Tracker_TD

Handily, I made a big post about this exact topic of discussion in the statuses just the other day. Like a so: Advance 1 is a fairly boring but harmless take on the Classic series. It gets pretty naff towards the end, which is a running theme with the series as DIMPS' idea of difficulty scaling is "add more bullshit", but oh well. Advance 2 is tolerable if you're playing as Cream, utterly painful with anyone else. The level design takes an absolute nosedive around the midway point (as will you, because of all the bottomless pits); with a smattering of awful bosses to boot, including one with an outright 1-Hit-KO move! Also has possibly the most annoying means of accessing Special Stages. It's personally one of my least favourite Sonic games, and Techno Base is probably second only to that water level in Sonic Blast as my least favourite 2D Sonic level... ever. Advance 3 is pretty bad, though weirdly I find it at least more consistent than Advance 2. The worst level is - confusingly - the first zone, Route 99. Things even out somewhat after that, but it's still far from great; the physics are extremely wonky, even by Sonic Advance standards. Its fetish for goading you into crusher traps persists throughout, and there's some particular levels late-on in the game that are just atrocious. I do enjoy messing with the tag system and how it can affect how you play, and I think the bosses are at least some kind of improvement over Advance 2, but yeah. Not great. Oh and as for Battle; it's got some appeal and the fighting mechanics are pretty interesting and well-considered, but the Story Mode is extremely tedious, so get comfy if you bother with it, which you basically have to in order to make Emerl worth a shit.

I do actually prefer Shadow to Sonic Heroes. I feel like its control is a pretty solid improvement, including on a mechanical level; the light dash is arguably the best out of the Adventure series, as it's mapped to its own separate button and isn't nearly as glitched out as Heroes (as well as actually carrying momentum on the ground), and the rail switching actually works. Even the spindash isn't entirely worthless, though it's nowhere near SA1 or SA2. The gunplay isn't atrocious despite how absurd it looks, and there's more variety in its means of padding than Heroes having you constantly do the same levels again but with minor tweaks, or just made longer. And while Shadow does have some absolutely atrocious levels, you never actually have to play the worst of them to see the Last Story. On the other hand, you do basically have to do each route twice to get each route's different ending, but I can at least choose to mix things up. This all makes it sounds like I think Shadow is great, but... no. It's still a bad game, it's just that I utterly despise Heroes in comparison, which says more about Heroes than Shadow. On the whole it's still a fairly tedious game to play through, it has no shortage of shit missions even in the better levels, and visually it leans towards being extremely bleak above anything else. The bosses are also pretty damn shit. I don't care about the lore of Sonic too much, but this game's contribution to it is so bloody dumb that I actively try and forget it happened in that regard. It's a game that is so dumb that I can just laugh at how absurd it is on a surface level, but as Dio pointed out... I don't think that was the point, sadly. It's a real shame too, because the game's expert mode is arguably how things should've just been - an absolute ton of A-B levels to run, jump and shoot through. That works fine, especially given how pretty much meaningless the 'choose your Shadow' stuff ultimately is. In the end, I don't think Shadow's misunderstood. It's bad and people give it a sound kicking for it. But I do think it makes some legitimate improvements on the mess that was Heroes, that get glossed over.

I personally wouldn't call Puyo Puyo small, but Arle would certainly be a pick that I think the majority of people would equate to Terry or something. I'd be fine with Sakura too! I just really want Arle.

Exactly what I said on the past 3 pages, which you apparently already forgot about.

He would just be infected. And then he's good as a paperweight to the rest of the group. Tails fighting them head on would not only be foolish, but selfish, and far more out of character than your weird-ass idea of Tails' character. Nobody fights them head-on without getting infected, as Sonic, Shadow and numerous others already proved. Can you not read? This has already been pointed out several times.

So you did miss the point of Tails. Sorted! Then someone's being a little too assumptive. It's possible to find things to appreciate in a given thing without a black or white outlook of "it's perfect" or "it's the worst thing ever". Anyone who's been here longer than five minutes knows Dio is the last person who'd call anything Forces does 'perfect'.

Then you've missed the point of Tails' character, not the writers. Forces may have gone too far in making Tails look like a wuss, but he's not some shonen action hero. He's the brains of the operation; Sonic's the reckless action star, and Knuckles is the brute force.

Like I said and you apparently didn't read: gameplay divide. In SA2 he has a big mech, and is going up against mechs, which he's already had plenty of experience dealing with via Eggman in the past. In Shadow, well, Shadow is there, and the one doing the bulk of the actual fighting. In 06, by the time he's tackling them himself he's had more than enough exposure to them alongside Sonic and co; and it's a literal end of the world situation if he doesn't fight. And in all of these cases, it's waves of enemies, not a big swarm including a boss-tier monster. That, and he's playable in them at all, hence a narrative/gameplay divide. This isn't Lester the Unlikely, having Tails run away at each enemy would be an annoying mechanic; but it doesn't mean he fears nothing. The brute at the centre of the Gaia goons that goes after Tails can be a chore to fight as Sonic, who's already a lot stronger than Tails is. No point Tails fighting if he's smart enough to realise he'd just get his ass kicked and achieve very little.

His friend is dead and the world’s about to end there. I think there’s a bit of a difference. That, and it’s at the very end of the game, after he’s already fought the Iblis monsters alongside Sonic and co for an entire game. The Unleashed thing happens at the very start, as an introduction to the Gaia brute monsters.

...because with the Zombots, just the mere act of trying to fight back would lead to almost certain infection, again as Shadow found out. The Dark Gaia monsters aren't, as far as I know, literally infectious to the touch; so while it's feasible that Tails could have fought back against the Dark Gaia monsters, ultimately my other point about the Gaia monsters being a huge swarm of unfamiliar foes (including the huge brute guy) probably took precedence. Tails knew he was probably going to get the shit kicked out of him and went to hide. Tails can fight back, but he's probably smart enough to know when he's in over his head. With stuff like the Egg Walker in SA1; yeah, it's a giant mech, but it's also Eggman, who he's fought alongside Sonic numerous times up to that point.

Tails is supposed to be a genius above all else. Hence he's smart enough to realise fighting a Zombot and getting infected isn't a good idea in the long-run. He's never been about brawn above all else, that's more Knuckles' thing; if there's a better way out than fighting, he'll probably take it.

The Zombot arc is certainly dark, but I don't find it's as dramatic as even something like Maria's death in SA2; it's essentially just a different take on robotization, not actually killing the characters in question. It is dramatic, but that comes from the more realistic ways in which the characters have reacted to the crisis. As for Tails... well, of course he'd flee from the Zombots. Everyone has to except Sonic, and the only reason he can afford to hold them off is that he's already infected. Fighting the Zombots pretty much means getting infected by the Zombots, which Shadow already learned the hard way. There's a time to play hero, and in Tails' case the more important thing was just making it out alive, given he was the brains of the operation to fight it. The earlier issues already showed Tails teaming up with Sonic to actually lay the smackdown, so it's not about Tails being a coward; it's about Tails knowing that this is a lot more serious than the usual Eggman robot situation.

Officially confirmed now! For Speed Battle, that is.

I don't think it necessarily means anything in regards to canon; Movie Sonic and Longclaw showed up, but nobody's calling those canon to Modern Sonic. It's just a bit of cross-promo. Saying that, I'd love to be wrong! I think Tangle and Whisper are really great, and I'm glad they're showing up in at least some kind of game setting.