izigame.me

I'm very conflicted about this title. As a Sonic fan, I like it. As a person who plays games and makes them sometimes, I really don't. I would not recommend this title whatsoever to anyone that does not have previous investment in the series. This is a highly experimental title in its structure, and I'm very sure it was used primarily as a stepping stone to improve the engine for the release of Shadow Generations.

As a Sonic fan, this game tickles a lot of itches particularly well in the platforming department. There's a lot of callbacks and character moments to relatively niche lore, always appreciated. The variety of movement types is pretty boundless, spin and drop dashes included later. Another Story allows for multiple playable characters, and adding what is almost another whole game's worth of content in my opinion. The music is stellar as always, not a bad song on the track. Lots of vocal tracks and a variety of genres presented. Art style is pretty cool too, everything feels like it fits in the world. Sometimes solving puzzles in creative ways made me feel pretty smart, though more on that later. The idea of open stage isn't too bad, the execution also not super terrible. Sort of enjoyed some of the puzzles, though wish more of them chained together seamlessly (say, like a regular stage, perhaps). Minigames were fun additions to the story elements, even if they felt a little out of place. Actual stages for the most part were reasonably challenging and not too gimmicky for the main game. Different opinion on Another Story, actually only played the first one and found out the rest were mainly gimmick stages, was burnt out at that point and just skipped them. Despite that, if you're here to play a Sonic game, this is absolutely a Sonic game.

This is where the 'saying nice things about the game' section ends. As a developer, there is a sinkhole the size of Space Colony ARK of issues and technical problems. Pop-in is probably the worst offender, because it's near impossible to see where some of the paths lead to get critical items to progress story, since they're out of vision range. I'm reasonably sure cyloop was pitched as a Pokemon Rangers-esque feature, and in the end result is used more often to unload assets with a much lower-overhead marker. Bouncing off terrain as you run is commonplace, turning a straight line into a 'oh, I guess I'm tricking now', as you try to figure out which button you need to press to exit the differing fall state. Running up walls you shouldn't be able to so you can skip platforming sections is a common thing to do when you can't figure out how something works. Any time you touch the boundary base of a surface at the edge of the map, you have to watch your character slide down it into the abyss at a painfully slow rate.

Speaking of waiting, this game loves unskippable cutscenes that play every time you have to retry something. There's an immersion breaking black-screen pause IN THE MIDDLE OF A CUTSCENE to show yet ANOTHER UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENE. I think the worst part about all of this besides the loading is not knowing when there's going to be a QTE in the middle of it, since they're used incredibly sparingly. There's even a loading time for YES/NO prompts in the game. Like the menu shows up and you can't click anything until a small icon pops up to let you.

I do not like the combat in this game. I have this gripe about a lot of beat-em-ups, but this the type of game where only one or two attacks are relevant, unless there's a gimmick enemy, because Cross-Slash deals the most damage for the least input. Combine this with occasionally janky targeting, relatively uninuitive indication of gimmicks on occasion, and the absolute terrible boss fights, and you have a very frustrating hard-mode experience. Completed the whole game like that by the way, except for two tower challenges in Another Story because they were simply so boring and frustrating I didn't feel like bashing my head against it any longer. If the game focused super heavily on cyloop and not on spamming X until you feel like a combo move, I would have liked it quite a bit. There's a reason people didn't like Werehog.

The boss fights seemed cool until I actually played them. Honestly I was hyped for more time as Super Sonic, since most secret bosses on DS were good. They are not great here. Extremely reliant on parry, which doesn't seem to function like a normal parry. The game says it's not time-based (it is), in Another Story you're required Perfect Parries, and its not ever evident if sidestepping an attack is better or required over parrying. Bosses love unskippable cutscenes, sometimes for their attacks, and getting knocked back (frequent) causes your camera to entirely turn around from the boss. This can lead to getting follow-up attacked while you couldn't control your character because the camera needed to orbit behind you again, great stuff. The lock-on is functionally worthless for attacking and is only useful for centering the camera. And many other issues that are enemy or boss specific.

Lets talk visuals, since we're in a related topic. This game can be so incredibly visually loud for all the things that DO NOT MATTER. I'm looking at you, Sky Serpent boss. When the rings start popping out, they don't damage you. They do however, obscure the missiles you need to parry in order to beat the boss, when getting hit by them due to camera angle was already an issue. Didn't even know I needed to parry the missiles the first time by the way, since there's no parry indication for what attacks are or aren't (or when). However, for something like how to get to a specific collectible, the game does not indicate where the start point for that collectible ever is (in open zone). The camera is also an issue, as sometimes it won't orient properly when entering an open-zone puzzle from anywhere but the start. Or you'll get locked into a camera angle you didn't want because you're passing *through* a puzzle in open-zone.

There's a lot of hidden rules about how aerial moves, like only one double jump, but not everything actually resets it, and only one air boost, but different things reset the air boost and double jump (besides touching the ground of course). Considering the open-zone scoring stages, really wish they had considered the Rush formula. But I guess then collecting Ubisoft open-world items wouldn't have the same draw if getting a bigger boost-gauge was tied to performance.

Last thing before I end this. Another Story is good content. It is arguably has better pacing, content distribution, and depth than the base game. You do have to beat the base game to access it. There's one major problem though, the difficulty jump when playing on Hard is insane. I don't mind repeating stuff, I have and will look up guides for puzzles I can't solve, but genuinely the platforming difficulty change is insane. I just avoided combat encounters altogether in the open-zone (they weren't required to beat Another Story either). Some of this is mitigated by unlocking different character abilities, but SEGA was very intentional about which characters are allowed to complete which challenges. Still don't know why breakable items were colored pink when Amy's puzzles are also colored that though, kind of a 'duh' decision in my opinion. Another Story almost made the mediocrity of the base game seem better by association. Until I did the final boss.