Nah. Advance 2 bosses rule. Objectively the best and most engaging bosses the 2D games have ever had.
Having trouble keeping your rings in a boss fight of all things is a good thing, especially if you can't wait forever for an opportunity. The fact that you have to build the opportunity to attack by approaching the boss while avoiding its attacks, putting yourself at risk and having to evaluate when and how to dodge... man, that's great. Every hit will be slightly different if you can't find your tempo, avoiding that horrible effect a lot of bosses have showed lately in which you just do the same thing eight (or more!) times over, desperately muttering "ok I get it" with no tension but no thrill either. With Sonic Advance 2 bosses, you can hit it whenever you want -- good luck doing so though. I can't see how this is not the best a Sonic boss can be.
No sir, that would be the boss of Labyrinth Zone in Sonic 1 (16 bit). Just some hard as nails platforming (ie: testing the skills you have acquired during the preceding level), and being able to completely avoid the rising water if you're skilled enough. There is no stalling, no waiting. No air bubbles to save you. You have to move, and you have to be careful and precise, and if you are, it's over in a flash.
I'm on the side of really liking Advance 2's bosses. They're "the same", but I like sussing out the rythm for each one because once you do, I feel it's really satisfying to defeat them and they are really quick. However, I especially felt the collision on the later ones, Ice Paradise's took me so long to defeat on my initial run because of this and Sky Canyon's OHKO hand was equal parts really annoying and really fun to dodge. When I talked about the frustration with the game, though, as brought up, as well, I definitely meant the checkpoint system and how losing all lives sent you back to Act 1. I actually had this issue with Mania, as well (unless I was missing something the entire time and you could start with Act 2) since the later levels got rather long. Strikes me as dated design. Seeing all of the different opinions definitely says Advance 2 is a divisive game at least!
That one is great too. The only issue is that it doesn't feel much like a boss, you expect something to happen at the end, but nothing, there's just the capsule. In my opinion there should have been something to hit at the end, a final hit on something... just for the satisfaction of having defeated the boss, not just survived to an obstacle course. Sonic 4 Ep 1 attempted to fix this, but that boss sucked hard, so the attempt was a failure in my opinion.
Sonic games struggle to have good boss fights in general, but arbitrarily switching up the rules for this clumsy mess where the player doesn't have proper control over their position is not the solution. Essentially deleting the player's rings on-hit is also not a good idea, the same way not giving them any was not a meaningful difficulty progression relative to what they'd taught the player up to that point in various 90s Sonic games. I'll take something that's maybe a little mindless over that trash any day.
You know, for all of the criticism I see Superstars get (again, noting I have not played the game yet), the Sonic 4 episodes existing as the creatively bankrupt, really bad Rush games they are makes me confused at some of reception for Superstars because the bosses seem like the true issue for that game while Sonic 4... has everything else. Perhaps it really is the point of comparison being Mania and being flawed, but foundationally really good, so the issues really jump out. (Also the price point.) Sonic 4 doesn't even have something like the satisfying trick system and boost of the Rush games. All of the bad, none of the style. They're like a soggy, bland instant noodle. But that doesn't strike me as an unpopular opinion.
Though, those bossfights don't take the controls away from you, they don't change the rules, at all. The same physics and controls of the base game apply in those boss acts, the only difference is that they are very fast autoscrollers. You can even stand still (for a split second until you hit the border of the room). Other games do this, Sonic Mania in Studiopolis Act 1 (the hard boiled miniboss), Metal Sonic in Generations, etc... they have different physics than the regular game; Advance 2 doesn't. Probably if you decrease the scrolling speed a bit, they would automatically become easier and less frustrating; not sure if I would like it though. EDIT: It would have been interesting if they started slow and became faster over time, with a noticeable increase in speed when they entered the "rage" mode.
My final unpopular opinion for the day is that "Sonic doesn't have good bosses" is by and a large a huge psyop. They were generally fine or better than that, and the changes in philosophy we've had in the past 10 years or so made them significantly worse (and it shows).
That's fair. Although I'm pretty sure you can hit Eggman both during and after the ascent, for what it's worth. One thing both Sonic 4 and Superstars have in common is not having proper badnik bouncing.
Sonic Advance 2 isn't a terrible game, but it is the worst of the three Advance titles: * It has the worst special stages of all three titles * 3 did the Special Stage entry hunt far better than 2 - you don't need to consult GameFAQs for a specific route every time you want to enter in, each Chao only ever has to be found once and you don't need to get to the end of the stage to ensure you have it either * The level design is dull, the view of each level being \ isn't that inaccurate * The physics are noticibly worse than 1 3 is better than 2 overall (and has the best special stages of all three games), 1 is better than both. 2 does have some nice ideas - I like Techno Base and Toy Kingdom. Sky Canyon and it's respective boss fight (and the fact it's in the final fucking chase as well) can fuck off and die though, I loathe that zone with a passion.
I look forward to exploring Superstars when I get to it (and can find it as cheap as possible, it still looks like kind of a mess of a game and absolutely not worth full price). As far as unpopular opinions go, though, I think liking Rush Adventure might be one? But again, not sure because unlike the Advance series, I feel like Rush Adventure is kind of a buried/forgotten game (similarly to Colors DS, which I think is kind of a great game). I didn't mind the mission structure and the boat stages, while being intrusive and getting really repetitive at points, at least weren't broken. It's much better played in bursts, but I actually really liked the stage themes and kind of felt like they improved on Rush's bottomless pit issues (though not by much). Granted, it is a game that's much less fresher in my mind. I played it a lot around its release, but haven't gone back to the Rush series in general. I do think we're due for a 3D boost game with Blaze.
That is changing the rules. I didn't say they altered the physics, I said they don't give you proper control over your position. Which they don't! You have to deal with a moving floor under your feet that mostly just forces you to fight with the controls. That's why I brought up the thing with the rings. They don't make rings stop counting or anything, but the player has been taught to expect that they can bring rings into a boss and survive using them. It's an exercise in planning and gathering what you need, albeit without a specific way to expect when the boss itself will start. Simply denying the player any of them in Death Egg is absolutely a rule change. Just because the literal programming isn't any different doesn't make it congruent with the stable (and, y'know, actually fun) philosophy the games had built up to that point. In this regard, Advance 2 (and I guess the game gear games, since those give you 0 rings for every boss) are less of a shock to the system, but still a dumb decision overall. I guess this is technically one thing that Twinkle Snow has over the bosses from 2, due to being a vertical scroller instead of horizontal, your movement is only forced to do the same kind of simple jumps you've already been doing the whole game. You can technically jump down and hit Eggman the normal way whenever you want if you think you can get away with it. But it still sucks, obviously. Rush Adventure is fun! The levels are absolutely less barren than Rush 1, and while I'm not sure they're any shorter, the bosses not locking you into 1 hit per cycle makes them feel a lot better physically. I think of the minigames sort of like the werehog from Unleashed, not bad per se but not making me feel much of anything, like a load of styrofoam packed around a really good game. Difference is Rush Adventure doesn't have nearly such a cumbersome campaign and progression system outside that...though I am good enough at it that I don't have to grind for materials, which is definitely a damper on things for newer players.
This is honestly a completely insane thing to say. The player wasn't taught to expect anything. They know they can survive as long as they have more than 0 rings. That's it. If anything, there not being rings is the one thing that conveys that that one is the final boss, the showdown you've been waiting for etc. If not then, when? That's where the fun lies. (Not to mention boss fights are, by essence and definition, an intervention in the gameplay patterns of the rest so you can face a narrative or mechanically significant enemy. Unless, of course, you're willing to say not being able to move outside the arena is an unfun, frustrating change in the rules. Or having to hit a boss twelve times instead of eight. Or that any shock will be a dumb decision because oh no! Now the screen is moving, or this stage has no rings.) One has to be really, really intolerant to the least amount of frustration imaginable to think that.
If the game is giving you rings for every prior boss (and it is, usually with a checkpoint, all of this stuff is very deliberately placed), then it is making having rings a de-facto mechanic, with or without explicit programming. The only asterisk is that the player could theoretically willingly choose to ignore that mechanic by forgoing the rings given to them up to that point (which nobody does, in my experience). Taking that away is therefore necessarily a change in the rules the player had been taught by that point, and not a fun one! It takes what previously felt like a push-and-pull, a scramble if you will, what could feel messy or like you're not sure if you can survive, into a trial-and-error fest where you know you're gonna die over and over and just have to memorize what order to do things in unless you're dexterous enough to see the two hardest things in the game's attacks coming, which are deliberately hard to read. If this is what it takes to make your final boss feel "final", then you've made a bad boss and applied a contrived difficulty spike to distract from that. They didn't make a bad final boss, by the way. Death Egg is fun and still legitimately harder than the rest of the game's bosses when you do have rings. It's not "they changed it, therefore it sucks", it's "they made a fun thing un-fun". If you're also claiming that the idea of Sonic having bad bosses up to that point is a fantasy (and for the record, I sorta agree, in that the breezy or often 'bumble your way through' nature of them is actually conducive to keeping the fast pace of a Sonic game up when they're just a quick match-up), then I'm not sure why you'd think it'd be a good idea to radically disrupt an essential part of that flow just for the alleged sake of making it more climactic (it doesn't do this, to be clear). I'm not intolerant of frustration, I'm intolerant of boredom, which is what these do-or-die design decisions induce. Makes me feel like I'm following a scripted choreography or something. In an allegedly-hard game like Dark Souls (yes, I need a new "hard game" to compare challenges to), there's actually a surprising amount of wiggle room to let you try different strategies, even within a single build, and usually optional (but not free) measures the player can take to alleviate the pressure. Despite having intense difficulty and frustration, bosses that can take hours to clear, FromSoft RPGs almost never have one-hit kills. When they do, it's shit everyone agrees is shit, like falling down holes in the Bed of Chaos. Sonic is not supposed to be anywhere near as hard as those games are usually considered to begin with, but this bottlenecking of player freedom doesn't do anything fun. It's part of the reason I do sometimes say bosses don't mix well with Sonic at their core, part of the magic of Sonic levels is the accomsodating design of the stages and player's varied skills or knowledge carving a unique path. But the bosses you fight usually are not tests of that, or logical progressions of the preceding design. I don't disagree that maybe Advance 2 is an attempt at marrying those things -- it doesn't do a good job at all, mind you -- but the way I'd do that is to make bosses that are themselves levels, I think. That's something CD was right to experiment with to a degree, even if all it's bosses feel like wet paper mache with the occasional bit of shrapnel inside. And yes, boss fights are a break with the normal gameplay. That doesn't give them a license to just do whatever stupid idea they think will occupy an extended period of time, which is most of what it feels like their attempts at "hard bosses" ever seem to do.
Completely agree. I also find it irksome how often people seem to think making bosses in Sonic better is by wasting your time and not letting you hit the boss. Superstars is this to the extreme. An idea that beating a boss too quickly is bad when I think that's the one of the big appeals of bosses in Sonic. That you can rinse them in 20 seconds if you know what you are doing is great.
I respectfully disagree. The bosses have the exact same rules too, except Egg Saucer's hand and its one-shot slap, and Egg Frog's gravity, but we're not talking about exceptions here, we're talking of the general concept. The moving floor is just you running, like you are doing in the regular levels 90% of the playtime; all you need to know is how momentum and terrain affects your jumps' arcs. Those bosses don't limit your movements any more than a static room which forces you to stay close to the boss and be at risk of getting hit. Green Hill Zone's boss forces you to stay in the trajectory of the wrecking ball, so you have to roll between those floating platforms to dodge it. If there was more space, you could stay away and never get hit. In Advance 2's bosses, I'm doing the same jumps I do in every other part of the game, I can move with precision, I love Advance 2 because it gives me plenty of control over the characters with plenty of movement options. Regarding the rings, it's not different than regular levels. If you have even just 6 rings, chances are that at least one will bounce in front of you when you are still invincible, and you will get it back... in the meanwhile, new rings will come from the right and you can get even more. It gets quite a few hits before you will remain with no rings and lose a life. Even if you remain with no rings, you have to survive 3 seconds at most before you will receive a new line of rings. The bosses are fine, they are just harder than your usual Sonic boss but still perfectly fair and balanced. As I suggested in my previous post, slowing the screen scrolling speed should make those bosses way easier and accessible to unexperienced players. Mania's Green Hill Zone Act 2's boss is just an Advance 2 style boss with a very slow autoscrolling speed, I just want to point it out as a reference. Regarding Twinkle Snow's boss, good luck hitting it the normal way and survive with no bounce physics.
In the regular levels, you decide when and where you're running and how fast. It's not the same when the game does that for you. My problem isn't limits on the space, that's the nature of a boss fight, I specified control over your position and the imprecision that the autoscroller introduces. You don't move the same when there's a moving floor forcing you to not stop! ...that is different from normal stages. Normal stages don't delete all but one ring, if that's even how the bosses work (I admit I haven't checked recently), and if it is, all that means is that an individual ring is worth way less and the game is essentially daring you to pick up more than you should need if you want to actually regather them. Also, again, this is not me being unable to beat the bosses or saying that they're too hard, they're just clumsy and feel like a break with the things that made the rest of the game fun. I wouldn't say anything makes it like Advance 2 other than the screen scrolling at all. You're on the opposite side of the boss, you're not being pushed forward by the side of the screen but encouraged to manually move forward by a hazard. I guess if you say that they just need to slow down then that would solve a large part of what makes them not fun, sure, but that slowdown is a big change, if you make it like Mania. Again, I'm not saying that makes it good, just that you can take that chance if you're careful. It's still a horrible boss either way.
I agree with prettymuch all of this, except I kinda like Sky Canyon. I think I just like the music and theming, though. Also, Toy Kingdom is in Advance 3, I think you're referring to Music Plant. Which, in MY unpopular opinion, has really weak music for what's supposed to be a music-themed stage. Honestly, Advance 2's soundtrack is pretty weak overall compared to 1 and 3.
