You guys want an unpopular opinion? Well here ya go: Sonic Mania is so overrated. First of all, fuck Sonic's neon cyan palette, fuck it to the dankest depths of Hades. It looks like putrid shit and should never have made it into the final product. Sonic is supposed to be blue, blue goddammit, you have to go out of your way to screw it up that badly. Some of the new sprites are weird and ugly, like the new looking up animations. The levels are far too streamlined, it feels a lot like the boost era games. It's extremely boring and uncreative to rehash the same old zones again from previous games. And frankly, the new levels suck, I stopped playing at Press Garden. That level's visuals are kind of a messy soup of bland colors and it's kinda hard to make out the sprites from the scenery. Lastly, unrelated to Mania specifically, all Sonic games after Sonic Adventure 2 are not worth playing at all.
I'll say good things about you at the funeral after the eventual horde of angry fans reaches your house On a serious note, I saw that you said you didn't like Mania in another thread. I was contemplating asking you, but thankfully you've delivered before that.
Let's see... Generations 3DS is the best 2d boost game, as it suffers less from the "player runs into every obstacle until they memorize the level layouts" syndrome than its predecessors. S4E2 is a good game that gets too much flak for not being more like the MD games (particularly in terms of physics). Which admittedly isn't entirely undeserved, as they should have called it something other than Sonic 4. But taken on its own it's not a bad game at all. The proto/S&KC versions of the music tracks for Carnival Night, Launch Base and Knuckles' theme were superior to the ones that replaced them in the final. Only IceCap was changed for the better. Incidentally, they sound the best in S&KC as long as you use the right midi synths. Tails Adventure is a great game that gets criminally overlooked for being just a Tails spin-off. Chaotix is a pretty fun co-op-centric game that gets too much flak for its inferior single player. The Sonic Boom cartoon is terrible, with its cringy characterizations. No, I'm not giving its a free pass just because it's a comedy. You can write funny gags without bastardizing the characters. I'm not giving it a free pass for being an alternate universe either, since the characterization changes were all for the worse except maybe for Amy. About only half the Sonic 2 zones were good. The rest were a complete chore. The broken classic gameplay in Generations and forced gimmick levels in Colors were about as tedious as the werehog levels in Unleashed, or close to it. As were the non-speed stages in SA2. The fishing in SA1 wasn't that bad ffs.
Maybe not unpopular but I never see this expressed anywhere: Bosses have no place in Sonic games. Especially the 2D games, just a waste of the player's time and the team's resources. The music and spectacle can make things better of course, like in Doomsday or SA2's last two bosses, but the only boss I ever really have fun with is the Casino Night boss due to the half pipe arena.
This is an opinion I’ve seen cropping up among some YouTubers lately. While I think that vast majority of Sonic bosses are lame, I really can’t imagine the games without them. The whole loop of zone, Eggman, zone, Eggman is a pretty iconic part of the classics. The only way I think they could dispense with them entirely is to restructure the game.
Now this is a thread for unpopular opinions, not a rebuttal to them, but I am absolutely baffled by this take about bosses having no place in Sonic. It's just. What.
...Because it's not up to you whether people are genuine in the things they say and believe? I feel like this is not a difficult thing to grasp. I think Sonic has always struggled with bosses because Sonic is at its best when its about rushing through and exploring levels, and the bosses are basically a big stop sign to levels where you have to play a short minigame about jumping at specific targets with good timing. Classic Sonic doesn't need to have no bosses, it needs to find a system where the bosses are as much a part of the level design which you rush through and try to speedrun as the stages themselves.
Quite touchy, huh? I just said it was my opinion that that was the case, not that it is 100% certain. Anyway, I only asked because the wording seemed like something particular to me so I wanted to clarify.
I don't know how unpopular this actually is but I find (classic) Sonic bosses to be great. Just amazing stuff. Theway they're usually coordinated with their stages' main gimmicks, the way they'll directly confront you in your weakest state. The way they may make you hate Eggman even when the boss isn't so hard, but it's annoying. You have to overcome the least favorable situations and beat a villain that builds really clever engines that use all the shit you put up with during the stage. And you overcome it. It's great. I feel great beating them. I hate Eggman, and I'm very much supposed to. He's the damn villain. Of course you have terrible bosses, like Palmtree Panic and GODDAMN Marble Garden Act 2. But they're outliers imo.
I have a pretty unpopular opinion regarding the topic of boss battles… I quite like Quartz Quadrant’s boss. The pinball physics are a little janky but I think it utilizes Sonic’s unique gameplay in a pretty interesting way compared to other bosses.
Gamma is the best part of Sonic Adventure. While I like the other characters in SA1 (Big's poorly paced mess aside), Gamma is by far one of the most polished — and arresting — parts of the game. It's very replayable and whenever I go back to playing SA1 I always go to Gamma first. I put this here because surprisingly, I find very few actually share my opinion? Many people I'm around talk about Sonic Adventure and how it's a marvel with a few bruises, but very rarely do they bring up Gamma outside of "oh he was cool". Gamma is so joyful, brisk, and fleeting with how he takes down anything he comes across and hovers around. I wish I knew more games like it with that "quickly taking down enemies when you know how" gameplay because I am feeeeeeening for more. Recca and Donpachi come to mind. Sky Chase is super good, it gives me that same joy when chaining enemies together in a fast, quick way and strategizing how much and how fast to take enemies for the more optimal route. Very few people also mention this mode outside of a passing mention, but I absolutely love it. (Then again, I'm a bit of a After Burner freak...)
Casting doubt upon a person's sincerity instead of engaging with their takes properly isn't really an honest thing to do, and calling someone "touchy" simply for having challenged you on it does not help. Saying "it's just my opinion" doesn't actually absolve you of responsibility for the things you say. Do you want a flamewar? Cause when you set precedent for instantly dismissing people by claiming they're just lying about their own beliefs, that's what you're asking for. I think the iconography and theming of Classic Sonic bosses is great! It's something sorely lacking from almost every 3D Sonic boss. Awesome robot designs (both mech and badnik) are one of the most underappreciated appeals of Sonic as a property, and Eggman usually knocks it out of the park when he is the boss of each stage in a given game. But I think the design philosophy behind these bosses wears thin after a bit. It's often said that a boss fight should be a test of the skills players have learned over the course of the game or stage, and virtually every classic Sonic boss brings the game's pace to a halt and tests the player's ability to slowly navigate around a series of hazards while occasionally jumping into a weak spot. As much as people enjoy bouncing on classic bosses to speedrun them, that's remedying the pacing problem by all-but deleting the actual battle itself.
I'm not sure if this is so unpopular, and I think it's not, but I'll go anyway: Sonic Adventure 2 is not a good game. The actions stages are okay, but not as good as SA1. The mecha stages are boring. The hunting stages are atrocious. The story, despite being entertaining, is a mess of plotholes. And the mere idea of the ultimate life form being convenently a hedgehog without any explanation whatsoever why and requiring us to conjecture, is something that baffles me to this day.
Did you miss OP’s statement regarding Pepe vs Amy? My initial comment was just a jokey response to that. If you are personally offended by Pepe Le Pew, feel free to share your thoughts. I just don’t think that a cartoon you can choose not to watch is something that would honestly offend anyone with any maturity. After all, the poor skunk was just following your advice of, “Be horny or else.”
