honestly...now that i'm 100% done with the story i think i can say i enjoyed sa1 just a sliiightly bit more because it was short simple and sweet. but that doesn't mean this game isn't nearly as good...for its time it was incredibly ambitious and while this game aged slightly worse than sa1 i think the story, the chao garden, and the battle dlc make it way more replayable than the first game. its definitely still worth playing today, and i can see why many people have this as one of their favorite if not their favorite sonic game. if they ever remaster this game i'll def play it again

okay...wow i have a lot of feelings about this game, some that i'm not even sure if i really feel. like i kind of fucking love it. but this game is also a complete mess. i took the neutral route first and i kind of dreaded having to play through 10 times just to get to the canonical ending. after doing the neutral route twice i went for the semi-dark route and i started to appreciate this game more. i really think it gets better as you play it and get used to the controls and bad story writing/dialogue. a lot of people say the controls are shitty i disagree a bit, i think sonic heroes has worse controls even though this game is built on the same engine. but the story. oh man it barely makes sense (which is normal for a sonic game), on top of that the cringy and confusing wording in the dialogue is laughable...although...i can't help but think its charming in a way. i don't know. i think they probably did the best they could for making the grittiest, darkest e10+ game ever. this game is a product of its time. almost like a time capsule. this was 2005 and video games were starting to appeal to more mature audiences and what better character from the sonic series could you use to capitalize on that? plus shadow was a popular character for being pretty different than the others at the time, i think this game did a decentish job at showing many different interpretations of shadow's character. i honestly kinda enjoyed this game as much as i did with sonic adventure 1 but i don't know if i can justify giving it 4 stars due to its many flaws. however this is not in anyway a bad sonic game. good idea terrible execution and all that. clearly i probably see this game as it should've been and not what it is but does that matter? the most important thing is i enjoyed it. i don't know if i want this game to get a sequel, it sure as hell isn't getting one but i'm maybe not opposed to it. the music in this game is awesome, older sonic music is just too good. also I think shadow is gay. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

awesome game for the gba, which is a lot considering that handheld is definitely not my fave when it comes to its game library...anyway, the story mode is pretty good, you get to play as a ton of characters with their own episode as the story progresses. this game can get pretty hard/challenging at times, although you can sort of customize the difficulty when fighting against emerl as whatever skills you have loaded for him is what you will fight against when a battle against emerl comes up in the story. i noticed the dialogue in this game is a bit different than in other sonic games, its a lot more lax and natural, which give these characters and story a bit more life. if you're not too good at fighting games like me its best to grind in sonic's story since the battles are the easiest there.

honestly, i'm not gonna mince words here - this game sucks. it fucking sucks. i love sonic so much but. it just does. maybe probably not the worst sonic game but good grief its definitely bottom of the barrel stuff. pretty sure what comes to mind about this game, if you mention it to anyone who (is masochistic enough that) has played it, immediately what will come to mind is the bullshit controls. or...perhaps the subpar story if for some reason the controls weren't the main issue for them. but the controls. they're worse than sonic heroes/shadow the hedgehog. worse than sonic r. the wiimote already has tacky motion controls but this game takes it to a whole other level. sonic is always running forward and you can stop by pressing 1 (i didn't find this out until i got to the third world i think, don't know if i wasn't paying attention or it was actually introduced that late) but that won't help you because when you move forward in this game it is not straightforward. its finicky as all hell, even if you keep the wiimote as straight as possible, any slight movement and sonic will move way to the left or right or whatever direction you don't want to move in. 50-70% of the time when you need to flip the wiimote back or forth the game doesn't register it. i know it doesn't because i literally have to flip it using more force than i should for a motion control game and when i decide to stop playing i feel tense because of all that extra stuff i shouldn't have to do. standing up and moving closer to the wii sensor bar doesn't help. shouting at the tv also doesn't help but it does make playing it less irritable i guess. all of the levels are actually quite simple, just collect rings, defeat enemies, find this and that yadda yadda. the real challenge here is fighting with the controls.
moving aside from the gameplay, this game isn't even that pretty to look at. sonic colors is so much prettier to look at but i'm not sure if it's really worthy of comparing since this game was made in 2007 and colors was in 2010. i heard around this time of making this game sega split up the dev teams or something along that line to work on sonic 06 so that's probably one reason why the graphics look bad. the colors are depressingly dull, i get this is meant to be a more "serious" game, takes its themes from a historic viewpoint, and is also on a "weak" gaming system, however i think it's still worthy of criticzing. the ui is kinda eye candy for me though.
why am i giving this a 2.5 instead of a 2 or something lower, even though my views on this game are mostly negative? because the few moments this game decided to work it wasn't too bad. i've played plenty worse games than this. (and...i also have a huge bias because as much as it felt like i was pulling out my hair or teeth constantly, there was some part in the story, or just seeing the characters that kinda dulled that feeling, even for a little bit)
i really believe if the controls were more thought out, the graphics were less pitiful, and the gameplay were improved, this would just be a mediocre game. it could be more than just mediocre but i think that would require more ambition than is needed on a system like the wii.
i haven't finished this game but i've seen all i need to see in order to type up a review. i'll still finish it though. semi-unrelated to this game but i've been trying to finish what i start

also i hate this cover please don't look at me like that

edit: literally two days after i wrote this review i decided to play again and the save file corrupted. guess im forced to just abandon this now

i bought this the year during or a year after it came out and i enjoyed it a lot, got more than halfway through but i just stopped and haven't looked back since. always had it in my mind to continue but realistically i think im probably not going to touch this game again and should probably just sell it or give it to someone who'll hopefully love it more than i did. my time with this game has been great but i don't feel an overwhelming urge to finish. i think i've seen everything i needed to see.

lemme preface this by saying i don't give two shits about medieval fantasy or medieval anything. i just don't care. i only played this because i fucking love sonic so much i'd be willing to play a game that shoves it down your throat. so needless to say i didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the story.

the gameplay is...definitely an improvement from secret rings to say the least. i honestly don't know if the wii motion controls are that shit for any game that isn't 1st party nintendo or if this game utilizes it weird/wrong or if im playing on an emulator or a combo of all the above. even tho this is a short game it took me a longer to complete it (just finishing the story fuck doing all the challenges hell no) than it should've cuz i struggled all the way through. i didn;t bother playing with the characters for even a level cuz for the short time i tested them out they def weren't as good as sonic, i think the levels are pretty much just designed with only sonic in mind, which is kinda lame. uhhh i also nearly sprained my wrist at least two times and got mild muscle pain from swinging the wiimote as hard as i could cuz otherwise it wouldn't register (i swear) so watch out for that

i gotta say i love the illustrations in this game, they're beautiful. its a really nice artstyle. and i love sonic's characterization throughout the entire thing. the final boss fight definitely has a lot of great lines, not going into detail i'd rather not this be a spoilery review.

overall this was kinda a waste of my time but i can't say i really regret it. don't entirely understand the people that absolutely abhor/adore this game but at least now i know what they're talking about