Which Sonic game were you most disapointed in?

[Guest]

On 9/19/2020 at 4:46 PM, BadBehavior said:

I bought Forces on PC, mostly to have it in my collection again, and to pre-empt anyone saying "you can't criticize the game if you don't own it".

I'm not even gonna bother. I watched someone play it on YouTube, that's enough for me.

Although my friend said he liked it. He got it for free though, keep in mind. And had zero expectations going into it, and isn't a huge Sonic fan.

On 9/24/2020 at 10:04 AM, PaperSonic said:

I went into playing Adventure 2 with the best of expectations. I bought it during a sale on Steam alongside Generations.  Ended up heavily disliking it, and I grow less and less fond of it as time goes on. Needless to say, I ended up playing Generations a ton more.

Yeah, I guess this really shows the generational divide between me and newer Sonic fans. Surprised you didn't get yeeted offa here for saying that. xD

54 minutes ago, Mattjohn234 said:

Sonic Xtreme, one person actually got into the hospital while making the game, then it got canceled.

That... doesn't count. The game never even got anywhere close to being finished. That said, it looked atrocious. So we can say we got disappointed by the whole story surrounding its failure to being completed. But I was like 4 or 5 years old and had no awareness it even existed so.

On 9/18/2020 at 7:29 PM, Shadow Chaos Control said:

A second choice would be Sonic Heroes. I applaud it for its brave gimmick of controling three characters at once. But the story was not on par with SA and SA2 in IMHO, nor was I fond of controlling three characters at once. 

Heroes is my choice. We had just come off of two 3D games with engaging stories, Chao gardens, unique gameplay for each character... what we got was rather heartless stories hastily put together, no Chao, and the same levels 4 times with the exact same gameplay. Those of us who had a Dreamcast and got the other two games on release, we waited years for this. And it let us down. To date, that's the last 3D Sonic game I've played through.

The entirety of Boost Sonic has let me down- that style of gameplay does nothing for me, despite how everyone else seems to love it. And if the next game is another damn boost-to-win game, I'm done. No more getting my hopes up for 3D Sonic ever again.

[Redemption]

2 minutes ago, Angyu said:

 

Heroes is my choice. We had just come off of two 3D games with engaging stories, Chao gardens, unique gameplay for each character... what we got was rather heartless stories hastily put together, no Chao, and the same levels 4 times with the exact same gameplay. Those of us who had a Dreamcast and got the other two games on release, we waited years for this. And it let us down. To date, that's the last 3D Sonic game I've played through.

Well Heroes wasn't a complete failure. The opening theme is continual stuck in my head. The same level's was dissapointing. the team blast feature was fun but the team thing in general needed work. I played it on the Wii (Gamecube cd) and specifically bought a Gamecube controller to play it and guess what i haven't used it even since i played Sonic Heroes. (makes me wanna go play Sonic Heroes now!) (I think i'll give it a second chance)

[Guest]

23 hours ago, Redemption said:

Well Heroes wasn't a complete failure. The opening theme is continual stuck in my head. The same level's was dissapointing. the team blast feature was fun but the team thing in general needed work. I played it on the Wii (Gamecube cd) and specifically bought a Gamecube controller to play it and guess what i haven't used it even since i played Sonic Heroes. (makes me wanna go play Sonic Heroes now!) (I think i'll give it a second chance)

The music was great! I loved all the Team theme songs, and some good level themes too. But... that's the best part of the game lol. I tried going back to replay it, and I don't enjoy it like I do the Adventure titles.

[Mars]

I'm surprised no-one said "Shadow the Hedgehog" yet. I re-bought it to give it another chance a couple of years ago, and I didn't like it. I can't place my finger on why though. Maybe it was the unskipable LONG cutscenes UGH, or maybe when Shadow uses the chaos blast (or whatever it was called) he goes straight head first into the screen and whooshes forward. 

[RadicalLaRuby]

Generations. It boasted to be more than it actually was for me. A botched Classic style and a boost style that I was already fatigued by due to Unleashed. I gravitated mostly to the missions with Sonic's friends, just to see them in action again. Most of them were underwhelming, and Vector's was just....infuriating. Terrible finale and nearly absent plot overall. Both Super Sonics are not even worth trying to use. I'll give it to them for alternate rescue dialogue, Silver, and Perfect Chaos presented like a stage boss. Other than that, it just didn't do it for me. I usually refer to Mania as the "Generations" I wanted.

If we're talking spin offs, Secret Rings. It is the most unresponsive game I've ever played with motion controls. Let's just say aside from music, it's the first and only Sonic game I've ever tried to sell off. A shame because most of the levels (that I made it up to) had some fun aesthetics that Sonic doesnt normally do.

[Kaotic Kanine]

Definitely Sonic Colors for me. After playing Unleashed on the 360 and loving it, in spite of what everyone was saying about the game at the time (which was far more negative than positive), I was looking forward to what Colors had to offer; thinking it would perfect what that game did good while improving on the "bad parts". I remember watching a preview for one of the cutscenes and being enthusiastic about this game having cutscenes with the characters having fun and stuff, and was humored by the voice clips of Eggman's PAs. Once the game came out to raving reviews, I picked it up as soon as I could and finished it within a day... And all I could think after was "how the fuck did this game get rave reviews?" 

Plenty of folks have harped on about Colors' sense of humor and story, so I suppose I don't have to say anything about that. But I will: the game's comedy is fucking awful. If it's not some of the most juvenile shit I've ever heard (there's a reason people bring up "Baldy McNosehair", and a lot of the Wisp mistranslations are hardly better), then it's just unfunny jokes. Like Sonic repeatedly asking a mute robot if it ordered a clobbering. Or how about Orbot spelling out the punchline of the "Who you calling nothing?" bit? And then there's that Scarface reference in the climax, which would've actually worked out fine in light of Cubot's mobster accent... If not for the fact that Eggman says "You talking to me? There's nobody else here, so you must be talking to me!" even though Orbot is right there alongside him and Cubot. This game is easily the most comedy focused of Sonic games, yet the previous non-comedy games did humor a lot better than this game ever did.

And the story is just a waste; nevermind how Sonic's characterization is a big downgrade from Unleashed and Black Knight (because him constantly spouting off jokes like some loser is so much better than an actually cool person who jumps into action), but the plot just doesn't work out. Like, what is even the point of Tails building a translator for the Wisps when all they have to say is already figured out by the time they can be translated: "Eggman has taken over our planets, capturing us for our Hyper-go-on energy, and you must free us and deactivate those generators you've already started doing". The plot has Tails get hit by Eggman's mind control ray, seemingly setting us up for a boss fight, only for the ray to run out of juice in, like, a minute. Which in turn severely casts doubt on Eggman's grand plan to mind control the planet with this ray since he ran out of energy for it very quickly, for one individual. Oh, but of course it turns out that whole thing was nothing to be concerned with anyway, since it was accidentally thwarted by Sonic after the first boss! So the only pressing matter of the story was saving the Wisps from Eggman. Too bad the story doesn't do much to make us actually care about the Wisps; the only Wisps who has any semblance of character is Yacker, and he ends up getting kidnapped off-screen! And chances are, you didn't even notice he was missing until Tails points out he hadn't seen Yacker in a while. So... What did this plot actually accomplish? 

Oh, but the gameplay definitely made up for all that, right...? For me, not in the slightest. If anything, Colors' gameplay and level design are the real reason why I was so disappointed with it. "Unleashed minus the Werehog" this game is not; the Day Stages of Unleashed were actually fun with level design appropriate for Sonic, and primarily 3D with some 2D segments. Colors is primarily 2D with some 3D segments that don't amount to much, and the level design is blocky platforming. Which I would argue completely goes against the Sonic series: Sonic had always set itself apart from other platformers by making heavy use of slopes, with blocky platforming being a rarity at best. Colors does pretty much the opposite of that, which seriously makes me question why so many folks thought this game was a "return to form" for Sonic. And it certainly doesn't help that this blocky level design does not synergize with the Boost gameplay. But outside of that, most of the levels were rife with moments that just ruin the pace of gameplay: mostly in the form of standing on buttons to make platforms very slowly move. So thrilling, right? Especially in comparison to the combat of Heroes and the Werehog levels? 

[Rexeljet]

For the same reasons as Blue Blood said, I can't really mention Sonic 4 or Sonic Forces, since my expectations had already been lowered to almost nothing by the time the games were released, even though I was optimistic towards both titles when they were first announced (I still haven't played Sonic Forces). I can't say I was disappointed with Lost World either, because I lost interest as soon as the game was revealed to be a WiiU exclusive (in fact, once the game came out and proved to be a critical failure, I was kinda relieved that I wasn't missing much!)

The only other games I was really keeping tabs on prior to release were Generations and Mania, and I can't truthfully say that either disappointed me.

So that leaves games that I only started playing long after they were released. Sonic Heroes was a bit of a disappointment- my first exposure to the game was a second hand copy of the PS2 version, but the disk was so scratched up that I couldn't really play it enough to form a proper opinion on it. I tried out the PC version a couple of years later, and couldn't understand what people liked about the game- from the slippery controls, to the automated sections often directly leading into bottomless pits, to the fact that you had to play through four versions of virtually the same campaign to access the final boss, it seemed to have all the hallmarks of a complete trainwreck of a game. I even bought the Gamecube version a couple of years back, in the hope that it would be better. It was not. The Music and level aesthetics are nice, though

Shadow the Hedgehog was also a bit of a disappointment. at the time the only console I had was a PS2, and the only 3D Sonic games I'd played were Heroes and the PC version of SADX. I wanted to try another 3D Sonic game and, back then, ShadowTH was the only other one available for a system I owned. Since I'd never played Sonic Adventure 2 the opening cutscene left me even more confused than it would've done otherwise, and the game itself just felt like Sonic Heroes all over again, except this time even the music and aesthetics were bland and ugly. I haven't touched the game since, but based on what I've heard, I'm not missing much regardless of what system I'm playing it on

[Rabbitearsblog]

For me, it was Sonic Forces.  The game boasted of having a huge story surrounding Dr. Eggman finally taking over the world and I was excited about that because we have never seen a Sonic the Hedgehog game where Dr. Eggman actually succeeded in taking over the world (well, he was close in Sonic Adventure 2).  But unfortunately, the story of this game fell flat for me, as they didn't really explore the emotional turmoil that each character would have felt with Dr. Eggman taking over the world and also, I didn't like the fact that they just added in an Avatar character that we could play, instead of having us play as Sonic's friends.  Also, the characterizations of the characters were a bit weak to me.  Not only did we have that scene of Tails cowering in fear when he meets up with Chaos, despite the fact that in Sonic Adventure, he pretty much got over his fear of facing dangerous foes; but there's that scene where Sonic was captured and tortured and yet, he didn't really show any kind of emotional issues resulting from that.  It was then that I couldn't take the whole situation seriously since the characters weren't taking the situation seriously.

It felt like Sonic Forces had so much potential to be a fantastic video game that showcase the best in storytelling for Sonic, but it just all fell flat in the end.

[Dr Ryan]

Sonic '06 for me. A mainline entry that was to serve as a reboot. It promised so much and delivered absolutely nothing.

(I still think another 12 months or more in the development 'oven' and it could have been good though. Albeit with a weird plot and art style.)