I remember being fascinated with Labyrinth Zone when I was in my early teens because, yeah it was a bit more difficult, but it felt really expansive. It had really cool graphics. Its music was stellar. It filled me with a sense of exploration and thinking there were probably cool secrets to find throughout. I never minded the slow pace. It was the most adventurous level in the game.
I struggle to pick a favourite Sonic voice between Drummond and Smith. Two very different takes that I think both suit Sonic wonderfully. I know fairly Smith tends to be fairly divisive in general, with his Fromtiers performance in particular being contentious before of how he was directed to sound so deep and serious. But that's where my unpopular opinion comes in; I honestly love the way that Sonic sounds in that game. He's equal parts cool and mature, as the situation requires. The only time I dislike Smith's performance as Sonic is in Lost World. He's straining to sound younger in that game, and it comes off as whiny. It's a subtle difference that draws the line between peak performance and worst performance.
To put it simply to Labyrinth lovers; slopes are fun and Labyrinth doesn't have them. Still better than Marble which hardly even bothers with multiple paths.
You all are sleeping on Scrap Brain Zone Act 3 But seriously though, I prefer Scrap Brain Zone Act 3's colour palette to Labyrinth's
True true every Sonic 1 level has it's merits Green Hill Zone is iconic, and teaches the player perfectly. Marble Zone Spring Yard is funky, and the half pipes are fun. Labyrinth is challenging with so many diverse paths. Star Light has great flow and is a great lead up to the finale with beautiful night sky visuals. Scrap Brain is a tough gauntlet throwing all sorts of hazards at you to prove your skill you built up through the game.
The best way to portray a sense of loss and put us in Shadow's shoes is to actually show us what he's missing. Gyatso and his relationship with Aang is so well characterized compared to Maria that even making that comparison undercuts your point and serves mine. We get a good sense of what these two mean to eachother, the nature of their relationship, what kind of hobbies and past time they shared, and where Aang got his fun loving temperament and spirit from. How important of a guardian figure Gyatso was to Aang and how much of a loose end he is without him. What SA2 goes for instead is very functional, but doesn't immerse us in the characters any. Just about every scene between the two of them is raw exposition and almost nothing else. Maria has some curiosity about earth, but what kind of hobbies may she have picked up to stave off that desire? What did she and Shadow do for fun that made them so close? As far as SA2 is concerned none of that is important. All you need to know is that they were close and now she's gone. It works in the same way a spinning gear or a turning wheel does, but my argument was never that the story wasn't functional. Just that it's not all that interesting to watch and it doesn't make me feel for Shadow as much as I'd like. Now, I'm not saying SA2's fast paced action movie plot needed to be cut down by a series of slow paced, slice of life laden flashbacks, but as long as the game is dumping optional missions and collectables on us left and right some more lore morsels as a reward couldn't have hurt.
Maybe I should give Marble/Labyrinth a little more respect considering my love for Sandopolis Act 2, the wildly overhated synthesis of Marble and Labyrinth's mechanics, that even has its own wildly overhated endless waterslide. It's just hard to go back to slow underwater controls when I can have fun regular controls while also whacking ghosts and sliding under trap doors just in time like Indiana Jones. Not to mention actual slopes to fly past an obstacle or two if I feel. I definitely think it's one of the best acts, though that probably means the Labyrinth lovers have a point.
That last point is fair; if I enjoy the new Maria content I would be fine with that as well. The lack of answers for the questions in the middle I think are reflective of their actual relationship though. Monk Gyatso has one or two scenes of levety and living a normal (which is an important distinction) life with Aang, which showcases their bond and the influence Gyatso had on Aang in the process. Shadow comparatively has one conversation with Maria, with her asking what it's like on earth, Shadow getting lost deep in thought about his purpose in life, and a general sense of existential melancholy hanging over them. Shadow was obviously close enough with Maria to confide in her with these kind of thoughts, but there was also a palpable distance between them as well. Closer than any other relationship, like how he doesn't refer to Gerald as his father in spite of the inverse being the case, but a general state of pensive observation. A large part of Shadow's personal relationships from my perspective are much more distant than anyone in the fandom usually portrays them as, so assuming that the context we did have is not enough because of that nature feels like it missed the point imo. And, if that is the ultimate takeaway from their relationship, does that make the story weaker? (I think that it does with the wrong framing, but that's why I keep bringing up framing as the crux of it.) As for portraying a sense of loss, that's what I was trying to get at with the narrative angle being completely different. We're supposed to empathize with Shadow's sense of loss to a degree, but for the most part that's not the point, and stepping into his shoes is less what it's about. The narrative meat and potatos is the viewer trying to untangle him as a character as the game progresses, and there's not really a specific point where the emotional weight of what he lost is supposed to impact you. You can get the functional sense that he lost someone important to him, but you don't know why he promised revenge until the end of the game, you don't know why he even reached that conclusion without Maria directly telling him. It might be "complexity for the sake of complexity", but that's ultimately the takeaway from the direction that I had, and as a result I don't feel like the foundation of the story is worse for it when it leans into that specifically. The immersion into the character is directly opposed to the obfuscation that they wanted to keep up, and the payoff we did get narratively has to do with a moral/existential takeaway and the weight it bears on Shadow. Is obfuscation as a narrative hook for dealing with characters' motivations and backstories worse than immersion and emotional catharsis, if there still is an equivalent catharsis included in the narrative itself? (this is something I'm conflicted on ever since hearing writers/critics lament audiences need to be handfed context, subtext be damned, vs the feelings I have for the details SA2 does have for it's plot that support it greatly, but were left exclusive to the epilogue for some/no reason) The other major issue at play is that the obfuscation is doing heavy lifting for more elaborate context they wrote for the game at the time of release, but didn't include, because it is probably far worse content-wise to include in the actual game... until ShTH in an ironically lower stakes level, whoops
ok I’ll throw some oil on the dwindling fire. Sonic lost world was great, people are just mad it wasn’t generations 2. Knuckles chaotix is really fun and easy, people are just too stubborn and get skill issued before they’ve bothered to memorize anything. Have fun with these.
You're mistaking SA2 as leveraging obfuscation over emotional catharsis and immersion when it's a story attempting to leverage both. maybe the former more than the latter but there is meant to be a point where we "get" Shadow. The moment, late game where he "gets" himself, Maria's actual sentiments and wishes and pivots on his ambitions. It's a classic case of capture and release. If we're not meant to be in his shoes there, we certainly are in STH and Sonic 06 which use the context of his backstory as fuel for further developments. It's not either/or. They're riding the blade's edge attempting to enrich one with the other. Let's use one last Avatar example as a way this is done positively. Zuko is introduced as an opposing force, and even when we get stories, scenes and entire episodes from his perspective they're careful not to spill the guts on his entire backstory and psyche. Even after he tries to kill the main characters the story pivots to his perspective without trying to endear us entirely to him. it's only with Zuko Alone, halfway through the series where Zuko is fully contextualized as a child fighting to earn what should be a birthright. Love, belonging, and a place to be. We've had Zuko's backstory explained to us before that point, but only then is the emotional turmoil of it all fully explored. Again, SA2 simply doesn't have the time to bring such ideas home as elegantly, even if the script were much better than it is(I think there's a lot of room for improvement here personally even within the confines of the short cutscenes we have availiable but I'll save those ideas for a different topic.), but with how much time we've spent on Shadow-centric stories afterward I think there's room to call out a missed opportunity here.
I think if Sonic Team had committed more to the parkour system instead of trying to make Super Sonic Galaxy, the game would've been a lot better received, wouldn't be Gens 2 but itd be a solid attempt at trying to explore ways to do 3D Sonic in a more efficient way. Instead dev time was wasted making levels with exciting gameplay like pushing fruit and controlling a giant snowball. I do like Lost World actually, the story is more tolerable than most Sonic games, and when the game decides to stick to something more Sonic-like it's a lot of fun. But yeah, it still wasn't a good follow-up after the 1-2 combo of Colors and Gens and that hurt bad.
I meannnn that's fair. But counter to that, I'd argue the fandom reception to what that takeaway actually was vs the takeaway they abided by after the fact, kinda feels like it reinforces that "getting" the character still wasn't the end goal ultimately? Maekawa said that he writes his stories in ways that people can reach different conclusions depending on what they see out of the story, and we can see that in how Shadow never states out loud many of the takeaways that people have from the conclusion, including my own tbh. I do think if SA2 was left to its own devices, then the story would likely end up worse for wear because of how much it leaves unexplored, both in the game and including the epilogue. There would never be an inevitable conclusion whether he was the Shadow that was released from the ARK or one created on prison island, there wouldn't be a follow up to where his actual character would go after he learned the whole truth of his past, there wouldn't really be an exploration of his own agency as opposed to the wishes of people passed and in the present day... it's all there in the original game to make use of, but they're ultimately elements that feel like a basket of loose threads and themes that were established to be mYstErIouS. That's why I'm actually thankful they're making use of them after bringing his character back, contrary to popular outlook lol So if SA2 was left on its own, I'd... probably dislike the functional complexity a fair bit more than I do now. It'd be frustrating actually. But now that we're actually continuing it, that uncertainty feels more like a feature actually benefiting the character, in the same way the serialized stories work? I know that SA2 was never made with that intention though, so it's odd imo. And whether they actually manage to capitalize off the emotional turmoil is a whole other story, considering that at best, we get the Sonic Channel story having a small section barely addressing it paired with the narration at the very least, but fundamentally the context of the emotional turmoil feels like it's perpetually destined to be subtext due to the subject material itself.
This is going to be me digging a hot take out of storage from more than 10 years ago, but honestly I feel like SLW at it's best should be just as gimmick-laden as the Wii U version was going for. Like Battons said, it was going for something different from what people expect. The problem is that a good chunk of those gimmicks had problems that made them unfun, or the controls made them unfun, or the game design itself didn't support the design as strongly as it should, etc Back when I played ShTH I was kind of shocked that the levels basically consisted of SLW Wii U-esque mini challenges here and there, and it's like... on the one hand, I get it. If the developers want to attempt to create these kinds of minigame esque gimmicks they should arguably be allowed to, to the best of their ability, even if they're not traditional platformer gimmicks or level design gimmicks people usually go for. But... they have to be as fun as a platformer is if they want to make that kind of game... I feel like Astrobot might have some good parallels to this, with the amount of gimmicks I have seen from trailers, but at the same time I haven't seen enough footage to know whether it goes in the minigame direction or the platforming direction, so I might be off base with regards to that.
