Honestly kind of shocked to realize that a lot of this turned out to have just completely washed over my 15-year-old self when I first played this when I later got completely attached to all the little character moments in The Third and IV that define my love for those games, because this does that just as well: from the seeds of The Boss and Pierce’s singalongs being planted with their radio fighting (along with Pierce just not being taken seriously in the slightest), to Johnny Gat being a complete Wife Guy when he’s not being the most murderous fucker on the planet, to The Boss taking a huge liking to Carlos even when his performance hasn’t been up to snuff (and thus making the latter’s death feel even more tragic), like, god the primary reason I love this series was just staring me in the face for so long and I glossed over it because most of my memories with the game in high school were just cruising around town to Gen X/Ultor Radio with a bunch of cheats enabled as well as some of the side activities like Insurance Fraud (which is still legendary af, don’t get me wrong).

Honestly it’s because of the character work that the only thing that slightly holds this back a bit for me is the structure of the game: this might just be an issue with how I played through the game, but being able to just go through any rival gangs’ missions in one go (or essentially just do that because of Respect being required to do missions) before tackling another’s makes it more obvious that once that’s done, characters hugely involved with said gang’s goings-on are pretty much absent from the others. The only real exception (aside from Pierce since he’s a general intel guy with no connections to any of the rival gangs) is Shaundi who has involvement in the latter half of the Brotherhood missions too, which is good since she’s a hell of a lot of fun here! But then you have things like Johnny Gat being stuck in the Ronin missions until the other gangs’ stuff is done, and Aisha being completely absent from said other stuff because she dies halfway through this one storyline that you might finish first. Same thing applies to Carlos in the Brotherhood missions, and it’s a shame because what they both have here is really goddamn good and I honestly wish that the structure of the story was more linear, even if I know that’s probably heresy to Open World Games, so that even more could have been done without the fear of it fucking with the continuity the player sets up.

Outside of that (and the lack of a regular soundtrack for when you’re outside of vehicles making things like warehouse raids incredibly silent for no real effect IMO, though there is a joy in having radio stations come in from vehicles if you’re on-foot, and even more from having rival gangs chase you down with their own music blaring and clashing with yours), though, this was an absolute joy to go back to and I’m glad I’m appreciating it a lot more this time around. It might not go to the goofier (compliment) lengths of the later (pre-reboot) games of the series but the pure chaotic nature of it is still certainly felt, and the balance it strikes with both its silly elements and a genuine darkness is a perfectly-executed tightrope walk. It’s still not my favorite Saints Row game at the moment, but I definitely understand now why a lot of people consider this to be the gold standard for the series.

(note: I do have this playthrough and rating marked as for the PC port, but the rating’s more in spite of said port because goddamn, even as someone who’s not way too bothered by technical bullshit, this port really is infamous for a reason. From the more minor in retrospect things like needing to install a mod (Gentlemen of the Row) to get the game to even properly start, to the more painful like all the audio being super compressed (aside from the radio stations if, again, a mod’s applied) and loud to the point where I had to turn the volume down because it started to get painful (and even after adjusting the volume cutscenes could just play stuff at max volume anyway), to bits like how even with GotR installed there was always a chance that the game would just crash if I was entering a vehicle or a firework effect was going off so if I forgot to save after a bit, well… yeah, this whole thing’s fucked and I hope that the patch that’s supposedly still being worked on comes to fruition because otherwise I’m just hoping that performance for the game on RPCS3 and Xenia improves if I go back to this for a third time because it was somehow worse with those)

So in no goddamn way am I going to claim that this is perfect by any means: I know that this horse has probably been beaten to hell and back when talking about the original GoW trilogy, but while this is also a symptom of, well, the games industry being what it was in general for way too fucking long, and I get that a bit of this could be arguably showing how destructive Kratos has become in pursuit of his goal to kill Zeus, but… jfc, to say the least this game really does not particularly care for women does it. It’s not like the first two games were stellar with regards to this either, but with things like the moment of Kratos sacrificing Poseidon’s girl without a second thought to progress (coupled with a horribly-named trophy in the original PS3 release) immediately followed by Aphrodite solely being present for the sake of a jokey sex minigame and that’s it, it just feels more egregious (also probably worth mentioning Hera who I'm going to assume the writers threw in because they wanted a Mean Woman but with her clearly being an abusive mother Kratos not giving a fuck about her feels more understandable in that case). And yeah they attempt to do something with Pandora in the last third as if to try to make up for this but of course this is a AAA game from 2010 so of course what they do end up doing is too little too late and she ends up being a plot device more than anything IMO (one that does contribute to the path of Kratos’ character towards the Norse saga making sense, yeah, but still just one in the end nonetheless).

The thing is that aside from that, though, goddamn this is like a perfection of what the series was going for all along: whereas 2 was kind of what I expected the first game to be during the time from when I first became aware of the series to when I actually played it, this just takes that and amps up the spectacle even more while condensing it into a tight 8-hour package that doesn’t let up. The alternate weapons, while generally being rather similar in the end when it comes to what you can do with them, have enough differences in how they're handled that combat doesn’t feel as static when swapping through them. The bosses… goddamn I love them all from tearing off Hades’ flesh leading up to that fakeout upon getting his weapon, Cronos being both possibly the biggest spectacle in the entire series (at least up to this point, gonna get to 2018 and Ragnarok later this year so I have zero clue if this gets topped) in terms of scale and a disgusting mass of viscera, the escalating sequence of fights with Zeus that concludes in first-person with Kratos beating the shit out of him so much that his eyes/the screen are just literally drenched in blood to the point where it’s impossible to see. The more puzzle-y bits are the most fun in the series (especially the garden where the stone from Hera's cup turns the perspective around so you can do a bit of MC Escher-esque shit) and devoid of frustrating moments IMO. Even the soundtrack, despite still being in that Standard AAA Cinematic Orchestra camp, feels more engaging this time. Maybe I’m letting this stuff factor in too much because it really should be stated that this has some pretty gross aspects to it and there’s zero fucking way I’m giving this a full 5 because of that. Hell, I completely understand if people think I’m still being too forgiving with giving this even a 4.5, maybe I’ll sour on that in the years following this initial playthrough but for right now I just think that every moment outside of those just hit extremely hard in a way that, even having played through 2, I wasn’t expecting.

gonna structure this like the way I used to do logs on Letterboxd, which is to say a lack of a real structure tbh

1. ok so just gonna get this caveat out of the way immediately: the cyberspace stages just aren’t good IMO. I’ve never played Sonic Forces, but watching a couple of other people who did play this and refer to the controls as just like that, I really have to wonder why tf Sonic Team went back to that. The actual controls are consistent with the rest of the game so that isn’t bad, but it just feels like you can’t actually go fast despite having a boost, which only works for like the first second before slowing down. And then, looking at these levels (that I didn’t do, I’ll get to that in a moment) some of the level design is literally ripped out of Generations just with Forces’ gameplay, that already made the more original level design feel like a slog and they just do not mesh well together. The later levels that take on the highway theme fare a bit better since they're actually designed around these controls but they still don't feel particularly great for me. And the post-game reward for finishing the game is an arcade mode of these?

2. So I will also admit that outside of the two you’re required to do for the tutorial, I only did like a couple of others afterwards (not bothering to do everything needed for keys, just to get a few to advance a bit quickly in the second map), along with playing some of the later ones in the arcade mode after finishing the game so that my opinion can be a little bit more solid, because thankfully they can be made completely optional by exploring the world and sped up the process of getting keys by buying them from Big after fishing for a bit. And… look, on one hand it does speak to a strength of the open world design of this that the game absolutely allows you to handle this how you want so if you don’t want to play the cyberspace stages you don’t have to with no friction, so I won’t dock too much from my rating for that. But at the same time I still spent all my time in the game wanting to actively avoid playing the traditional Sonic stages which is not a good thing in a damn Sonic game

3. also speaking of stuff I wanted to avoid doing why did they not add a bulk level up option for speed and ring count with the Elder Koco that made the process of raising those stats feel incredibly tedious

4. my other caveat is that the combat, even after unlocking other abilities feels really basic, and for the regular enemy mobs that spawn my strategy literally just amounted to getting a bit of distance and holding the left trigger to use Sonic Boom so they wouldn’t put up their shields. And yeah the Guardians are there and they are definitely more interesting to fight, but, because of my whole avoiding cyberspace thing, I pretty much had no reason to fight them since my only reward would be portal gears to open. I never thought I’d say this but goddamn as much as I didn’t particularly care for the combat Spark the Electric Jester 3 (a game that I would also definitely recommend in spite of that) it feels weird that that still feels more involved than the big budget Sonic game.

5. ANYWAY caveats out of the way time for gushing, but going back to the combat while they’re about as actually mechanically engaging as the regular enemies (parrying being required aside), the Titan fights… look, they are also just pure spectacle but goddamn they are also just HYPE AS FUCK, bless Tomoya Ohtani for contributing some post-hardcore to the soundtrack because that certainly helps

5.5. loving that some of the official lyrics of the ending theme made for this Sonic the Hedgehog game are "fuck the pain away, my bed is in ruins" (changed for the in-game version of course)

6. speaking of sounds, the rest of the soundtrack ain’t incredible but it does contribute to the game’s surprisingly sombre atmosphere really dang well, and all of the voice acting (aside from a few lines from Knuckles that sound weirdly-directed) is actually pretty dang stellar as well! Sonic especially, the slightly deeper take on his voice actually works really well while still having a hell of a lot of charm with none of the Saturday Morning Snark that the series has had from Colors onwards. Also with charm, god the laughing that he does when he’s losing his balance during gameplay is like the most goddamn lovable thing ever and put a huge smile on my face whenever it happened

7. also separate section for Eggman because GOD I love Mike Pollock so much, he was like the one element that kept the cutscenes of said run of Colors, Generations and Lost World from falling entirely into 100% uh Not Good since he was actually able to sell his comedy material there well IMO, and here? Well he still gets in some maniacal laughs in there but, particularly in the Egg Memos, his performance as what’s almost a tired old man is excellent and wonderfully contributes to the game’s aforementioned sombre tone.

8. ok scripts, weirdly possibly this game’s strongest suit? It’s not like this is like the Disco Elysium of Sonic or anything, but if the IDW comics are anything like this I gotta get to them because bringing Ian Flynn onto the writing team was an amazing call. Yes it definitely gets a bit callback heavy but when the game turns said callbacks into moments of surprisingly great character development (fr it turned that bit in Forces where Tails was scared shitless of Chaos 0 and couldn’t do anything into a bit of genuine shame that acted as a catalyst for him wanting to stop relying on Sonic) it doesn’t actually feel particularly egregious. And the sole new addition to the cast (which is surprisingly limited considering that it’s a Sonic game), Sage, is also just absolutely wonderful and the way she develops over the game actually almost got me tearing up by the end of it. Extremely hoping that this style of writing continues in future games (even if it’ll likely be with different characters considering Tails’, Knuckles’ and Amy’s arcs here), though considering how this series already showed a bit of hope before before taking it away before with following up Generations with Lost World, who knows

9. I really should talk about the open world though since it was kinda the big selling point of this game when it was announced. I don’t have this giant hatred of them like others do since I’m admittedly not actually a big AAA person in general and y’know just don’t bother with a lot of them because there are literal thousands of games coming out each year that aren’t like them, but I have grown more tired of them after my initial encounters with the genre. Hell I can only easily recall two games where I liked that aspect of them in recent memory: the PS4 Spider-Man games, where the method of traversing it was extremely relaxing and almost zen-like, and Elden Ring where it was pretty much just your usual FromSoft amazingness just blown up in size without any of the markers of things to do filling up the screen nonsense. Frontiers does have that nonsense admittedly, but when you’re blazing through the map at high speeds and a lot of those things are fun platforming bits that you can just get drawn to naturally without opening the map since they just come up when trying to explore and navigate so a lot of the memory tokens (which you also do not need in the slightest to 100% the maps, just gotta do the little challenges associated with revealing parts of the map screen) were just being cleared out without me even really realizing it. I’m not really sure how to end this part but uh yeah open world Sonic surprisingly cool

10. I dunno how to end things in general so yeah very good game despite the couple of caveats would get close to crying at a shot of Eggman on a cliff watching shooting stars again

I really wanted to like this more because what Bloober Team would later do in Observer is just the absolute best shit and all, the atmosphere in the first few chapters was incredibly goddamn effective (and the moment in the ending where you go around your wrecked home is really sobering), and I generally love the way this plays with space, even if the game could have taken a bit more time before plunging me into that stuff.

But ngl the game feels too visually dark in a way that's actually obstructive than atmospheric, with multiple occasions of me being stuck in rooms with nothing to do but go out a door but the exit is so obscured by darkness that I think there's a puzzle. oh and speaking of puzzles whose idea was it to make this less of a """walking simulator""" in the end with a big but slow checker-finding puzzle that feels really out of place

Again, I really wanted to adore this a lot more than I did and I still appreciate it in a lot of ways but this definitely feels like Bloober's still finding their footing. Hopefully the sequel fares better than this.