zephie's game journals
there's an auto-combo feature which automatically chooses the "best" skill to use in combat, since combat is pretty shallow and pointless anyway. but don't use it because it will randomly do this when trying to homing attack enemies as obstacles which you are often supposed to do
i like that throughout the fourth island Sonic is slowly succumbing to his cyber ouchies in cutscenes, barely able to stand, and then immediately afterwards
ludonarrative dissonance whatever, this is a game about an ancient race who built giant floating obstacle courses everywhere for no reason (although actually this is touched upon in the new expansion which i have already played sorry i got way ahead of myself)
i sort of like this island, it's nothing but long platforming challenges while ascending these towers. it's not difficult, but it's much more difficult than anything else in the open world, which never feels like it gives itself room to be difficult in any way because of how collectibles are structured. not to mention the "challenges" that uncover the map
i specifically held off on complaining about the island challenges until the final island, to give them time to becoming marginally demanding of me. and no they are still pitifully simple it's just that on the first islands they would be like "parry one (1) time(s)!" and i hold L1/R1 to parry indefinitely. and light square puzzles that seem like they're intended for actual hedgehogs (post-expansion me checking in again to say ohhh boy just i wait)
did the game just get mad at me for playing it the optimal way. also at this point it's already revealed that the big disembodied sky voice was the real villain all along so. i'm gonna carry on with my circlage
sorry i got bored of the Sonic game and started watching Evangelion
sorry i got bored of the Sonic game and started playing Ikaruga
why they decided to make the final boss in this style as well i have no idea. of course that's only if playing on hard mode, on lower difficulties it's just an anti-climactic titan fight followed by Sonic saying "is that it?" then he fights the real final boss in a cutscene, and then it plays a One Ok Rock song about him having so much sex he breaks his bed. why they decided to hide the real final boss like that i also have no idea, the only hint that's the case is the difficulty setting for hard mode mentions "something extra"
a lot of this game's story happens because whenever Sage says "don't" and Sonic asks why she just says "it's a secret hehe ;)" they say it's because she's a computergirl who runs on calculations and statistics so determines there would be "no point" in explaining but buddy you have shown me her crying, that's all out the window. then it's meant to be sad when she dies even though she's a computer program who can be copied and pasted, which is exactly what happens after the credits
i kinda rushed my way through the last third of the game because the expansion was about to drop. i'm glad i went for a new game+ to speed things up, keeping my max stats was nice but speed should not be levelable, controlling Sonic is difficult enough. yet the cyberspace levels are weirdly slow, a problem i realized i had was i could hardly tell when i was boosting. the boost feels super weak and as if it loses max speed easily, so i was constantly refreshing it. also i don't know why i implied before that those levels were difficult, that was how i remembered them for some reason but they're baby gaming
the expansion came out at 1am. i'm a night owl whatever i'll stay up for a while to play and write about it the next day. i played it for seven hours. i did not finish it, because Sonic's Fun Tears: The Final Tears is, quite literally, one hundred times harder than the base game
story-wise i was worried they would be doing End of Sonic Evangelion. it starts with a cutscene of him running into a portal to supposedly an alternate version of the island, then acting like nothing happened while Sage explains another "simulation" she had not considered. not that i care much for the original ending, but for a game that so desperately tries to tighten the series' canon it's a little weird
i get to play as Amy. for the first time since '06 i can play as Amy the Rose Hedgehog in a mainline Sonic game. i waited so long for them to fix this game and the day has finally come. and she's fun!!! too fun, she totally shows up Sonic who now sucks and is cringe to me. they've really started playing into the tarot witch stuff again with her moveset which i was never big on but whatever. i don't know it's a cartoon fantasy world maybe there's something to it here
it rotates through the characters, which is a shame because it then forced me to play as Knuckles who is not fun. wall climbing feels real bad and there's a weird delay to his gliding. Tails is pretty fun. all these characters can fly or glide long distances which plays into the level design, and that's when this game's big pop-in problem becomes a bigger popper-in problem. most of the time i just have no idea where to go because i'm not within fifty feet of it
as if the game hadn't suddenly become difficult enough. when it for some reason made me play as Sonic again in this Sonic game, they'd read the part of my journal earlier where i said "these towers are pretty cool" and said okay then what if they were way taller waaaay tougher and there were no checkpoints. the amount of times i found myself falling, seemingly endlessly, contemplating my life choices as i watched all the obstacles i'd spent the last ten minutes sweating through whiz by
at the top of the towers are combat trials. one of them in particular, the "Snake's Trial", i have no idea if i did it the right way, i feel like i cheesed it but i'd also spent maybe half an hour trying to figure out how else i could possibly do it. finally, a very time-limited boss fight, all stats at level 1, where for the first time in this game parrying actually requires timing, and it is almost frame-perfect. i manage to get through with little time left, and then, i can't remember the last time i was sat in stunned silence over how difficult a video game was. it was a boss rush
in stark contrast to when the expansion dropped - when i was extremely giddy and didn't even feel like journaling or doing anything that wasn't playing - i have not yet opened the game back up today, just to give people who are better than me at video games time to figure out what to do. i started to think i'd just have to make peace with never finishing this game, which is surprising for such a story-heavy expansion? the only thing in Sonic i can think of remotely comparable in difficulty is the Hot Dog missions in Unleashed. and even those, if you would believe it from the name, were not required for the story
and the worst part is i can't play as the other characters again until i beat it!!! in the end i just resorted to running around completing the much en-hardened-er island challenges, and trying to find the other characters to talk to on the off chance one of them would kindly offer to let me embody them again. no such luck, Tails just talks about how we can pull through because of how friendship we are, Amy talks about how she used to be written by people who hate women but now she's not, and Sage drops lorebombs such as "Big the Cat is not real"
