during interviews a lot they said that they consider this the next step for the series like how sonic adventure was back then and i think that's actually insanely accurate
any fuckin notable issue i have with this game technically, control wise, structurally, etc is so incredibly mute when this is the closest i think a sonic game has ever gotten to fully realizing every idea it wanted to get across

in my eyes, by the end this game's themes in writing/gameplay/music/etc all revolve around showing the heart of sonic and this whole series and why it'll never really die no matter how badly the past can cause you problems
i dunno know if anything for sonic is more perfect than than the final boss telling at you through the entire fight that trying is worthless cuz so many before you have failed only for sonic to never even think twice on pushing ahead anyways

this series means so much to me, and i'm glad to see it back

this is everything i could've possibly wanted

i have like so many thoughts on this one and almost all of them are positive this is some of the most fun i've had with a new jrpg release. favorite thing easily is the world and all the gameplay that revolves around it. the maps here are massive with so many things to look at, npcs with frequently changing dialogue, and side quests that i just get lost in it all so much. stuff like a random side quest about a demon who feels weak so he asks you to outside and tell other demons "he's useful, i swear" or another where there are two demons with opposing views on how to run things in that area and it's completely up to you who to help and how the world will be shaped. a lot of this doesn't have very long last consequences outside of the direct rewards you get but it's so frequent and the game has so many ways of doing this i just can't help but want to see it all and get genuinely super attached to this world because of it, and in a game that wants to really dig in to the relationships between humans and demons in smt it's genuinely perfect and smt's general gameplay is more than enough to keep up with it. press turn and demon fusion is fun as always it's genuinely really hard to make it feel bad. THOUGH i think making buff and debuff skills single target is really weird choice and doesn't really benefit the game much but it's not that big a deal.

the story is also pretty underwritten and focuses a lot more on how things work out thematically more than anything so a lot of the characters don't feel nearly as fleshed out as they could be on their own but even then it's hard to be TOO upset about that when the game's closing hours (at least in the true neutral ending that i played) bring it all together in such an insanely good way that's perfect both for this game and following up on the theme's of noctune. was just kinda sitting in pure silence when the credits started, i never imagined this game giving such an emotionally great pay off to story that was mostly just serviceable for a large amount of the game.

this game is good it's good yea i love this