#cutscenes and bonuses and alternate plots and near misses

[lauronk]

there’s a gap in the middle that needs filling

and lots of edits still

but i would think that y’all might have the final chapter of busfic in your grubby little paws tonight or tomorrow

[blazehedgehog]

As someone that got the game on release, I'm honestly confused as to why so much of the fandom doesn't like Sonic Lost World? I could understand it with Unleashed, a game I liked despite fan opinion at large, but Lost World has me baffled. It seems polished, the controls feel pretty solid, aesthetically pleasing, etc. I honestly really like it as an alternative to the boost formula, but everyone thinks I'm nuts? Do you have any insight? I've been wondering this since release lol

I have a video review that’s slightly out of date since the game was patched, but in short: Sonic Lost World is just a sloppily made game.

You say it seems polished, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise:

For starters, what purpose does the scoring system solve? You have the combo-based homing attack that gives you bonus points for locking on to big groups of enemies, but why? What do those points do? There’s no grading system like in past Sonic games, where score contributes to a ranking. You just amass thousand and thousands of points for… nothing. You have an entire Casino level where you collect slot machine tokens so you can deposit them for massive score bonuses for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

It was later “fixed” that DLC stages could only be played once before they’d disappear – and to get them to come back, you’d have to score 10,000 points in a level, but let’s be perfectly honest: that’s a hamfisted solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist. The only explanation is that there used to be a ranking system in Sonic Lost World but they deleted it and never got around to replacing it with anything meaningful. After all, the 3DS version of Lost World still has a letter grade score ranking system. That’s not the best explanation in the world, but it’s certainly better than the alternative: that they removed it because they didn’t realize how or why the two systems interconnected (they made a dumb mistake, in other words).

Or maybe they were just dumb – the biggest change in the patch that came out for Sonic Lost World has to do with how it handles rings. In the game as it originally shipped, rings did not give you 1ups. Standard platformer vocabulary says that once you collect enough coins, or rings, or star bits, or gems, or wumpa fruit, or bananas, or whatever, you’d get a 1up. That’s sort of the entire reason you’d even bother with collecting them. Sonic Lost World doesn’t do this, which is unfortunate, because Sonic Lost World has some pretty big spikes in difficulty in a few places, especially as you near the end of the game. I remember seeing the Game Over screen a lot, because there was no reliable way to get more lives outside of slowly grinding for one or two here and there.

Now, Sonic’s collectibles serve a double purpose: in addition to building towards a free 1up, they are also a measurement of his health. But no matter how many rings you’re holding, Sonic (at least in Lost World) will only drop 20 rings to be recollected. Now, this is important, because levels are still designed to have secret caches of rings – in particular, Sonic Lost World has some areas with 40, 50, even 100+ rings tucked away in corners just out of sight. But if you only drop a maximum of 20 rings, then why do you need numbers greater than that? It doesn’t make any sense, does it? Again: it feels like something they removed either because they intended to replace it with something else, or because they made a dumb mistake. Two months after release they patched the game to restore the “100 rings = 1up” behavior (on top of the Yoshi DLC that buries you in endless free 1ups), but it’s baffling that wasn’t the norm to begin with. It’s the sort of thing that should’ve been an obvious problem for anyone who thought about it for more than 30 seconds. Was it just a bug? We’ll never know.

Maybe it was a bug. Maybe Sonic Lost World wasn’t finished. If you get 100% completion on the game, you get a dialog box about receiving a special reward but there’s no reward to be found. You don’t get anything for 100% completion, even though the game explicitly tells you that you do. Or how about this: the game has 30+ minutes of fully voiced, animated cutscenes that can never be rewatched without starting a new game. Say what you will about the game’s crummy, plot-hole-ridden story, but missing that feature is definitely not the norm for other Sonic games.

And, man, don’t even get me started about that story. What are the Zeti? Are they the only ones of their kind? Why does a magical conch shell control them? Why can they interface with machines? When Sonic beats them all the second time, do they die or are they still alive? Why don’t they interface with more machines?(like, say, Eggman’s big mech suit?) Why do the Zeti even care about Sonic at all? Weren’t they just against Eggman? If Sonic, with zero hesitation, freed them from Eggman’s control, shouldn’t they be indebted to him for freeing them from slavery? Why do they want to take over the world? What was stopping them before?Couldn’t Eggman launch his energy siphon device from somewhere else besides The Lost Hex planet? If outfitting Tails with all the robot junk made the Zeti afraid of him, why didn’t he use it to help Sonic? If all the wisps flew back to their own home planets, why are so many of them hanging out on The Lost Hex? Why are there NEW wisps that we’ve never seen before? Are they indigenous to other planets besides Planet Wisp? What do those planets look like? Why didn’t Eggman use these new wisps in Sonic Colors? If the wisps are still a source of energy and they’re still hanging around, why does Eggman need to drain energy from his own planet? Couldn’t he just use the wisps again? Wouldn’t it also make more sense for Eggman to drain The Lost Hex of its planetary energy instead of his own planet?

(And on and on and on…)