You know, it's been a long time since I got to actually replay Sonic Unleashed instead of just loading up my complete save file to play the daytime stages and some of the boss fights, or listening to the soundtrack on Youtube. I used to think this game was pretty decent and that the daytime stages were basically good enough to make up for the boring parts, but that's because I kept going back to them while the boring parts kept fading out from my memory, but experiencing a new save file brought back all those sealed memories to the forefront of my brain. It's not just the night stages, though they are boring ass pace-breakers where you basically stop playing your Sonic game so you can play some uninspired God of War knockoff, but it's also... Everything else.
Why do I need to keep going back to spagonia every time I'm done with a continent? Yeah, I know the in-universe reason, so that Professor Exposition there can tell me where to go next, but sometimes I even need to talk to him in order to unlock shit in the continents I already had unlocked before. Can't he just communicate with Sonic, Chip and Tails using a phone or something like that? Why do I have to collect these stupid medals just to progress? The night stages already take long enough to complete on their own, but you still have to go out of your way to search for every nook and cranny for medals, or else the game will just cock-block you from entering the next stage because you didn't collect enough of the damn things.
"Well, why don't you collect them in the day stages then?"
Have you seen how fast Sonic goes in those things? They obvously weren't meant for exploration, almost every time I collected a medal in these stages it was by pure accident, I was just blasting through and then oh, I collected a medal, arlight then. Plus, these levels don't have as many medals to collect as the night ones, so it's not really worth the effort, I was collecting from the hub worlds and the night stages instead. Let me tell you, I was not having a good time doing any of that, all this tedious process made me think was "Jesus fuck I'll have to do this just to get to the next day stage" instead of having any kind of fun. The hub worlds are charming and have a lot of personality, but the vast majority of the side quests you get to do in them are just glorified time attacks or enemy gauntlets in slightly modified parts of the regular stages.
Oh, and the story is mediocre at best, don't even get me started on that, seriously.
So, if most of my game time is spent doing tedious shit I don't care about while roughly 40% of the game is the part I have fun with, then why was it that I believed Sonic Unleashed was a good game to begin with? It's not, it never was, I just liked the daytime stages way too much and kept replaying them after I was done with this game for the first time, this whole process caused me to have a bit of a selective memory. Eh, I really should have just stuck with the Unleashed Project mod for Sonic Generations, it already gives me the parts of Unleashed I like without forcing me to play through the rest of the game. Yeah, I'll do that, so goodbye Sonic Unleahsed!
Why do I need to keep going back to spagonia every time I'm done with a continent? Yeah, I know the in-universe reason, so that Professor Exposition there can tell me where to go next, but sometimes I even need to talk to him in order to unlock shit in the continents I already had unlocked before. Can't he just communicate with Sonic, Chip and Tails using a phone or something like that? Why do I have to collect these stupid medals just to progress? The night stages already take long enough to complete on their own, but you still have to go out of your way to search for every nook and cranny for medals, or else the game will just cock-block you from entering the next stage because you didn't collect enough of the damn things.
"Well, why don't you collect them in the day stages then?"
Have you seen how fast Sonic goes in those things? They obvously weren't meant for exploration, almost every time I collected a medal in these stages it was by pure accident, I was just blasting through and then oh, I collected a medal, arlight then. Plus, these levels don't have as many medals to collect as the night ones, so it's not really worth the effort, I was collecting from the hub worlds and the night stages instead. Let me tell you, I was not having a good time doing any of that, all this tedious process made me think was "Jesus fuck I'll have to do this just to get to the next day stage" instead of having any kind of fun. The hub worlds are charming and have a lot of personality, but the vast majority of the side quests you get to do in them are just glorified time attacks or enemy gauntlets in slightly modified parts of the regular stages.
Oh, and the story is mediocre at best, don't even get me started on that, seriously.
So, if most of my game time is spent doing tedious shit I don't care about while roughly 40% of the game is the part I have fun with, then why was it that I believed Sonic Unleashed was a good game to begin with? It's not, it never was, I just liked the daytime stages way too much and kept replaying them after I was done with this game for the first time, this whole process caused me to have a bit of a selective memory. Eh, I really should have just stuck with the Unleashed Project mod for Sonic Generations, it already gives me the parts of Unleashed I like without forcing me to play through the rest of the game. Yeah, I'll do that, so goodbye Sonic Unleahsed!