"Please buy my new, definitive collection of classic Sonic games, featuring new content like mission modes, animations, wid-"

Shut the fuck up Iizuka, ain't nobody gonna drop 40 dollars for some dumbass romset.

"ソニックオリジンズを購入するか、私があなたの指を取ります！"

Anything for you, my queen. I only regret that I have but 40 dollars to lose for you, my queen.

got to the 2nd island before i decided to pack it in. delighted that this is resonating for so many people but feel pretty confident in saying that i sadly won't be joining you. everything that i enjoy about sonic is absent here, individual ingredients of sonic play scattered haphazardly through an almost disarmingly ugly default unreal engine map, without context or pace or anything to give them life, a series of endlessly repeated chores that offer various flavors of coins that you feed into various flavors of vending machine that dispense cutscenes that, while a step above the standard of the past few games are still lightyears behind the heights of SA2 and Shadow. ian flynn evidently has an earnest fannish enthusiasm for these characters, which is refreshing, but from what i saw of the story (which is not much in fairness) his script very much struggles to keep it's head above water in terms of actual entertainment.

i feel this way not out of mean-spirited hate for sonic and his fandom, but out of love. i'm not the biggest sonic fan in the world but i do genuinely adore the series in the moments i fully resonate with it, and spent a big portion of my last youtube video waxing lyrical about one of the most derided sonic games. that's why the closing of my time on the first island, of following a map marker and feeding coins into amy rose so she could dispense another anonymous cutscene, over and over again, until it felt less like rolling around at the speed of sound and more like clocking into work, felt so genuinely heartbreaking. the sonic i love, his energy, his attitude, his world...none of that is here. all that remains is a hollow facsimile, dispensing flavorless sonic-brand protein paste. playing this genuinely made me feel sad. there's a moment, climbing the big floating tower on the first island, that the game actually felt like a sonic game, chaining together homing attacks and rail grinds and keeping momentum and speed against rapid challenges...and it was all underscored by the same completely utilitarian sad piano track that perpetually haunts the experience. if this was A Level in a sonic game, there would be one of the franchise's signature sick tunes punctuating my ascent, but the open world has taken even this from me...what are we doing here, when we lose even The Tunes to the open world zeitgeist? why should i keep playing when the only moments with any life are those that briefly come close to recapturing the normal experience of playing a level in the adventure-era games? why don't I just boot up an old SA2 level?

i'm just bummed. i really wanted to like this, but it honestly feels like a companion piece in desperation to the last game I reviewed, a final plea to the zeitgeist that the blue blur can still keep up, one that by most accounts is a success, but one that, for me, discards everything i find loveable about the series and replaces it with a frankenstein quilt of contemporary influences that never work together, one that will almost certainly define the direction of the franchise going forward. ultimately, detchibe is right: I love sonic for being new, bold, and weird. and this game is none of those things. it's stale, safe, and depressingly in line with every other game latching onto The Open World as if it is a universal panacea for franchise stagnation.

i should play spark the electric jester.