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I like Sonic 4.

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Winins, Dec 12, 2021.

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  1. kyasarintsu

    kyasarintsu

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    I think the threads were slightly interesting for trying to get people to think about a popular or unpopular game in ways otherwise might not, but the threads get old quickly and there's only so much that can be said for many of these games.
    Like, what am I supposed to say about Sonic 4? It's one of the most boring, lifeless games I've ever played. Should I praise Sega for listening to fans in the most half-hearted way possible?
     
  2. Fadaway

    Fadaway

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    I couldn't get into either of them. I guess there's not much I can add that isn't often said. To me, personally, it was borderline unplayable. I could never get passed the first levels on either episode. The controls were super weird. The weird dual spindash attack with Tails in episode two was maddening to pull off for me.

    The graphics didn't even look as good as even a mediocre mobile game in my opinion. I am aware some people liked episode two, at least to some extent, but I thought it was just as poor as the first one. Bleh. I hate having such negative opinions about anything, but for the record those are my opinions of those games.
     
  3. Sonic 4 Episode II is far from being perfect, but I really think is kinda good. Not "good" in the same level of Sonic 1, 2, 3K, Mania etc., but still good. You can see Dimps actually tried with this one.
     
  4. Josh

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    I like it, too. Episode II has a real spark behind it, but there are even things I appreciate about Episode I. It just didn't live up to its pedigree.

    The marketing for it (even now) claims it as THE Sonic game "you've waited 16 years for." And it definitely wasn't that. There WAS a Sonic game I'd been waiting for for 16 years, but I'd be waiting another 7 on that one. If Sonic 4 was called anything else, it wouldn't have pissed everyone off so royally, but it also probably wouldn't have caught so much (mostly, surprisingly positive) mainstream buzz, so starved was the market for anything that even KIND OF looked like one of the good Sonic games, haha.

    That said, I definitely understand WHY it so royally pissed everyone off. Much better than I did then, even, what with my Sisyphean need to claim the bad games weren't THAT bad. :P It was to 90s fans what Forces seems to have been to some sect of 2000s fans. Many of us really had been dreaming of Sonic 4 for 16 years, we were in that late-teens/early-20s period of peak nostalgic reverence for our own childhoods, and to have Sega SAY they were finally giving it to us, only to have it come out like THAT, and the mainstream to react like we were just mad about "green eyes"... yeah, NEVER have I seen the Sonic fandom in worse shape.

    I don't know how relevant this is, but now seems like a good time to bring it up. Kevin Eva was a community manager for Sega at the time, and he recently revealed some pretty enlightening info (which had always been suspected) on Twitter.

     
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  5. TheInvisibleSun

    TheInvisibleSun

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    Episode II, while not excellent, had a soul.
     
  6. Black Squirrel

    Black Squirrel

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    I like better topics.



    This is a damn-sight more relevant than "opinion topic #342930432". That's a "collect more testimonies and put them on the wiki" job, because any admission from Sega that Sonic 4 was offensively terrible makes excellent reading.
     
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  7. Dek Rollins

    Dek Rollins

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    I don't know what everyone else sees in Episode II. I played both games again earlier this year and they seemed basically the same in quality, beyond Episode II having less ugly graphics. Actually, I took note that in the first one I could at least roll down a hill a little bit by pressing down, whereas in II Sonic will just stop moving immediately.
     
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  8. Shadic

    Shadic

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    Cool. You're allowed to like bad games.
     
  9. I played both this year for some godforsaken reason. Episode II wasn't awful, I liked that one alright. I didn't bother finishing Episode I, got turned off pretty quick by the ugly design and the terrible controls.
     
  10. Xiao Hayes

    Xiao Hayes

    Classic Eggman art Member
    Tempted to speak about politics in bad english so mods shut down it instantly, but I'll bite and play your game instead (the topic, not Sonic 4).

    I liked ep.1 more than ep.2, it was ep.2 the one I had to force myself to finish. Remove that cheap running boss prior to the smart version of death egg robot (I liked fighting this one), and I'm ok with the basic game. Special stages, whoever... I don't know what the unlockable final levels are, I get 4 to 5 emeralds and after that I can't go further in either episode thanks to the way they're accessed, but at least I can play the ep.2 ones while the ep.1 ones are a nightmare both in visuals and controls. Ep. 2 is gimmicky as hell, I remember that point where you're basically stuck if you don't destroy the sea lions before they freeze the whole underwater tunnel, same with the tornado level spinning through walls. Besides being an acceptable try in adapting old levels to 2.5D and give them day to night variants, I can see how one would love these games, and, if there's something good more I'm forgetting, I'm not missing it.

    But we still need a conclusion to its story arc; that poor little planet...
     
  11. MykonosFan

    MykonosFan

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    We can do better than complaining about a thread in a thread, and joking to "have it shut down". It's far worse than someone coming in to say they like a Sonic game, especially to someone who is new.
     
  12. Xiao Hayes

    Xiao Hayes

    Classic Eggman art Member
    I'll apologize, then. It's still surprising the thread remains open either way considering past examples.
     
  13. Sid Starkiller

    Sid Starkiller

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    Probably because of the oversaturation of the time.
     
  14. _Sidle

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    That's quite the tale... I don't expect many, if any, people here have walked such a path and reached such an outlook.
    I've had similar exposure to 1-3K+CD and the two 4EPs roughly around the same time, but very quickly noticed 4 as something quite "off" and gravitated to the core classics.
    Mashing jump for AirDashes to get up to speed is indicative of Sonic's standard handling and physics being flawed and unengaging to use. Ripping the movement of a character designed to work with a specific mechanic, into a game without said mechanic, will do that. The HomingAttack is a (questionable) solution to the problem of accurately aiming at things in three dimensions at high speed. This problem does not exist in 2D, so it's demanded usage feels arbitrary and rather unfun.

    Level concepts aren't groundbreaking to begin with, and they all blur together in the abundance of boosters and springs transcending any cool map design. Likely due to the physics being ill-suited for much else.

    Even amongst contemporary retro revivals, (NSMBDS+Wii, Contra4, DKCR, MM9+10, KirbyRtDL, etc) Sonic 4 is not a good showing of what the appeal of the original series is.​
    Even in a pre-Mania world, the Advance trilogy had already accomplished everything 4 set out to do more successfully than it, and even earlier works like PocketAdventure and the GameGear games are more novel within their limitations.

    4 is a very lackluster pair of games no matter where you group it, having easily earned it's ire as I see it. To get the general perception on it to change is an uphill battle. One you aren't exactly SpiderManWalking over.

    Indeed, Kevin Eva's "opposite of whatever it is, was or will be" Sonic 4 thread is some nice insight worth preserving.
    Actually, the interviews on the wiki are all text based as far as I can remember. Is there any precedent for the concept of embedded reaction images, or would someone need to edit them out of the text?
     
  15. Sid Starkiller

    Sid Starkiller

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    I haven't played Episode 1 since its release, but I remember it being...OK. Since the Wii didn't get Episode 2, I couldn't play it at the time, but I did pick it up in a humble bundle a couple years ago...and it refused to run at all.
     
  16. Willie

    Willie

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    Same. I made an account on Sonic Retro the year Sonic 4: Episode I came out, yet a ton of people in this thread grew up with the game in their childhood. I personally thought Episode I was okay, but I liked Episode II. It's the only 2D Sonic game with online co-op, which brought me some fun memories. Most fun I had with Episode I was submitting images to the Sonic Retro refund contest. Biggest problem with both games is that they should have never been called Sonic the Hedgehog 4, but that's an argument that has been made a million times. I wonder if Dimps will ever make another Sonic game. They made some great games. Sonic Advance 2 in particular is one of my favorite Sonic games.
     
  17. raphael_fc

    raphael_fc

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    On one hand, it's good that Sonic 4 ep II had a co-op feature. On the other hand, I don't like the co-op feature.
     
  18. Vanishing Vision

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    I enjoy both episodes of Sonic 4 despite them being a far cry from the Genesis games in terms of level design and physics. I didn't buy Episode 1 until long after I was aware of the flaws with it, so I wasn't really let down or disappointed that this wasn't a "true Sonic 4". Mania makes those aforementioned flaws much more apparent, but I still have fun with 4. However, there is ONE thing 4 does EXTREMELY well that I absolutely love about it, and absolutely hate that Mania did not offer:

    Sonic 4 FINALLY makes classic Sonic work as a score attack game.

    It is so unbelievably irritating that the worst 2D "classic" Sonic in terms of general gameplay is the only one that is actually balanced for proper score competition. First, each act is selectable in either Score Attack or Time Attack mode, catering to both playstyles. Second, while keeping all the things that worked about scoring in classic Sonic (enemy chains, ring bonus), 4 fixes the time bonus problem. Instead of the blanket -30sec = 50K bonus that is simply not attainable in most classic Sonic stages (leading the ideal scoring route to be just grabbing every ring within the leisurely 10 minute limit), 4 assigns scaled target times for each act, depending on their length. Episode 1 features a "step down" series of 80K, 50K, and 10K bonuses, and Episode 2 just continually decreases the time bonus value, like how, say, SA2 does it.

    With these changes, Sonic 4 is a perfect score attack game in which getting the best record requires an exact balance between "do all the tricks" and "do it fast", with no room for either backtracking or skipping. Yet this perfect system is trapped in the worst 2D Sonic, while Mania nearly entirely ignores score attack for the expected "Sonic = speedrunning" attitude. I have serious doubts that Origins would make any changes like these to rebalance the Genesis games, and I'm aware of how niche this playstyle seems to be for this series nowadays, but it would become an immediate buy for me if they did something like the Sonic 4 system.
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2021
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  19. astroblema

    astroblema

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    I liked the Episode 1 special stages
     
  20. RetroJordan91

    RetroJordan91

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    I think everyone is in agreement here, and this includes me, that this should not have been called Sonic 4. Now that doesn’t mean I disliked the games when they came out.. in fact I had a good time with them, episodic release and Rush style physics not withstanding. Episode 2 was much better than Episode 1 and I was really looking forward to an episode 3 to finish off the series (my dumb self back then was thinking that eventually SEGA would bundle all the games together when a 3rd episode would come out so we can play the game as intended, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be). Now looking back on it, especially with the amazing Sonic Mania, this was not the true Sonic 4.

    You have to remember that this was 2010 and we hadn’t seen a 2D console Sonic game in 16 years at that point. I could be wrong with this but I believe this was the first time SEGA went back to this simple gameplay style. No friends, no boosting, just Sonic and Robotnik with the classic badniks again.

    However, this was only meant to be a simple cash grab mobile game and it shows. I just hope whoever made that decision to call it Sonic 4 is no longer employed.
     
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