Being able to cancel the super forms freely is the key to this. In Superstars, Super Sonic is less a transformation and more an invincibility monitor you can turn on and off at will. Press Factory 1, go super and smack the boss while he's electrified, then cancel out and save your rings.
I wholeheartedly endorse this opinion. I'm not a really fan of how "friendly" the Superstars aesthetic is. Feels too much like a Mario imitation (not as bad as Lost World, though). It's not bad, it just feels a bit plastic-y and generic. I like the characters to have a bit more personality to them. In general, Sonic 4 Episode 2 is hugely underrated IMO. I seem to be in the minority on this, but I love the art style, and the general aesthetic feels like a natural evolution of the Advance series. It's a decent template for how a really good "modern" 2D game could look. It'd be great if the series could stop consciously dividing itself between classic 2D / modern 3D.
hah, reading this just made me remember about how Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee look the way they do explicitly because the devs wanted the game to look "safe" - that is, when a parent walks into the room and sees their kid playing the game, they would be put at ease. I wonder if there was a similar philosophy here on some level?
I like that the game wasn't afraid to draw from older, removed/unimplmented concepts in the series but given you've got a reasonable shot of being right in that, they needed to return the metal sonic 'jumpscare' intro somewhere they had in some of the first stage of Knuckles' Chaotix prototypes
It's a really bombastic and fun track. But it plays entirely too often, and at the expense of the top-notch level themes themselves. I wish they'd saved the battle theme for missions in the town areas etc, and just did a Yoshi-esque drum beat for battles in the actual levels. I certainly didn't need the full battle theme playing everytime I approached a stray enemy that would then die in a single hit.
Shadow is one of my favourites. Whenever life gives you a hard time, Shadow enpowers you to power through it and get a piece of mind. He doesn't let you down.
I just like how Shadow is super edgy and serious and yet he moves by skating. It's beautiful. Though, is loving Shadow an unpopular opinion?
I genuily like Shadow but I maybe have a possible un-popular opinion: 90's Classic Sonic is cooler than Shadow the Hedgehog.
I think it's somewhat unpopular on this website specifically. Outside of here though he's one of the most popular characters in the franchise though lol, IIRC he only ranks second to Sonic himself in polls.
Shadow has a cool design and a good character arc in Sonic Adventure 2. His characterization in basically everything else blows though, imo
I hate that they made Shadow an edgy, sour cunt in the later games and media. I liked it when Sonic and Shadow had a mutual respect for each other!
Knuckles Chaotix is just as good as Sonic CD and deserves to be praised like the other classics. The music is great, the character abilities are fun to use, the special stages are arguably the best besides the blue sphere challenges, and the tethering is a fun gimmick for speed runs. The bosses have a perfect balance of difficulty. This game deserves a remake.
The rare moments when Shadow lightens up a bit and seems interested/pleased with something ("Cool city..." in Casino Park) are great, and I wish there were more of them.
It's not even later games and media, it's the fanbase itself. A large portion of the fanbase, for whatever reason, enjoys Shadow being a gun-toting psycho who hates Sonic's guts. I see fanart of it all over Twitter. It's eerily similar to when the internet was portraying Knuckles as being a brainless idiot a decade ago. Hopefully this will similarly reverse itself. I do think Shadow should be "darker" compared to Sonic, but the issue is those aspects of him nowadays are portrayed as "cool" rather than character flaws.
I think what made Shadow an interesting subversion of the "evil doppelganger" trope in SA2 is that he was hurt, played and manipulated by Gerald and G.U.N. (and the Black Arms in retcon). He wasn't really evil or a bad guy, which we see when he saves Rogue from Prison Island, he's just heavily misguided due to his tampered memories. I think pre-reboot Archie Shadow was really interesting because of the empathy he was given for others in his position, like Omega and Metal Sonic. I can understand if some people think that book made him too sentimental, and I'd struggle to entirely disagree, but I think it should be a reference point for future appearances. Shadow can be a grump, and even self-assured that his way of doing things is the right way as an "end justifies the means" kind of guy, but I think the thing you really need to make him a compelling character is his strong sense of justice and the trait that he does actually care a lot, even if he doesn't show it. These days, in IDW in particular, Shadow feels static and boring, more concerned with being perfect than with what he's actually fighting for (despite a promising start in issue 5 of the book).
The very first thing Knuckles does in the series is instantly believe the story of some clown scientist who just flooded his island with a giant evil space station with his face on it. I'm saying it was fine to lean into Knuckles' stupidity in an era where every other character had worse traits emphasized anyway. Give me dumb Knuckles over dumb Colors Tails any day.
