General Sonic The Hedgehog thread

Regarding the final boss of Sonic Frontiers, if Sonic ever talked during the battle, he'd tell The End "Oh, SHUT UP already!" during its speech.

Did anyone notice that in the final battle of Sonic Frontiers, the fight was surprisingly gruesome for a Sonic game? I mean, you have Super Sonic essentially twisting the boss in some pretty bloody ways.

Edited by Rabbitearsblog on Apr 13th 2024 at 4:23:16 AM

Honestly, Frontiers is very gruesome really. I mean, all the bosses explode gallons of a purpley-crimson liquid that technically isn't but is basically (and looks like) blood.

Fitting for a game that takes inspiration for Evangelion, isn't it?

As far as gruesomeness goes I don't think you can top Dark Gaia.

That's not true. Obviously the most gruesome boss battle is Sonic taking on Team Rose. His stalker was RIGHT THERE, he had to FIGHT her off, traumatizing, truly.

If you're talking about the time needed to A rank those damn fights, I agree.

I think Dark Gaia Phoenix might be one of my favorite boss fight in the series (not counting final bosses). A cool design, some decent boss mechanics, and fun QTE animations.

Speaking of Dark Gaia bosses, I feel like the Dark Guardian got a really lackluster fight in the PS 360 version, whereas the PS 2 / Wii version made it much larger and made it a straight up man-to-man fight which resulted in something far more visually impressive.

It was rather easy once you get the hang of it, you can end them in one second.

Edited by Tomodachi on Apr 13th 2024 at 1:05:29 AM

Oh man! I forgot about Dark Gaia!

Dark Gaia and its minions inspired a lot of my Sonic focused writing, to be honest. Specifically my main series about a 20-year period of peace being interrupted by the Darkbeings (which turn out to be the true forms of Dark Gaia creatures) invading and turning Mobius into a hellhole after a Curbstomp Battle, and it's on the brink of dying outright unless Sonic and company, alongside a new band of unlikely allies, unite to reverse the damage and hopefully save their world.

I never did manage to beat Sonic Unleashed. When I rented it on PS3 it took me TWO HOURS to get through Eggmanland. Surprisingly, I actually beat the Egg Dragoon in one try.

But the final boss...I could not. I just could not. My blood was boiling that night, and I quit and sent it back to Gamefly after numerous attempts to beat the timer and avoid getting hit by Dark Gaia's missile things. Even with my hedgehog stats maxed out.

Edited by wooden-ladybug93 on Apr 13th 2024 at 1:21:22 PM

I honestly think very poorly of Dark Gaia as a boss battle. I was very bored with it.

Dark Gaia is definitely gruesome with its first appearance!

Sonic's had a boss problem for a long while.

I would suspect part of it is that the modern gameplay styles aren't very conducive to robustly designed fights against enemies - both regular enemies and bosses - leaving those fights very difficult for the developers to balance, but even the 2D games these days tend to be hit or miss with bosses.

I can't think of a Sonic game since Adventure 1 (except maybe Sonic 4-2, but literally nobody talks about that game: overshadowed by its much worse predecessor), where I could say I thought most of the bosses were well designed and fun to play.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Apr 14th 2024 at 11:29:19 AM

In Generations, I'd say 1 boss is terrible (Time Eater), there's 2 bosses I find enjoyable but fairly challenging that no one else does (Metal Sonic and the first Eggman boss fight, can't remember what it's called), 2 that are fun but a bit easy (Shadow and Perfect Chaos) and 2 that are genuinely quite difficult but also very fun (Silver and Egg Dragoon).

So, to me, the bosses overall in Generations are good, though this isn't surprising given it's meant to be the franchise highlights.

Edit: I actually think '06 has pretty good boss battle design, just limited by the issues with the gameplay.

Edited by king15 on Apr 14th 2024 at 6:43:09 PM

I think the bosses in 3D games without Boost were mostly fine. I think the bosses are both Adventure games are mostly good. I would agree that 06's bosses are fine and any problems have more to do with the physics and not directly to how the bosses are designed. I don't remember Lost World's bosses being particularly good or bad, just generally okay. Shadow's bosses are kind of iffy with how much you have to shoot them, but there's usually ways to do it faster and I don't find them particularly unfun. I think Heroes has it the worst, with how simple it is to hit bosses but how much you have to wail on them to kill them, plus those lazy robot army fights. I think I would still prefer playing Heroes' bosses over the ones in Unleashed, Colors, or Forces though.

I think the Boost games have Sonic Team struggling to come up with good ways to use it as a part of a fight, and you end up with a lot of samey fights where you're chasing down the boss and usually feel one of two extremes of either overly trivial to beat or needlessly frustrating. Unleashed's daytime and Super Sonic bosses are all pretty bad. Colors' bosses I don't even really remember much outside the final boss. And Forces' are all over the place and mostly repeats of fights from previous games. Unleashed's Werehog bosses are relatively okay because the Werehog is about combat anyway, but I wouldn't say they're great. Generations and Frontiers are really the best of the games with Boost because they have a different ideas of how to handle them and mostly end up overly simple mechanically but fun from a spectacle standpoint. Except Time Eater being just bad.

Oh yeah, and there's the Storybook games. The bosses in those bad. It's mostly running at the boss until you have to flail the Wiimote around when the game tells you to. It sucks and feels like the controls are getting in your way. Exception I guess to the knight fights in Black Knight, where you just kind of attack randomly and win in less than a minute.

For the 2D games, I think they're all kind of iffy in general. The reasons are different, but it's kind of like the Boost games where bosses often end up either really easy or the devs get too cute about some gimmick and it's just annoying. It's hard to really say much though because they're all over the place, but usually games that are generally better anyway have less problems with the bosses. I would say Rush, Advance 2, and Superstars are the top games in having bosses that are so unfun to fight that it starts to bring down my views of the game as a whole.

Didn't know there was so much hate for Sonic bosses. I usually like most of them.

Me either. Though Advance 2 I absolutely understand at least. Every boss being an endless runner makes them monotonous (I can forgive, say, Heavy Gunner because he's the only one in the game), the running means you can't recollect lost rings (a central mechanic of Sonic), and THE HAND (iykyk).

I found the bosses in all the games from Sonic Origins all fun and quirky. But the bosses from the 3d games are all pretty technical and serious. And some manner of evil separate from Eggman.

Chaos from Sonic Adventure, Biolizard from Sonic Adventure 2, Metal Madness from Sonic Heroes...

All the ones from the newer games, etc.

I understand the discussion was about boss gameplay in general rather than the character of the final boss, but still on point.

One thing I liked about the Adventure bosses is that a lightspeed attack or a heat knuckle would count as 2 hits. Really useful versus Chaos 6, and it is a shame it didn't return in Adventure 2.

Charging a lightspeed attack when the Biolizard summons the eggs, and using that to get 2 hits at once, would had been a glorious approach.

Can't wait to see Project 06's bosses as well.

Multiple sources claim Keanu Reeves will be voicing Shadow in the 3rd movie.

I can see it.

Hope it will be closer to John Wick to...the kind of Surfer Dude-esque accent I think Reeves usually had.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 15th 2024 at 3:28:14 AM