I mean I've always preferred the other characters play like Sonic with a variation for the classic titles, both because the playthroughs don't feel so drastically different from each other and that even with those small contrasts there's real depth to he had from having different characters emphasize various elements of the gameplay.
Between Superstars, Origins, and Mania Plus it feels like there's three categories of characters based around exploration, speed, & platforming/defense. Tails & Knuckles obviously fit the first, Sonic & Ray the second, with Mighty (and now seemingly Amy) in the third. Ray achieves in the air what Sonic is on the ground; fast movement that does take skill to perfectly pull off with the latter's drop dash allowing even more organic movement in that regard. Mighty's nature meant hazards could be a bit more nerfed and became an option for those most bothered by spikes or enemies out of nowhere.
In that sense Amy having a double jump and a wide shield via the hammer spin makes sense; she effectively rounds off the gameplay triangle by being the second defensive oriented character that's also has precision for platforming.
Edited by BorneAgain on Jun 10th 2023 at 11:04:35 AM
By the way, not that I'm complaining, but what is it with them giving Amy multiple jumps in some games she's playable in? Heck, Rise of Lyric took it even further. Every character has a double jump? Amy has a triple jump. And thank goodness it functions nothing like her double jump from 06. Seriously, what was that? The stupidest thing is that Blaze's double jump worked perfectly fine. How did they screw up Amy so much? Was she the last character they worked on and didn't have much time left afterwards?
Edited by mstorzil on Jun 10th 2023 at 7:58:11 AM
No rain could douse the flames that burn within me!No...Amy doesn't have a Super Peel Out in Advance 2.
Her animation for the Spin-dash just looks like it would be.
There may be a combination in Advance 3 that allows this.
Rules of the Internet 45. Rule 45 is a lie. Check out my art if you notice.She was originally slow as fuck and needed the hammer to do acrobatics.
Edit: I have no idea why I said aerobics. I confused the words.
Edited by Tomodachi on Jun 10th 2023 at 9:29:34 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.Im not too surprised they made Amy more uniform with everyone else in Origins and Superstars.
The original design ethos for her in Advance was translating her Adventure moveset to a 2D field, the same was true for Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles here.
That's not the goal here for obvious reasons, so its natural they were gonna tone her down and make her way less complex as a result.
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.My problem is more she isn't really distinct to me. Double jump as said is a pretty generic choice for her jump ability compared to the innovative Drop Dash or gliding/climbing abilities and doesn't even feel related to her hammer trademark. I get if they wanted to have something more in style with the others than in Advance 1 but i feel like they could have been more creative with what they did give her here.
Critics got to play the demo, first impressions are positive.
Edited by kkhohoho on Jun 10th 2023 at 4:01:00 AM
I think Sega/Sonic Team may not have simply been aware of the popularity and sub-brand potential of Classic Sonic until Generations, and not really till Mania. There may have been an assumption circa the aughts that the the 2D/portable games had to move forward and try new things because there was uncertainty about how well a Classic Sonic game would actually do. Mania's success might have been the proof needed and the last few years could have possibly been Sonic Team getting all their ducks in a row to essentially ready a wholly new Classic series while at the same time gradually merchandising it via stuff like toys, the IDW one shots, and of course Sonic Origins.
Edited by BorneAgain on Jun 10th 2023 at 6:36:59 AM
It's not that weird that 2D games stopped being a regular occurrence considering the circumstances. Advance and Rush were made by by Dimps with oversight from Sonic Team. Rush Adventure didn't sell that great, possibly because it released at right around the same time the first DS Zelda game came out. So Sega decided to what they did back with Sonic 1 and 2 and have handheld versions of their mainline games made that can be sold at the same time with the same marketing campaign. So they had Dimps make the handheld versions of Colors, Generations, and Lost World. Dimps stopped working with Sega after that, maybe because Sega was kind of screwing them over in the early 2010s with having to rush out 3DS Generations and Lost World, and the whole thing with Sonic 4. After that, Sonic Team would have needed to find someone else to take over making 2D Sonic games. And Sonic Team couldn't really do it themselves because they also restructured a bunch in the early 2010s and didn't really have the resources anymore to be working on more than one game at a time. Mania was a special occurrence caused from some guys being the right place at the right time to pitch their ideas to Iizuka and get the project greenlit by Sega.
And this also kind of goes into why the later 2D games were different from the classic games. It's not like Dimps couldn't do classic Sonic, a lot of their staff was part of the team at SNK that made Sonic Pocket Adventure, which is a classic-style Sonic game down to its levels being based on Sonic 2 levels. But they probably wanted to do something different when they had to move on to new hardware anyway and so experimented with different gameplay ideas throughout the Advance and Rush games. Mania was made by huge fans of classic Sonic that started off making fangames and romhack before getting hired to port the old games, and they wanted to make a new game of their own in the same style, so that's what it was.
Sonic Team never really understood just how popular Classic Sonic and the 2D titles were until recently, so they just kind of did their own thing in the oughts and early 2010's.
Sonic 4 was a cash grab that made no real attempt at trying to be like the games they were emulating and nobody outside of hard-core Classic Sonic fans truly hated that game.
It was only after Mania and the glowing reception it got that Sonic Team realized that there is an audience for Classic Sonic and it's specific aesthetic and gameplay specifically.
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.I mean, I think they knew the old 2D games were popular. They sold a lot and the series kept being made because of that. It would be more accurate to say they underestimated how purist a lot of people would be about wanting new games that played the exact same and would reject almost all the new stuff that was doing something different.
And Sonic 4 was not even trying to emulate the older games. It was designed by Dimps to be a cheap mobile game using the Rush engine and played with a touchscreen and gyro controls. A lot of the level design and gimmicks in Episode 1 are designed around that, and it's why it's episodic too. But then Sega of America asked Sega of Japan to make a Sonic 4 to try and cash in all the buzz on the internet from those classic purists who hated recent Sonic games, SoJ looked at the mobile project and was like "this good?", and SoA was like "yeah, good enough," and so Dimps got told to put the game on consoles and they slapped Sonic 4 to market it as a retro throwback for the classic fans.
According to a VGC interview with Iizuka
:
- Arzest and Ohshima are "100% developers" of Superstars; Sonic Team is only assisting on "design and some other elements"
- Christian Whitehead was contacted to potentially work on another 2D Sonic game, but the plans fell through
- Jun Senoue is the audio lead and is "focused on making [Superstars] sound like a classic game"; he's working with internal SEGA teams and external sources, such as Tee Lopes, to compose the music
Edited by SonicWind on Jun 10th 2023 at 1:07:57 PM
That's a very... derogatory way of putting it? Like no shit people are gonna prefer a certain version of Sonic after the series changed as drastically as possible and the quality of the games significantly dropped off after it changed.
Like what did you think was gonna happen, that people weren't gonna want a new Classic Sonic game after a while?
A lazy millennial who's good at what he does.![]()
Purist is just what it, I can't help if the word sounds derogatory. People have the right to be purist over what Sonic they like and they're not doing anything wrong for it, but it seems pretty natural to me that Sega didn't expect so many people to take that position. It's not like you saw Mario fans after 64 and Sunshine were released making calls for the return of "classic Mario", or any other such random examples I could make. The amount of vitriol you'll see from some Sonic fans with the idea that the 3D games ruined Sonic is pretty rare among video game fanbases. Actually, what's particularly unique about Sonic is that it wasn't just hardcore fan, it was game reviewers and people only casually invested in Sonic that this vitriol spread to that the idea spread through in a way not really seen anywhere else.
And you had to add in that "and the quality of the games significantly dropped off after it changed" to make the reaction seem more natural and predictable, but it's not that simple. Adventure and Adventure 2 were mostly liked when they were new, and I would also argue that Heroes wasn't really that big of a drop in quality. Obviously games like 06 have glaring issues, but you can't argue that say Adventure is bad because 06 is bad, though there's people that unironically do that, that's just not a real argument. If someone wants to argue that 3D Sonic was always terrible right from Adventure, then that's a position a lot of people would argue against, enough so that it's not natural or predictable that the idea that there needs to be new Sonic games exactly like the oldest ones without anything from any 3D games or newer handheld 2D games in order to save the series would become something a lot of people on the internet would loudly proclaim.

...so would you say, then, that Advance 2 Sonic was an Amy reskin?
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.