And you feel that making red rings a Golden Snitch makes everything else not worth bothering with, right?
De Romanīs, lingua Latina gloriosa non fuī.I'm trying to say that more often than not the other bonuses are meaningless unless you get at least 2-3 red rings. I'm having a hard time putting it into words, but the best I can say is that even by themselves they're meaningless, but combined with red rings is required for an S.
They're important, but not the most important to the point it's the biggest deciding factor. That's the best way I can say it.
Edited by mstorzil on Jul 18th 2022 at 4:26:20 AM
No rain could douse the flames that burn within me!Ryan Bloom of video game website/You Tube show Better Late than Never gives us his thoughts on possibly making Sonic's stories more simple and character-focused, with the asker in question bringing up Gamma from Sonic Adventure 1 as an example:
The story is that Eggman uses the magic conch to enslave the Deadly Six in order to do… something? I mean, Eggman already controls robots pretty well, given he’s the one that builds them. It’s never clear why he needed to enslave them, outside of hassling Sonic. Sonic trashes the conch and Eggman loses control of The Deadly Six, after which they immediately double cross Eggman and assume control of his factory, which has a machine that begins sucking the life out of the planet below them. They then spend the rest of the game doing absolutely nothing of value while Sonic and Eggman team up against them. Eggman also largely does nothing of value, but Sonic systematically defeats all the Deadly Six one by one.
Then Tails gets kidnapped and Eggman supposedly dies during the final assault on his stolen factory. Sonic defeats the Deadly Six one last time, possibly even killing them, and rescues Tails. Eggman returns to reveal this was his plot all along and you re-fight the final boss of Sonic Colors again, but worse this time. The End. To this day nothing has been revealed about who the Deadly Six were, what their purpose in life was, or even if there are more than just six zeti (one of them mentions having a mom, so probably). We don’t even know if they lived peacefully or if they were imprisoned on the Lost Hex planet. Are they just intrinsically evil? If so, why? Nobody knows. They also all seem to have powers besides controlling magnets, but nothing is ever said about those, either.
We don’t even know what happened to them after Sonic beat them the final time. They have never actually returned in any official, canonical capacity – Zavok turns up in Sonic Forces as part of the returning rogues gallery, but he’s a holographic copy created by the Phantom Ruby. It’s not the real Zavok. The real Zavok, along with the rest of the Deadly Six, might actually just be dead for all we know (which, let’s be honest: that’s fine.) They were super super nothing villains in a nothing story that whiplashes between obnoxious Saturday Morning Cartoon vibes and being weirdly serious for no reason. And whereas some other Sonic games can have over an hour and a half of cutscenes, Sonic Lost World barely manages 30 minutes of (incredibly disjointed) story.
When you say “Sonic should stop trying to be epic” all I hear is Sonic Lost World. I know you said character-focused, but I’m not entirely sure what that means, and your example of Gamma is forgetting that Gamma’s Story in Sonic Adventure was part of the larger “epic narrative.” Gamma tied in to the idea that redemption is always possible in some form or another, and that’s what saves Chaos in the end. But there’s still a whole stretch of Sonic games that tried to focus on smaller amounts of narrative with less heavy drama regardless. Even The Time Eater was treated as decidedly non-important in the end. Again, sort of like The Deadly Six, it was just something Eggman found out in space, apparently. No back story, no personality, no drama, just a big weird clockwork monster that eats time somehow, apparently.
I dunno. Sonic’s always touched on ancient mysteries and epic narratives ever since Sonic 3. The Japanese instruction manual for that game literally sets up the core of what became Sonic Adventure’s whole narrative. It’s been there since the Genesis games. The Archie Sonic comics, for all of their soap opera drama, set a record for the longest running continuous licensed book in the entire comics industry. There was a time where it was outselling everything Marvel and DC were putting on shelves. Archie’s book continued a legacy from the Saturday Morning Cartoon, about a grim dictator struggling against a small band of rebels living in the forest.
Like it or not, but “big epic” stories have been a significant, notable part of this franchise, and is something people come to Sonic specifically to experience. They tried to simplify things and it ended up turning to crap, so now they’re going back in the other direction again. Hopefully Ian Flynn can make something out of it, but it’s important to note that Sonic Team themselves still came up with the story, and Flynn is just… adapting it, I guess? As part of the localization process.
Reading Ryan posts, he has a bad opinion of the writers that worked with Sonic Team in the past, finding them to be less writers and more "scene writers", as in, they only write scenes around but not a story as a whole. Regarding Ken Pontac, he finds him to be more of a "paycheck writer", who writes funny scenes but cannot work on narratives.
He does have a good impression of Ian Flynn, at the very least.
To win, you need to adapt, and to adapt, you need to be able to laugh away all the restraints. Everything holding you back.Frontiers' release date on SteamDB has been changed to December 8th and Denuvo has been removed.
Edited by tclittle on Jul 20th 2022 at 10:29:10 AM
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."Thank you for the link. That was so cool. And as a long time Antoine stan the offpanel really made my day!
see my completed Tangled (Varian) fanfic collection! https://archiveofourown.org/works/24467056/chapters/59049532video
: Someone made a fan mod of Mania that makes it look and sound like it was made to appear on the Saturn.
Edited by AceOfScarabs on Jul 21st 2022 at 10:34:35 PM
The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!Chao Garden for Android would be a killer app. Make it cross-platform with the ability to sync to a Switch or even backwards to a 3DS and we will be GOLDEN.
Salad Plain BGM
: I can't believe it, I started a massive comment thread full of zone name/food puns
credit goes to Argick for Lava Beef and Lunch Base.
Edited by AceOfScarabs on Jul 22nd 2022 at 10:36:37 PM
The three finest things in life are to splat your enemies, drive them from their turf, and hear their lamentations as their rank falls!@Tomodachi, honestly, I think he makes a fair point. Really all Sonic stories need to do is just give a villain a backstory that makes sense, and tie it to the game's themes and messages.
The Deadly Six only have each other, and are stuck an floating add. Add they were just born with no reason and were stuck with nothing but their own power and abilities and Eggman exploited them for cheap labor. The situation makes them realizes they can be much more and use Eggman's devices to turn their planet into something allowing them to interact with the other world, finish the device to make their planet bigger and finally be able to live like the way they were created or find their purpose in life.
I think IDW did a good job with Zavok especially. He believes his abilities shouldn't eliminate the use of his strength and truly strong people will surpass the weak through passion, creativity, and hard work.
Time Eater is easy. Have him as a creature forced to relive all of humanity and times worst mistakes, and Eggman alters it to basically go back in time and defeat Sonic throughout history. At the end of the game, Sonic convinces the Time Eater that even though his life has had ups and downs, there's still good to be found if time continues in the future and beyond.
They're trying to play too safe because of how the Dark Era was received, except the problem wasn't the stories for the most part, it was the gameplay. The Modern Era (meta is a dumb name) has better wide appeal with Colors and Generations, debatably Lost World, and Forces sold well, they just need to tighten the story better and gameplay so they get the best of both worlds.
I think Frontiers is on their way to do that, so I'm optimistic to the future.

The game wants you to use a lot of Wisp Powers, even if its not the fastest way to finish a level. That's a game where just going fast will not get you S Ranks.
And yes, Color is the game I was thinking of, thank you. I think an actual "Time Over" or "Time's Up" message appears in place of the word "Score" on the screen.