Sonic was never good! No, maybe this is where he peaked, and everything thing else fell apart!



So many opinions about this game that are just widely talked about whether they enjoy this game, or just consider it the most mediocre thing since sliced bread. Hell, even I'm at fault at thinking that this is where the series peaked, and I haven't played this game since 2005. So, here we are nearly 20 years later, how does this game still hold up?

Pretty alright when compared to the rest of the sonic games to be completely honest. I wanna get my gripes out of the way so I can talk about the stuff that made me enjoy this very much.

We can't talk about the game without bringing up the very boring gameplay of the emerald hunt stages for both knuckles and rouge. I completed them in roughly around 6-7 ish minutes per level (Including mad space, where I thought I was gonna struggle a bit, ended up just taking me 4 minutes overall.) and moved on. I didn't feel much for these levels as I just wanted to get back into the action of the running and mech sections, since there's at least something to do there than just run around until my beeper starts beeping around an area. Didn't care much about these levels back then, and I still don't care about em now really.

This opinion is slightly mixed as I really enjoyed some parts of the eggman and tails stages at times. But some of these levels were total stinkers to deal with, such the beginning levels for the both of them when you have no upgrades, so you are just going through each section of the level holding up until you get to the goal. But I did have a grin on my face playing through cosmic wall and eternal engine. Man those levels rocked.

Another huge gripe is with the bosses in the game just being punch thing and wait for it to finish it's move without it deviating too much on how to tackle a boss. The only times where that changes is during the second to last boss and the final boss, where they just go all out in stopping you, (Even if the second boss gives you no way to get any rings, pretty much stopping you from getting any from below while in the air. ) but that's about it. No changes and just all punch punch till the thing is dead. The bosses are pushovers, but it wasn't a deal breaker for me continuing the game.

I'll get to the stuff that I did like now.

I'm surprised I didn't have that many complaints about this game like I did with frontiers! The movement still feels fine enough for all characters, with some occasional slippage, but all of it manageable. Sonic and shadow really do shine in their levels when playing through them as jumping to a platform with a spindash jump or even cutting through some levels like in Final Chase still feel like second nature to me after all of this time. I can't describe it, but the movement for these characters just feel pretty damn good.

This is something minor, but I'm glad that most of the levels were fairly short for the most part. Hell, even the ark joint level was roughly around 7 minutes, and it moved on from there. I don't think I can do another 16 hour sonic game like I did with frontiers, so I'm just pretty happy that once a level is finished, we move on to the next part of the story.

There are various different opinions on how a sonic game should be told in it's story and even if some things get deus ex machina'd to hell, it's still a fun time playing through the perspectives of both dark and light side.

I'm not going to be rating the extra content as I wanted to mainly focus on the story mode for this review, but I did play a bit of the extra stuff including chao garden by accidentally grabbing a key, and it's a pretty cute timekiller for someone that wants to raise and put em in events that they have in the garden. I might go back to it and see how far I can get compared to back then when I played on my gamecube.

Did I have fun with this game? Yeah, I really did. I would even say that I still love this game now than I did back then, but I can still recognize the faults that it has. This game is not the end all be all of sonic. And If there is a title for that, then that title should be given to Frontiers for captivating a new wave of sonic fans to enjoy that game.

As for me, I don't play sonic games anymore. I just wanted to see if I had any rose tinted glasses about this game or if what I played back then just sucked. If I had to rate this on the game and nothing else, this would probably be a 3/5 at best, and a 2/5 at it's worst, but my time with the game was just fun overall hearing those tracks while I played through each level.

I'm glad I had fun with this short but sweet ride.

It's really just frustrating me with how un-great it is, i actually liked Sword and Shield AND Arceus despite how unambitious the former was, it just felt like a good Pokemon game, Scarlet feels like it's caught inbetween both of those good games, and what comes out is that horribly okay.

Terastallizing is by far the worst gimmick Pokemon has ever had, and i'm not a fan of any of the gimmicks, they're horribly forced and make you play a certain way every single time, and leaning them is a chore because you know they're just going to remove them in the next game, they're wastes of time that divert resources from actually improving the game. This one is so, so much more awful than all the others. Tera types can be anything for any pokemon, so type advantage as an entire concept is essentially thrown out the window when they're in play, any pokemon can be any type, but this doesn't even work in your favor because afaik the tera type is fixed to a specific pokemon and there is no way to change it, no idea how this is supposed to work in multiplayer, if it's even there. I encountered a gym leader who's main pokemon just doesn't have weaknesses due to their ability and tera type, not having any weaknesses at all is absurd, and a terrible way to try and create difficulty. The entire point of type advantages is so the game comes down to something other than just numbers, it's what makes the game about playing smart and not hard. Without type advantage the only solution to beating a pokemon that can one-shot all of yours is to just go and grind, and that's in a game where every single battle takes forever.

They still have yet to make the combat faster, it takes several minutes just for random battles sometimes. A good gym fight can take half an hour just because of how long it takes for messages and and animations to play out, and the animations don't look good enough for them to force you to watch them every single time. Fire Emblem has let you skip animations since 2012, technically 2007, and Pokemon still refuses to catch up on making the game more playable rather than more watchable. The performance wouldn't bother me as much if it wasn't making an already slow game slower.

The non-technical aspects of the game are very mixed. The region simply isn't interesting, the areas to explore just feel like stock video game settings, mountains, forrests, deserts, we've been here before. The civilized areas have some good detail to them, just not as much personality. I can remember the tropical setting of Alola, and the industrial setting of Unova, but even while looking at this game i find it's setting tepid and dull, and i can't say i feel like i'm going to think about it after i'm done playing it. The character designs are mixed, some are great, some are the most boring i've ever seen. There are some good new pokemon designs, but nothing killer.

The story and characters are a step-up, as they feel more unique and more expressive than any game before. The open-world nature of the game makes the story's lack of focus work in it's favor.

The open-world isn't a meaningful addition for multiple reasons, it's gatekept by level, it's not an interesting setting, and there's not enough to actually do in it. Being able to challenge the gym leaders in any order would be cool if it actually had a level-scaling system, instead they still clearly have a right way and wrong way to do things, it's actually made even more rigid by removing weaknesses to exploit, i don't see any way you're supposed to beat a significantly higher level gym leader, so a vast majority of all players are just going to go in the exact same order.

I can't see any reason why this game would be considered better than the previous two, it removes all of Arceus' improvements, and accentuates Sword and Shield's flaws.

Update: Starting to have fun with it again.

I've been waiting for another good Sonic game for a while that wasn't Mania and I'm glad that Team Sonic delivered. The open world isn't perfect, but it's fun to navigate around especially with the max speed boost. The bosses and mini bosses all are pretty fun to fight with some choice favorites such as the Knight. The music fuckin rocks especially the Titan bosses, good lord it hasn't been since MGR that an OST got me so hype in conjunction with what was happening on the screen.

The game has its crust such as the camera being ass. So much of the platforming relies on it that it getting robbed from you for some weird angle they want to emphasize for certain enemies make it obnoxious to navigate. Plus the paths that turn into 2D movement completely fuck with your ability to expediently move around. The overworld needs some fine tuning if they're gonna go forward with it, because that's really the majority of my complaints is how janky so much of it is. Aside from that I had a blast. Even the story of the game is pretty decent for what it is featuring character development for characters who haven't had any in eons and a pretty strong character arc for both Eggman and the new girl, Sage.

Also there is a fishing minigame that has some fun finds and is easy to get through quickly, god bless. Had so much fun with this game, I hope they can make a good follow up.