T-minus one day until the new expansion, of which there is zero gameplay available to watch. today i am looking for new Koco, navigating these new areas that can only be described as a small child going crazy in a level editor. i was awkwardly jumping around this thing for several minutes trying to figure out what to do until suddenly a spring decided to appear which would send me where i needed to go. i had been at this point so many times

he's referring to how the platforming in this game amounts to hitting a spring or boost pad (often accidentally) that then puts you on a 10-second rube goldberg machine and flings you 50 feet in the opposite direction. occasionally an input is required. honestly thank god because whenever i'm asked for any semblence of precision platforming like in the new Koco sections, it is cause for endless frustration because Sonic is a nightmare to control

the bosses are by far the coolest part of the game, and none of that has to do with the gameplay. it's like they finally realized Super Sonic boss fights in these games are almost never as fun as they should be so they just focused on ramping up the spectacle of it. keeping the parry button held down indefinitely then spamming the same attack over and over? booo. hitting a QTE and watching a 15-second cutscene of Sonic swinging a sword a hundred times his size while the Sleeping with Sirens guy yells at me?? yeeeaaa babyyy!!!!

Amy Island is complete. i guess they retroactively made some things on the map into collectibles that are required to truly complete it. like the memory tokens scattered about, i just saw the map icon like "there's one spawned over here if you need it" but i never needed it because i can just run around in circles, or fish

proud of him

Knuckles Island is considerably bigger, and i want to at least hit the credits by tomorrow so i'm forgoing the constantly opening my map to check remaining collectible locations for now. it's fun for a while to run around triggering Sonic equivalents of Auto-Mario levels. but each chunk of floating sky platforms and rails clearly corresponds to one collectible, and there's no "you've already been here" icon for them. plus the map only shows where the collectible physically is, not where to hop onto a boost pad or spring in order to get there. it would be cool if that meant there were multiple ways to get to a certain point but that is not how they designed this world

the sexual tension between Sonic and Knuckles in this game is unbelievable. there were unused voice lines in the game's files about Sonic being into Amy instead but they must have taken them out because no one would believe it after seeing the cutscenes with Knuckles

"Sonic Frontiers ripped off Zelda" um you mean made it better? do Like Likes send you to hell after taking your shield? didn't think so

this game reminds me of sonic games

probably a good idea i abandoned any desire to 100% this game for now because i remember the next island being extremely annoying just to get around. oh did you want to go somewhere? does that involve suddenly being locked to a 2D plane that goes in the opposite direction with no way to get out of it. because if so if i have amazing news. incredibly ballsy move of them to do that in an open world game, you honestly have to commend it

Tails Island is extremely annoying i remembered correctly, i quit out of exasperation last night. luckily it turns out the new update is tomorrow in my time zone so i have more time. anyway another cool thing about those forced 2D segments is they're only 2D if i start them at the right point, so all too often will i be confused about why the camera seems to be working so hard against me and why the platforming is so precise, before realizing it's a 2D section i'm accidentally playing in 3D

and to ramp up the annoying - around the islands there are these little treasure spots i run a circle around and then collectibles pop out, or as did almost exclusively pop out of them up till now. for some reason now on this island those same spots are almost exclusively boost pads or springs which suddenly send me to rube goldberg hell, and then later turn back into treasure spots for me to accidentally trigger all over again

but like every Sonic game it's all worth it for the funniest cutscenes known to man. it's weird the cutscenes and dialogue were all fine up to this point; better written and better voice acted than any other Sonic game

lmao. of course not Tails but your island is another story

Tails is written like a cleanup job. in Adventure 2 he thought Sonic was dead so he fought harder, in Forces he thought Sonic was dead so he had a six-month mental breakdown. for a decade these games were written by people who admitted they'd never played a Sonic game - the writers of Happy Tree Friends, a show with no dialogue. so unsurprisingly the writing in Sonic went from charmingly bad and poorly-translated to just bad

now there's a new writer, the supposed Good Sonic Writer (jury's still out depending on how involved he was in the crying robot girl scene), and in this cutscene Tails straight up calls himself "inconsistent". his whole arc here is moping over how dirty he was done in Forces by people who'd made a career out of butchering cartoon animals. it's cool tho we get some nice big bro Sonic moments. i do love my cartoon animals i hope they're well

now i get to play this mandatory terrible ancient pinball machine, which causes a volcano eruption, which uncovers an ancient robot for Sonic to fight. this would fit into the "confidently trying new things poorly to a charming degree" if they didn't hamfist pinball stuff into every Sonic game, all because people liked it once in a game from 1992, and not at all in every game since

Sonic really has me tightly wrapped around his big cartoon gloved finger. "waah this game is bad so i won't 100% it" shut up birdbrain you know full well you owe your life to the blue man and will dig into every inch of his games unconditionally. i'm working through Tails Island now also and i would love a compilation of me saying "no i don't want to go this way" "no let me out why can't i get off of this" "why would they do this" "why did/didn't that lock on" "why can't i move the camera" "why did i choose this series to be into"