Character development is fine. Hell, I even know where Volpino's coming from: In Adventure, you see the first signs of Tails wanting to break away from Sonic and be his own justified hero. His own person, even. It was an important rite of passage for the character to face Eggman himself. This happens as well for Amy by the end of the game, minus facing Eggman. Even Sonic finds his view of any of Eggman's robots challenged by Amy's defense of E-102 Gamma, evidently suggesting that the animals inside the machines can somehow influence the machines. In Adventure 2, Sonic & Tails finds their own devices subverted by Eggman's cunning, and Shadow serves as an interesting foil to Sonic's character: dark to light. The problem with both those game's representation of the story was in the writing. And the introduction of excess throwaway characters. And the laughable model animation. And the weird, often awkward juxtaposition of dialogue scenes with somebody's theme song. Those games were a mess, but there were parts where they did good things with the characters, and ultimately those games were fun at least as long as you played as Sonic. Sonic Colors is far more refined in both presentation and writing, even if all the characters are doing are cracking jokes and assuming silly cartoony personalities. At least they have believable, entertaining personalities as anthropomorphic cartoon characters. There has not been one Sonic game that managed that, not even the Adventure games. So, to sum up: Adventure had halfway decent writing, but poor presentation. Sonic Colors succeeds in both fronts, by my reckoning. It might fall short here and there in gameplay, but it seems to be better than any 3D Sonic game we've ever gotten. Yeah, I'd say that I'm still waiting for Sonic Adventure 3, but the thing about Adventures 1 & 2 is that they had great gameplay buried under bad story and bad gameplay, so both packages suffer more than Colors might from trial-and-error gameplay and a weak co-op. But as far as I can see, the story is one of it's best parts, and it's really not meant to be taken as Shakespeare.
You want to talk character development? Yakker, the most silent side-kick ever in the entire Sonic series, wound up evoking the most honest feeling out of me. + - When Tails said he hadn't seen Yakker in a while after they found the machine that converts wisps into generators I genuinely felt bad.
I'm going to echo MegaDash's appraisal of the story here, both in regards to Colors and previous Sonic games. The Adventure games did have some nice ideas as far as Sonic's story goes, but those ideas were marred by issues of writing and presentation, so when you put everything on a scale to see how the ups and downs balance out, Colors weighs in a lot more favorably. I'd like to present a third option to compliment the issue of comedic cartoonyness vs. serious business, though, and given that this is Sonic the Hedgehog we're talking about, it's probably the idea option. Keep the toony, joke-infested scripts. Dial back the cheesiness of certain lines just a LITTLE bit. Take a small syringe and inject a small dose of serious business. If my estimates are correct, what you'd wind up with is something similar to, say, a Jak 2 or 3 plotline, minus the T-rated aspects like breast-ogling and the like. Something, dare I say, kind of like SatAM, only better-written and without the grimdark environments. (Unless, you know, a grimdark environment works for a given level, then it's okay.) Keep Orbot and Cubot. Scratch and Grounder cower before their awesomeness. Those two dumbots from Sonic X don't even register on the Scouter next to Orbot and Cubot. And as much as Eggman likes to talk to himself, he's a lot better when he has a sidekick or two to bounce his dialogue off of.
Wow. + - I can't believe how fucking annoying Asteroid Coaster is on the DS version. The drill controlled like ass in previous levels, but the void takes the cake. My thumb fucking hurts from trying to steer this mother fucker to where I want him to go, and I never get there in time, doomed to fall to a lower path or into that green shit that OHKOs you. Mission 3 in particular is a fucking nightmare. I'm going to walk away for a little while and cool my jets before trying to tackle it again. On the bright side, + - I really like the Special Stages. Your incentive for only collecting one type of sphere is that the ones you leave alone are left to be collected on the next lap. Dunno if any of that was really spoiler worthy, but better safe than sorry I guess.
If you wanted to hear what the characters sound like in the DS version, here's a compilation of their voices: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvjLf21n9no Includes: Sonic, Tails, Eggman, Cubot and Orbot, Shadow, Blaze, Amy, Silver, Cream, Big, Espio, Charmy, Vector, Chao, Rouge, Omega, and various Wisp noises.
Wow no Knuckles again? That's kind of shocking especially seeing how the cast of characters includes almost everyone else besides Knuckles.
What the hell, is Big a stoner now? I'm mean it'd fit the character perfect but still. Charmy sounds less annoying and Omega sounds like Gamma which are both pluses.
This is the first I've heard of Silver. I like what I've heard, but honestly that's a bit too little to base off of. I'm sure there are Free Riders videos I could look into if I really wanted to though. And Omega's voice. Reminds me more of his original voice than recent work. No disrespect towards Maddie Blaustein (and quite honestly that was more of the effects put towards her voice as opposed to her actual performance) but I always preferred the original Omega-styled voice. Still, he was the last character I was expecting to see in Colors. Odd. EDIT: Actually...he DOES sound a lot more like Gamma. Hnnnngggg yes. And yay chao
What's up with the DS version? Why did they put so much shit in it? What the fuck does these characters have to do with Color's plot anyway? It should have been Sonic & Tails only, goddammit. Hopefully, they were all at Tropical Resort when it blew up, and died along with it. And, Jesus Christ, I loved Espio's voice! "How goes your training? A failure! Good luck!" Made perfect sense. =P
They appear in the side missions only, never in the actual story. They're just there for filler pretty much. They're all enjoying the theme park on their own accord and such.
I expected one or two more characters in the DS version, but damn, they seem to be doing the ol' character-overload thang again. Thank God I'm totally uninterested in anything DS-related AND in anything Sonic Rush related, so I won't be picking it up. Perhaps I'll view the cutscenes on YouTube to see what the writing's like. No doubt there will be plenty of justification for the presence of Blaze the Cat.
I said this like two posts ago Also, Sonic Colours on the DS is 1000X more fun than Sonic Rush (never played Adventure, though).
So they made the DS version the "cram every character into one game" version. lets keep that way so we good shit on consoles and they get to keep their all characters in one game ratio. Also, HOLY FUCK OMEGA YOU SOUND GREAT! thank you SEGA! the rest are pretty much great as well. Is this DS or wii? I want to say DS. How to do convert 2sf to mp3?
Hey, so remember when Sonic Rivals was a relatively decent game that was brief in terms of characters, and for the sequel they were like "hurp let's throw in all the other retarded characters"? + - ...you don't suppose they're going to do the same with Sonic Colors 2, are they? Assuming they make a sequel to the Wii Sonic Colors.
