I just wished they would've had her hammer as her main weapon and the cards as secondary items in her moveset. But honestly Tails throwing wrenches bothered me more than instead of using his Tails swipe from Adventure or his hand blaster from Battle.
Amy was designed with dated ideas back in the 90's,why should we try go keep it that way? Especially in modern days where you can keep her hyper feminine aspects, and still have her be part of the main cast. Also the entirety of Eggman empire are designed like they were meant to be toys, Amy having to wield a toy weapon that is actually functional is not out of place.
How does Amy having a trait you don't like make her "just" that thing? I never said Amy should "just" give advice and I think you know that. I was humoring your bizarre argument that her giving advice isn't helpful, which it canonically is. Sonic absolutely could have regretted killing Gamma. An official Sonic story already covered him feeling sympathy for an enemy robot in the OVA and that worked fine to me. Plus Sonic not regretting something wouldn't necessarily make it a morally good choice. I think the implication in that cutscene is that Sonic would've harmed the flicky trapped inside Gamma and Amy inadvertently saved it. It's not just about Sonic obeying Amy the Talking Cricket. I just didn't want to say 'magic' twice in a row but sure "mystical" wasn't a very accurate word. It's not relevant though since I only used the word to refer to the characters' powers. There's nothing specifically mystical about Tails' flight by the same metric but I'd say it's pretty magical to make a helicopter propeller out of a tail. Sonic's light dash shoes that glow like Sketchers for four-year-olds are just as much a toy as the Piko Piko Hammer. Do we have to get rid of rings cause they make a goofy toyetic sound when you collect them? I do not accept this premise that the terms here are mystically different because Amy is a girl, and especially this premise that her using a hammer instead of cards somehow makes her less of a part of the main cast or more of a damsel in distress. Or rather I don't know who this hypothetical person you guys are arguing with that wants her to be a damsel or not heroic.
Speaking of continuity, if Sonic CD was where here obsession began, then Frontiers was were it ended. And the cards were at both the start and the end.
QFT Amy's tarot cards are really nice. But they were just very overdone in Frontiers. Amy's lost her firey temper, and her hammer was a good extension of that at times. They've neutered her character and the hammer is collateral, not the other way around. Tails' wrenches on the other hand can kindly fuck right off. I've never really liked seeing him walk around with gadgets and tech stuff to be honest with you and haven't quite gotten over the fact he spent all of SA2 in a mech walker. But at least he was using something of his own creation there, and again with ring bombs in Heroes/06. Frontiers giving him these shitty little wrenches was so naff visually, naff for gameplay and naff for his character. That game relies on the homing attack, and without it he was very u fun to use. Whoever decided to give Tails wrenches as his main form of attack deserves to be hit round the head with one. There's so much more they can do with him flying and whipping his tails around.
Tails having a projectile while flying is fine... But it didn't work in Frontiers and it's unlikely that a game that makes Tails a major player again will require homing attack as a major mechanic. That just isn't necessary.
For the type of gameplay that Frontiers pushed, not having the homing attack felt incomplete. The game constantly wanted you to home in on springs and other targets in its "platforming" sections. I'm not a fan of the way that the homing attack is used in the games these days, but the fact it's that's becomes an integral part of the moveset that the game expects you to using the homing attack after 90% of jumps. The gameplay has of the franchised has developed in such a way that now you basically just press homing attack to do platforming. I was really surprised to see that Knuckles had been given the move in Frontiers but it made sense after half a minute of playtime. Having the manually guide Tails to springs and zip lines kinda sucked.
Its wild how SA1 gave Tails an almost perfect base 3D moveset and it would never be used again. Dummy rings and wrenches is so much cooler than Tails weaponizing his namesake obviously.
Just in the air. On the ground his Tail attack would be the most beneficial. In fact it would be extremely good for both attack and defending against projectiles.
It's not that I don't like it; it's that it's inconsequential. Sonic would never, ever kill Gamma if it meant something bad. True, he didn't because Amy told him so, and we live in the world where this is the story we were told. But there isn't a world where the story of Sonic Adventure 1 has Sonic harming a flicky and regretting it later on. We never had that, don't have that and will never have that. The point here is that her levelheadedness as a character trait doesn't make up in importance to anything The Boys can do to save the world. We never had the story where, without her, they inadvertently use their powers for Stupid or for Evil. Sonic's thing already is that he does the right thing no matter what. Actually, I'm not sure why we are even discussing this. You diverted the attention toward some other topic by equating things that no one else is comparing. I for one love that the hammer she uses is a toy, but why would you compare it to rings? I'll just disengage and leave it at "I think it's cool that she can use a toy hammer and tarot cards but I do wish she could actually gather information no one else has with fortune telling like discovering secrets or seeing into the future"
Maybe? Arguably? I'd rather see him kick up some wind projectiles by swishing tails, ala Sonic in Lost World 3DS than throwing wrenches or using any other physical weapon.
OK but like come on. I didn't get all confused when you called Amy a cricket a minute ago. We both know how analogies work. Antheraea was implying that the Piko Piko hammer is demeaning to Amy because it looks like a toy and makes goofy sounds, when I'd make the argument that Sonic's shoes, the rings, and all kinds of other stuff inherent to Sonic are all already super toyetic. The standard SYZ-style spring design always reminded me of the Pixar ball. I probably should've quoted Anther but I didn't have that much to say about their post specifically.
Idk if it's a popular opinion or not but making Amy a firecracker again and giving her a cutesy Mjolnir that makes funny "piko" sounds and hearts sounds really funny and cute to me so I'm on board I can take or leave the tarot thing
That's why I said literally. The badniks are designed LIKE toys. Amy's hammer at first brush was a literal toy. She was designed to be pretty toothless with a comedic edge. Technically the entire concept of sonic is dated, being a mascot platformer and all. Striving for modernity and a wider audience and all is great but you gotta know when to pick your battles. You can't take a torch to everything the zeitgeist turns their noise up at otherwise you don't still have Sonic to begin with. In Amy's I think some of the dated aspects are charming and give her a unique position among the cast, including the lovestruck personality and underpowered position among superheroes. You're free to disagree but I think there's enough valuable 'quirk' here to throw into a given situation that I think turning her into another superhero is a waste. Maybe enough people in power disagree that it doesn't matter, but that's where I draw my line in the sand. Sonic needs to stop being an 'everything must go' kind of series that's willing to give what's unique about itself away for a smoother reception.
I know it's a meme now, but Sonic IS very much designed like a typical Shonen action series or Western action series. And, for better or worse, that is a genre that very much marginalizes it's female cast members to prop up the male ones; usually by making them underpowered compared to the male heroes, and/or helpless damsels to be saved. Whether you think those trends should be broken or not is another matter entirely, but that's very much the root of the discourse surrounding Amy nowadays.I like to think there's a middle ground between making her as fast as Sonic or as strong as Knuckles, and blatantly making her the "weak" one among the main characters to make the boys look better. I do feel like it was a bit misguided to put this burden on Amy though, even though I understand why it happened. Like it or not, she was never created with the intent of being an action hero along with Sonic, and was kind of retrofitted into the role as the times changed. That inevitably meant some parts of her character had to be adjusted or dropped to make her more palatable to the wider audience. And if I feel like if you had to go that far, you could have just made a new character to fill that female action hero slot (*cough*Blaze*cough*). But the genie is out of the bottle now and Amy has been established as a main character for roughly two decades, and phasing her out would cause far too much backlash, so they're kind of railroaded into this new direction with her. I speculate this is why she's not in the movies yet. Besides the obvious issues with the setting, I feel like the creators would struggle finding an actual role for her that isn't just being another female action hero or a damsel to be saved. And being real for a second, I think that speaks to a greater issue with the roles of female characters within a given narrative.
I'm not really concerned with changing things up for the sake of making it more palatable for modern audiences,its not even something what I'm arguing for. I will repeat myself here, you can still have her be hyper feminine, just like how she always was and still be in the same league with the "boys". This isn't an argument for changing things up drastically, it's a very minor one that builds off of elements that have always been present. We have better options, folks who would be happy with such a decision have also been here since the beginning. Having this strict and rigid idea of what Sonic is and who it's for does not bring a sense of correctness, it just denies how Sonic has always appealed to all kinds of people.
I don't disagree with this, but the point I was attempting to make is that it's kind of jarring that the one mainline girl character gets a toy as her "thing", while the other characters get real things so to speak, such as Tails' very cool planes, the mech with a gun and lasers, Knuckles'...everything. It's kind of infantilizing? Like, the biplane in the 2D games does look toy-ish, but they threw that out the window by having the Tornado 2 be a cool transforming jet plane and the Cyclone being a plane that turns into a mecha with guns. Likewise, knuckles could glide and climb and that was the extent of his vibes, but then they went and made him the one that gets physical and has mysterious powers from his ancestors/the mystical gem he guards and the most backstory.
I think a cool plane that transforms is also very toy-like. It's just a cool toy. Not all toys are Fisher-Price.
