is more static but the camera angles are a lot more dynamic than usual which helps with keeping the scenes looking interesting even if movement is minimal. The dynamic camera angles in combat are also quite nice but I can’t help but feel like Sonic Team didn’t utilize foreshortening and forced perspective quite as much as they could’ve. The Titan fight cinematics in general could’ve been improved had they been more dynamic and striking.

Is That Fur Genuine?:

Sonic and his stupid friends look good. Well, their textures look good. The model quality still isn’t very great but I’m at least glad the fur is back to the same quality as SA1. It’s nice. Heres to hoping they give us an actual good model in the next game because Sonic Team can clearly fucking do it.

Shinji Frontiers:

The voice direction here is nice. I think everyone did a very good job. I’m happy to see Roger finally start to get his roses because he does great with his Sonic voice.

Creaky:

The bed creak sample is used in the alternative Tower theme. I just find this kinda funny.

WRAP UP:

So that’s Sonic Frontiers. A very confused and messy collect-a-thon that doesn’t really succeed at much of anything. Its open zones feel half baked and like a game that’s far too late to the collect-a-thon party, the combat feels like a first draft, the writing is a mess and only makes itself messier with time and its more Sonic elements suck at being that. So what is good here? Uhhh– A lot of small stuff. Notably the movement. Probably some of the best movement that Sonic has ever had in a 3D space. This isn’t to say everything else sucks, this isn’t a broken unplayable game, but it’s a very polarizing one, at least to me.

My title for this review was calling it the "most important Sonic game ever made" and that's not really just clickbait. Frontiers is the most experimental game this series has ever seen I think. There's just so much added to it and so much being tried that there's legit so many possible directions to take after this and I think it will end up being the most influential game in the series. This is a turning point for better or worse. Whether Sonic Team gets their act together and does something great with it or we're sentenced to more mediocrity is up in the air.

Personally, I'm on the side of cautious optimism, but I do hope the best for the blue bastard going forward.

[skaruresonic]

Regarding illusions of Rouge and Omega I think it's exactly how you said: having Shadow being tormented by someone not named Maria isn't "important" enough. Here you not only get the feels points (because Maria was so important to Shadow that the fandom must make his whole existence revolve around her) but also approval from the more elitist anti-sega side of the fandom (because you unlike the big bad sega actually remember the continuity and giving respects to the "best" parts of the franchise).

Unfortunately in the current fandom climate "continuity" means you must reference literally everything from past entries every 5 minutes or else you're "being inconsistent". See: the people asking "why does Knuckles not talk about the Master Emerald? Does he just not care about guarding it anymore??" or the small-scale "drama" around Dream Team cause omg big bad sega is ruining the timeline again cause the game doesn't mention Sage anywhere.

but also approval from the more elitist anti-sega side of the fandom (because you unlike the big bad sega actually remember the continuity and giving respects to the "best" parts of the franchise).

If they really wanted to give respect to the "best" parts of the franchise, they'd all go play Battle

Shadow's trauma will never not inform a part of his character. It's the foundation on which most of it currently rests. It's rather insecure to keep insisting that every form of suffering he experiences from here on out must tie back to his original trauma in some way. That's... not how life works.

For all of this hullabaloo about Rouge and Omega being Shadow's besties, when showed a canonical example that possibly supports what they're talking about (if you tilt your head and squint), they don't want it to take it.

Which is it? Are they his ride or die until he drops them like hot potatoes for Maria's memory, or what?

---

Unfortunately in the current fandom climate "continuity" means you must reference literally everything from past entries every 5 minutes or else you're "being inconsistent". I hate the use of the word "inconsistent" because nobody can provide a solid definition. They always say something that inevitably devolves into being a roundabout way of saying "the games' quality fluctuates" and/or "the games suck." Or else they just mean the art direction's changed again. Changes in art direction alone do not true inconsistency make. Sonic and co.'s characterizations have largely remained consistent across the games. It's fanon that's changed. It's really ironic too because the series references previous games all the time.

--- See: the people asking "why does Knuckles not talk about the Master Emerald? Does he just not care about guarding it anymore??" or the small-scale "drama" around Dream Team cause omg big bad sega is ruining the timeline again cause the game doesn't mention Sage anywhere.

At some point it hilariously reads like a serious lack of object permanence. "ST didn't show Cream in Forces, they forgot her!" Or maybe they're just not using her atm and she still diegetically exists in the world, just like how Shadow didn't magically poof out of existence in Unleashed.

Sage isn't in Dream Team? Guess she must have been erased like Doodlebob lol.

[prowerprojects]

I feel like this is a growing side effect of fans being starved from Tails being the non-action tech guy for so long to where Forces caused a boiling point for so many, some are latching onto Nine or IDW in spite of it. (I argue Tails got drowned out often even back then when characters like Shadow, Silver, and Blaze were a huge talking point back in the 2000s. But still in good standing before Unleashed and Colors.)

While I'm glad the movie and Prime made Tails in general a big talking point again; more positively this time, I am mixed on it coming at the expense of his Modern self. MOSTH and Modern being playable again later in Frontiers is a start, but he's probably not going to really shake this off until he goes solo for a bit in a upfront way. (That, and having more interactions outside of Sonic to show off more of his character. Love their bond, don't love how fans treat it so one-sided when discussing it.)

Anon, you're probably right.

(Though I don't really see what is there to latch onto in idw, he doesn't really do much? I wouldn't even say his characterization is bad, it's just that he kinda. Exists around. I see people hype up idw Tails and I'm like. Wow no wonder people think he's boring and lame if this is what passes for good Tails representation)

The thing with Unleashed and Colors is interesting, because I feel like the characters who had good early portrayals (the aforementioned Blaze, Shadow and Silver) but hadn't appeared since are still remembered as competent and cool characters because this characterization is still fresh in people's minds even though it was so long ago, while due to Tails having more appearances he's more remembered for the more recent ones... (and probably there's a part of "Why can't my supercool fave be in this game, why is Tails here, he's lame!")

I feel there's also the thing that all of those characters had very... impressive introductions. No matter how bad the writing for Shadow gets people can go back to his introductory game and remember what he was invisioned to be as a character, etc.

But Tails's backstory is all in the manual. He even has a little character arc (seeing Sonic, becoming more optimistic and learning to fly/run fast enough to keep up with Sonic, meeting Sonic for the first time and following him into battle), and it's not only only in the manual, it happens before the events of the game itself. Even Knuckles has more of a character arc/involvement in his introductory game plot. (This is how we ended up with early adaptations where Tails thinks that math is yucky and hard despite canon Tails literally being an engineer) Tails just. Doesn't get to make the same impression, and never will, because he's a 30+ old character and that ship has sailed. (And it's ironic to see how people latched onto Nine since he's technically having the same arc, it's just like you know... Show, don't tell. It really works. (And also he's angsty, that helps too))

Yeah... I love people being excited about versions of Tails from adaptations, but it really brings me down when people use them to talk shit about mainline Tails. You know what this reminds me of? When there's a new Scooby Doo adaptation and everyone is like "Finally they fixed Daphne so she's competent and isn't a damsel in distress anymore". And it's like. Do you know anything about Daphne. And. Why are you giving credit to the adaptation for doing something that has always been a thing?

I'm not expecting Frontiers to break through Tails's public image either, but I hope he at least has an enjoyable gameplay so people could be like "Wow that was fun! I wish Sega would make even more games where you could play as Tails!" :3c And then maybe we could get this "solo adventure".

(Though the way it's worded in Frontiers it's more of a "Tails is going to the mountains to train" than "Tails is becoming a solo operation". Like he clearly just wants to get "stronger"(in a broad sense of the word. Though personally I think what he actually needs is to stop basing his self worth on his usefulness and Sonic's opinions. Ironically if he was more like Sonic in this way he would be happier) and is expecting to get back to Sonic at some point. I could live with this though, I don't mind it at all as long as he's actually treated as Sonic's partner afterwards rather than a cute accessory that Sonic talks to so he doesn't look weird talking to the broken robots.)

I love tmosth! Ian Sr is such a good writer, honestly I don't know about his abilities to write a cool adventure plot, but he has the character voices nailed down! (Except for maybe kleptomania jokes with Rouge) But Tails was so good! He was basically a co-protag with Barry (they had a very cute dynamic), we saw him interacting with other characters who aren't Sonic (honestly he and Sonic barely interact with each other there at all), he took charge of the investigation and got to show off his smarts beyond "I fix this broken thing like it's magic"(Though he did that as well!), and he was still shown to be insecure and childish at times, it's just *clenches fist* so good.

Sorry had to take a break to gush, this post was becoming too negative ahaha. Ok back to it.

The Unbreakable Bond thing. Yeah... I also love their relationship, but the fact that Tails doesn't really have developed relationships with the rest of the cast makes him feel very isolated and like his life revolves around Sonic. Even Amy and Knuckles, whose most developed relationships are with Sonic as well, have other characters that they interact with without Sonic being involved, (or at least used to interact with), like Rouge or Cream. Who does Tails have? Professor Pickle? Barry? Please. Tails is getting suffocated by the soulmate bond.

(And I don't love to criticize how other fans engage with the franchise because I also have my silly headcanons and interpretations. Like. I literally hc Tails as nonbinary which he isn't, in canon, as far as I'm aware. But. Yeah sometimes it feels like people are more into the idea of Sonic having a little brother that he can dote on. Rather than, you know. Sonic & Tails's actual relationship. Like I literally saw someone say (genuinely as far as I could guess) "Sonic sacrificed so much to raise Tails" and like. Ok. It's time to step back a little and look at the actual canon content. Sonic didn't even know where Tails's house was in sa1, what exactly is he sacrificing with such attentive parenting I wonder. But I do also love cute brotherly bonding stuff so. (One of the reasons why I love aosth so much, though there are other reasons as well. Also while I'm complaining, nobody understands the "Mom, Dad and the Picket Fence" thing.))

Sorry if this post got a big edgy at times, sometimes I start going and slip into it a little bit, even though I'm generally trying not to complain too much about the stuff I don't like and instead focus on the things I do.