Sonic's friends: Should they be defenseless without him or be capable of standing on their own two feet?

[Kazhnuz]

The problem is for me what we define by "competent", and how much we old on that point. I don't think that they were "defenseless" in Sonic Forces - especially with Diogene last point that even with Sonic and the Avatar, it's mostly the Phantom Ruby prototype that saved them (and basically Silver intervention from the future ? We can assume that in his first timeline, without him coming and fighting infinite, the Avatar wouldn't got the Phantom Ruby and they would all have been burned to death).

There is a big difference for me between "being able to stand on their own two feets" and "being able to fight a god-level threat".

[Plasme]

Honestly, I'd say Forces makes the other characters out to be hopeless. Sonic goes missing and then Eggman takses over 99% of the world immediately? What.

I know he has Infinite as his trump card but it seems pretty baffling to me. I get that Tails isn't a fighter in the Modern canon, but you are telling me that Knuckles, Omega, Vector, Rouge, Espio and Silver would all together stand no chance against stopping Eggman"s world domination? 

I get that they tried to explain Shadow's situation with the prologue, but the whole thing comes off as incredibly strange to me.

[Splash the Otter]

Of course they should be able to fight on their own! I said this in another topic, but what made Sonic so important in Forces that his presence was required for the resistance to have a fighting chance?

[Iko]

Not to be the devil's advocate, but in Sonic Forces, Eggman takes over 99% of the planet because not only Sonic's friends were unable to win against him, but Sonic as well.

So it's not like the friends were helpless without Sonic, it's that they were all helpless including Sonic.

And they stayed helpless until the end, they only won thanks to that prototype recovered by the avatar that stopped the sun illusion.

[Plasme]

30 minutes ago, Iko said:

Not to be the devil's advocate, but in Sonic Forces, Eggman takes over 99% of the planet because not only Sonic's friends were unable to win against him, but Sonic as well.

So it's not like the friends were helpless without Sonic, it's that they were all helpless including Sonic.

And they stayed helpless until the end, they only won thanks to that prototype recovered by the avatar that stopped the sun illusion.

Sonic's defeat against Infinite was understandable, because he went in alone and arrogantly. Sonic's friends would have known at this point to coordinate their attacks, and they do as much in the game when fighting Eggman's robots. Yet even with their power united, they were unable to put up any resistance at all against Eggman taking over the world so quickly..

It seems really contrived to me. When Sonic and the Avatar team up, they are able to beat Infinite, but all of Sonic's friends together couldn't do anything to stop him.

And while Sonic's win over Eggman was close-fought, there's a huge difference between defeating an enemy who already has world domination and losing the entire world to someone who's far outnumbered by Sonic's friends and then losing so quickly.

[Shade Vortex]

See, the problem is, I don't like extremes. Sonic's friends should NOT be useless without him, BUT there should be things they can't do without him. There should be things he can't do without them, either, but also of course, a lot he can do on his own.

Basically, you could have specialized tasks for individual characters, and tasks large enough to need a group of characters.

[DabigRG]

1 hour ago, Plasme said:

Honestly, I'd say Forces makes the other characters out to be hopeless. Sonic goes missing and then Eggman takses over 99% of the world immediately? What.

I know he has Infinite as his trump card but it seems pretty baffling to me. I get that Tails isn't a fighter in the Modern canon, but you are telling me that Knuckles, Omega, Vector, Rouge, Espio and Silver would all together stand no chance against stopping Eggman"s world domination? 

I get that they tried to explain Shadow's situation with the prologue, but the whole thing comes off as incredibly strange to me.

Omega also went out of commission for most of the story. 

31 minutes ago, Plasme said:

Sonic's defeat against Infinite was understandable, because he went in alone and arrogantly. Sonic's friends would have known at this point to coordinate their attacks, and they do as much in the game when fighting Eggman's robots. Yet even with their power united, they were unable to put up any resistance at all against Eggman taking over the world so quickly..

It seems really contrived to me. When Sonic and the Avatar team up, they are able to beat Infinite, but all of Sonic's friends together couldn't do anything to stop him.

And while Sonic's win over Eggman was close-fought, there's a huge difference between defeating an enemy who already has world domination and losing the entire world to someone who's far outnumbered by Sonic's friends and then losing so quickly.

It's implied that Eggman coordinated Infinite and the other villains attack and take over other areas that the core Resistance weren't in, with the City containing their headquarters coming under constant attack after the time skip because it's the one playable area couldn't control at that point.

Espio and Infinite also state the latter never really got to do anything against them. 

And then there's them needing to gradually depower the Phantom Ruby to truly defeat Infinite, who they could only briefly stagger throughout the game. 

[Multikaris]

Regardless of how helpless they were, they were still less helpless than in Lost World and prior, where they literally only cheered on Sonic and didn’t even think about fighting.  

[thumbs13]

In Forces' defense, Sonic wasn't the only one gone, Tails and Omega were gone too. And that one cutscene where Silver couldn't beat him shows that Infinite was a pretty big threat.

[Shadowlax]

2 hours ago, thumbs13 said:

In Forces' defense, Sonic wasn't the only one gone, Tails and Omega were gone too. And that one cutscene where Silver couldn't beat him shows that Infinite was a pretty big threat.

It didn't though, I would argue it showed the opposite. Silvers entire thing is telekinesis and for whatever reason... he didn't do against this one guy and infinite has no power established that could stop telekensis. In fact due to silver not needing to touch him, would actually beat out infinite's powers. He didn't not use that, he didn't use that so sonic could save him. It doesn't show that infinite is a giant threat , it shows that characters who should be capably are either removed from the narrative or made weak to allow that mess of a story to exist. I'm not saying everyone has to think the most logically all the time, but that's like shadow not using chaos control or knuckles not punching something, its the thing they do. And he just magically doesn't do that now? It was a failed attempt to make infinite look threatening and sonic's ability to homing attack him 5 minutes later proving effective proves how bad it was.

[StaticMania]

Silver has to direct his Telekinesis, so if Infinite got out even once...he could use illusions to misdirect Silver.

That's kind of the point, too bad it's never used that way.

[Diogenes]

5 hours ago, Shadowlax said:

and infinite has no power established that could stop telekensis

Except, y'know, illusions. Super speed. Dissolution into cubes. The fact that he's not actually a physical being.

[DabigRG]

Silver didn't use telekinesis on information in the fight we see because he already tried and it didn't work and/or because him zipping through the air is more dynamic and something he only did in a cutscene before.

Not to mention he can always just summon something to attack Silver if he did get grabbed.

[thumbs13]

6 hours ago, Shadowlax said:

It didn't though, I would argue it showed the opposite. Silvers entire thing is telekinesis and for whatever reason... he didn't do against this one guy and infinite has no power established that could stop telekensis. In fact due to silver not needing to touch him, would actually beat out infinite's powers. He didn't not use that, he didn't use that so sonic could save him. It doesn't show that infinite is a giant threat , it shows that characters who should be capably are either removed from the narrative or made weak to allow that mess of a story to exist. I'm not saying everyone has to think the most logically all the time, but that's like shadow not using chaos control or knuckles not punching something, its the thing they do. And he just magically doesn't do that now? It was a failed attempt to make infinite look threatening and sonic's ability to homing attack him 5 minutes later proving effective proves how bad it was.

Silver not using Telekenesis isn't that weirdwhen his most famous scene in the whole series is the one where he tries to fistfight shadow. At least in this one he did use his TK to put a blue outline around himself.

Also, Infinite didn't use his powers either, he just flew at Silver. He didn't use illusions, or red floating cubes, he just air jousted.

[Wraith]

It's pretty hard to argue the other characters are defenseless in Sonic Forces but the thing that probably bothers most of you about it is that their presence doesn't really impact the experience in a meaningful way. They don't make any significant gains on their own, even as a team. The game doesn't bother to let them show up in levels or anything like that which makes the idea that they're even participating at all harder to swallow when you deal with most things in the game by yourself. The war is brought to a standstill until Sonic and Tails return. They're also the only characters with any meaningful character arcs along with buddy.

You could downsize the conflict to an island and have Sonic, Tails and Buddy as the only participants on the hero's side and not much about the plot changes. In fact with the game's limited pool of environments would probably come off better if we weren't supposed to believe this was a planet scale conflict. The game would have to ditch the war aesthetic but it was only wearing that as a skin anyway. Good war stories usually use a wider spread of characters and perspectives to sell the scale of the conflict. 

Ironically Shadow the Hedgehog was a lot better about this by giving each character their own explicit agendas during the Black Arms invasion. It felt a lot more meaningful to me to stop in a location where the conflict was going on and help a different character with a unique goal than to read about them scrambling in the background as a unit on the map screen.

[Shadowlax]

1 hour ago, thumbs13 said:

Silver not using Telekenesis isn't that weirdwhen his most famous scene in the whole series is the one where he tries to fistfight shadow. At least in this one he did use his TK to put a blue outline around himself.

Also, Infinite didn't use his powers either, he just flew at Silver. He didn't use illusions, or red floating cubes, he just air jousted.

I think the scene with shadow is also a really bad attempt to make shadow look cool considering he just just grabbed up sonic scenes earlier. Shadow isnt exempt from this because I like him, that was shit too.

That scene much like the one with infinite,  could have been fixed easy. Just show em breaking out of the telekinesis.

You could have had silver trap a clone while the real infinite bopper him. You could have had shadow teleport out of the telekinesis. Have the antagonist at the moment use their abilities to show how capable they are by getting around the others abilities. Basic story telling. But forces doesn't do that it doesn't bother to do that. And if you have to justify these scene with one of the worst games in the entire series worst scenes that speaks to how bad it was at effectively communicating what it wanted to.

 

 

1 hour ago, Wraith said:

Ironically Shadow the Hedgehog was a lot better about this by giving each character their own explicit agendas during the Black Arms invasion. It felt a lot more meaningful to me to stop in a location where the conflict was going on and help a different character with a unique goal than to read about them scrambling in the background as a unit on the map screen.

And they all had different perspectives on the matter and goals. And you could play as them with a 2nd controller

[Multikaris]

13 hours ago, Wraith said:

It's pretty hard to argue the other characters are defenseless in Sonic Forces but the thing that probably bothers most of you about it is that their presence doesn't really impact the experience in a meaningful way. They don't make any significant gains on their own, even as a team. The game doesn't bother to let them show up in levels or anything like that which makes the idea that they're even participating at all harder to swallow when you deal with most things in the game by yourself. The war is brought to a standstill until Sonic and Tails return. They're also the only characters with any meaningful character arcs along with buddy.

You could downsize the conflict to an island and have Sonic, Tails and Buddy as the only participants on the hero's side and not much about the plot changes. In fact with the game's limited pool of environments would probably come off better if we weren't supposed to believe this was a planet scale conflict. The game would have to ditch the war aesthetic but it was only wearing that as a skin anyway. Good war stories usually use a wider spread of characters and perspectives to sell the scale of the conflict. 

Ironically Shadow the Hedgehog was a lot better about this by giving each character their own explicit agendas during the Black Arms invasion. It felt a lot more meaningful to me to stop in a location where the conflict was going on and help a different character with a unique goal than to read about them scrambling in the background as a unit on the map screen.

Also, why even Tails? He didn’t do anything but freak out. 

[StaticMania]

Tails probably would do more...because no other characters would be there.

...because Sonic wouldn't be badly beaten to a "plup" if he's one of the only 3 characters there.

So Tails wouldn't be a wreck because Sonic got wrecked.

[dbzfan7]

It really depends honestly on the conflict. It also depends on how much impact said characters have. Of course Sonic has to save the day, he's the main character. He has to in some form save the day. Whether he does it on his own, or has help doing it. He must be present. When it comes to everyone else you either give them some importance or relevancy or don't have them at all. Who likes just seeing a character stand there honestly. Standing and talking is boring. If the best you can give a character is stand and talk...don't bother having them. 

[ComeAsYouAre]

Blaze Silver Shadow Knuckles Tails and Omega should be portrayed as strong given their past 

Rouge and The Chaotix should be portrayed as at least competent at what they do 

Only Amy being defenceless makes somewhat sense since shes not a fighter or a government agent or a Mercenary , but even then she should at least be able to destroy robots with her hammer

 

 

[Multikaris]

18 hours ago, dbzfan7 said:

It really depends honestly on the conflict. It also depends on how much impact said characters have. Of course Sonic has to save the day, he's the main character. He has to in some form save the day. Whether he does it on his own, or has help doing it. He must be present. When it comes to everyone else you either give them some importance or relevancy or don't have them at all. Who likes just seeing a character stand there honestly. Standing and talking is boring. If the best you can give a character is stand and talk...don't bother having them. 

Which is why games like Mania at least give them a little tiny bit of narrative worth, alongside gameplay function. 

[DabigRG]

32 minutes ago, Miragnarok said:

Which is why games like Mania at least give them a little tiny bit of narrative worth, alongside gameplay function. 

Is there really that much of a narrative in Mania?

[ComeAsYouAre]

14 hours ago, DabigRG said:

Is there really that much of a narrative in Mania?

Kind of ,the whole struggle over the Phantom Ruby and King heavy turning against eggman while Eggman trying his hardest to keep his grip over the HBH

 

 

[MetalSkulkBane]

First of all I really hate Tittle of this topic.I's biased, skewing  everyone who reads it to saying "Of course they can fight. My *insert favorite character name* is not a wuss!"

So let me try playing devil's advocate, in context of Forces.

1) I'm pretty sure Eggman could defeat Team Rose or Chaotix, given enough resources, time and  focus. They only really fought him in Heroes, where it's not really Eggman, resources are split on 4 groups and killing any of the groups isn't real goal. Tails, Rouge, Knuckles and Omega are harder but first two can be defeat with enough power (say Metal Sonic), while latter duo aren't mental challenge for Eggman.

2) In Forces Sonic, Shadow, Omega, Tails and Blaze are not present, taken down or aren't in best shape. If you're keeping score that leaves Silver (Rouge and Knuckles, if you want to argue) with potentially enough wit, power and skill to stop Eggman. But

3) Even ignoring Infinite, Ruby made army of clones, badniks or 'generals', so of course Egg Army is way larger to a point where one or two 'super soldiers' can't win war on their own.

4) This is war, not a 'get inside Death Egg, press self-destruction, win'. Rules are different. Civilians need to be moved to safety, supply lines kept running, morale risen. This situation is more similar to Satam or Archie Comics, where good guys, despite having alive Sonic with them, couldn't just beat Eggman in a weekend.

So it's not idea, it's execution. Like picking topic as big as World War and giving budget for Anglo-Zanzibar War

[ComeAsYouAre]

I wonder where the hell was GUN