zephie's game journals
played through Trip's Story last night. i was wrong, it wasn't the same game with different cutscenes, it was the same game made worse with almost no cutscenes. i completely stopped having fun with the game here! sucks because i tried out playing with Trip briefly the night before and thought she was neat... she turns into a DRAGON dude how could her story not be fun. well i found out how
everything i didn't like about the game got amplified here (except the music which is as bad as it was before). Trip's story is essentially Hard Mode which of course in Sonic terms means gotchas galore. i came close several times to quitting because i wasn't enjoying it at all, but i figured it's labeled a "story" and it's clearly set after the main game so there must be something that'll make it worth sticking with. but all i got was obnoxious boss fights overstaying their welcome even more than they did before
i found out the game was primarily made by Arzest which made me feel better about frequently uttering "this game sucks" under my breath. like i figured if it was another Sonic Team joint it'd almost be like self-fulfilling prophecy, since i'd recently gotten done replaying Frontiers so i was thoroughly primed to not enjoy another game of theirs. not that i'd expect to enjoy a game from the developers of Yoshi's New Island and Balan Wonderworld much either
the final boss took me over an hour to beat, which is great when the bosses are at the end of every level instead of separate so i can't quit and come back later like i very much wanted to. even greater when the level was already up to ten minutes long. even greater when the boss suddenly introduces untelegraphed insta-death mechanics ten minutes into the fight!!! i take back what i said about Fang when that animated short about him came out a few weeks ago, i DON'T think he's hot anymore
no it has nothing to do with the timer being at zero, this level counts down from 10 minutes and then nothing happens when it runs out. gotcha!
sucks this game couldn't leave me on a positive note. i thought it was okay when i hit the credits before! but the random death traps, the leaps of faith, the launching me into special stages out of nowhere, the enemies with arbitrary hitboxes, the glitches, the tedious boss fights....it all wore me down. but i fight through it because it's Sonic. and i guess i love him or whatever
pictured: me about to get trip back for her story
surprise! wondering if this one will actually be a story, because the last thing it called a "story" sure wasn't even by voiceless 2D Sonic game standards
a dragon just shows up and Super Sonic has to fight it. there's really no pomp and circumstance about it, suddenly there is big dragon and then there's yellow hedgehog. in a game full of obnoxiously tedious boss fights i was dreading this
was much more of a game of chance than i'd have liked or have considered a good fight. will the projectiles i need to hit back at the dragon appear anywhere near me? will the batch of rings i need to stay alive appear long enough before it transitions to a 2D segment and they disappear? will the randomly-placed obstacles in that 2D segment be remotely possible to get past in time? hit restart a lot of times on this one and it ended up taking me over an hour
the best part is when there's, once again, a new mechanic ten minutes into the fight, and there's little instruction on what to do, and i have limited time to figure out what's happening before i run out of rings, and it costs me five rings whenever i want to try something out. i got up to this point a few times before finally pausing and asking what to do online, because i didn't want to keep spending ten minutes (or more, depending on if i had to restart due to bad luck) getting back to it just to experiment a handful of times
i found a video of someone doing it, and they were getting these reticles on every meteor that appeared, having to dash at it (costing five rings) at the right moment. that's what i was trying to do, and i thought i was hitting the first meteor right but then a reticle wouldn't appear on the next one!! turned out the reticles just stop appearing if i keep the dash held down for more than a split second, which definitely seems like a bug. fitting ending for this game
cutscenes have me yearning for the Evening Star-developed cartoon-styled Mania sequel that will never be
i've been avoiding using Steam when possible nowadays (which it wasn't here), but the only thing i had on my profile was a big showcase of all the Sonic games i had every achievement in. don't know if i'm gonna bother with this one, even though they don't super involve the parts of the game i don't enjoy. but that could be mostly because they're not tracked in the game itself and so it's only a Steam thing
feels good to truly be done with this game now, as my eternal soul contract states i must do with every Sonic game including those released after i die. they just announced a new comic book miniseries about Fang so he'll have his chance to redeem himself. Trip will remain on thin ice in the meantime. for now my closing thoughts on Sonic Superstars: this game costs sixty seven dollars