In terms of aesthetic cohesion that probably is the only level where they actually succeeded in the unique twist gimmick they were going for. For example - the enormous crab in Green Hills just... doesn't work as well. But yeah - I really liked that level once I got a handle on it - but it also can be one of the most frustrating for someone who doesn't completely 'get' the controls. Watching the speed run of that level looks awesome, but for a low skilled player the level is just awkward to both play and watch, constant stop/starts and lots, lots, lots of hidden traps.
Infinite's backstory is pretty tragic if you think about it. Shadow murders his jackal squad (as in literally kills them to death), Infinite tries to ambush Shadow and avenge his fallen brethren but gets repeatedly kicked in the face and humiliated. "Worthless, don't show your pathetic face around me ever again", says Shadow and chaos controls away. Infinite has a meltdown, takes Shadow's words to heart and starts wearing that cumbersome iron mask to hide his "pathetic face", and more importantly gives up on life and implants Phantom Ruby into his chest, making him indeed stronger but not less insecure. Finally, he runs again into Shadow, his now sworn enemy. And Shadow is like "who?". This is honestly pretty dark for a cartoon game. Shadow is the real MVP and the true Chaotic Neutral character in the universe. That field where he grows his fucks is completely barren.
I've seen people complain a lot about Shadow's characterization in modern games, but honestly this seems totally amazing
So, I was thinking about Forces' playerbase as mentioned in this thread, and I wanted to bring up something I noticed recently that may be illuminating. Here's the percentage of players who completed the first three zones and made it through Death Egg Robot boss in Sonic Generations on Steam: And here's the percentage of players who completed the main story in Sonic Forces: The caveat here, of course, is that Sonic Generations is regarded as one of the best 3D Sonic games, and therefore probably picked up a lot of sales via positive word of mouth. Whereas if you bought Forces, especially on PC, then chances are you're enough of a Sonic fan to be aware of what you're getting into, and have your expectations set accordingly. Still. Forces has always seemed like a game so simple and streamlined, it's only going to be engaging at most for ONE playthrough. This was not the result of laziness or a rushed development. Beta level layouts have been found that were much more challenging and complex. But it's easy to imagine, perhaps, that Forces was playtested in development, and they got feedback that players who weren't Sonic diehards weren't having fun. Or heck, maybe higher-ups at Sega just looked at achievement data like THIS, and it was decided the game should be more accessible. Most modern players are only gonna play a game one time, anyway, and if they get too frustrated, they're just gonna bounce off. Anecdotally, I've seen a couple of parents describe how their kids hit a wall in Generations, and found Mania too obtuse and difficult, but got positively obsessed with Forces, designing tons of avatars, unlocking all the customizations, and investing in the story/characters, because the gameplay was so much more streamlined and approachable. If the game is considered a success internally at Sega, then it's probably because that was exactly what they were going for.
Ah the Fuse dilemma. Something that looked so awesome in its initial pre-release stage had its positive qualities sanded down until it was a generic, middling experience that just blended with every other thing on the market at the time Looks like Forces may have been the same deal. "Drift is too hard to use, get rid of it" "But, we just tightened the drift arc in Generations. Besides won't removing the move make the level design less interesting?" "Do it! It's for the fans!" Repeat ad nauseum for everything that made Boost games fun and exciting till it became an experience so boring and mindless that it became the very "boost to win" tripe that the critics of this style derided it as since it's creation.
I also want to point out that while sonic's demographic does have kids as part of it. Most of it however does consist of teens and young adults. A demographic Sega was pushing towards during the 90s. Sonic is not suppose to be dumbed down to this level as Forces has shown. I legit think Sonic Team is starting to pander towards the casual market while only adding shallow fanservice to the most vocal bunch from the fanbase at the time.
To back up Josh's argument about how the simplified gameplay in Forces was a deliberate choice, I went digging around and found some interesting developer quotes. Spoiler (for those wondering if this sounds a tad familiar)
Was it really aimed at young adults in the 90s though? main demographic were always kids whether we admit it or not, otherwise why make cartoons of sonic for kids? or comics aimed at kids? It's just that the standard for difficulty in the 90s were higher for all games in general, even kids games, it went down with time, the reason for difficulty being higher wasn't some noble thing like presenting challenges for teens and adults, but the simple fact of games being light on content while also being expensive so the difficulty forces you to play it multiple times to finish the game,something that is not really an issue nowadays. I would say Sonic Team had the right idea of making the game more accessible, even quality games like mario odyssey are suuuuuuper easy compared to past games, yet they still had critical success and sold the best of the series by far. They could strike a balance to please hardcore fans and casual non-fans alike, they could make the main campaign easy and really accessible, but also offers like side challenges, or hard post-game content, they could make multiple routes in levels being harder but rewards you in different ways, basically the same philosophy of classic games but make the main path more accessible and different paths even harder to reach so you have to reach them with some effort, a quick example would be the very start of modern chemical plant in Generations, where you would usually just go ahead, but you can actually jump to the pipes in the sides,you can ignore them and even don't know that you can actually run on them, but they rewards you for trying
I finally gave in and started playing this game and oh my god. I know this has been discussed countless times, but no one prepared for how much of a fever dream the first ten minutes of this game are. We start off with a completely contextless cutscene of Eggman hard smash cut to Sonic in Green Hill with zero connecting tissue. Tails is asking him to help defend "the city" (because it's not like we don't have many actually named cities they could have used, let's just not name it at all). Then a cutscene of four villains coming back and in a literal minute they beat up Sonic with zero plot justification and then a black text screen of "Eggman's forces have taken over the whole world!" because showing that would require more money than SEGA budgeted apparently. When Vector comes in the next cutscene and just blandly dumps "without Sonic the people are falling into despair" I started giggling, and then when Amy says "sometimes...I still dream that he's with us" I just absolutely lost it. Holy shit. Please tell me the rest of this game is the same kind of hilarious utterly surreal completely half-assed fever dream of plot points rushing through at lightning speed. I've seen fanfiction that does a better job of pacing than this. This is just...incredible. It's like the plot of this game has the every problem 06's plot had but inverted.
The plot of this game actually makes me appreciate the plot of Sonic 06' (except maybe for Sonic's story, but even that had a little more effort than Forces' story, I think).
I just love how the ridiculously simple level design and short levels means that stuff as harrowing as invading Eggman's fortified munitions factory takes less than two minutes and is so brainless it's amazing no one did it before Sonic came along. Also what on earth is with the Avatar physics, because they take like five seconds to get to 20% of their top speed and then immediately lurch to top speed in five frames
Game beaten. That happened, alright. It's really cool how most levels had Cool Stuff in the background and you just...go on this extremely boring level design actively avoiding that. Infinite is a really big waste of potential. He is the only animal character in the mainline games to dedicate himself to Eggman's cause (Knux was just tricked by him and didn't know Eggman's true side, Shadow, Rouge, and Fang all had ulterior motives) and I actually find the mechanical uses of his ability (summoning more difficult obstacles if you get hit by him) to be a really cool thing. But he's just utterly wasted. At least he's hot
I thought I was having a goddamn stroke reading that. At least it's just a joke and no one at Sonic Team/Sega seriously believes that... ...or do they?
The movie wasn't made by SEGA who pretty much disowned it until the new design was well liked. The Sonic animated material SoJ had everything to do with had Sonic saying the S word, giving the finger, and one even had a breast feeding scene. I think it's more of an all ages franchise but I kind of agree with James.
I have this avatar and you're surprised I'm a furry I meant him without the mask for the record. Now for other observations: -The Avatar was a surprisingly compelling reason for me to continue, even though it's extremely barebones. It's a testament to how compelling even a simple CaC mode in a game can be, and I actually hope it returns, but it needs to be a LOT more complex. Like a LOT more. It's also hampered by the need to make sure that animal characters who aren't in the canon main cast are all different looking for some reason. Why are they lankier and skinnier? At the bare minimum, we need to have a lot more choices in head shapes and ears and the like. Also, no ability to make a fox is baffling and means I couldn't make my old shitty OC. I can understand having no Echidnas, but come on man. We have canon foxes, jerboas, flying squirrels, and even a damn lemur. In addition, it's impossible to make a hedgehog with quills like Amy, or a cat similar to Blaze or Honey. The Avatar is also unfortunately hampered by the design language Sonic Team uses for all the animal characters--if you look a lot of actual Sonic OC's, they tend to have anime-esque hair, but hair on the actual Sonic characters is basically non-existent. -I actually really like the change they made to airboosting, with the graceful curving arc. It feels really nice to use, and while it admittedly breaks the level design a LOT, if they HAVE to keep boost then it should stay. -I absolutely despise wisps. They're a bad calque of Mario's powerups awkwardly shoved into Sonic and they just will not go away (why on Earth does Sonic need a wisp capsule to boost in this game now?!). However wispons are a great idea. They allow for firearms/guns that aren't hilariously incoherent with the series overall cartoony aesthetic, and they have a wide range of interesting abilities in theory. It's weird that Tails, a character who you think would be highly involved with them, basically ignores them entirely, though. He's not the fisticuffs type like Sonic, Amy, or Knuckles, and has no supernatural powers like Silver or Blaze, so it makes perfect sense for him to use wispons when he's already an invention-creating genius. -This game has a MASSIVE problem with putting all the Cool Stuff in the background. Green Hill looks like ass, but I actually quite like the look of The City (WHY IS THIS PLACE NOT NAMED WE HAVE LIKE SEVEN OTHER NAMED CITIES SONIC TEAM WHAT ARE YOU DOING), and Chemical Plant's iced-over tubes, dark moody sky, and massive sea looks really nice. It's a shame Chemical Plant was brought back at all, but there's an inkling of a good idea there. The Eggman Empire Tower is...less interesting looking, but okay I guess. Metropolis looks really good...and is also extremely thematically and aesthetically incoherent to the rest of the game. Also, why is it called Metropolis when it looks nothing like Metropolis Zone? Yeah yeah I know, it isn't actually it, but they brought back Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and the Death Egg...so why bring back that name for something entirely different? -It is so painfully obvious that Classic Sonic was shoved in at effectively last-minute. Oof. His levels are...okay I guess, but yeah. Sheesh. They didn't even name half of his acts different from the actual zone! -Why does Red Gate Bridge have a three minute long song when it's interrupted by a cinematic cutscene and boss fight six seconds into the stage -That Aqua Road level is cool. It's a shame the level is only the middle sliding gimmick and they forgot to include the rest of the level around it. That exists...right? -Mortar Canyon is very cool, but....so....SHOOOOOOOOOOORT WHY SONIC TEAM -The soundtrack in this game is extremely odd. Sonic's stages especially, which use these weird lo-fi synths SO MUCH for some reason. I don't know why they went for those of all things. The Avatar stages are a lot stronger and Classic Sonic's stages mostly have good compositions hampered by the shitty synths. But seriously. People talk about Classic's bad genesis-knock-offs but never the weird as hell chiptune...ish synths Modern uses.
On the entire site probably. I don't feel like looking it up but iirc both of these games have the same head writer lol
Oh and I forgot another thing: firstly, it's weird how the light speed dash, one of Sonic's most consistent moves, is entirely gone from his moveset and is instead on a specific wispon...but my main complaint is that wow, they did NOT balance the wispons entirely. Burst and Lightning are the best ones by far for clearing stages and like the ONLY two I ever saw get special capsules for their specific abilities (and lightning was still way more common than burst and could sometimes get on its paths anyway with proper usage). I could complain about how braindead the wispons are but fuck it I'm tired of typing for now. But also why do the egg pawns look completely generic now. Why did they redesign enemies that didn't need to be redesigned. WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THIS GAME
