I guess that’s why they call it YMMV, as I enjoy both the 2D and 3D parts of those games.
Except the way Frontiers snapped you into them if you stepped wrong. That’s just stupid.
My musician pageThe 2D sections are the only time Sonic Team really adds any significant platforming to the level design.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.Infinite is kind of an amazing villain by complete accident. He seems intimidating at first, talking big shit and doing crazy stuff, but at the end of the day he's just a massive pushover and most of his powers are mere illusions. He acts dark and brooding like he has a tragic backstory, but it's actually just him throwing a temper tantrum over losing a single fight. In their efforts to make a badass villain, the writers of Sonic Forces accidentally made a genius deconstruction of the kind of people who try to act badass in real life.
That was accidental? I always thought that was the intended message behind Infinite, since his powers are literally illusions and Sonic gives a whole canned speech at the end about living in the real world with real friends, not a fantasy world like Infinite created.
I thought that was intentional and ultimately underbaked. If the message was supposed to be that Infinite is a loser for creating a fantasy world with his powers to escape reality, they should have shown more of Infinite using his powers for his own gain. Have him re-create the Jackal Squadron and get all delusional that they're real.
Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Dec 28th 2022 at 3:51:33 AM
There's also the fact that stuff like "You let him live? That's a big issue >:(" "No it's not because I'm strong and epic" is too on the nose to not be intentional.
I feel like Infinite is meant to be a character who's deliberately incompetent, and is only a threat because of the raw power he has. It makes sense with his backstory being how weak he was before, and how ultimately he was a replaceable pawn in Eggman's plans despite the theatrics.
Being 'sucky' on purpose is not clever.
To win, you need to adapt, and to adapt, you need to be able to laugh away all the restraints. Everything holding you back.I think Infinite was a half and half case. I suspect he was intended to a be a bit of a paper tiger that would be eventually taken out by the growing competence of the Avatar character. Its just that Forces half assing so many story elements meant the character ended up being such an edgy try hard with a fundamentally shallow core that he essentially became a somewhat unintended satire of that kind of figure. His Start of Darkness coming from Shadow (the quasi-edgy character who has actual depth) was more or less the cherry on top.
Edited by BorneAgain on Dec 28th 2022 at 7:08:01 AM
Being terrible on purpose not being clever is kind of the point.
It's not suppose to be clever, it's suppose to be simple.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.Pariah final review of Unleashed
"Unleashed is probably one of the worst games in the series (...), and only the day stages are worth it."
Unleashedbros...owari da.
Its also one of his favorites BECAUSE of the day stages.
Edited by Tomodachi on Dec 28th 2022 at 4:14:44 AM
To win, you need to adapt, and to adapt, you need to be able to laugh away all the restraints. Everything holding you back.Unleashed is one of the worst games?
I guess this is why judgement is ignored, but any actual critique is valued.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.I mean...that's essentially how the game was received; people loved the day stages, but didn't care for the Night stages.
Pariah prefers the DLC day stages over the main ones, so that's where the praise comes from.
And yes, he vastly prefers the dickish, trial and error gameplay from later day stages and the DLC ones.
...And I'm inclined to agree. The fact they haven't made a game as brutally hard as Unleashed is a crime. People are too weak :V
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 7:37:15 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.Skill Issue
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They are by far the hardest levels in any 3D Sonic game to date. That is not an exaggeration.
They're still up in the DLC store I believe if you have the console. Otherwise, I think the fan PC ports have them added in.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 7:46:12 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.The problem with the Day Stages is terrible stage design. Not the controls, which were legitimately better in that regard to 06's Mach Speed sections. Ironically the Mach Speed sections also had better stages overall. Kind of opposites in that regard. They were shorter, though faster, and has some overall better layouts that could make them fun without being hyper long at times. The rest of said stage of course, which is before the Mach Speed sections, can be good or bad, respectively. Note that I'm ignoring the only other "hard camera controlled" section in Sonic's story(that was super slow but hard to control all the same, being the Snowboarding level, which I consider it in the same category of gameplay; forced camera and speed the entire time).
Anyway, the only real good thing Unleashed added was the ability to strafe. And yeah, the Werehog stages' only actual issues were way too many battles, but had both better designed stages in general and better gameplay. It's just not what people expected or wanted, so understandably it's less popular in general.
The issue is that until 06, Sonic controlled fairly well by having speedy stages, but he wasn't severely fast to uncontrollable levels. 06's oddity is that he's either too slow, or too fast, or just uncontrollable in some other way. No other character suffered the same way(with only Amy playing fairly well, just lacking an aerial Hammer attack, meaning she's good at leaving herself wide open. Rest were buggy generally in some way or at least very hard to control, like Tails).
Shadow?I’m with Yakuzu on this one: I’d be all for brutally hard, twitch-reflex borderline or even actual trial-and-error high speed gameplay if Sonic Team ever feels bold.
My musician pageNext year, Parih is finally entering the 2010's.
That shall be fun. I think he will skip the Boom games and the mobile ones. Meaning... 5 games, and 3 handheld versions.
Last decade was rather short in games, eh?
To win, you need to adapt, and to adapt, you need to be able to laugh away all the restraints. Everything holding you back.The trial and error gameplay in Unleashed doesn't come off as intentional, regardless. It comes off as them not being used to how powerful the boost system was and struggling to implement challenging mechanics into the system. As a result, there's a bunch of stuff thrown in they clearly thought would be difficult that wasn't, a bunch of stuff thrown in that didn't age well (the trial and error gameplay, the Press X to Not Die, etc), and whole thing in general reads as unpolished.
The two gameplay styles thus ended up with a bit of a reverse impact. Unleashed's mechanics were at its best when they allowed the player to cut loose and really enjoy the speed - so at the beginning of the game the day stages really impressed while the slow, plodding night stages were at their most represehensible. But later in the game, when the game was trying to make stages actually difficult, the day stages struggled to find things the player could reasonably do while the night stages' slower safety ironically allowed it more developed platforming challenges.
I mostly give it a pass because it's clearly their first try with the Boost system, but it's not a good look in a vacuum.
You can also tell they must have agreed on some level, because they immediately dialed it back on how much access to Boost the player received, and didn't give it back until a couple games alter after they had tested out ways to engage the players with it. Colors always struck me as a testing ground for boost gameplay: where, in the meantime, the players had to ration their boost since they didn't get it all the time. Generations then used what they learned from Colors and gave the players the boost back, and the result was a much better put together experience with much less reliance on trial and error as a crutch.
Which is fine by me. Imo trial and error gameplay is inherently bad game design (it's one of the most obvious examples of Fake Difficulty) unless you're setting out to make a frustrating game a la YWBTG, especially in a platformer. Referring to it as a "crutch" is a good way to look at it imo: as it's generally a fallback developers use if they can't think of anything more substantial to throw at the player. But if the player cannot intuit how to play it, it has no business being there.
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: Also Sonic Dash.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 28th 2022 at 5:43:29 AM
Sorry, I cannot agree with that. The trial and error gameplay very much felt intentional on their part, because the challenges in them are things that only someone who's mastered the game could hope to achieve.
What they didn't account for is the inherent difficulty of said levels and how Sonic's target demographic would react to that. Kids are NOT beating the later day stages and DLC levels, not unless they spent a lot of time trying to master them, which a lot of casual gamers aren't going to do nowadays. I get why they dialed back, because those type of levels only appeal to a specific type of player (me, a psychopath) but aren't ideal for a franchise aimed mostly at children, who probably aren't going to like their games kicking them in the dick Cuz they're weak)
The real problem is that, once you lower the difficulty of Boost gameplay, you don't really have much left in terms of depth. The challenge is if the player has the reaction time to get through the levels...but if you take that way, you have a gameplay style that's inherently simplistic and doesn't offer much.
I get that and understand, but it really doesn't appeal to me personally as someone who prefers brutally hard games. If they're gonna stick with Boost as part of the series from here on out, then they really need to up the difficulty to Unleashed levels again. Maybe not put it in the main stages so to not overwhelm casual players, but something man. I haven't enjoyed a Boost game in over ten years, which is a huge problem when that's the main style of gameplay the series has had since.
I don't see Trial-and-Error Gameplay as inherently bad design; its just another way to design games is all. One that I understand is not popular in the modern environment of gaming, and was the result of how games were made in the 90's and late 80's, but it's still valid IMO and I'm not really too fond how dismissive people are about it personally. Like I get why people don't like it because they feel the game is punishing them for not being good, but developers took the wrong lesson for that and started removing a lot of depth from certain games to ease players into it more and that...bothers me, a lot.
Fighting games in particular have been suffering from that and it drives me up the wall. Especially since it hasn't actually had the intended effect of getting people into fighting games at all, they still sell about the same as they always have. So people play the game for a few days/weeks drop it, and now you're just left with a gutted game.
Edited by BlackYakuzu94 on Dec 28th 2022 at 9:00:56 AM
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.My issue has never been trial and error gameplay, but the problem was that the reliance on bottomless pits takes certain sections of Unleashed into Dragon's Lair territory where its borderline memorization to get through. Classic Sonic titles had the speediest paths only consistently accessible from memory too, however the difference was the punishment was typically ending up in a slower section, not falling to your doom.
Sonic excels being arcade like at times; its just that indulging to what feels like quarter muncher territory starts to be a bit much.

People wouldn't complain about the 2D sections in boost games so much if they were good. But to be fair, it's not like the 3D sections of boost games are anything to write home about either.