I find extremely funny that in my day and age, i preffer playing this game over Sonic Colors or Sonic Adventure 2, i dislike all 3 games, but Sonic Boom manages to be mildy entertaining thank to the sheer unpolishness that allows the access to a lot of different ways to skip stuff, mainly the infinite jumps with Knuckles, I mostly used that anytime i didnt feel like doing one of those "WE NEED TO PRESS 3 VERY FAR AWAY SWITCHES TO OPEN THAT DOOR" or something high up that required boring platformig, the glitch is easy but easy to mess up so practising it while beating the game, if i try i can complete the game in under an hour without looking at any speedrun guides just with the knuckles glitch, but is kinda slow so thats why i didnt use it all the time.

Some people (I know I met them) will say that im not allowed to critique the game because i didnt play it the way is meant to be played and use the word "objectively" 7 times in the same sentence, but i decide how i play the game, and i prefer this way more than a 7 minute SA2 boss fight with the same interactivity as a 7 second SA1 boss fight.

Videogames are awesome

The most important part of the game, which is the handling is spot on, fantastic, mostly grip but some drift is good in some close corners, and some of the main mechanics like risk reward with money, the cops, coupled with the race requrements at the end of the week makes the first hours fantastic, i remember fucking up and getting caught on the second day of the first in-game week and loosing a ton of money and having to strategize how im going to upgrade the car, what races would i participate in, where i use my 2 available race restarts and being extremely tense when running the cops with a lot of money on hand.

Said that this game took me 30 hours to complete and basically the last 20 hours werent nearly as great and the last 10 were an obligation to finish the game, i didnt have a bad time since handling is fantastic, but all the difficulty wears off extremely quickly: while being in a slow car and inexperinced, having to deal with a level 5 heat is hard as balls and an achievent to make it out alive, with a fast car and understanding how the AI works, cops are just a chore; when you understand the best path to upgrade and buy cars, money transforms overtime from a strategy game to an acumulating pile of numbers like every AAA ever does, and in races, where I sweated and celebrated my first victory after the prologe since money was hard and you never had a fast car compared to your oponents, I ended up almost lapping A$AP Rocky in a 3 lap race to take his car in one of teh last races of the campaign, kinda like the Dark Souls 1 experience but in this game is waaaaaaaay worse, i played on the hardest difficulty btw.

Every game doesnt need to be extremely mechanically profound or anything like that, but if you main story is around 25 to 35 hours long to beat, as a designer, you cannot expect the player to have the same level of challenge if you havent made any single change to the game through it, in the original Most Wanted police heat levels werent all unlocked from the start so the high heats didnt have to be tuned down so you could escape in your Civic and you also didnt have as much time to learn how they work, level 6 heat only apears at the end of Most Wanted!, also with giving full map access at the start, 30 hours to learn how something works is a fuck ton of hours

I think i will come back to this game with a difficulty mod where requirements are higher, you have less days to meet those requirements or/and there arent races where you win cars

I cannot break the gameplay in fun ways like a badly made sonic game or a very exploitable game; it doesnt give me the challenge of a 3D Ninja Gaiden for example, where level and enemy design are different puzzles of situations you have to solve with the tools at your disposal, just press the jump button to go to a platform, press the assist button to activate a platform, press the hook button to go somewhere, filler, classic 7th gen games filler; it doesnt have a freedom of gameplay ramifications like a Sunset Overdrive or InFamous where i choose what to upgrade, what missions i do or what weapons and scenery i use to tackle fights. and nor it has the slightless DMC or whatever depth in the combat system, no cancels, every attack has massive areas, enemy and playable character alike, also the beat system makes timmings much more simplistic and removes complex button presses.

I have died in this game mainly because i didnt have the patience to dodge hoping I would hit faster to be done with fights sooner.

For the non gameplay part: characters, storytelling and all that, while very well executed, i cannot see the sightless hint of originality, i have already seen this story, this protagonist, these different characters, every new personallty just tells me how proud they are to be cliche, and every potential plothole or whatever is solved by classic "haha this game is goofy remember?" almost 4th wall type of shit.

Nevertheless, im rooting for more game to come out like this, experiences that grab your money once and never ask you again, thank you

Bueno que decir de este juego. Salió en su tiempo con una pésima recepción en occidente y fue una "joya oculta" durante un buen rato para que luego se vuelva una obra apreciada por muchos y una influencia en los juegos indie. Es un rpg que trata de ser diferente en todo y en muchas cosas logra un buen resultado. Si, su gameplay puede ser una mierda ya que es un rpg tradicional que se puede comparar fácilmente con los dragon warrior/dragon quest y termina siendo algo tedioso y molesto, pero los otros elementos del juego (como su música, su estilo, sus personajes, etc.) es lo que hacen que este juego sea diferente a los de su mismo genero y sea disfrutable de jugar. El juego te entretiene de una forma u otra con cada cosa que pasa durante la historia y logra que varios momentos sean memorables. En conclusión este rpg es una muy buena experiencia, icónica por lo diferente que es de otros rpgs volviéndose una gran influencia en la modernidad.