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That explains my surprise when I saw this the other day. My friend and I would've picked Adventure 2 or Generations for best-selling 3D Sonic game.
Hyper Sonic made sense for what it was: A Super Duper Sonic form where players could collect the Emeralds and go Super despite already having the Emeralds and being Super. It's an artifact of Sonic 3 & Knuckles being broken into two games and needing to have two sequential sets of Emerald/Super Sonic minigames and transformations. So there isn't really anything that distinguishes Super from Hyper.
Super Sonic is completely invulnerable and infinity powerful, and Hyper Sonic is even more invulnerable-er and infinity times infinity powerful to the power of infinity. Super Sonic's already so absurdly OP that the only way to make Hyper Sonic meaningful as a recurring fixture of the brand would be to degrade Super Sonic.
The only way to make Hyper Sonic work is by introducing enemies who are too powerful for Super Sonic and need a game-ending ultimate power-up to defeat. But Super Sonic's already the game-ending ultimate power-up for defeating too powerful threats. So that would feel less like serial escalation and more like powering down Super Sonic to the point that the concept loses its value.
We do not want Super Sonic to become what Super Saiyan became: an unspecial, totally mundane baseline for Sonic that can't accomplish anything and always gets its teeth kicked in to warrant pursuit of increasingly stronger forms.
I'd rather see the series pursue horizontal escalation in the form of giving us chances for Super Tails, Super Amy, Super Rouge, etc. to appear, rather than vertical escalation in the form of Super Sonic God Super Sonic Potential Unleashed x20.
Edited by TobiasDrake on May 8th 2023 at 7:02:52 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.After Super Ray and Super Mighty 5 years ago, Super Tails being redefined to work with the Chaos Emeralds 6 years ago (with the Super Emerald-powered one being renamed as Hyper Tails last year), and the incoming DLC, I expect Super Amy to be a thing next month.
But, yeah, story-related non-Sonic Supers haven't been a thing since 2007. Super Shadow was a thing in SEGA All Star Racing, and poor Super Silver has only appeared once.
Of course, the corollary is that if you go through the whole game already needing Super Sonic for the regular bosses, then a final boss who is supposed to be the biggest threat Sonic has ever facednote who can be taken out with the same level of power does not live up to the hype.
Never mind the gameplay change making it not really feel like Sonic taking it on at all.
My musician pageWhen there's a boss that Sonic can't beat with the power of Super Sonic by himself, then he just teams up with his past self, his friends, his allies or Robotnik.
So as much as I want Hyper Sonic to return, I don't think it will happen.
Edited by neoamon on May 8th 2023 at 4:14:01 PM
"May your heart be your guiding key"Yeah, the previous games where Super Sonic alone wasn't enough still didn't have an intermediate threat where Super Sonic alone was enough, making the leap in power still sufficiently climactic.
My musician pageMy Genre Savvy self expected that if the regular bosses required the normally game-ending Super Sonic to defeat, then the final boss would be able to inflict The Worf Effect on said game-ending Super Sonic, and he'd need something even stronger to win.
We all have to answer to the call of fate when it beckons us, even if it is not at a moment of our choosing.Trust me, nothing good lies down that road. You do not want the Sonic brand to start treating Super Sonic and Hyper Sonic and Ultra Sonic and Sonicest Sonic as power levels that can be trumped by whatever the new, more powerful bad guy is.
Once you establish finite limitations for Super Sonic that need a stronger transformation to overcome, you open the door to a lot of shonen bullshit while eliminating what makes Super Sonic special in the first place.
Edited by TobiasDrake on May 8th 2023 at 10:04:08 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
x2 What I was thinking of was a new form, or a possible return of Hyper Sonic (the former seemed more likely than the latter to me given the cyber-corruption plotline).
Edited by Teamkirin5 on May 8th 2023 at 3:30:42 PM
We all have to answer to the call of fate when it beckons us, even if it is not at a moment of our choosing.Yeah, and that's exactly what we want to avoid. "Super Sonic sucks, only Hyper Sonic can win" is the stepping stone to "Hyper Sonic sucks, only Ultimate Sonic can win" is the stepping stone to "Ultimate Sonic sucks, only God Sonic can win" is the stepping stone to "God Sonic sucks, only Omni Sonic can win," etc. etc.
That is exactly what we do not want to happen. We have a perfectly fine Super Form as is.
Edited by TobiasDrake on May 8th 2023 at 10:06:27 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.That's what they were saying would be a bad idea. Whether you call it Hyper Sonic, or Maximum Over-Sonic, or Super Sonic Grade 2, Super Sonic 2, Super Sonic 3, Great Golden Hedgehog, Super Sonic 4, Super Sonic God, Super Sonic God Super Sonic, Super Sonic God Super Sonic with Wisp Powers x10, Ultra Instinct Sonic, Mastered Ultra Instinct Sonic...
Power Creep is annoying when it's unmanaged. There's nothing wrong with escalating stakes, but you need to do it in a way that doesn't invalidate what came before.
Introducing Hyper Sonic just as a better Super Sonic completely renders the latter redundant and useless, which is exactly what happened with the various transformations with Dragon Ball where every new form is better than the last despite the new form being considered the strongest thing ever. It opens the floodgates.
That being said, Frontiers could have easily had a final boss that properly escalated the stakes in a way that makes sense. Given Sonic's line before the fight, we could have had the dead spirits of the Koco all empowering Sonic in some way to fight The End.
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.In past games, Sonic's had alternate super modes that aren't Super Sonic But More, but are rather just more specialized and/or thematic so
would work.
Each time a TITAN was defeated, a cutscene showed that the souls of the Ancients were still tied to it. One didn't happen for SUPREME, which wasn't completely destroyed like the others. It's reasonable to infer that that connection is still there.
The only thing that wasn't conveyed was how Sonic was contributing to the fight with THE END, if he was charging SUPREME or what.
