I'm right with you on that. I could happily complete Knuckles' campaign, even though I knew it was harder, because I was able to get through Carnival Night. As Sonic, I was always stuck at the barrel until I figured out that you could get through by repeatedly bouncing with a bubble shield. It meant playing carefully to end up with a shield there, but it was possible. And Tails? Nah mate, I couldn't get his arse passed the Marble Garden 2 boss. Even when I did eventually manage that some years later, I knew he was going to get stuck at the barrel with no way to use the bubble shield. Knuckles' campaign is technically the hardest, but it was the only way that I could beat the game. I still remember the first time I got all of the Emeralds too.
I've always enjoyed Knuckles campaign in 3K and the challenge of the harder level design. I also like that you can still access Sonic & Tails longer route in Carnival Night act2 and join S&T's route in Lava Reef act1 (about halfway through IIRC). You can even try and take on the Carnival Night act2 boss which is a bit of a nightmare thanks to Knuckles lower jump height.
I always wanted Tails to have his own patch as well. I know Sonic 3 & Knuckles had some for him, but it wasn't enough and Knuckles could acess some of Tails' routes as well.
The issue with Sonic Adventure 2 is that a good chunk of it got left in Japan. Such as the detail that there wasn't just one capsule fired from the ARK, but several, which is why they couldn't be sure if Shadow had actually been aboard the ARK.
Yes, I'm aware. And I'd argue we may still not have all the answers, as they may have retconned the planned ideas when creating later games like Sonic Battle and Shadow. But I think that should be saved for another thread. There are so many oddities about the lore from 2001-2004.
Again, that's somewhere that Mania dropped the ball a bit. Tails had always been the worst character to play as in the Classics, imo. His flight abilities are so slow and don't actually help you very often, unlike either Sonic's shields and drop dash or Knuckles' gliding and climbing. Even Mighty and Ray in Mania are more useful in the moment-to-moment gameplay with their abilities than Tails is with his flight. Plus you can get all of the benefits of Tails' flight whilst he's Sonic's partner. The fact that there are very few routes in S3K that only Tails can access, and none that he has to take, makes him a worse pick than anyone else.
Lol Tails, in Encore mode in Mania I try my best to avoid ever having tails in my team, and now thanks to extra slot Amy in the decomp version I can have a complete team of 5 and still give Tails the boot.
Tails feels like a high floor, low ceiling skill mastery "easy mode" in that while he's the obvious choice for beginners/casual players due to having flight, mastering Sonic's abilities in 3K is actually far more satisfying. The elemental shields are a lot more fun, and the Insta Shield is beastly if you know how to use it. Tails' flight has more obvious utility (skipping over difficult parts, safety net for bottomless pits), but there really isn't any way of exploiting the ability, and since it slows your momentum to a crawl to use it, I don't even use it that much when I play as Tails now that I basically know all of the level design by heart. In fact, anytime I get the itch to play S3K now, I'll usually do a Sonic run, then a Knuckles run, and then maybe a Tails run, and often with a few days between finishing the Knuckles run and starting as Tails. Since it's just a retread of Sonic's game, I don't really feel an urgency to do it other than to have three nice files on the save select screen.
I think a lot of people forget Tails was designed with small children in mind. He can fly and is easy to get through the game. He looks cute. That's his appeal. It doesn't matter that he's slow and plodding because his main purpose is to help children play the game when they might lose on Zone 1 otherwise. Its perhaps not the most elegant game design and he could definitely be improved to be faster and more fun at high level. But I think it's really important to push back against this narrative that he's a bad character because he's slow. Or a bad pick. He's not a bad pick for his target audience because going through the levels quickly is not on the agenda for them. Simply getting through a few levels is.
Designated "little brother mode" character. You give the 2nd player controller to your younger sibling and say you're playing with them or sharing the console with him. That's all Tails needed to do.
Yeah, I used to play Sonic 2 tons with my brother as a kid that way, when I was way too young to be able to play the games well at all. It was far better than just unplugging the controller and saying I'm playing lol (which my brothers have mentioned that they did all the time with other games lol).
There is one route that Tails has to take, that Sonic and Knuckles don't: the first elevator in the zone goes up as Tails, but down and around as Sonic or Knuckles. You can access the other area regardless of what character you pick, but you have to go around the long way. Granted that one's kinda arbitrary and doesn't use the character abilities in any way, but it exists. I do agree that there isn't much compelling you to play as Tails though; even taking into account the fact that it's the "little brother mode" character, they could've done more.
Tails as "little sibling mode" was horribly frustrating. Even if the Sonic player went super slow (which in itself spoiled all the fun of playing Sonic), the Tails player would always disappear. And making the older player Tails who has to protect little sibling Sonic didn’t work out either. I wish they had made it that Tails can press start to instantly respawn next to Sonic. And make it that Tails' can't go past the screen boundary. It's frustrating that Mania/Origins don’t have a co-op mode (especially because the retro engine has the technology for it). Although the survey for Origins Plus mentioned new co-op modes, so this could be the year of little siblings!
Yeah, act1 of Launch Base. Strangely in the Origins version Tails goes down when taking the first elevator (same as S&K) instead of up. No idea if that is a glitch or just a design choice by Stealth and his team.
It would be cool for there to be a co-op mode that starts off as one wide-screen display that breaks into two smaller windows allowing for two players to explore different parts of the zone
if I could Agree this a hundred times I would that, and also I think Tails is very useful for finding Special Stage rings in levels so I can memorize their positions. he's a good "scout" character for the S3&K/Mania-style huge levels.
Bionic Commando Rearmed will always be king for its awesome dynamic Split-Screen mode and screen scaling. 00:54 Obviously other games have done this method before (Toejam and Earl) but I can't of another platformer with large levels outside of Bionic Commando Rearmed 2. And that's a far better game for co-op as those levels are huge with multiple routes that aren't restricted by old NES layouts. It would have been sick if the Retro games would have had a feature like this to truly stand out even further. I'd kill for the Advance games to get a remake with this feature, especially Advance 3. Honestly, that's something I personally miss from all the newer games. The multiplayer modes always feel half baked. I mean, they've always been to be perfectly honest, but I would always dump hours into that mode with my brother. SA2 DC only had 3 fucking levels for Sonic/Shadow and we still grinded that shit like crazy.
It always reminds me of what @Palas once said. The point of Sonic is to complete the levels. People get so hung up on speed running, high routes, and exploration they forget this basic fact.
