feels like i played this alongside my six year old self. we did it lil' buddy, we finally beat the one game we had no chance in hell of finishing without a gamecube memory card

as with sa1, there's really no point in arguing about this series since the detractors have long made up their shitty minds. sa2's an interesting beast though because it manages to excel just as much as its predecessor... in very different ways!

the speed stages are great, albeit nothing like sa1's. maybe you prefer these more linearly driven, setpiece-focused levels, but i might be partial to having a spindash that can blaze me across entire courses in a matter of seconds. i like going places i shouldn't and being rewarded for it. there's some of that here, but it's not nearly the same. that said, there's no city escape or final rush in sa1 so we'll call it a draw

treasure hunting is improved tenfold. i definitely prefer the newly limited radar system (it makes finding shards early super satisfying) and the overall increased difficulty. especially after knuckles' previous story was an absolute cakewalk. rouge is basically knuckles on hard mode and i generally prefer her side more for that. love her music too, though i wish it was more lyrically driven to better contrast knuckles

shooting's a more mixed bag. tails reps one of the best stages but also most of the worst. eggman on the other hand for the most part lives up to gamma's gameplay well enough - especially once he gets his booster. there's def a sense of flow to these that i feel a solid chunk of people don't give deserved credit because they just wanna go fast and grind rails

...which is a sentiment i don't completely identify with because i feel sa2 is more than the sum of its parts. the narrative is genuinely great and actively shifts moods and gameplay styles accordingly. you're always listening to a banger, you're never on the same sort of stage for more than a few minutes at a time - and you're always pushing closer to one of the greatest fuckin' finales you'll ever find in video games. the quality of direction really skyrocketed here. the last episode's preview alone completely solos every single scene in sa1

one strange oddity though: there's a surprising lack of shadow gameplay here. maybe the devs weren't so confident in him as a newcomer and didn't expect him to be such a hit?

if they knew what was good for them, sonic team would've just made a whole ass game where you play as shadow the hedgehog...

EDIT: after careful deliberation (replaying the shit out of everything) i've decided that i have 0 significant issues with this game. i'm not even standing by what i said about the speed stages before. they're all fuckin' fantastic and i think i might actually prefer these to sa1's (granted i need to spend some more time with that game too for confirmation)

on top of all of what i've said - i've still barely scratched the surface of the chao world content and that on its own is pretty impressive for being in an already tightly-packed game to begin with. how the fuck did this get made in two years?

i also learned last night via the extra video that city escape was inspired by sonic team constantly receiving parking tickets while living in san francisco. that's worthy of some merit on its own

and maybe this is cheating to mention since it's largely battle rerelease content, but i don't care: the multiplayer is some of the most fun i've ever had with a 2-player game

you know what - fuck it, 10/10

EDIT 2: got all 180 emblems. basically a perfect game

(7-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

[Dad: What score are you thinking]

[CatTheCutest: A five!]

[Dad: A five?? Are you sure?]

[CatTheCutest: Well, a four. A four-point-five!!]

Okay. So first up, you start off as Gollum, and if you look at him, he's kind of creepy and horrifying. Then you see some... beautiful image. But then Gollum shows up! GRRR! And also it's very dark, so it's kinda hard to find things, especially those VINES. It was just so dark. There was only like teensy bits of fire and that was your only light. And be careful, or else you'll accidentally fall off a cliff! Cuz I did.

é claro que depois de cinquenta anos de treino hoje a gente considera videogame algo "intuitivo", mas não é uma prática psico ou fisiologicamente natural. minha mãe sofria muito quando tinha que apertar pra frente e o botão de pulo ao mesmo quando eu tentava fazer ela jogar donkey kong country 3, e isso não quer dizer que ela era incapaz ou que o jogo "não ensinava direito", mas sim que ela não havia praticado tanto quanto eu. a graça de unlimited saga é que ele é impraticável, inacostumável, mesmo se você gostar de videogame, gostar de rpg, gostar de jogo por turno, gostar de jogo de tabuleiro ou gostar de outros saga.

não dá pra dizer que ele foi feito pra alguém. intuitivamente ninguém vai orbitá-lo. nem mesmo os criadores! foi um esforço tornar ele tão obtuso quanto é, uma filosofia de atrito, documentada. não acho nem que é um jogo que o kawazu fez pra si mesmo. entretanto, também não é um exercício de hostilidade: o jogo é super agradável esteticamente. ele te chama e te acaricia, te dá a tal da dopamina em todos os momentos de aposta, se revela, mas sua profundidade é tamanha que sempre vai faltar algo para você conseguir entender completamente. ele te manipula em seus mistérios, no que deixa de revelar, nos seus resultados imprevisíveis, nas maldadezinhas ocasionais e nos presentes inesperados.

é legal também que a única cena super animada e elaborada seja no mesmo lugar para todos os personagens — eu sempre ficava ansioso pra chegar em regina leone pra ver como iam mostrar o festival dessa vez. serve como o núcleo de familiaridade entre todas as histórias, visto que o contexto sinestésico delas também varia muito. você aprende bastante cada vez que completa uma, mas nunca o suficiente pra próxima ser fácil ou só uma lapidação de conceitos.

todos os momentos de unlimited saga são como jogar videogame pela primeira vez. eu nem lembro como foi essa sensação de verdade porque na minha cabeça eu já nasci usando uma meia do Sonic, mas agora consigo sentir esse ataque meio esquizo aos sentidos que é apertar um botão e sentir que tenho que lutar com minha própria mente com o qual já tinha me acostumado como se fosse novo. sensação de projeção astral em outro mundo onde não existe nenhuma convenção artística e tudo é cognitivamente violento. não gostaria de morar lá, mas visitar é sempre uma diversão.

Galerians almost immediately starts with you, Rion, in a "Short" state where you can kill any enemy in one hit by just getting near them and also where your health dips by the second. there are some lore documents that could help you figure out what to do, but you know you're playing a survival horror, famous for it's limited resources, so this is definitely scripted right? i'm not gonna waste any resources this early into the game. this meant that 4 out the 4 people (including me) who have recently played it died in this beginning sequence without ever saving, having to restart it's short 3 minute sequence all over again until you figure out the solution. a powerful way to set the stage i think.

Galerians' industrial noise pipe banging, steel ball clacking, radiator recording, air conditioner infused soundtrack will perpetually aggrieve you all the way to the end (this is a good thing). while not really a scary game, it doesn't actually feature any jumpscares and some places, while creepy, are not so gross or otherwordly to inspire any sense of disgust, it does invoke a very specific sense of dread, of something wrong. the hospital features no windows and feels much more like a research facility, your house seems to be stuck in time, the standard hotel still runs a boiler room with terrible piping even though the city seems to be very well developed. "it is what it is", is probably what the citizens of this megalopolis think to themselves. and Rion, being a kid with a mission and no real agency, has no time to think about that. but the player certainly has.

also Babylon Hotel. this game is not very subtle in any of it's themes or imagery (last boss is straight up an H.R. Gieger painting), but this stage. this stage could have it's own entire game made around it (actually now that i think about it someone kinda did it's called hotel dusk play it). not that I do not enjoy the rest of Galerians' stages, the fact that it cut out it's survival horror narrative in several stages is very cool!! but the hotel goes a step beyond. here you have several characters with their own stories and developments and all of them with voiced cutscenes (it's no wonder the hotel is disc 2 by itself). while all of these characters are just a means for Rion to progress the story, most if not all of them have nothing to do with him or each other even. they're living their own feverish personal dramas, each one with their own ambitions, be them good or bad. it paints the picture of a horrible world, one that seems to be crumbling and finding it's denizens progressively more unhinged. and Rion, who has been mostly on a (justified) murderous rampage, seems like the most normal one there. he's just a kid after all, what can he do to emotionally reach these adults even if he has psychic murder powers?

Galerians' ambitious cinematic take on the survival horror genre created a very very short game chock-full of very cool FMVs which makes me think that the fact that it ended up getting a CGI-based OVA retelling of the game's story was it's only logical conclusion (it also has a PS2 sequel that seems to change the vibe completely, looks pretty fun!). i'm gonna watch it someday, but until then, i'm still very glad games like this exist and that people were able to make them in the first place

i cried like twice in the Special Story mode. it shows an unwavering confidence in its own narrative that's pretty rare to see in those licensed Naruto games. it's completely focused on the impossible romance between Boruto, who's a modern-day kid in a country without any active wars, and Nanashi, who lived as a "weapon" in one of the most cruel periods in the Naruto world. even without any bombastic battles or moments that were previously a selling point in the Storm series (which are prolly gone because of the focus on that depressing "History Mode" or maybe Bandai being a dick with deadlines/budget), i still think this is an incredible achievement because it commits almost-wholesale to telling Nanashi's story. like many kinda non-canon anime spinoffs, this can't interfere with the ongoing manga story, but in this case, this is used to the narrative's advantage by furthering the tragedy of the situation.

Boruto travels through his dad's past through a godlike connection inside an MMORPG and falls in love with someone who initially seems like just a goddamn NPC. the story frames them as just friends, but i also think that has to do with the sorta non-canon thing here. Boruto's way too innocent view of the world clashes with the horrors Nanashi lived through, and they both understand each other. they beautifully parallel Naruto and Sasuke's relationship in the original manga. this Special Story mode never stops to question its existence. it just fills itself with a lovely indulgence in its own characters. love it!! i wish Nanashi existed outside of this game lol