Diogenes

Haven't played it myself (I'd probably get like 2 fps on the lowest settings...) but honestly I don't think it looks too good. The first section looks like a somewhat janky remake of the original White Jungle, which is ok I guess, but not that interesting. The second section though, it feels like they gave up trying to make a level. There's a switch hunt with basically no guidance or indicators, there's a weird section that's just semitransparent platforms and dash hoops, and because it's all a big vertical climb it looks like you could lose several minute's worth of progress with every missed jump. The third part's a big flashy escape sequence but it seems like the equivalent of a mach speed section without the auto-run, in that one mistake could put you horribly off track and completely disoriented. Graphically it looks nice enough (if a little excessively effects-heavy) and most fan games don't even get to the point of having cutscenes so there's some commendable effort there, but it feels like they've fallen into the trap of rushing ahead to the flashy stuff before getting a proper handle on the fundamentals.

Honestly I had figured Arms was dead. Also surprised they announced the series but not the fighter themself. Could just be that they aren't in a polished enough state to show off yet, but it makes me wonder if it might be an actual surprise and not one of the most obvious picks.

For the grounded homing attack existing at all, the homing attack is powerful and reliable enough that it's hard to justify trying to roll/slide/boost into grounded enemies a lot of the time (basically whenever they're not set up like bowling pins) instead of just homing attacking them. Being able to homing attack in either state brings them under the same umbrella instead of one side being neglected. As for why it'd only target grounded enemies, I'd figure if you wanted to be in the air you'd jump yourself; if you're homing attacking from the ground you'd want to stay on the ground. So the grounded homing attack would pierce through enemies and leave you rolling afterwards instead of bouncing you into the air.

I mean they still need to fill in the space around those ideas (plus coming up with better interpretations of things like parkour). To throw some of my own ideas/thoughts out there: -Move the homing attack from the jump button to a dedicated attack button and make it work on the ground (probably only against grounded enemies). -A run button, more for controlling acceleration than top speed. -The basic parkour wall run shouldn't be stiff and scripted like in Lost World, it should just be an extension of the existing slope physics. Run/jump against a wall, press the run button, and as long as you're moving fast enough parallel to the wall you start running on it. There might still be some use for an extra scripted "push" to get Sonic running straight up a wall, though; it's harder to get enough upwards speed naturally. -A replacement for the drift, I'm thinking a brake button except you don't just lose your momentum but store it temporarily, and you can release it and blast off once you reorient yourself. Sort of like a manual version of how Sonic takes sharp turns in the storybook games. -Some kind of midair brake move maybe? Like a micro-double-jump, something like Mario Galaxy's spin, that can stop you from flying off god knows where but doesn't lock you into a drop like the stomp or bounce. -Level design needs, like...just a completely new philosophy, I don't think any 3D Sonic has a genuinely good approach to 3D level design. The way I see it it feels like they design levels by opening a blank file and immediately starting to draw the individual paths, so even when there are multiple paths they tend to feel like disconnected hallways and catwalks; what I think they should be doing is starting with designing and building the meta-path, the wider playable space that all the specific paths will exist in, and then carve and sculpt the specific paths into that space so that they're organic parts of it and not just a bunch of disconnected lines. -The levels' collision geometry should probably be as simple as possible; flat planes, smooth curves, no weird little greebly bits to trip on. They could decorate it a bit to look more organic, but the "lumpier" the underlying geometry, the less predictable your interactions with it. Alternatively, I don't know how practical this is (probably isn't), but I've wondered about actually having two different sets of collision geometry; a more detailed one while moving at low speeds that can be more accurate to the visuals, and a simplified one for high speeds to smooth things out. And of course there's still every other potential playable character to consider. Even basing their core gameplay on Sonic's, you've still got to figure out how to make their unique moves fun but not game-breaking, and some characters have some pretty wild movement options to contend with.

Not a whole lot, I'd say. SA's basic movement was ok and the homing attack is probably a necessary evil for 3D Sonic. SA2's grinding was a bit unpolished but still a good addition, and they should bring the balancing aspect back in some form. SatSR adding a targeting reticle to the homing attack was a good move, to make it clear what you were actually about to attack. Lost World's parkour was pretty rough, but the idea of incorporating parkour-like movement into Sonic gameplay is solid. It's...honestly hard to think of much beyond that. I think "fixing" 3D Sonic is going to take more fresh ideas than taking from previous 3D Sonics.

Because that's what the game does. Possibly excepting the "I'm not weak" moment, which manages to be a step more ridiculous than the rest of Forces' story, there's nothing that points to Infinite being any sort of deliberate joke. Everything in the game frames him as being at least as serious and legitimate a threat as any other villain has been, there's no wink to the player that he's deliberately written to be over-the-top, he just is badly written. Which is kind of a shame, because I think they absolutely could've taken that route; make Infinite the bad (in both alignment and quality) self insert counterpart to the Avatar as the good self insert. But I see no way to read that from what the game actually does with the characters.

...y'know I did just assume it was Sonic on fire at first, but looking again...it's almost suspicious how well the fire blocks basically every detail that would tell Sonic and Blaze apart. The wrists and ankles, the heels of the shoes, the lower half of the torso, the majority of the head but not an ear... I'm not making any solid predictions but if it does turn out to be a bait-and-switch of Sonic and Blaze, they certainly didn't take the easy way out with that silhouette.

I'm not saying it's the most important part of the story, but it is, absolutely, a part of the story, and it's not something you can really escape from considering 95% of the enemies in the game are GUN robots and a large part of the story deals with both sides' interactions with GUN.

It's a central point of the whole Shadow/Gerald/Maria revenge thing, the story doesn't happen without it. Plus you've got them chasing down the heroes for most of the game based on "mistaken identity" (they know Sonic's not Shadow. They can't not know).

Things can be about more than one thing. Gerald's diary specifically talks about GUN destroying his work and shutting the ARK down under the pretense of there being an accident.

It was deliberately hyperbolic to emphasize how different ways of handling death and killing carry different weights and have different tones and that not every option is appropriate for every series (and admittedly because I was getting a bit pissed off) I mean, I made a whole effortpost up there trying to explain why I feel Maria's death is out of place in the series. I'm not sure what more I can say to explain my position.

Ok? I'm aware it doesn't have to be gory or entirely tasteless, I've seen the scene in question. That was never actually the point.

Is it really that hard to make an educated guess as to why someone might not be terribly fond of it? Even I'm not so cynical as to think the shooting death of a child is trivial. Look, I'm not making these arguments because I'm squeamish or prudish, or that I have some absolutist moral issue with fictional children being fictionally harmed. Case in point, my favorite currently-airing anime has a 13 year old girl's face get ripped off, and I consider it rad as hell. But I think we can all agree that that wouldn't be appropriate in Sonic the Hedgehog, a series where magic rings protect the hero from any real injury and where the bad guy's lair can explode around him doing him no more damage than some cracked glasses and scuff marks. It's not a series where severe physical injuries "exist", even when characters get beaten up, even when they get killed. Likewise, different series handle deaths and killing in different ways. Sometimes it's realistic and dignified, sometimes it's a bloody slaughterfest, sometimes it's abstracted and sanitized. Sonic falls into the last category; most games don't involve any deaths (aside from robots and monsters we can easily not care about), and when there is a significant death, it's usually offscreen, always bloodless, occurs in some "unreal" manner, and is occasionally reversed by the end of the story. Sonic characters don't die realistically in the same way they don't get injured realistically. When they killed Sonic in '06, it was from a monster shooting a magic laser that basically just knocked him out for an hour before he got kissed back to life. Maria gets shot by a soldier. Yes, it's offscreen, there's no blood, and she's helping her bioengineered half-hedgehog half-alien adopted brother(?) escape a space station at the time; it's still sterilized and unreal to some extent. But it's a lot more real and a lot more grounded than any death in the series before or any death after. It sticks out from the tone and setting of the rest of the series (even as inconsistent as they've been). There's any number of stories that could be written, and any number of ways to write this kind of story, without feeling like a plot point from an entirely different series wandered in. I don't want kids getting shot by soldiers in my colorful superpowered animal action series any more than I want magic lasers that do no identifiable damage in my dark gory horror/comedy series. It's the wrong tool for the job, it pushes me out rather than drawing me in. In conclusion, watch Dorohedoro. It's sure as shit a better story than any Sonic game.

Okay so is it possible, maybe, to do this without things like shooting children? Or is an action story only valid if there's a certain amount of death in it? Don't pretend like you've done it any less.

Let's have Eggman shoot Tails in the face next game. It will be Very Mature, and therefore good. And it's a different kind of story, so nobody can complain.

You can write meaningful stories without death at all. It doesn't have to be nothing but whimsy. And the number of deaths isn't the only factor. It is different for a bunch of faceless background characters to get killed offscreen by a monster in a far-past flashback, compared to a young girl we (somewhat) get to know and who has a strong connection to a main character being shot. It's not impossible to draw a line that includes one but not the other.

Not having as much death as you want doesn't make a thing worthless.

That exists entirely in response to Sonic. You cannot have Metal Sonic without Sonic. Not just in the sense that the designers made him in response to Sonic, not just that Eggman created him in response to Sonic, but that his role as a character is fundamentally to be a response to Sonic. You take Sonic out of the equation and Metal ceases to be a meaningful, coherent character.

Metal Sonic exists specifically in relation to Sonic. He's not an independent character, he's a response, he doesn't make sense without the context of what he's a response to. Shadow starts off looking like he's going to be a response but his similarities to Sonic end up being coincidental and his story spins off in a completely different direction. There's a weird tension to the character where they treat him almost as if he's the protagonist of an entirely separate series but there's no way to escape that he's Dark Sonic for no reason.

SA2's style didn't come completely out of nowhere but that doesn't mean it can't be considered the tipping point where things had changed too much from what they had previously been.

How's there any difference? The Adventure-'06 era does its own thing, different from the classic games, the Colors-Forces era does its own thing, different from the Adventure era. If it justifies one it should justify both.

If we've accepted Chaos, the Black Arms, Iblis and its spawn, and Dark Gaia and its minions as part of the series, I don't see why there should be any concern with the D6's designs fitting in.

Omega absolutely could've waited in that room, guarding Shadow, as Eggman presumably intended. He wouldn't have liked it, but, well, that's him making the choice whether to continue following Eggman's orders or to rebel.