[Verse 1]
The secret side of me
I never let you see
I keep it caged, but I can't control it
So stay away from me
The beast is ugly
I feel the rage, and I just can't hold it
It's scratching on the walls
In the closet, in the halls
It comes awake, and I can't control it
Hiding under the bed
In my body, in my head
Why won't somebody come and save me from this?
Make it end!

[Chorus]
I feel it deep within!
It's just beneath the skin!
I must confess that I feel like a monster!
I hate what I've become!
The nightmare's just begun!
I must confess that I feel like a monster!
I, I feel like a monster!
I, I feel like a monster!

[Verse 2]
My secret side I keep
Hid under lock and key
I keep it caged, but I can't control it
'Cause if I let him out
He'll tear me up, break me down
Why won't somebody come and save me from this?
Make it end!
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[Chorus]
I feel it deep within!
It's just beneath the skin!
I must confess that I feel like a monster!
I hate what I've become!
The nightmare's just begun!
I must confess that I feel like a monster!
I feel it deep within!
It's just beneath the skin!
I must confess that I feel like a monster!
I, I feel like a monster!
I, I feel like a monster!

[Bridge]
It's hiding in the dark!
Its teeth are razor-sharp!
There's no escape for me, it wants my soul, it wants my heart
No one can hear me scream
Maybe it's just a dream
Maybe it's inside of me
Stop this monster!
I feel it deep within, it's just beneath the skin
I must confess that I feel like a monster

[Chorus]
I hate what I've become!
The nightmare's just begun!
I must confess that I feel like a monster!
I feel it deep within!
It's just beneath the skin!
I must confess that I feel like a monster!
I’m gonna lose control!
It’s something radical!
I must confess that I feel like a monster!
I, I feel like a monster!
I, I feel like a monster!
I, I feel like a monster!
I, I feel like a monster!

This game is way more rough than I remembered, in 2017 I was all in on the "Unleashed is underrated, better than Colors/Gens" bandwagon. The day stages are very unstable and as much as I like the level design the controls ruin it and no matter how much I play I can't come to grips with it. Worst same button syndrome in the series mapping the air boost to the homing attack, and Sonic feels like a bumper car on ice. S ranking these stages feels more like luck than skill, shit gives me sensory overload. With enough trial and error, I was able to do it for all of them except Arid Sands where I just gave up. God forbid you try to get the medals in these stages, these were not built for exploration. The night stages have no business being in a Sonic game and even looking at them as an actual combat focused game they're pretty shallow because they were still targeting a younger demographic with this game. The platforming sections are okay, they really should've just made being a slower paced platformer the main focus for the Werehog and removed the combat imo. The performance is inexcusably poor for a AAA series, it's not because "the game is so ambitious that it required the processing power of the Xbox Series X" it's because the game was rushed and is poorly optimized. I did in fact encounter quite a few glitches, music would only play when you are boosting or not play at all, the game crashed, I got stuck, textures bugged out in Savannah Citadel. The padding with the medals and having to visit professor pickle is also annoying. Overall I'm quite heartbroken that this game fell off for me.

You know, it's been a long time since I got to actually replay Sonic Unleashed instead of just loading up my complete save file to play the daytime stages and some of the boss fights, or listening to the soundtrack on Youtube. I used to think this game was pretty decent and that the daytime stages were basically good enough to make up for the boring parts, but that's because I kept going back to them while the boring parts kept fading out from my memory, but experiencing a new save file brought back all those sealed memories to the forefront of my brain. It's not just the night stages, though they are boring ass pace-breakers where you basically stop playing your Sonic game so you can play some uninspired God of War knockoff, but it's also... Everything else.

Why do I need to keep going back to spagonia every time I'm done with a continent? Yeah, I know the in-universe reason, so that Professor Exposition there can tell me where to go next, but sometimes I even need to talk to him in order to unlock shit in the continents I already had unlocked before. Can't he just communicate with Sonic, Chip and Tails using a phone or something like that? Why do I have to collect these stupid medals just to progress? The night stages already take long enough to complete on their own, but you still have to go out of your way to search for every nook and cranny for medals, or else the game will just cock-block you from entering the next stage because you didn't collect enough of the damn things.

"Well, why don't you collect them in the day stages then?"

Have you seen how fast Sonic goes in those things? They obvously weren't meant for exploration, almost every time I collected a medal in these stages it was by pure accident, I was just blasting through and then oh, I collected a medal, arlight then. Plus, these levels don't have as many medals to collect as the night ones, so it's not really worth the effort, I was collecting from the hub worlds and the night stages instead. Let me tell you, I was not having a good time doing any of that, all this tedious process made me think was "Jesus fuck I'll have to do this just to get to the next day stage" instead of having any kind of fun. The hub worlds are charming and have a lot of personality, but the vast majority of the side quests you get to do in them are just glorified time attacks or enemy gauntlets in slightly modified parts of the regular stages.

Oh, and the story is mediocre at best, don't even get me started on that, seriously.

So, if most of my game time is spent doing tedious shit I don't care about while roughly 40% of the game is the part I have fun with, then why was it that I believed Sonic Unleashed was a good game to begin with? It's not, it never was, I just liked the daytime stages way too much and kept replaying them after I was done with this game for the first time, this whole process caused me to have a bit of a selective memory. Eh, I really should have just stuck with the Unleashed Project mod for Sonic Generations, it already gives me the parts of Unleashed I like without forcing me to play through the rest of the game. Yeah, I'll do that, so goodbye Sonic Unleahsed!