I like Sonic 4.

I wasn't implying that it was okay to call it "Sonic 4."
Only that, as a game in the sea of many games, it made a handful of neurons in my brain fire off to the point where I can say: "Well, it's a decent enough game."
It was a relatively playable, inoffensive experience and I can think of a lot worse things out there to play (many within the same series.)

I'm certainly not asking for Episode 3, though.

 

If Sonic 4 should get credit for at least one thing, it was how it brought back Super Sonic in a great way. His transformation, homing attack effects and idle animation are all really well-done, and the way he handled made blasting through the stages a lot of fun. He really felt powerful in these games. I actually found his appearance in '4' way more exciting than 'Colors', which I'd tried him for only a few levels and lost interest in.

 

Yeah, but Super Sonic theme was terrible in 4. Ep1

I liked "modern" Metal Sonic theme from Ep 2 thought. It's as iconic to me as stardust speedway.

 

I actually liked Super's theme in Episode 1 okay, it was just way too short and didn't take long to get old.

And, oh yeah! I'd somehow forgotten about Metal's theme in Episode 2:


It sounds so sinister and metallic, and very Jun Senoue-like. I'd like to see it repurposed for something in the future.

 

There are some aspects I've always appreciated about Sonic 4....Episode 2
like the art style for example, it's one of my favourite renditions of Sonic's world in the series. It's got a pretty perfect blend of whimsy and a realistic grit to it, not to mention it's just a really nice looking game. The enemy designs in it are just pretty awesome too, and that's basically just what a modern Sonic rendition of badniks should look like. The bosses also have very fun designs even if they're not that fun to fight. Otherwise the game is just kinda coasting...it's probably just like, the most okayest Sonic game ever. some of the music is alright but they're all way too short and repetitive and the instruments obviously suck. They should've just put all the act songs together to make a fleshed out score.

episode 1 is just kinda the worst, I can't think of anything from it that is remotely redeeming that isn't extremely minor.

Sonic 4 control wise feels like an extremely misguided attempt to try and make 2d Sonic gameplay more accessible by giving you more direct control over the character at the cost of pretty much everything else that made it fun. I don't think it's an unworkable concept...but the incompetence of the developers and them not being able to recognize their mistakes at all, and essentially just scripting in points where it gives you the illusion of gaining momentum by rolling in specific spots to give off the impression they addressed criticism. I'm really not sure who this game was made for.

 

Yeah, Super Sonic was pretty much my main reason for getting Episode 1 in the first place. At the time it was enough of a draw to me since there had been many Sonic platformers that only let you use him in a Doomsday-style extra fight at the end. The Adventure games, Heroes, Sonic 06, Unleashed, ALL of the many Dimps games... I was starved for a classic-style Super Sonic treatment at that point, and you know what, I was pretty satisfied with him in 4.

That said this was the beginning of a Super Sonic renaissance since they finally started to standardize his inclusion as a transformation in regular levels. You were pretty down on his Colors treatment and I get why, it's kind of sloppy and useless in a way that tells me they rushed him out (no wisps, really?), but I was really hyped at the time to have him usable like that in a 3D game. I was even following the progress of the first guy to get all the emeralds in Colors and it was so cool to see it happen. But yeah, Super Sonic as a gameplay feature is at its best when it's a side objective that you can potentially complete well before the end of the game, which Sonic 4 does at least stay faithful to.

 

I still remember people saying good things about the game when it first came out, calling it a "return to form for the series" only for the position of detractors to eventually overtake it over the course of a month or so.
I'm not much of a fan of it at all, and as a "sequel" to my favorite Sonic game, it doesn't even come close to living up to it. But really, Sonic 4 in a vacuum is really inoffensive to me. Really, the only sin of the game is the name they changed it to to push sales.
As a game, it's honestly fine. Not great, and not even necessarily what I would most want from 2D Sonic, but fine. Especially for something that was just supposed to be a mobile game. The politics around the game aside, I find the level of venom tossed towards to game generally overdone and hyperbolic.
I do think the sequel is much better though.

Trust me, there are plenty of Sonic games I would pass up for Sonic 4. Sonic Blast is not giving it much competition.

 

As far as the music from these games go, I love this one. And also Mad Gear Act 1:

 

Sonic 4 was the first “new” Sonic game I bought since Shadiw the Hedgehog, so the hype was real. I was in grad school and super excited for Sonic 4. I got it on Wii, so it was super nostalgic and I loved the twist they took on Episode 1’s special stage. Episode 2 took way too long, but I can tell they put more work into making it a much better game. No more dying cats, tails, Metal Sonic, and the Death Egg.

what I’m hoarsely dissatisfied the most about is the cliffhanger that we only had a sound effect for.

Free the Little Planet from its Death Egg Mk.II form!!!

 

The ost was pretty good for both games. I need to check out who was in charge of the Soundtrack.

Oh, and that Metal Sonic theme was repurposed for All Star attack in Transformed. In TSR they used USA rendition of Stardust Speedway Bad Future, I believe. I was kinda disappointed back then, but oh well. TSR was disappointing in general for me.

 

Jun Senoue had both games' soundtracks all to himself. I actually listened to a majority of both of them the other night, for the first time in a long while. Episode 2 holds up better than I'd remembered, with all of Sylvania Castle being pretty exciting. Sky Fortress is also a highlight, since it's reminiscent of the hard-driving guitar work he excels with. Episode 1 had pretty meager bass, so thankfully he went with something far more satisfying for Episode 2.

 

Some things that always bugged me about S4's were the soundtrack were the faux 16-bit sound font used, and with that the arbitrarily short loops of all the tracks that made many of the feel incomplete. My favourite track in the duology is the slightly melancholy Sylvania Castle Act 2, but the wind down to the loop at 0:54 just seems to come out of nowhere. Splash Hill 1, Lost Labyrinth 3 (another favourite), White Park 2, the E2 Eggman music and so many others, they all seem to end right in the middle of a verse with so much more song left to go. I just expect more than half of the soundtrack to last much longer before the loops set in. And then you have that sound font which was just so misguided. Nothing else about the game was done in such an overtly retro style, so the music really clashes with the visuals. And it's not even an authentic Mega Drive sound font, with that incredibly low quality snare drum and "dying cat" synth in E1.

And this is a bit more pedantic of me, but I dislike that instead of using different arrangements for each act ala every other game, each act instead has totally unique music. Except Oil Dessert and Sky Fortress because ??? And the fact that the Metal Sonic race is an arrangement of the Generations version instead of the original just felt strange too. (Gotta love how they just lazily used a screenshot of Generations for the Metal Sonic cutscene too)

There're some good tunes in there for sure. Jun Senoue knows how to make a good Sonic tune. But he was sticking to a strange set of limitations for S4. The instruments were garbage by choice to sound retro, and the track length just reeks of "2010 digital file size considerations". It just didn't work.

 

I was really hyped when this game first came out. I remember really enjoying it when I bought it on Wii and then later on 360. I enjoyed episode 2 quite a bit at the time too.

I don't know what happened but with time I enjoyed it less and less and its now at the point where I don't think I'll ever replay either one again. I don't hate them but they just don't excite me either.

It was an awesome time to be a Sonic fan with Generations just around the corner. In addition with Colors it felt like the franchise was finally going to pick things up and go in the right direction.

 

...then, everything changed when 2013 happened. But yeah, compared to where Sonic was in the mid-00s, we had quite a renaissance for a few years there

 

you could almost say that the sonic world got a little lost there

 

And what, things went boom the next year? We could do this all day. Lol

I like to lump Sonic 4 in with Colours, Generations and Lost World as part of SEGA's very transparent efforts to ditch the brand that the series had developed since the Dreamcast and instead bank purely on the nostalgic/retro angle. Sometimes it was done better than others, but the that entire era reeked of over-correcting the criticisms that the series had faced for the last decade. SEGA never took the time to understand why the Classic games were so beloved, which is why Sonic 4 was such a surface level retro throwback. And that's why E2 flopped so bad. People latched on to the surface level appeal of a 2D game called Sonic 4 with E1, but by the time E2 rolled around they'd already played both E1 and Generations so the gimmick had worn off.

 

The delay between Episodes 1 and 2 was unforgivable, but I know Episode 2's quality would have been worse for it.

 

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the game that started stoking the embers of the flame that would become this era may have actually been Secret Rings, and moreover, the extremely warm reception it (and Rush) got initially for being a Sonic game that was actually just ABOUT being a Sonic game.



I distinctly remember someone here claiming Secret Rings as not JUST the best 3D Sonic game so far, but the first one that deserved to stand up alongside the classics. And the feeling within the fandom was reflected outside of it. As Eurogamer put it, "You play as Sonic - not as Knuckles, not as Tails, not as Amy, not as Shadow, and not as any of the other misfits who seem to occupy most of the screen time in recent Sonic Adventure style titles. This is a Sonic game; you play Sonic. You go very fast and you jump on things. That's what Sonic does, and the dawning realisation that that's exactly what this game planned to focus on for its entire duration made the first vestiges of a smile touch the corners of our mouths.

That smile widened to a broad grin when we discovered that not only do you play as Sonic throughout the game, but that playing as Sonic is awesome.”

I think Sega took away a strong lesson from Secret Rings' success after a string of (increasingly cataclysmic) failures. For one thing, the guy who made his directorial debut with Secret Rings (Morio Kishimoto) would go on to direct most of the mainline titles since. And Unleashed took a great many cues from it in both gameplay (homing attack reticle, "always moving forward" stage design, a renewed emphasis on speed) and storytelling (largely cut off from all previous entries, pairing the cast back to a few spotlight characters per game, having Sonic and his personality as the driver of the plot), even if they botched the meaning of what people meant when they said they wanted "just Sonic," haha.

 

It was poor planning, really. Dimps were also working on a Colours DS and Generations 3DS and the same time as/between the S4 games. Dimps' were churning out third-rate Sonic games constantly at that time.

As Josh points out in us post above, SEGA were taking all the criticisms levelled at the series and learning the wrong lessons from it. This is is blatant with the very existence of S4E1, its delay and then the eventual release of S4E2. And SEGA have still been doing that as recently as Forces...

 

Oh, I don't think they really learned the wrong lessons. They did exactly what was necessary after 06, they just bungled the execution in titles like Sonic 4. But I really liked Secret Rings, and Unleashed, Colors, and Generations are some of my favorite games in the whole series. I think they FINALLY listened, and did exactly what people had been asking, nay, BEGGING them to do for nearly a decade. Those decisions allowed the series to pull out of the death spiral it was in in the mid-00s, and by 2012, the gosh-darn SONIC FANDOM was a place of OPTIMISM. Imagine!

It's just that then, instead of building on all that goodwill, they threw the baby out with the bathwater and went back to square one AGAIN with Lost World, reinvented the entire series in a bid to indoctrinate a new generation in Boom (and bombed the execution there harder than anything since 06), and then clumsily tried to course-correct with Forces, a game that tried to be for everyone, and inevitably ended up appealing to no one (except kids ((and me after about three years I guess)).

This is why I prefer to draw a distinction between ~2007-2012 (a renaissance era where Sonic games were getting better and better reception), and 2013 to the present (a time of slower releases, fewer spin-offs, and only one incredibly beloved Sonic game amid a sea of titles that are more mediocre than bad. They're not really damaging the brand the way the stuff in the mid-00s did, the mainstream isn't calling for Sonic's head... but they're not satisfying anyone, either, and a number of fans have turned cynical again.)