OhMyGoatfish
11 reviews liked by OhMyGoatfish
Marking as shelved as I plan to pick up Another Code R's remake later.
Christ, whoever said this was a faithful remake I think is lying to you. They've changed so much. I'm a diehard fan of this series and especially the original game and I feel like this is a major letdown compared to what I think of the original. I feel the original was a perfectly fine game and I'm confused as to why so many things are different. Ashley seems like a very different person, missing the attitude and strong emotions she had in the original game (which made sense for her age). Some character's stories are so different (I can't get into who without spoiling, but the villain) that I feel like it just messes stuff up. The pacing felt really strange, it either felt like it was moving at super speed or extremely slow and events from the original game were shifted around. It's not that big of a deal, but ended up bothering me.
Major issue of mine is the fact I felt like I couldn't connect to any of these characters in the same way I did for the original, which I think is one of the major things that makes CiNG works so good, and what made this a huge letdown. I feel like you're going to be inevitably missing stuff from the story with this having a shift from 2d to 3d- its sense of scale is much larger and I found myself not at all invested in the story of the Edwards, which is something I very much enjoyed in the original. I did look and notice that they got new scriptwriters for these remakes, which might explain some of my dissatisfaction... but why change up the script of a perfectly fine game and not just focus on adapting it straight to 3D, no need to remake a soundtrack you can find high quality versions of elsewhere (speaking in Another Code R's case), and especially no need to change the script.
I do like the art direction and music here, they're both good. This just isn't my Ashley and sure isn't the Another Code I remember. This is definitely Another Code for a newer generation, but it won't live up to the originals. I can't confidently reccomend this to anyone who actually cares a lot about the original games.
Christ, whoever said this was a faithful remake I think is lying to you. They've changed so much. I'm a diehard fan of this series and especially the original game and I feel like this is a major letdown compared to what I think of the original. I feel the original was a perfectly fine game and I'm confused as to why so many things are different. Ashley seems like a very different person, missing the attitude and strong emotions she had in the original game (which made sense for her age). Some character's stories are so different (I can't get into who without spoiling, but the villain) that I feel like it just messes stuff up. The pacing felt really strange, it either felt like it was moving at super speed or extremely slow and events from the original game were shifted around. It's not that big of a deal, but ended up bothering me.
Major issue of mine is the fact I felt like I couldn't connect to any of these characters in the same way I did for the original, which I think is one of the major things that makes CiNG works so good, and what made this a huge letdown. I feel like you're going to be inevitably missing stuff from the story with this having a shift from 2d to 3d- its sense of scale is much larger and I found myself not at all invested in the story of the Edwards, which is something I very much enjoyed in the original. I did look and notice that they got new scriptwriters for these remakes, which might explain some of my dissatisfaction... but why change up the script of a perfectly fine game and not just focus on adapting it straight to 3D, no need to remake a soundtrack you can find high quality versions of elsewhere (speaking in Another Code R's case), and especially no need to change the script.
I do like the art direction and music here, they're both good. This just isn't my Ashley and sure isn't the Another Code I remember. This is definitely Another Code for a newer generation, but it won't live up to the originals. I can't confidently reccomend this to anyone who actually cares a lot about the original games.
Biomutant
2021
clunky and very repetitive but the charm of being a little rat guy didnt wear off at all
One Night Stand
2016
This review contains spoilers
It's remarkable just how bad I felt about myself after seeing the last of One Night Stand's twelve endings. Each brief playthrough starts the same way: you wake up with a hangover and no memories of the previous night. You're in an unfamiliar bedroom with a naked stranger next to you.
I assume most people will approach the first playthrough much like I did, by acting it out roughly like I would have done in real life. For what it's worth, I was pretty much honest with the stranger and made awkward but sincere attempts to make conversation and learn more about her - and how we ended up together. We ended up hugging and parting on mostly good terms.
Then the game asks me how this could have ended differently.
Now, I'm not generally one for multiple playthroughs, especially not in games where making choices are the main form of interaction. I tend to treat such games almost like morality plays or little tests for myself, truly letting myself sink into the situation and dealing with it honestly. Approaching these types of stories in terms of 100%ing them would take some of the value out of my personal experience. This is why I'm never going to play the Genocide Route in Undertale, or why I'm not keen on replaying Disco Elysium - two of my all-time favourite games. Exploring all the #content of a game just to see it all doesn't necessarily make for a richer experience than the one you get by just following your own path.
With all that said... could this have gone differently? Something about the restrained brevity of One Night Stand, along with the lovely hand-drawn rotoscoped art and naturalistic writing, made me curious to at least explore more alternatives.
And it was here where I started playing One Night Stand properly. Because I don't think One Night Stand is a game asking the player to consider how they would act after waking up next to a stranger in bed - it's a game about being a manipulative asshole.
The majority of the game's endings require you to act like a colossal douchebag and do both horrendous and criminal things to an innocent stranger. Some are over-the-top awful, like stealing her underwear (you can either do this stealthily or confront her while wearing nothing but her own panties). Others are more insidious, most of which require you to look through her personal belongings. You dig through her wallet, her drawers, you mess with her stuff, you look at her laptop and read her messages.
In most cases you get an ending that most would classify as "bad", but the game itself does not make any distinctions. All routes are as valid, whether you sneak out while she's doubled over the toilet, if she throws you out in the nude, or if you part as friends. The point isn't whether individual endings are Good or Bad - the game is putting you in the mindset of a manipulator.
One Night Stand makes you act like a horrible person, and it took me a while to even notice. After all, most games treat invasions of privacy as alternately harmless or necessary evils - a way to gather information. In One Night Stand, your character makes the goal clear that you need to find out this girl's name before she realises that you've forgotten. So naturally, peeking through her wallet is fine, right? Well, it turns out she doesn't remember your name either, and she's totally understanding that last night is blurry in your mind. The entire premise, as defined by your protagonist, is pointless, and you've acted horribly to resolve it.
The narrative conceit of One Night Stand tricks you into thinking that you are acting as yourself, while making you actually step into the mind of a protagonist that is clearly self-serving and manipulative - sometimes to a criminal degree. Even if you do everything "right" and get the "best" ending, you've more than likely done so by betraying an innocent person's trust multiple times.
When you've finally 100%ed the game and seen all endings, you get a text message. It's from your friend, whose messages woke you up in the first place. At first he was pissed off that you bailed on him last night, especially since you were the one who convinced him to stand up his date to hang out with you. This time he's even more angry, because it turns out that date was Robin - the girl whose house you've just left.
This is the game's ultimate punchline. There was no "best" ending, there is no canon golden ending where your character and Robin end up in a sweet, loving relationship, because you are horrible. All of the endings are canon because all of them represent actions your character - and by extension the player controlling them - were willing to take.
The game put me in the shoes of a villain and made the worst actions seem if not reasonable then at least defendable, given that these are just branching paths stretching out from one what-if crossroads. But this final denouement makes it clear that you were playing an abuser all along.
With this final sucker punch, Kinmoku manages to do what so many games try and fail to achieve: make me feel guilty. Because I realised that what I was doing was manipulating somebody in order to get close to them. I was effectively stalking them, prying into their personal life, going through their belongings, exploiting their vulnerability in order to get closer to them. And I felt awful, way worse than The Last of Us' "don't you feel bad about killing all the people we made you kill" schtick ever did.
One Night Stand is an intimate story and it's exactly because of the small scope that it manages to construct such a powerful tale of control and exploitation. It makes you empathise with the most banal of evil, and sympathise with those who become their victims.
I assume most people will approach the first playthrough much like I did, by acting it out roughly like I would have done in real life. For what it's worth, I was pretty much honest with the stranger and made awkward but sincere attempts to make conversation and learn more about her - and how we ended up together. We ended up hugging and parting on mostly good terms.
Then the game asks me how this could have ended differently.
Now, I'm not generally one for multiple playthroughs, especially not in games where making choices are the main form of interaction. I tend to treat such games almost like morality plays or little tests for myself, truly letting myself sink into the situation and dealing with it honestly. Approaching these types of stories in terms of 100%ing them would take some of the value out of my personal experience. This is why I'm never going to play the Genocide Route in Undertale, or why I'm not keen on replaying Disco Elysium - two of my all-time favourite games. Exploring all the #content of a game just to see it all doesn't necessarily make for a richer experience than the one you get by just following your own path.
With all that said... could this have gone differently? Something about the restrained brevity of One Night Stand, along with the lovely hand-drawn rotoscoped art and naturalistic writing, made me curious to at least explore more alternatives.
And it was here where I started playing One Night Stand properly. Because I don't think One Night Stand is a game asking the player to consider how they would act after waking up next to a stranger in bed - it's a game about being a manipulative asshole.
The majority of the game's endings require you to act like a colossal douchebag and do both horrendous and criminal things to an innocent stranger. Some are over-the-top awful, like stealing her underwear (you can either do this stealthily or confront her while wearing nothing but her own panties). Others are more insidious, most of which require you to look through her personal belongings. You dig through her wallet, her drawers, you mess with her stuff, you look at her laptop and read her messages.
In most cases you get an ending that most would classify as "bad", but the game itself does not make any distinctions. All routes are as valid, whether you sneak out while she's doubled over the toilet, if she throws you out in the nude, or if you part as friends. The point isn't whether individual endings are Good or Bad - the game is putting you in the mindset of a manipulator.
One Night Stand makes you act like a horrible person, and it took me a while to even notice. After all, most games treat invasions of privacy as alternately harmless or necessary evils - a way to gather information. In One Night Stand, your character makes the goal clear that you need to find out this girl's name before she realises that you've forgotten. So naturally, peeking through her wallet is fine, right? Well, it turns out she doesn't remember your name either, and she's totally understanding that last night is blurry in your mind. The entire premise, as defined by your protagonist, is pointless, and you've acted horribly to resolve it.
The narrative conceit of One Night Stand tricks you into thinking that you are acting as yourself, while making you actually step into the mind of a protagonist that is clearly self-serving and manipulative - sometimes to a criminal degree. Even if you do everything "right" and get the "best" ending, you've more than likely done so by betraying an innocent person's trust multiple times.
When you've finally 100%ed the game and seen all endings, you get a text message. It's from your friend, whose messages woke you up in the first place. At first he was pissed off that you bailed on him last night, especially since you were the one who convinced him to stand up his date to hang out with you. This time he's even more angry, because it turns out that date was Robin - the girl whose house you've just left.
This is the game's ultimate punchline. There was no "best" ending, there is no canon golden ending where your character and Robin end up in a sweet, loving relationship, because you are horrible. All of the endings are canon because all of them represent actions your character - and by extension the player controlling them - were willing to take.
The game put me in the shoes of a villain and made the worst actions seem if not reasonable then at least defendable, given that these are just branching paths stretching out from one what-if crossroads. But this final denouement makes it clear that you were playing an abuser all along.
With this final sucker punch, Kinmoku manages to do what so many games try and fail to achieve: make me feel guilty. Because I realised that what I was doing was manipulating somebody in order to get close to them. I was effectively stalking them, prying into their personal life, going through their belongings, exploiting their vulnerability in order to get closer to them. And I felt awful, way worse than The Last of Us' "don't you feel bad about killing all the people we made you kill" schtick ever did.
One Night Stand is an intimate story and it's exactly because of the small scope that it manages to construct such a powerful tale of control and exploitation. It makes you empathise with the most banal of evil, and sympathise with those who become their victims.
Wii Fit
2007
Told me I was Obese.
Sonic Frontiers
2022
I wish Eggman was my dad
Sonic Frontiers
2022
This review contains spoilers
Vandalize my Heart you blue rat. (This review won't have major spoilers until I quite literally type out "Major Game Spoilers" in the review)
Alright. So I've 100%ed everything. Got all the levels to max, viewed all the side stories, completed all the cyberspace levels with an S rank, nabbed all the fish, and have defeated every guardian and titan in the game all on Hard mode. With that being said, Sonic Frontiers, overall, surprised me. Initial gameplay shown off from IGN made the game look rough, slow, and boring. But for some awful reason, every single game journalist make Sonic games look as bad as possible. It took a bit but we all finally got the game (some of us earlier than others) and were able to see for ourselves. I was originally in the camp of people that thought this game wouldn't be anything good. But as I played I felt my opinion change throughout my time with the game.
Guess I might as well start off with Gameplay. The game has you going through both the open worlds of the Starfall Islands and the digitized realm of Cyberspace. Let's start with the Starfall Islands. There are a total of five islands (one of them is mostly a playground that sets up for story in the game). Exploring the Kronos and Ares islands (1st and 2nd) was magical. It was very fun running around and the amount of random little things to do in the world like looking for memory tokens, defeating guardians, and just screwing around was great. The first two islands are the game at it's peak. It takes a noticable dip once you get to Chaos Island the 3rd one. The islands inside Chaos Island as a whole are split apart meaning you'll have to find some sort of unorthodox way there like using a travel bird enemy or something. That along with the lava pits you can't see coming at such fast speeds make for instant deaths. It's annoying. That is all I will say on the islands for now and will talk more about the other two later. The game itself, for the most part, is sound. It's a bit janky at times but this is the first time they've tried something like this. I've always felt that it was kind of weird that you'd run on terrain with an incline, either going up or down, and for some reason your gravity would keep holding on to the ground if you were boosting. I get it. If it wasn't like this, you'd be shooting off into space 24/7. They added back a large assortment of moves back into Sonic's arsenal while also adding in some new ones. He gets his standard jump, boost, and stomp as well as the returning light speed dash. I don't really like that, now, the move cancels out all of your forward air momentum so you kinda just drop like a rock after using it. It wasn't like this in the previous games so why change it? Along with his old moves he gets some new ones. The drop dash from Sonic Mania makes a playable debut in the 3D areas and I can honestly see this becoming a staple in sonic games. Although here it felt odd. After you got moving you could hardly move right or left. In 2D sections, the momentum with this move is completely non-existent making it kinda worthless. It's a move I only use when I want to go in a straight line down a hill or something. The Cyloop is a Frontiers exclusive. You run around in a little circle and you can uncover rings and other items, solve puzzles, and stagger enemies. It's a fun move to use. The combat is fine. I didn't expect anything like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, but it's fun enough. You get a large number of moves to integrate into your combos through a skill tree which at times can feel very accidental. Then there are other times where I'm sure I'm doing the button inputs correctly and nothing happens. It's again janky but the times where it works it's fun combining move after move and annihilating your opponents. The Titan bosses are one of the major highlights of the game by the way. Huge Shadow of the Colossus type enemies that you take on head on as Super Sonic.
Cyberspace should feel a lot more familiar to fans of Unleashed, Colors and Generations. They're your standard fair when it comes to levels in the game. Some of em are fun and others are completely 2D and are more just tests of patience than anything. Some of the levels reuse stage paths from games as such as Adventure 2, Unleashed, Generations and more if I recall. I'll admit I wasn't really a fan of this idea at first, but it was fun to see something familiar to me in a stage and go "Oh this is White Jungle from Adventure 2!" It makes sense that some of these stages are like this given context. The stages can last anywhere from around a minute to an upwards of almost three. They're a good break from exploring the Starfall Islands all the time.
Hmm. Guess I should cover story now. They have Ian Flynn of the Sonic IDW comics fame doing the main writing of the game and that's already a great sign. The gang, Sonic, Tails, and Amy are brought over to the Starfall Islands when they hear that 1. The Chaos Emeralds are being attracted over there, and 2. Dr. Eggman is already there scheming. The three of them are separated due to a wormhole and Tails and Amy are captured and split between the digital realm and real life. Knuckles has also been captured of his own accord but the events leading up to that are available on YouTube. Sonic must save his friends and find out the mysteries revolving around the islands and his new adversary Sage. Even though I marked this review as spoilers, I likely won't go into full detail on the story until the end of this review. It's a roller coaster of emotions, and it's really great to see the characters interacting like normal people again instead of making dumb quips all the damn time.
The music of the game is great. Even as I'm writing this I'm listening to the entire Cyberspace soundtrack. Sonic games as of late have started to take a more electronic turn with it's music. I'm pretty indifferent to the change. I'll definitely miss the rock of old and more varied tracks of the 2010s but the music isn't bad. The overworld music is adaptive so you'll hear more parts of the track come out the more progress you make on the islands. The music of these islands are all very tranquil and quiet. It fits the kind of empty world atmosphere they're going for. Reminds me a bit of Nier Automata in that sense. The boss fights against the Titans are absolute bangers though. Can't believe they got Kellin Quinn from fucking Sleeping With Sirens to do the vocals for the boss themes. As a little personal tidbit, I used to make fun of my sister for listening to that "emo shit". Now I listen to music like that regularly and have the boss themes on loop. Great music and makes the bosses feel that much more menacing. I completely forgot to point out that this game has fishing in it with Big the Cat, and the music is such a chill track. It has a "lofi beats to study to" vibe to it. Can't wait to listen to it more on my own.
On a graphical front, the game looks pretty good. I played on PC with all the graphical settings on max and was able to keep a consistent 60 FPS (even if I wish I could uncap the framerate). The worlds are all pretty realistic looking even if a bit barren at times. Shoutouts to the water. Some of the most realistic looking water I've ever seen in a video game. Of course it's not without it's problems. Pop-in. It's really really bad in this game. At the fast rate that Sonic is moving, I guess it would be difficult to render everything in... on the switch. It kinda feels like they made this game with the switch in mind, and then just made it available everywhere else with a higher resolution and framerate dependant on where you're running the game.
Suppose I should get the extra stuff out before the spoiler talk. The overall experience on PC was enjoyable. The game still has Denuvo Anti-Tamper as of writing this review, so that is a minus and at Launch, the game would crash each time you tried to go into the graphics settings. Thankfully, as far as I'm sure, that issue has been fixed now. But other than those things the PC version of the game is pretty cool. The game itself, I found to be pretty buggy though. Random pieces of terrain would bring me to a screeching halt or jolt me into the air and to my impending death. There were a lot of times where I'd pass through collision. Sometimes it was against the guardians and one time I passed through the floor on a side story mission. The game freaked out cause you're not supposed to die in those missions, and I almost got softlocked in the game. It's not a hot mess or anything but expect to run into some bugs while playing.
--MAJOR SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT-- (Lot of spitballing with no cohesion here since I've got a ton of thoughts on what takes place here)
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Alrighty so the forth and fifth islands Rhea Island and Ouranos Island. Rhea Island is more or less a playground if your first priority isn't the Towers that you need to take out. Not really much happened there on a gameplay front, but I think it is quite interesting that they connected the Kocos, the new little chao replacements as being connected to the same Chaos from Adventure 1. Ouranos Island is where things really start to get going. That all so familiar tune I heard way back when the game had a mini trailer reveal was heard in full and I couldn't wait to see what happens next. It's great that Sage, the sassy lost child that was always annoyingly vague about everything, was actually working with Sonic now and being a lot more open with him. But at the same time, the game takes so many twists and turns that it's kinda hard to follow. From what I recall Sonic took on the Supreme Titan that was actually just being possessed by a concept or state of mind called The End which is the true final boss. That threw me for a loop and I almost feel like it came out of left field. Sonic and Sage team up to take on the end and here along with the other times is where I really felt what could be inspiration from Nier. I could be wrong but I just notice what I see. Honestly, I thought that it was a bit underwhelming moreso than the Titan boss fights in the game. Sonic and Sage take out The End and Sage "sacrifices" herself at the same time. I think the ending is pretty good, all of the main cast deciding that they all want to do their own thing and not just be tied down by Sonic. But at the same time there's a ton of unanswered questions with this game. We'll just have to see what Ian is cooking later.
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Overall, this game is a not a perfect one. It is flawed in more ways than one, but it's a long jump in the right direction for Sonic and the series moving forward. They've laid a great foundation. Now all they need to do is keep going with this momentum. With that being said for the first time in years, I'm excited to see where Sonic will go next.
Alright. So I've 100%ed everything. Got all the levels to max, viewed all the side stories, completed all the cyberspace levels with an S rank, nabbed all the fish, and have defeated every guardian and titan in the game all on Hard mode. With that being said, Sonic Frontiers, overall, surprised me. Initial gameplay shown off from IGN made the game look rough, slow, and boring. But for some awful reason, every single game journalist make Sonic games look as bad as possible. It took a bit but we all finally got the game (some of us earlier than others) and were able to see for ourselves. I was originally in the camp of people that thought this game wouldn't be anything good. But as I played I felt my opinion change throughout my time with the game.
Guess I might as well start off with Gameplay. The game has you going through both the open worlds of the Starfall Islands and the digitized realm of Cyberspace. Let's start with the Starfall Islands. There are a total of five islands (one of them is mostly a playground that sets up for story in the game). Exploring the Kronos and Ares islands (1st and 2nd) was magical. It was very fun running around and the amount of random little things to do in the world like looking for memory tokens, defeating guardians, and just screwing around was great. The first two islands are the game at it's peak. It takes a noticable dip once you get to Chaos Island the 3rd one. The islands inside Chaos Island as a whole are split apart meaning you'll have to find some sort of unorthodox way there like using a travel bird enemy or something. That along with the lava pits you can't see coming at such fast speeds make for instant deaths. It's annoying. That is all I will say on the islands for now and will talk more about the other two later. The game itself, for the most part, is sound. It's a bit janky at times but this is the first time they've tried something like this. I've always felt that it was kind of weird that you'd run on terrain with an incline, either going up or down, and for some reason your gravity would keep holding on to the ground if you were boosting. I get it. If it wasn't like this, you'd be shooting off into space 24/7. They added back a large assortment of moves back into Sonic's arsenal while also adding in some new ones. He gets his standard jump, boost, and stomp as well as the returning light speed dash. I don't really like that, now, the move cancels out all of your forward air momentum so you kinda just drop like a rock after using it. It wasn't like this in the previous games so why change it? Along with his old moves he gets some new ones. The drop dash from Sonic Mania makes a playable debut in the 3D areas and I can honestly see this becoming a staple in sonic games. Although here it felt odd. After you got moving you could hardly move right or left. In 2D sections, the momentum with this move is completely non-existent making it kinda worthless. It's a move I only use when I want to go in a straight line down a hill or something. The Cyloop is a Frontiers exclusive. You run around in a little circle and you can uncover rings and other items, solve puzzles, and stagger enemies. It's a fun move to use. The combat is fine. I didn't expect anything like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, but it's fun enough. You get a large number of moves to integrate into your combos through a skill tree which at times can feel very accidental. Then there are other times where I'm sure I'm doing the button inputs correctly and nothing happens. It's again janky but the times where it works it's fun combining move after move and annihilating your opponents. The Titan bosses are one of the major highlights of the game by the way. Huge Shadow of the Colossus type enemies that you take on head on as Super Sonic.
Cyberspace should feel a lot more familiar to fans of Unleashed, Colors and Generations. They're your standard fair when it comes to levels in the game. Some of em are fun and others are completely 2D and are more just tests of patience than anything. Some of the levels reuse stage paths from games as such as Adventure 2, Unleashed, Generations and more if I recall. I'll admit I wasn't really a fan of this idea at first, but it was fun to see something familiar to me in a stage and go "Oh this is White Jungle from Adventure 2!" It makes sense that some of these stages are like this given context. The stages can last anywhere from around a minute to an upwards of almost three. They're a good break from exploring the Starfall Islands all the time.
Hmm. Guess I should cover story now. They have Ian Flynn of the Sonic IDW comics fame doing the main writing of the game and that's already a great sign. The gang, Sonic, Tails, and Amy are brought over to the Starfall Islands when they hear that 1. The Chaos Emeralds are being attracted over there, and 2. Dr. Eggman is already there scheming. The three of them are separated due to a wormhole and Tails and Amy are captured and split between the digital realm and real life. Knuckles has also been captured of his own accord but the events leading up to that are available on YouTube. Sonic must save his friends and find out the mysteries revolving around the islands and his new adversary Sage. Even though I marked this review as spoilers, I likely won't go into full detail on the story until the end of this review. It's a roller coaster of emotions, and it's really great to see the characters interacting like normal people again instead of making dumb quips all the damn time.
The music of the game is great. Even as I'm writing this I'm listening to the entire Cyberspace soundtrack. Sonic games as of late have started to take a more electronic turn with it's music. I'm pretty indifferent to the change. I'll definitely miss the rock of old and more varied tracks of the 2010s but the music isn't bad. The overworld music is adaptive so you'll hear more parts of the track come out the more progress you make on the islands. The music of these islands are all very tranquil and quiet. It fits the kind of empty world atmosphere they're going for. Reminds me a bit of Nier Automata in that sense. The boss fights against the Titans are absolute bangers though. Can't believe they got Kellin Quinn from fucking Sleeping With Sirens to do the vocals for the boss themes. As a little personal tidbit, I used to make fun of my sister for listening to that "emo shit". Now I listen to music like that regularly and have the boss themes on loop. Great music and makes the bosses feel that much more menacing. I completely forgot to point out that this game has fishing in it with Big the Cat, and the music is such a chill track. It has a "lofi beats to study to" vibe to it. Can't wait to listen to it more on my own.
On a graphical front, the game looks pretty good. I played on PC with all the graphical settings on max and was able to keep a consistent 60 FPS (even if I wish I could uncap the framerate). The worlds are all pretty realistic looking even if a bit barren at times. Shoutouts to the water. Some of the most realistic looking water I've ever seen in a video game. Of course it's not without it's problems. Pop-in. It's really really bad in this game. At the fast rate that Sonic is moving, I guess it would be difficult to render everything in... on the switch. It kinda feels like they made this game with the switch in mind, and then just made it available everywhere else with a higher resolution and framerate dependant on where you're running the game.
Suppose I should get the extra stuff out before the spoiler talk. The overall experience on PC was enjoyable. The game still has Denuvo Anti-Tamper as of writing this review, so that is a minus and at Launch, the game would crash each time you tried to go into the graphics settings. Thankfully, as far as I'm sure, that issue has been fixed now. But other than those things the PC version of the game is pretty cool. The game itself, I found to be pretty buggy though. Random pieces of terrain would bring me to a screeching halt or jolt me into the air and to my impending death. There were a lot of times where I'd pass through collision. Sometimes it was against the guardians and one time I passed through the floor on a side story mission. The game freaked out cause you're not supposed to die in those missions, and I almost got softlocked in the game. It's not a hot mess or anything but expect to run into some bugs while playing.
--MAJOR SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT-- (Lot of spitballing with no cohesion here since I've got a ton of thoughts on what takes place here)
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Alrighty so the forth and fifth islands Rhea Island and Ouranos Island. Rhea Island is more or less a playground if your first priority isn't the Towers that you need to take out. Not really much happened there on a gameplay front, but I think it is quite interesting that they connected the Kocos, the new little chao replacements as being connected to the same Chaos from Adventure 1. Ouranos Island is where things really start to get going. That all so familiar tune I heard way back when the game had a mini trailer reveal was heard in full and I couldn't wait to see what happens next. It's great that Sage, the sassy lost child that was always annoyingly vague about everything, was actually working with Sonic now and being a lot more open with him. But at the same time, the game takes so many twists and turns that it's kinda hard to follow. From what I recall Sonic took on the Supreme Titan that was actually just being possessed by a concept or state of mind called The End which is the true final boss. That threw me for a loop and I almost feel like it came out of left field. Sonic and Sage team up to take on the end and here along with the other times is where I really felt what could be inspiration from Nier. I could be wrong but I just notice what I see. Honestly, I thought that it was a bit underwhelming moreso than the Titan boss fights in the game. Sonic and Sage take out The End and Sage "sacrifices" herself at the same time. I think the ending is pretty good, all of the main cast deciding that they all want to do their own thing and not just be tied down by Sonic. But at the same time there's a ton of unanswered questions with this game. We'll just have to see what Ian is cooking later.
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Overall, this game is a not a perfect one. It is flawed in more ways than one, but it's a long jump in the right direction for Sonic and the series moving forward. They've laid a great foundation. Now all they need to do is keep going with this momentum. With that being said for the first time in years, I'm excited to see where Sonic will go next.
Robotics;Notes DaSH
2019
they really didnt do my favourite cast in all of gaming history justice with this game.
its just fanservice with a bit of story at the end that is pretty much the same as robotics;notes.
also had multiple glitches happen throughout the playthrough, including Misa's model stuck t-posing throughout all of it.
its just fanservice with a bit of story at the end that is pretty much the same as robotics;notes.
also had multiple glitches happen throughout the playthrough, including Misa's model stuck t-posing throughout all of it.
This game ruined my life. I have spent over 2000 hours on it and all over games pale in comparison. I love it.
this game is honestly some of the hypest shit. "it hasnt aged well" shut the fuck up the game has sonic the hedgehog jumping out of a helicopter and snowboarding on the streets of sanfran. its so fucking cool
SA2 is one of the most sincere and powerful games I've played. I don't care about the nitpicks with the different gameplay styles or the camera - the game sets out to be a serious Sonic story with cool characterization and adrenaline-filled setpieces and it excels at just that. Even if it doesn't reach the same overall peaks that some other Sonic games do, I can always come back to this one and say I love it with no regrets.