zephie's game journals
this came out yesterday. despite my unwavering love for Sonic it was unfortunately not enough for me to spend $67 USD on a video game, let alone an apparently very short one, let alone one that forces Denuvo, Steam and Epic Games(???) on me, let alone one that just didn't look very good. then i found a key online for much cheaper, and i'm already regretting it. immediate Sonic 4 Episode III vibes
back when Sonic Mania came out (which i loved) i didn't really care much until like a few days before release, when i suddenly got super excited for it. that didn't happen this time! i think Frontiers once and for all broke me out of the Sonic Cycle; i no longer have any faith that Sonic Team will make a good video game. although this time around they've teamed up with the acclaimed developers of Balan Wonderworld so maybe this will turn things around
alright. alright i've played the first couple zones. first off i want to air my biggest grievance - the age-old tradition of Sonic games (usually) having great music no matter how bad the game is, being totally broken by now. a lot of what i've heard here so far is almost grating, plus Forces and Frontiers having a great deal of stinkers too. what happened dude!!!
for whatever reason everything Classic Sonic now has to have this Not Mega Drive music. they didn't even do that in Generations where the contrast between modern and classic was the whole point!! i don't want to believe this is the "style" of Classic music now, not necessarily as a callback to the Mega Drive, because that would be a huge shame. what am i saying it's The Sonic Company of course they're still just nostalgia-baiting, for the hundredth game in a row
now they're even modern-baiting us wow how low can they go.. also when i saw Classic Amy in her modern outfit i realized the reason it looked weird was her nose? she used to have a long Sonic nose and now she just has a little nub. they've been stressing hard lately that these character incarnations are the same as the modern characters just younger. so what did she do to her nose
never change sonic. and no i can't jump in mid-air
when i exited out of the game a while ago to write in my stupid gamer journal i was feeling pretty disillusioned with it. the game was barraging me with lots of little bad ideas and bad times, but i'm going to give it a longer shake. for now i will say: the screen is way too zoomed in oh my god, i can't see a damn thing!! sometimes it shoots me off to another plane in the distance and i really think that should be the default
uhhh ok i finished the main game in about. four hours? i think at first i was a little annoyed because of my unconditional love for Sonic forcing me to spend more money than i felt comfortable. i really can't stress enough how little say i have in the matter. that being said there doesn't seem to be that much side content, which if is the case then i'm gonna give myself a pass for feeling annoyed
after the credits i did go back and un-negativify parts of what i've written - when i went back to the game after taking a break i started getting a lot more into it. of course that could just be because it'd been long enough for me to mentally disconnect from how much money i'd spent, but i also started to believe for a while that this was the only Sonic game in existence that actually got better as it went on? obviously as is tradition the final level proved that wrong, since Sonic games aren't great at scaling difficulty in ways other than increasing the rate of "gotchas"
i've long complained that Sonic doesn't try anything new in terms of level mechanics in his games that he makes. as this game went on i thought it had a nice healthy mix of actually cool ideas, and things they put in the game simply because it was something new to put in the game. but it turned out to be a lot of new stuff anyway which i appreciate :) that was probably part of what had me so disheartened at the start, because it really did just seem like another rehashing Sonic game
especially after being hit with these again. honestly i am not a this-kind-of-special-stage hater, in fact they did some fun things with it this time around. the emerald stages blow though
emerald powers are cool but feel kinda OP. most of the time if i had even slight trouble with a part i could just use a basic one to make it easy. they're basically Whenever Wisps but a guy doesn't yell "Cube!" at me. though i won't complain about them helping massively speed up boss fights that go on too long and have funky hitboxes
does feel like this game should call for replaying more than i'm sensing it does. from what i've seen the only collectible is the medals i can earn in a lot of different ways, and i think they're only used to unlock cosmetics in the online mode i don't much care about? just looks like Forces' character creator but worse because i have to be an ugly robot. snzsnzz
i do not much care about "Trip" either i'm sorry to say. finishing the game unlocked ""Trip's Story"" which i'm expecting to be the same game with different cutscenes, even though she also became playable in the main game. obviously i will play it because i have to wring out this game of things to do to beside grinding for medals. but maybe i'm the big sucker and that's where the bulk of this game was all along and it should have actually been $70
let me play as this guy instead
tried out the battle mode and wow yeah it's no good! nothing of value here! maybe the worst multiplayer mode i've ever played including shovelware! this is the only thing medals are used for?? and there's a ranking system??? ohhh sonic you could've been a little more quiet about this and it would've just been a tacked-on "it sucks but whatever" thing but no you decided to have DLC for it