Sonic Forces Thread

But the boost at least offers some control, and it places more emphasis on reacting to obstacles than worrying about enemies. The idea itself is more like a stamina bar than a win button.

 

I've been having short playtimes of many modern titles recently and got a worse feeling about this particular upcoming game. I'm not worried about a rather linear gameplay if it packs a lot of action and good twists in design, but the presence of wisps and other returning bad choices are ruining my will to try it. I'ts possible that I like the OC gameplay the most just because it will feel like it isn't a Sonic game at all, and, that way, I won't be making that many comparisons.

 

I know I'm late to this, but;

Wrong. Super Mario Sunshine had Mario Game Feel. He played closely enough to the way he did in SM64 to make the gameplay seem like an extension or further iteration of the game that predated it. Super Mario 64 was at the time the closest translation of Mario Game Feel to 3D that you could get. There was continuity in playstyles, even when adding a dimension or gameplay gimmick. This is not something that Sonic has had the luxury of having until Unleashed came out. You know that you're comparing apples and oranges here.

Sonic games need to feel like Sonic games. Every Mario game I've ever played feels like a Mario game. The reason why Sonic games don't do this is because of laziness, incompetence, and poor foundational gameplay design choices. They want to reinvent the wheel every 3 fucking years, and it's annoying. You can have similar gameplay to your previous game and have this new game still be original. Sonic Team just don't fucking try, and to be fair, if you're looking at New Super Mario Bros. I guess Mario can't either, in some instances.

Sonic Team should not be let off the hook anymore. They have had since the fucking Dreamcast came out to get this right, and they have very narrowly perfected almost every formula they have tried, before giving up and moving on to their next mistake, every time leaving you with a sense of want and disappointment. They are like that genius dude from Jimmy Neutron who makes brilliant inventions but can never finish anything. The only thing they need to do is learn where they fucked up in the last game, and use those points to correct their next one. They don't need to keep trying to figure out how Sonic is going to work in 3D. This is not 1997. We are not living in 1997.

I guess you can also blame the hostile tenant farmer nature of Japanese work environments for the incompetence, but somehow Nintendo EAD can churn out gold on an annual basis while still living under the same brand of legal slavery, so why can't Sonic Team?




Oh, and one final note: Fuck Wisps. I hate them, fuck them. They don't have a place in this series and haven't since 2010. They canonically departed from the Earth, so why the fuck are they still around and still encapsulated?

 

Some of the wisps probably chose to stay on earth with Sonic (and got captured, again).

 

Maybe it's like rings or extra lives or shields and they're just there and don't exist outside of levels while you play them? Yknow, like power ups in every other game.

 

Right? That's why I feel like the "wisps don't make sense plot wise" point sucks. Who cares if they make sense. Mario has a leaf that turns him into a raccoon, where'd that come from? Who lays item monitors around? What the hell were those yellow experience crystals in Unleashed? Who knows and honestly who cares.

Now saying some wisps powers suck is a very different and very real thing. Rhythm for example can go jump off the metaphorical cliff and die, as can bomb. I like the idea of the wisps power ups and I think they're being used properly in this game. Hell they're not even being used by Sonic, they've been passed off to Original the Character.

 

Besides Lobotomy's reference to Unleashed as a game that had a real Sonic feel, which I'm still wondering where did they hide that when I played the game, I agree with (almost?) all the inconsistency arguments given here. The creative process of finding an identity for a Sonic game in a 3D environment should have happened just when developing one of the games, and maybe a second game if the first needed polishment; let's say the very first of them is a total ruin, and we could add a third try, but that's all: Sonic Team should have known what to do after Adventure 2, and they didn't, they made Sonic Heroes, an out of place formula they didn't use again, anyway, but they kept the "let's try this even if it's out of place" as a design philosophy. Sonic Generations, incidentally, did something right, and they could have followed from there, but Sonic Lost World came out as a new experiment, and something like Sonic Boom was licensed. Now, we have this Forces thing, and we don't know if they've learned the lesson, or experiments and lack of care in more important things will ruin the upcoming game again.

 

I think the big difference here is that Sonic tends to be story focused, has a continuity (that keeps getting ignored), and the Wisps were specifically acknowledged in the story. Outside of the RPG spinoffs, Mario is so deprived of story that there isn't much of a continuity at all, if there's any to begin with. The closest we've gotten to this was with the backstories of the Super Mario Land/Wario Land games, which haven't been followed up on.

 

Sorry, but I have to heavily disagree with you here. Sure, Mario Sunshine played more or less like a more gimmick-heavy Mario 64. But.. see, I grew up without the 3D Mario games. I didn't play Mario 64 until I was about 14 years old, when I discovered a N64 emulator. Before that I had only played the Mario games on the DS and Game Boy. And Mario 64 felt like an entirely different kind of game to me. No run button? An entire moveset for Mario? Open game world with little to no direction? Cryptic mission objectives? Power stars to unlock new levels?

At first I had no idea what this game required from me, as I ran around Peach's castle endlessly before finding the first level. And guess what happened there... Yep, I ran around the level for a long time, confused and wondering what kind of "Mario game" this even was.

Continuity in playstyles? Mario 64 changed what Mario games were about completely. More so than Yoshi's Island, perhaps. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I really enjoyed Mario 64, and now I own both versions of the game. I've even completed it 2.5 times by now. But Mario 64 (and Sunshine & the upcoming Odyssey) are fundamentally different from the 2D Marios. Nintendo pretty much considered the 3D games and the 2D NSMB their own independent series, with the Galaxy games being the ones to show off to the gaming press and fans, and the NSMB games functioning as Nintendo's horribly stale, yet unbelievably profitable cash-cow.

But enough of that. Let's think about what Sonic Adventure did differently from the Mega Drive game (including Sonic 3D), shall we?
There's hubworlds. Tails and Knuckles have their own different attacks instead of the spindash, and their levels have little gimmicks like chasing and emerald hunting. There's more of a focus on a "cohesive" narrative. And Big and Amy exist. Also, Gamma, which is just a poor man's Burning Rangers.
But Sonic, who is the focus of the game (having the most content as well as the most fleshed out gameplay), is really not much different from MD Sonic. I jumped into SA1 after playing the first two Sonic games on MD and Master System, and it felt more of less like a continuation of those old games, just in 3D and with extra content in the form of different characters and minigames. And SA2 was a continuation of SA1 pretty much the same way Sunshine was a continuation of 64 (and funnily enough, both SA2 and Sunshine managed to be pretty unpolished games, despite coming out years after the games that proceeded them!)

And about Unleashed being a continuation of the "real Sonic feel"....

hahahaWHAT

 

This isn't correct. The Wisps in their debut in Colors have an entire dedicated backstory to them, they weren't standard game objects that spontaneously started to appear without explanation. They had their own home planet away from Sonic's world, they were kidnapped from that planet and used as power source by Eggman, and Sonic's goal for that game was rescuing and freeing them (as well as saving their Mother Wisp in the DS game). At the end of the game they were shown to be leaving back to their home planet after rescuing Sonic and saying goodbye to him and Tails. Generations also supported this with Planet Wisp being the only level where they were available as powerups (and it made sense in that game because the game's narrative was about time-travel piece). It when Lost World simply had them in the game without any explanation given in the game's story that people started questioning their existence.

I'm not even that big of a stickler in canon or narrative for Sonic titles, but I think it's pretty clear Wisps were introduced in a manner that separated them from things like shields or rings.

I don't agree. The sandbox-styled Mario games (64, Sunshine, and Odyssey) made several of changes to the formula regarding objectives when bringing the series to 3D, but its not like they didn't throw out the foundations of the original Mario games completely. The core gameplay is still about precision-based platforming and Mario's trademark jumping abilities are still his defining gameplay mechanics. The new mechanics that have been introduced over the years --triple jumps, wall jumps, the dive, the spin-- don't upstage the primary gameplay (only FLUDD could be considered an exception here). There's a reason Mario 64 is held up as the example in translating a 2D series to 3D, most people don't pick up 64 or Sunshine and say "this feels nothing like a Mario game".

You're also neglecting to mention that the Galaxy games and the Super Mario 3D games (especially the latter) are designed to be far more in line with the 2D Mario games as it is.

 

I don't think you understand my meaning when I say that. Of course Sonic Unleashed doesn't play like Green Hill Zone Act 1. However, they managed to tack down a playstyle that fit the character and made it feel like an actual extension of the character's abilities carried over from the 2D games, rather than something massively different and unfitting for the character. I didn't say that to mean that Unleashed was an autismally specific recreation of the "Good Old Days". Play Unleashed, and you think "okay, I'm controlling Sonic the Hedgehog". Some of the other games in the series don't give you that.
You will NEVER get a 3D Sonic game that plays like a 2D Sonic Game. You can mimic angle-handling, momentum, rolling, and what have you, but my point is that Sonic Unleashed felt like a Sonic game, whereas, Colors and Lost World felt like My First Super Mario Bros. Unleashed didn't feel as though it was derivative of something else, but rather, it seemed to meet people's expectations of how Sonic could/would work in 3D.

Lost World Sonic felt like you were controlling either a tertiary character from the franchise, or some backwoods Mario clone from China, depending on whether or not you chose to put up with Parkour. Slow in all the wrong places, fast in all the wrong places, two uniform speeds to work with, no real carrying of momentum in the air. It just didn't feel like a Sonic game. Sonic Unleashed felt more like a Sonic game.

 

Beyond the facts that it's a platformer, some moves return from/were inspired by Donkey Kong '94 (a puzzle platformer spinoff) and Yoshi's Island (a Mario game in name only), and has the appearance of Mario, what about 64 resembled a Super Mario Bros. game? How many platformers aren't about precision based platforming (Which 64 and Sunshine mostly lacked outside of the Bowser and Secret courses, respectively) and a character using their jumping abilities?

I think the only reason people don't look at 64, Sunshine, and Odyssey and say "this feels nothing like a Mario game" is because this is what Mario was first like in 3D. It's why we have people nonsensically dismissing the 3D games as simply "2D Mario in 3D" rather than "real 3D Mario games".

Strangely, many of the people who say things like this think of the Galaxy games being more in line with the likes of 64, Sunshine, and Odyssey than 3D Land and World. I've seen at least one person describe the first Galaxy as a "linear Super Mario 64", which is pretty oxymoronic.

 

As for the fact that they're in capsules, I don't think that really needs a story explanation, it's simply a convenient form for the powerup to take.

 

I understood perfectly what you said, but I don't feel it like that by any means. I like platformers, not racing games, and I like precision and control, which that game didn't had enough of these. Still better to play than Colours, the only game I played less than 10 hours because I really really really hate it.


Oh, and I forgot this before...

I'm not sure if Mario 64 really followed its predecessors, as I really loved 64 and just enjoyed a bit the previous games besides Yoshi's Island, which wasn't really a Mario game. The aesthetics and atmosphere of that game DID follow its predecessors, so it worked as an appropiate spin-off/improvement for the series. It's quite obvious that Sonic Adventure tried to mimic some of those 2D-to-3D changes, but got worse instead of better.

 

Mario 64 was different from the standard 2D platformer Mario games, but I always felt Mario's moveset and the vertically focused stages were inspired by the GB Donkey Kong remake. It could be argued 64 is closer to the Arcade Mario games than the platformer ones.

 

So many people these days seem to be forgetting how bad Unleashed truly is. Even disregarding the hubworlds and the third rate God of War clone they hastily cobbled together to justify the game's price tag (also known as the "Werehog"). Unleashed IS derivative of something else, and it's painfully obvious playing it. It takes the basic gameplay from the DS games, strips it down considerably by removing any stage specific gimmicks as well as the trick system and replacing Sonic's "R-Button moves" with much less practical ones like stomping (how many times in the game do you even need to do that in a level?), drifting, which controls like wank in Unleashed, and the slide, which is essentially a really, really crap spindash, as well as making most of the level design a bunch of 3D hallways and 2D segments that entirely depend on fucking QTEs (the most hated cliché from the "We want to be just like God of War guiz!!" era) and Sonic running , railgrinding and bouncing along (semi-)automated sequences. And the concepts taken from the DS games are usually integrated very poorly, like boosting across water (which kills you instantly in Unleashed, becuase they couldn't be arsed to program underwater physics).

That is not good game design. At all. And when the game does unexpectedly throw a bit of "precision" platforming at the player, it's completely ruined by the controls and general laggyness. Say what you want about My First Super Mario Bros, but I - and the vast majority of the gaming public - would just much rather play something like Colours, because when I play it, it actually makes me think the designers gave a toss/b]. If Colours isn't a "true" Sonic because of "blockiness", then you might as well say that Sonic 1 after Green Hill zone isn't a "true Sonic game".


EDIT:

The fuck are you even trying to say dude... Not everyone here speaks 4chan.

 

I'm not a huge fan of Unleashed or the boost gameplay in general, but it really isn't that bad. At least not Sonic's portion. Yes it's restrictive, has a bunch of sloppy controls, and relies way too much on QTE's and automation, but the things that work about it work pretty well. Quick Stepping is an absolute worthless ability, as is drifting in most cases, but things like stomping, the air boost, and even the slide can all be used to help keep up the pace and get really good times on levels if you use them properly. The narrow level design and swapping perspectives helps maintain focus, which works better for Speedruns. And really, that's the only aspect the boost gameplay has going for it, so why not focus on it. If I'm to be completely honest, I prefer Unleashed's Daytime levels over Generation's Modern levels. Boost Sonic in general is like a less solid Crash game. The 3D space is there to look pretty, more so than interact with, and it's much more focused on consistent, kinetic action than actual platforming. It lacks Crash's great level design and tight control scheme, but it's pretty much the same conceptually.