So... the way to improve Elise is to make her Blaze? LOL Sounds about right, TBH. You could go full Frozen Elsa with it. Her flame powers ARE the Flames of Disaster. She learns to open herself up and control her powers.
I, for one, would gladly play a version of Sonic 06 where Blaze is in the place of Elise, plot mostly intact. Wait actually no I want to play as Blaze too
I would play a version of 06 where Elise gets crushed by a comically large anvil during the opening and fucking dies and doesn't appear at all for the rest of the game
also, and this still blows my mind, she literally kisses him in front of his series-wide love interest, who doesn't seem to give a single shit about it. Like, that one scene alone sums up all of Sonic 06's story and world problems IMO, because the game wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to have these grandiose, realistic environments (...even if it never gets the dev time to really have them) and these realistic humans while also putting it all next to a bunch of cartoon animals that said humans never acknowledge, so it's just completely weird. Not a single other NPC in the entire city looks like Sonic or his friends, but you can't tell that by how the NPCs react to them. If you swapped the models and made Sonic and co human, literally none of the dialogue or story would change. Which is...honestly pretty normal for the Adventure games but it is so, so jarring actually looking at and playing the game when it's trying harder than either Adventure game ever did to render literally everything not-Sonic realistically. It wants to have these more bland, """realistic""" characters like the weird Eggman redesign and everything involving Elise but also goes for having Amy and Shadow running around being practically exactly the same as previous titles, so you just get this mismash of items that are just not blending together, culminating in a scene that everyone mocks for multiple reasons, the biggest one for me being that Amy just gets completely ignored and unacknowledged in one of the weirdest ways. Like they just forgot her whole gimmick existed?
I had an idea for how to rewrite Blaze as Elise where you keep both characters somehow. Instead of having Elise be Blaze, have her be Blaze's mother. She's assumed to carry Iblis within her, only for the revelation later on that it's inside Blaze instead, being a very young child. And Blaze isn't even really aware of it. Blaze's complete inexperience and training for handling Iblis at so young an age is what causes her to lose control over it eventually. And something happens where due to Iblis being released, Blaze is made to be immortal, and has part of her soul bonded to Iblis. So in the future, Silver and Blaze are still fighting Iblis, but Blaze isn't even really aware of how it all happened or why she doesn't age, until she learns the truth later on. Silver destroying Iblis in the future is actually what makes her vanish. That's on top of a general rewrite where the entire future portion of Silver's story takes place before Sonic's portion of 06 even happens, so rather than hopping back and forth across time, it's a one-way trip, and Silver is given more motivation to kill Sonic, because he believes it will save Blaze. Of course, what this ultimately results in is the romance plot of 06 being nipped in the bud, and possibly moved to being between Silver and Blaze instead. /autism
While we're ragging on 06 and its romance plot, I always found that one "Test of Love" mission in Sonic's story to be odd. Literally all it is, is you have to walk to either Elise or Amy, and that's it. It doesn't mean anything. But it makes me wonder. Was Sega gonna have dating sim-esque elements in that game that got cut due to time constraints? I don't think there's any real evidence of that, but it's such an odd moment.
Honestly, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they had planned for some of Sonic's interactions with Amy/Elise and vice versa to be slightly different depending on the player's choice. It is worth noting that Elise and Amy both have dialog that's unique to this mission - I don't believe there's a single other HUB mission in the game that has unique dialog for playable/secondary characters like it? It strikes me as a very odd choice, especially since the other two trials are relatively difficult in comparison (namely the no hit one). It feels weird for the third to have no real impact on the player experience. Really as a whole I don't mind Elise, but the issue is that her debut game doesn't really give her a whole lot outside of being a device to help tell the plot. Her biggest issue is that she's basically a McGuffin. Throughout all of Sonic's story, she's repeatedly kidnapped and seen as a 'key' to help Eggman in his latest scheme. Any time the story tries to give her attention, it's almost immediately revoked by a sneak attack from Eggman. I suspect some of this is a result of chunks of the story having to be hastily rearranged or cut out with the deadline given, but it causes her character to suffer. Silver is the only other story that gives her character attention, but that also boils down to her...being a device for the plot (her father choosing to seal Iblis inside of her). I don't recall if there's even a single scene in Shadow's campaign that really gives her any screen time. There isn't a whole lot of interesting characterization with Elise in the screen time she does get, because they have to write her as this 'calm individual' trying to keep Iblis from escaping. There are glimpses of something slightly more interesting in some of the pre-rendered cinematics (nearly crying and running to Sonic for comfort), but I understand the Sonic/Elise romance thing is very odd to many. I guess my solution would be to make her slightly more...angsty? That sounds silly saying it out loud, but 06 was trying for something more cinematic. The more I think about it, the more I'm somewhat surprised there wasn't something like Elise is actually somewhat upset at her dad since she never properly got to say goodbye. Maybe she ends up initially feeling a little betrayed her father sealed this weird thing in her. There's basically no real 'resolution' between the two characters and Elise just sort of immediately accepts this responsibility without ever really having a face-to-face moment with her dad. The game also has her dad's spirit(?) as a guide/hint like Adventure 1's Tikal...but without the payoff Adventure 1 had. It'd be difficult to justify a reason to bring her back too since Iblis was killed, and the character is surrounded by this 'Well that wasn't very good' discourse. Somewhat related and probably not terribly unpopular now, but I never quite got the discourse over humans in Sonic. Anthro animals interacting with humans feels like it was pretty common in 1930s cartoons, which is where some of the influence in Sonic's design lies. That and I feel humans can allow for more interesting characterization than say the smaller animals being in danger. I dunno. I thought at least Adventure 1/2 had the right idea.
Ok so allow me to elaborate. Lost World 3DS has quite a few things that keep me from disliking it. I vastly prefer how Sonic controls in the 3DS version over the Wii U/PC version; he doesn't lose momentum whenever you turn, the parkour feels better, and I thought the homing attack felt more reliable. I maintain that the first two worlds are quite good, and it has a handful of levels (e.g. Sky Road Zone 3) where everything comes together and it feels right. I think the main issue the game runs into is the level design; after the first two worlds, the levels fall into the Sonic Heroes/Sonic '06/Werehog trap of "the levels are way too fucking long" and it gets tiring, not to mention that the gyro controls tend to be pretty poorly done and require you to use a lot of space for a handheld game you mostly play when you're bored on the bus. Still, it had enough charm that I was able to finish it, which is more than I can say about the likes of Heroes or Shadow. I also sorta appreciate it on... principle, I guess. It was both the last Sonic game designed for a handheld (Runners doesn't count) and the last Sonic game that Dimps developed, not to mention that it's the only handheld-exclusive Sonic game to feature full 3D gameplay. In a way, it has this "end of an era" feeling to it, like it's the culmination of a series of games that began all the way back with Sonic Pocket Adventure (or even longer if you count the handheld games before the Dimps staff got involved). Don't get me wrong, it's not exactly a great conclusion for the handheld series, but its uniqueness gives it a lot of novelty. tl;dr, it's kind of dogshit but it's my kind of dogshit
Agreed. I can't take the anthros outside of the main cast in Forces seriously at all. It ends up looking like Toon Town with how generic they are. I think the anime style of Adventure 1 is my favorite by far, then SA2, then Unleashed and 06 tied at the bottom. Disregarding the awful, generic models they use in-game, I honestly don't mind how 06's humans look. While Unleashed is more consistent, I hate the off-brand Pixar designs.
An idea that's been nagging me at the back of my head lately is somehow getting access to the source and publishing rights and doing a version of Lost World 3ds for Android (so it can take advantage of all the Android-based Handhelds coming out) while doing some tweaks like giving all the Gyro stuff alternative physical controls, moving any touch screen elements elsewhere, redoing/replacing some of the models with still low poly but better versions (like maybe Sonic uses his highest quality Gens 3ds stuff), and polishing up the UI and world textures to use less compressed assets. Even though today it'd be seen as somewhat unnecessary because you could instead just port over the other Sonic Lost World, I personally feel like it's an experience that's at risk of going away in a lot of ways. Also, the speedrun is kind of crazy. Edit: Actually, Question, do you end up using the D Pad or Slide Pad more?
I'm still waiting for humans that arent related to Eggman/the Robotniks to appear in Sonic media again (other than the movies ofc), especially after the Elise redesign in that one Sonic Channel(?) art, would love to see humans like that in the games over dollar store Pixar and Final Fantasy. The anthro designs in both Boom and Forces give me the same vibes as Archie's original designs did, aka knock-off brand furry mascot characters. Huge part of why I've never gave those things any attention.
The telltale sign that this discourse has a reason to be is that we have obviously always had humans in Sonic -- namely, Eggman -- but we still got complaints. Either everyone is an absolute lunatic or... something else was going on. And what was going on was that for some very strange reason, humans never looked like Eggman, so he ends up looking like a strange anthro-human, completely out of place in his own world, using the latest Egg Hovercraft to get his metallic Egg Dog to the Egg Veterinarian Clinic he built to give his metallic Egg Doctors an Egg Job while everyone else is living in a mostly normal, if vaguely and ever so slightly futuristic world. Even the important ones, like Maria or the President. My point would then be that the discourse about humans was a lot more about aesthetic homogeneity and identity than actually having humans there or not, and creating world where both Sonic and Eggman belong. The only game in which the humans and anthros seem to exist in a somewhat coherent world is... 06. Soleanna looks like home for that Eggman, being a city that produces somewhat realistic, yet really advanced gadgets just like him.
We probably got (and still get) complaints because there's no direct evidence of humans being around in the Genesis games, or half the boost games ftm. There's also SATAM (I think), Sonic X and of course the movies now which do establish the humans as being from a separate dimension. And I'm not even going to try to summarize the total batshit way the Archie comics handled it. Point is I don't think it necessarily comes down to the aesthetic tastes of the fans, moreso that Sega/ST themselves just never really nailed down one specific way that humans were supposed to work in this canon. So it's easy for fans to just go off whatever they've been most exposed to.
Personally, I'd prefer if Eggman was the only human. Not because of any hand-wringing about whether they should or shouldn't have a place in Sonic's world, but just because I don't find their designs or characters to be nearly as fun as the anthros. I like Sonic having this imaginative, fantastical aesthetic that couldn't exist in reality, and having humans and their society around - or at least, FOCUSING on them - only serves to ground that potential in my book.
I confess, I honestly like the snowball level in Sonic Lost World. I especially like the music and don't mind the controls at all. It's pretty.
