I'm going to ignore everything else because I can't be bothered to talk much about Forces anymore and just address this point (although I will ascertain that Infinite has perhaps the ugliest design of any regular Sonic animal character). The robots in Forces look like crap, but thematically they're cleverly designed in as much as they're supposed to look generic. Eggman has taken over the world and instead of using his usual array of wacky designs based on either himself or animals, he'd stripped it all right back to basics and is using much simpler looking mass-produced models. He's never had so much ground to cover before. I think that that's clearly what they were going for, most notably with the white and grey Death Egg Robots that don't have faces. I don't think it's very in-character of Eggman to go down such a route, but he's entirely out-of-character for the whole game so that's a moot point. Point is, thematically for Forces the designs make sense. They could have made better looking generic designs though. And fuck it, I'm going to talk about this too. I haaaaaaaate the avatar character in Forces. As far as character creator tools go, Forces' has the most basic one that I've ever seen and it feels downright lazy most of the time. You get a limited selection of heads and eyes and... that's it. All of the rest of the customisation comes in the form of hideous, goofy clothing accessories that put the avatar at complete odds with every other character in the game. They don't look good. If I have to create a character, I'd rather it looked like it blended into the world than it was the victim of Hot Topic and wherever all the cool kids shop. But it's not just their appearance and limited options that I dislike; I dislike the entire concept of the avatar character. The Sonic series has a huge range of characters to choose from and it used to create new characters regularly. I like seeing these characters. Injecting myself into the story and gameplay? No. That shit sucks. It has its place in a few RPGs and other multiplayer, but very few games manage to pull it off well. Audience-insert characters aren't fun. Forces essentially just lets you design a character who's already got their role in the story and entire arc planned out. You can't influence it in any way at all beyond choosing between whether they wear crocs or a Sanic T-shirt. I don't care about that. I don't want to be Sonic's BFF. I don't want to see yet another silent protagonist in the series. Classic Sonic is a silent protagonist as of Generations and Forces and that's already a big mistake. I know why the avatar is so appealing to so many people and why Sonic OCs will always be a thing. But that's all the total antithesis to my personal interest in the series. Give me fun characters to watch do cool things and tell me fun stories. Don't try to make me a part of it. I hope that this particuar feature never comes back to the series ever again. Even if they improve the character designing tools, I don't want it. Character creation and insertion is something that actively detracts from my enjoyment of a game, especially when it's forced into a series where it categorically does not belong, e.g. Sonic.
I feel like the whole create a character self-insert thing is pretty anachronistic anyway. I always associate RPG self insert stories with the mid 2000s PS2 RPGs. Maybe that's just me though. I mean I can understand if you are a young child it could be fun, but eeeh
I mean, custom silent protagonists have been a thing in RPGs since the dawn of CRPGs in the 70's and 80's, which in turn were inspired by tabletop RPGs. Outside of multiplayer games, I never much cared for silent protagonists in general myself, and they make even less sense in a Platformer like Sonic.
So, uh... It's entirely because of this mod, which basically amounts to more difficult, engaging level design for the stages. They still usually follow the same structure, but there are tons of new paths and shortcuts, more hazards, and even some new setpieces and gimmicks. And MAN, it's so much more satisfying to blast through the stages when you're actually required to do more than just hold down the boost button. When I first played it, I kept running into obvious hazards, because I was so used to not having to pay attention. (I'm also using this physics improvement mod, and turning the avatar into Whisper.) I think something like this could've helped Forces strike a better balance. I mean, it's VERY ODD that the game has a difficulty selection, when AFAIK the only thing "Easy Mode" actually does is make it so you only drop 20 rings when hit. Keeping the accessible, "press X to win" level layouts for easy, and making something more engaging and replayable for "Sonic veterans" would've been so much better. I don't condemn Sega/Sonic Team for wanting to make the game accessible for kids. I needed a Game Genie to finish Sonic games when I was six, and kids nowadays don't have the option. But that doesn't need to happen to the extreme detriment of more experienced players.
I mean, that's what I've been saying. There's a right way and a wrong way to streamline a game for a wider audience. The infuriating thing is Sonic Team did it the right way once with Generations, trimming Unleashed's fat and jagged edges. While, yes, it was a less difficult, less skill-based experience than Unleashed, it still retained the core of what made it exciting... just with less drifting into bottomless pits (that one turn in Skyscraper Scamper. You all know the one). Maybe Sonic Team saw achievement data for Generations, maybe few people finished it and thought it was because the game they already made easy wasn't made easier enough and so they had to pulverize the formula into a bland, textureless mush for it to be fun. And not because, oh I don't know, the final boss was absolute dogshit?? I know for a fact that boss was the sole reason it took me more than a week to finish the game.
Wait which final boss are you talking about. I guess it doesn't matter as both Generations and Forces had shit final bosses. And @Josh amazing what other people can do to polish this turd huh.
Yeah, they're all supposed to look militaristic, fitting the game's war theme. Ian Flynn said Sega told them not to use the Sonic Forces or Sonic 2006 robots in the IDW comic, since their designs were particular to those games.
So this means we're probably not going to see the Forces designs of the Egg Pawns for a while? I'm totally on board with that - as pretty as Forces looks, I don't like its enemy designs. I just want them to go back to the way they were in Colors, which I think was a good compromise of using the same robots every zone but giving them design tweaks so the environments seem more unique, sorta like the Genesis games.
I was talking about Generations, and how kids having difficulty beating it's godawful final boss gave Sega the wrong idea and so they made Forces a baby game for babies. Although you're not wrong. Was the guy who designed the Colours final boss the nephew of the Sega president or something and it's only being repeated out of sheer nepotism? That's the only reason I can imagine (sans laziness) for why they've rehashed it not once, but twice.
I found Forces "harder" than Generations, because I was constantly fighting against the controls/physics. Died more times trying to hop small gaps as the Avatar because their speed accelerates from 1 to 11 in an instant, making jump arcs a real pain to gauge. The level design itself was less engaging, so the difficulty came from all the wrong places. It was a big reminder of Sonic 4.
Really? I don’t think I died a single time on my first run. I didn’t feel like I had to fight the physics at all.
I only had three levels where I had trouble dying: -The Avatar Green Hill stage because the 2D physics are absolute ass and staying on the higher route's platforms was a bitch -The Classic Sonic Death Egg stage and solely because of the part where the conveyor platform autoscrolls down because for SOME INSANE REASON the electric floor in that section is impossible to jump away from if you land on it--so you'll lose all your rings and then get insta-killed before you can jump away. It's like your mercy invincibility is 1/3 as long and only lasts as long as Sonic's getup animation and I have no idea why -The final Classic Sonic level with the autoscroller because I was super tired and wanted it to be done and that autoscroller sucks ass
Forces is difficult, but only because of its janked-up-the-arse controls and not because of difficult game design. If the game controlled well, it'd be the easiest Sonic game to date (and that's sayine something when you think about how often Forces plays itself already). Modern and the Avatar have the most broken acceleration curve that goes from 0 to 10 to 100, whilst Classic Sonic get confused every time he jumps into the air; he will stop dead in his tracks when he lands if you're not holding left/right even if he was hurtling through the sky at 100mph. Plus he continues rolling when he lands if we rolled off a ramp. But it gets worse - sometimes his mid-air rolling can cause him to stick to walls, ceilings and floors, making a complete joke of the already broken physics. The Avatar and Modern Sonic have virtually no control over their air movement, which means that whether or not you successfully make a jump is determined at the time that you press jump and never later. You can't correct it or reposition them in the air. If you're standing still or walking, you'll get a fixed short jump arc, without so much as the ability to rotate more than a couple of degrees. You won't pick up any speed either. Chances are, you'll fall way short of your mark. When running again jumping, you get a fixed big arc, but still cannot turn or adjust your landing spot. Now that means that you're likely going to overshoot the mark. With the pathetic little double jump that Sonic and bird Avatars have, you can start a second jump arc mid-jump. But it will give you either a tiny arc ala a standing jump or a huge arc ala a running jump depending on how you hold the analogue stick. I've posted this video before, and it's I'll do it again because relevant here: Look how he moves in the air relative to the analogue stick and his ground movement speed. It's awful. There is something to be said of the argument that the physics of a game can be different without being inherently bad. Take for example Classic Sonic in Generations versus S3K. S3K is better IMO, but there's little actually wrong with Generations as its own thing (if we pretend it wasn't trying to emulate the Classics). It's just different. But Forces is demonstrably inconsistent and broken. It expects you to do things that go against the controls you're given. The problems with Forces physics can be traced back as far as Unleashed. I replayed Unleashed recently for the first time in many years and despite Sonic being far too slippery, that game gives you such wonderful control over his movements. He's responsive on the ground and in the air. Notably, you can jump from a standstill and pick up some distance by holding forwards. Likewise, you can "brake" in the air by holding backwards. It's even possible to turn Sonic 180 to 360° when jumping from a standstill. That's only in 3D however, as in 2D Sonic will often refuse to turn in the air; he will only brake and won't turn until he's landed and you're holding the opposite direction (try this when bouncing on springy poles). It was minor, but a nuisance. If I had to guess why this was, it's because Sonic was still tied to 3D behaviour in the 2D sections, so he would need a turning circle when jumping in 3D but couldn't make the circle because he was moving on only 2 axes instead of 3. Colours and Generations controlled very similarly, but they tightened up his turning circle to make him less slippery. This improved the issue of slipperiness but left him a lot less manoeuvrable, especially when airborne. They didn't fix the underlying problem of Sonic's slippery controls, they just took away that level of control that made him slippery. Trying to turn Sonic in mid-air after jumping or walking off a ledge in Generations is much harder than in Unleashed. They addressed the symptom and not the cause. Unleashed is strikingly similar to SA1 and SA2 in terms of control, only he is now less-snappy and more-slippery. Colours also has the same double jump issue as in Forces, but you're able to brake or accelerate in the air in Colours to a small degree so the problem is less pronounced. You can still get locked into a pre-determined over/under-shot double jump though in the same way as in Forces. The double jump in Colours was included to address the fact that they'd neutered Sonic's control rather than offer a new movement option. Finally you move on to Lost World which controls so incredibly similarly to in Forces, except the binary acceleration is manual instead of automatic and Sonic can turn much more readily on the ground at the cost of all speed. tl;dr Unleashed got the controls almost right, but they have been addressing the faults of it in the wrong way in every subsequent game such that we've ended with the broken mess of Forces. I'm not saying that you're lying, but Forces' controls are so fundamentally broken, inconsistent and unintuitive that I actually find this almost impossible to believe. Or perhaps "incomprehensible" is a better way of putting it. It's not even like Sonic 4 which is at least consistent in its jank. Forces doesn't have a rulebook that it adheres to.
This game, man. I tried out the Reimagined mod @Josh mentioned (it's not half bad!) and came across a truly hilarious(ly sad) thing in Sonic's Metropolis level. So after the initial 2D section and the skydiving one, there's a big long curved and banked highway with no walls on a lot of it. The mod added a big wall of spikes in the middle of the road near the beginning: I, sanely, decided that trying to boost through the section and squeeze past. No dice. I fell off like 20 times. The road banks leftwards and Sonic is naturally dragged to the side if you don't boost and falls off. You can't just jump over the spikes because he won't have enough momentum to not slide off. Admittedly, this actually makes sense. But he also has AWFUL turning and simply cannot make the turn afterwards even if you do manage to thread the needle. I was absolutely stuck. Eventually I got so frustrated I just boosted, and discovered something: in sections like these, Sonic Team automatically scripts the level so you cannot fall off these sections when boosting. You'll just painlessly hit an invisible wall that keeps you moving forward even if you actively try to run off. Literally all you need to do is hold boost and hold left and Sonic just bizarrely runs on the edge and never actually falls off. Amazing. Just...amazing.
Don't forget the botched targeting. If you're not already facing an enemy by the time you hit jump, good luck getting Sonic to aim his Homing Attack at it. Whatever work they did to Frankenstein the Lost World engine branch back into a Boost game was not done well. (And if that's not actually what happened, I'm even more baffled at what went wrong.)
As an overall entry to the series, I would say it is. If only because it appears to be changing directions, or at least toying with the idea. Forces is the first main Sonic entry since 2006 to feature a playable character that isn't Sonic. It has a story that at least takes itself somewhat seriously (even though there are points where it is absurd). And the final villain is Eggman himself. The Avatar and the Dailies add some level of replay value, something that is nonexistent in the aforementioned titles. While spinning off Classic Sonic into a separate dimension seems crazy, it actually functions as a kind of damage control for the earlier timeline meddling of Colors (and a less extent) Generations. Sonic Colors introduced "Two Worlds" canon, and features Sonic visiting Candy Land to save the Lucky Charms aliens from Baldy McNosehair. Like Sonic Lost World, I couldn't even motivate myself to finish this one. Sonic Generations I did finish, but never looked back. The "story" if it can even be called that, is completely irrelevant. Worse then that it created the "Neo Classic Sonic" that exists now which has the appearance of Classic Sonic (though even that is a stretch) but none of the substance. Generations distilled the Classic series down to GHZ, CPZ, SS, and the Death Egg robot, and for the last 9 years Sonic Team hasn't let us forget it. Every problem that Forces has was introduced in Generations. The gameplay may have been a little tighter in those earlier titles, but when the level art is hideous and the plot shatters 15+ years of canon I just can't bring myself to care. Especially when we have games from 20 years ago that are FULL 3D and play heaps better to start with than 2.5D boost.
