JezMM

It'd be weird to release S3&K with an entirely remade soundtrack. Like... I'd love it (I personally mostly play the classic games with music turned off while listening to higher-spec music as is - either fan remixes of the soundtrack or music from other modern Sonic games that have compatible music just for fun/to make things a bit more dramatic), but that doesn't seem in-style for Sonic Team's releases. Unless they're making like, an HD version of S3&K, a soundtrack overhaul would be strange. The fact that several names are involved in this remix is a bit off too - for a port job, it'd be kind of odd for multiple names to be involved in a soundtrack (granted the original S3&K soundtrack had many hands laid upon it so who knows). Either way it's just reaching a bit. Having said THAT, just releasing a remix for no real reason is a new move for Sonic PR. But it would be cool if Tee Lopes has enough affection from SEGA now that his personal just-for-fun remixes that preceeded his work on Mania are now going to be released as free official bonus content for just... the franchise in general.

Personality-wise they're not very similar, but they have similar aesthetics (big guy, leader, horns, a tail, sharp teeth (or uhh... mouth? in Zavok's case?), physically strong, red in colour scheme) and the fact that his final boss battle in Sonic Lost World was a near-replica of a typical final Bowser boss battle (bad guy grows huge, breathes fire, lava is present) didn't help either (which was further emphasised by Lost World seemingly taking inspiration from Mario Galaxy's planet/gravity-based level design and the aesthetics of the seven zones being a carbon-copy of the New Super Mario Bros. games all the way down to the order said aesthetics appear in (excluding a mountainous region) so people already have Mario on the mind. It's been a running joke among the fanbase that Zavok is a Bowser-clone since Lost World came out.

Honestly the more I think about it, the more I'm okay with Zavok. In fact, I really wouldn't mind if another mainline Sonic game used the Deadly Six again IF ONLY to allow them to maybe explain the Lost Hex's place in Sonic canon and flesh them out into better characters. But doing that for six characters while also doing due justice to the series regulars in a game as plot-light as the Sonic cut-scenes tend to be is a bit of a tall order so uhh... hopes staying low on that'un. Anyway, regarding Infinite's chances, to be fair, while it wasn't ACTUALLY Zavok the 2nd time around, Zavok has appeared in two games to Infinite's one (as well as appearing in Olympic Games if I recall). It also makes sense considering this game, like most modern Sonic games, will have a kid-focus in mind, and Sonic Lost World is probably a Sonic game lots of kids-who-are-still-currently-kids played since it came out just under 6 years ago.

Gonna be honest, pretty sure next to no-one expected or wanted Zavok... but he's still a better character than four chao in a car so whatevs.

Chamomile #91

Sakurai never specifically said WHAT about trophies made them so time-consuming to develop. I imagine both the modelling (or importing) of them AND the research/writing/translation for them all were a heavy task. Honestly though, if the disc-space allowed, I wouldn't have minded if they had just imported most trophies from previous games with the same descriptions, and just added an extra 10% or so of new ones on top of those. They could still have spirits on top of that, and unlocking a trophy also unlocks the spirit, etc. Having said that, there may be new supported languages that they would have to translate all the older trophies to as well. Well, at the very least I wish we had trophy-description-length bios for all the characters, stages and assist trophies - just the big stuff. The tips section does about a sentence or two for MOST of the above but even then, not all.

Five so far - Planet Wisp, Sandopolis, Rooftop Run, Seaside Hill and an ice stage that's yet to have a clear connection to any previous zone (the one track we've seen uses Cool Edge music but doesn't contain any visuals that evoke what make Cool Edge unique among other ice stages).

I'm 90% sure it's been confirmed that we're getting 7 "zones" with 3 tracks each, but the only tracks we've seen more than one track from is Sandopolis and Seaside Hill. It's still a bit up in the air as to how much variety there'll be in the tracks, but the assumption is that there will be significant asset re-use between them all - however the MUSIC for said tracks will remix various themes from that "genre" of zone. Sand Hill may be the remix of choice, but the name of the TRACK is Sand Road, remember, and like Boo's House, it is set in the same zone - which is either Sandopolis or just a generic desert location. Think of the soundtrack in the same way as how Windy Valley Act 3 used Green Grove's music in Sonic Adventure - it's just music. Windy Valley Act 3 is not meant to be Green Grove, likewise, Sand Road in TSR is not meant to be Sand Hill.

To be fair, with a remake like Crash there is less pressure to keep some of the "cooler stuff" underwraps. People want to see how a bunch of the game has changed from the off, whereas with a new title, you don't want to reveal literally every single course or environment before release. I expect they want to keep at least one or two of the "zones" hidden before launch (though granted, Forces revealed all 7 environments before launch so maybe not). Having said that, would be nice to see some gameplay footage at least of the tracks they've revealed through music uploads.

Great music as ever but yay this all but confirms three of the game's tracks will be Seaside Hill agaaaaaaaaaaaaaainnnnnnnnnnnnn (To be fair though we know it can't be a carbon-copy because the cars don't transform in TSR, and Ocean View contains boat sections). EDIT: Forgot that the first lap is entirely on land. I mean it would be very very cool if the third track to complete the "throwback zone" was something from Sonic R (presumebly Resort Island to keep the theming going) but on the flipside that inconsistency would kinda bug me too lol. Though I guess there's nothing that canonically suggests Resort Island couldn't be a part of whatever archipelago makes up the overall location known as "Seaside Hill".

I'm kind of halfway between the two sides here. I also hated the micromanaging aspect and gameplay which 100% was not combat/skill focused and found myself only playing WoL in short bursts for the first few hours of it. At the same time, I never felt hugely compelled to just steamroll the mode with legend spirits, I would usually play with a recommended level and only switch to powerful spirits after a couple of failures using a recommended level. It's kind of like whenever I chose to use overpowered spirits, a big mental block was coming up in the same way I would when hesitating to select Easy mode on a game I'm playing for the first time. "Oh, you're not even gonna try!?" I'd think to myself. In some cases the answer was "Nah I don't really care about this spirit I don't know what they're from/it's on a stage I don't like/I hate fighting this character/I'm nearly at the end of this part I think and I'm kinda ansty to see the next area" and I'd be comfortable to continue with using an overpowered spirit team. Otherwise though... I felt there wasn't much point being pissed off at the lack of action gameplay between fights if I was basically gonna use a spirit team that may as well have caused a "skip fight" option to appear on the startup screen for every single match. Like, increased rewards are nice but sometimes the reward can be the gameplay itself. I do agree with Diogenes logic that if you're gonna deny yourself even that then... why bother playing at all. I think as I've gotten older I've become a LOT better at being okay with ditching video games that I'm not enjoying. Life is too short. "This one just ain't for me", that's fine. Also, honestly the mixture of spirits stuff and the more creative Classic mode kind of inspired me to mix up my random matches against CPUs a bit more. The other day I played a self-imposed "playlist" of matches on stages/against opponents/with music to evoke the levels of a favourite game of mine and it was pretty fulfilling.

Chamomile #90

Rare were still allowed (are still allowed? idk if they've done anything beyond the original DS) to make handheld games for Nintendo even after the Microsoft buy-out, because those products weren't directly competing with Microsoft's products. I could see "cameo in Smash Bros" as an exception on similar grounds to that. It's not like Microsoft can make their own Smash Bros with Banjo and hope for it to be even remotely as popular - they thankfully have Sony to thank for doing that research for them already. Banjo in Smash would be a perfectly fine way to remind people the characters exist if they have a new B-K game in the works behind the scenes. Xbox will still be the only place to play it if so.

Chamomile #89

Freedom Planet might've started life as a Sonic fangame, but it has VERY much evolved into it's own thing at this point, and it feels kind of disrespectful to their hard work giving the game it's own identity to suggest that Archie characters would just slot right into their universe. They'd have to reboot them too obviously, when I think what most Archie fans really want is for the original story to continue, which, sadly, it never will. But granted, I'm the type who is never really that fussed about "consolation prize" content - I'm not the type to praise "something" over "nothing" when that something still isn't what I wanted, even though I might seperately appreciate that "something" on it's own merit.