Unpopular opinion of the story

[NBOX21]

This... might actually be the best story that Pontac and Graff have ever written for this series. Yes, it's a complete mess, the villains felt like nostalgia baiting just as much as Green Hill and Chemical Plant, Tails had all his character development ruined and there's a lot of cringy lines that go against the series' appeal, but compared to anything else we've gotten in the 2010's except for the DS version of Colours, Sonic Forces felt like a masterpiece in storytelling.

If there's anything about the story in Sonic Forces that no other Sonic story in the 2010's except the DS version of Colours had, it was tension. It's not much, but it's something. As underdeveloped as Infinite was, at least he was an actual character with personality. Compared to all the villains in the 2010's decade of Sonic games, I actually cared about what Infinite was planning and what his motives were. He even turns against Eggman and actually has a good reasoning for doing so.

Compare that to Colours - I never cared about the wisps as there's no backstory involving their home planet, nothing that shows any signs of damage Eggman has done to their worlds or anything. The Deadly Six in Lost World are just as bland and generic as the Koopalings in Super Mario Bros. 3. Who are the Zeti and why are the Deadly Six the way they are? Nothing was explained. The plot in Generations may be non-existent, but at least they made references to past adventures and were (mostly) respectful about it.

There were also moments where Sonic actually has some good one-liners as well, such as when he escapes the Death Egg and mentions how there's no way he's sticking around because there's nothing to run on. That I thought was pretty cool and I wish there were more moments like these.

Classic Sonic can disappear outright, however. Replace all instances of Classic Sonic with "the avatar" and almost nothing would change. Heck, the "Cheer up Tails, I'm sure we'll run into them again" line would actually work in this case.

Also, spoilers for the ending: When Sonic mentions fixing the world we all live in, I can't help but feel that's something we could learn in real life. The last Sonic game I can ever recall having any life morals we could learn in the real world was in Sonic Unleashed.

Does anyone else agree with anything I've mentioned here?

[WhitePhantom]

The story is cool on paper, in a cheesy 2000's anime kind of way. All of Sonic's old enemies team up to defeat him. Sonic is missing, presumed dead and Eggman takes over, so you play as a random who helps the resistance. You later find Sonic is alive after being kept prisoner and tortured. Sounds pretty cool and edgy like Adventure 1 or 2.
The problem is that most of that happens within 30 minutes of starting the game. It's not long at all before you rescue Sonic and he's instantly back to his old self. There's no impact.

It should have taken you way longer to save Sonic, and even then he should have given up, acting all defeated. You could then go into his origin and why he does what he does. Sonic has no motivation or real character. Why did he decide to be a hero? Why does he have these abilities? The movie did this pretty well, but it's never really been addressed in the games.

Nearly four years of development for a three hour story. We saw more of Eggman's conquest of the world in the early trailers than in the actual game.

[NBOX21]

Автор сообщения: El

This is a garbage fire of a self-insert furry fanfic. It's like this was made to pander to the lunatics who infest the likes of DeviantArt.

I wasn't praising the story either, just that it was better written than most of the other garbage that we've gotten as of lately. Still doesn't change the fact that this is a pretty garbage story though.

You want a good story in a Sonic game, play Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 or Unleashed.

[NBOX21]

Автор сообщения: WhitePhantom

The story is cool on paper, in a cheesy 2000's anime kind of way. All of Sonic's old enemies team up to defeat him. Sonic is missing, presumed dead and Eggman takes over, so you play as a random who helps the resistance. You later find Sonic is alive after being kept prisoner and tortured. Sounds pretty cool and edgy like Adventure 1 or 2.
The problem is that most of that happens within 30 minutes of starting the game. It's not long at all before you rescue Sonic and he's instantly back to his old self. There's no impact.

Sonic Adventure 2 handled this sort of setup about as well as you could have for a Sonic game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY4nQPww9HM
A great moment for a cutscene with so much impact and tension and pretty much succeeds in every way that Forces failed.

Автор сообщения: WhitePhantom

It should have taken you way longer to save Sonic, and even then he should have given up, acting all defeated. You could then go into his origin and why he does what he does. Sonic has no motivation or real character. Why did he decide to be a hero? Why does he have these abilities? The movie did this pretty well, but it's never really been addressed in the games.

Nearly four years of development for a three hour story. We saw more of Eggman's conquest of the world in the early trailers than in the actual game.

Speaking of Adventure 2, we saw so much character development throughout that game's plot. Tails went from depending on Sonic to relying on himself for example.

[Dark Redshift]

Автор сообщения: NBOX21

What about games like Klonoa or the PS2 Ratchet and Clank games? Those games actually had well written stories that complimented their gameplay and made the overall experience better for it.

I'm not asking for RPG levels of storytelling for a platformer or "cinematic" experiences - just something that motivates and contextualise gameplay.

There's also A Hat in Time, Psychonauts, Blinx 2, every single Tomb Raider game (except Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider Anniversary), Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time trilogy and Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order. All of them are platformers (with the latter having Dark Souls elements) and all of them are better for having a story that gels with the gameplay. Just like Sonic games from the Dreamcast, Shadow & Sonic P-06 to at least Generations.

Автор сообщения: WhitePhantom

The story is cool on paper, in a cheesy 2000's anime kind of way. All of Sonic's old enemies team up to defeat him. Sonic is missing, presumed dead and Eggman takes over, so you play as a random who helps the resistance. You later find Sonic is alive after being kept prisoner and tortured. Sounds pretty cool and edgy like Adventure 1 or 2.
The problem is that most of that happens within 30 minutes of starting the game. It's not long at all before you rescue Sonic and he's instantly back to his old self. There's no impact.

It should have taken you way longer to save Sonic, and even then he should have given up, acting all defeated. You could then go into his origin and why he does what he does. Sonic has no motivation or real character. Why did he decide to be a hero? Why does he have these abilities? The movie did this pretty well, but it's never really been addressed in the games.

Nearly four years of development for a three hour story. We saw more of Eggman's conquest of the world in the early trailers than in the actual game.

That sounds like a good idea. I like the game and I love the concept of Eggman having taken over the world and you have to fight back, but it was executed a bit poorly. I got a whole essay on how the worldbuilding should be improved location wise, plus the idea you came up with could be added into it.:

Автор сообщения: Dark Redshift

Two of my biggest gripes are that Super Sonic isn’t in the final battle against the Kyodai Eggman Robo and they half-assed the earth being thrown into the sun during Imperial Tower. That is the best time for a timed mission, despite the level being hard as hell, but the sun seems to teleport much higher into the sky than it is in the cutscenes during the actual level and only falls a little bit at a certain point. Then Eggman uses his Stardust Speedway laser at the end, even though it would make more sense for him and Infinite to make the sun plummet at this point regardless of its position, forcing you to speed up and/or try to deflect it with your fake-ruby prototype a couple of times to buy a couple of extra seconds.

Like so:

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1493064616

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1493065985

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1493067381

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1493068202

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1493069014

Besides using Super Sonic for the final battle, I’d have loved to see levels and Adventure Fields in locations from all past games, under Eggman’s control and see what it’s like for the citizens living there under his rule, giving more reasons why him taking over the world is bad, like Wolfenstein: The New Order and New Colossus did. Not this boring World Adventure style map screen. Here’s my idea of how to do it:

1. Station Square/Central City and Westopolis should return for one, possibly with a sort of “City 17” vibe. The former staff of Prison Island and the US United Federation (from Gerald Robotnik’s time, including the members of his firing squad provided they are still alive) are hunted down by Infinite and publicly executed by the Doctor himself.

2. Soleanna, with Princess Elise leading the human side of the resistance, possibly even seeing the reformed Solaris himself restoring her and Sonic’s memory of the 2006 events, explaining that he created the original Phantom Ruby, intending it for Classic Sonic in the past as a gift to help him against Eggman, but Eggman got to it first and modern Eggman reverse engineered it. (similar to fake Chaos emeralds. Infinite just uses the purest, most perfect of the copies.)

Solaris could even team up with all the three heroes at the final battle, lending them his power to boost them even further. (Soleanna in the Sonic universe is in Egypt, near the Nile Delta by the way)

As for the city itself, it’s now the centre of science and tourism in the Robotnik Regime. The sand in Dusty Desert is now safe to walk on as Eggman is extracting all of the quicksand’s water, White Acropolis is now a private ski resort for Eggman’s inner circle and the old Soleanna Castle and Kingdom Valley (still in use as of the new timeline Solaris made Sonic and Elise create at the end of New Sonic) is Eggman’s personal holiday home, the canyon with the upward flowing waterfalls is his private surfing pool.

3. Angel Island may be converted into a flying fortress similar to the Black Corps’ Battle Temple in Shadow the Hedgehog. The master emerald shrine and the chaos emeralds are merely used as a reactor/engine as Eggman doesn’t need the chaos emeralds when he has the Phantom Ruby and the copy of it he made. Hidden Palace could be a backup reactor.

The reason to go here would be to recover the Chaos Emeralds for the Super Sonic final battle later on at the end, and to recruit the real Chaos against Eggman like Solaris & his split personalities would, with Tikal providing support e.g. as a medic.

4. South Island and Westside Island we do see in the game itself, (with the former being continent sized) but new areas to this could be an Adventure Field in Genocide City (Metropolis) with the location in general being renamed such, to fit in with the Sonic 2 Beta ideas. (Like Green Hill becoming a desert) Imperial Tower could be shown more clearly as the rebuilt Scrap Brain, and the original Hidden Palace Zone with a new version of its Track 10 theme could return as the place you become Super Sonic for the first time. You also can come back here to teleport to all other Adventure fields without needing to travel to them via sneaking around conventional transport and/or the Tornado 3/Cyclone i.e. a fast travel hub with its own level.

5. The GUN Fortress is all but abandoned, with Commander Tower and his grandchildren acting as human resistance members/mission control regarding its levels. The hellish electrified blue acid is still there and just as deadly as it always was. Except now Eggman’s robots are extracting it from the pools and the lake with the crashed GUN ships using insulated pipes, in order to weaponise it.

You’d even work with Shadow (after meeting him in the South Island city in the final game) to commandeer the old Diablon mech to use in a boss fight against fake Shadow and fake Chaos, the latter of whom absorbs some of the electric acid similar to how the real chaos possessed the Mystic Ruin’s mill pond.

6. All World Adventure areas have been taken over and Eggmanland is rebuilt:

-Neo Atlantis AKA Santorini/Apotos is now a holiday destination for good, law abiding citizens, especially those who chose to become SHODAN esque cyborgs working for Eggman, like the Combine Overwatch.

-Siena/Spagonia is now a vast data centre for Eggman’s robots and his research, with the former rooftop run now being re-purposed as the Italy branch of Eggman’s training courses for human and morph cyborgs.

-The plains of Kenya/Mazuri is now home to concentration camps for Eggman’s human enemies. The morphs are segregated and put on the Death Egg simply because they cause him more trouble than his fellow humans ever could. This is very much based on Nazi Germany camps of the same kind-incinerators and all- combined with Nova Prospect from Half Life 2. Some of Eggman’s prisoners too valuable to kill instead get forcefully made into what I call “Stalker cyborgs”, looking and behaving like this:

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1415799605

-Alaska/Holoska contains weather control facilities, which Eggman tells his citizens is to prevent climate change from the damage he does to the environment, but really it’s to plague resisting countries or islands with harsh weather conditions including snowfall, lightning storms, or even fire whirls like that one form Iblis can take. Think Thunder Tower in Mother 3. He also uses it to make sure places like Chemical Plant are inhospitable to intruders, deterring attacks, not that that helps any when we go to Chemical Plant.

-China/Chun-nan is where his major robotics factories are kept. Human and morph workers who refuse to become cyborgs, as well as any slaves he gets from prisoners not sent to his death camps are forced into data entry and admin roles where their “offices” are work stations/desks suspended in the middle of, and high above a deep chasm, with no safety harnesses nor ways to reach their chairs other than getting a lift from robot supervisors. The Great Wall of China (does it appear in Dragon Road?) is reinforced, transformed into a mobile Smart barrier fort (to recover resources needed for the factories and to demolish resistance outposts hidden in the countryside) and construction is continued around the whole country except the sea, which is heavily fortified with his rebuilt robot pirate crew from Rush 2 anyway.

-Jordan/Shamar contains an air exchange building. This was intended to remove the air from the atmosphere and replace it with pure oxygen. As in, 100% oxygen, no other gases. The carbon dioxide picked up from people breathing is redistributed to Earth’s remaining plant life to aid in the creation of more oxygen. Since oxygen on its own in high doses is actually toxic, anyone who does not want to become cybernetically enhanced to the Doctor’s specifications will be poisoned by sweet, fresh O2, as the cyborgs are built to be able to breathe pure oxygen. The sun toss plan is just to exterminate the current resistance. The other gasses needed in air are also re-purposed for use by the weather control only and sent back to the air exchange when they aren’t in use.

-New York/Empire City is flattened into a radioactive wasteland, inhabited only by robots and radiation resistant cyborgs, including Stalker tanks. Construction in the area is intended to restore the city into the American branch of Eggmanland. The level that takes place here is called “Big Apple Strudel”.

-Angkor Wat,Cambodia/Adabat is now a testing ground for Eggman’s biological weapons and new phantom ruby illusions. Such weapons include recreations of the Gene Bomb nukes that created the anthropomorphs like Sonic in the first place. Warped and twisted mutants stalk the forests and the water is flooded with toxic waste. Chimeras of morphs, humans and even the vegetation can also be found, including native ant anthropomorphs infected with a genetically modified cordyceps.

-Eggmanland is back! Bigger, better and more dangerous than before, including fan favourites of the former Egg Planet Park, Drummer Hell bouncy castle made out of multiple barrels of Doom from Carnival Night, and the Circus Park big top is now in town once again, as the Meat Circus Haunted Carnival ride, which Eggman describes as being inspired by both Psychonauts and all of the arcade CarnEvil.

7. The Space Colony ARK is reopened to the public as a tourist attraction; a memorial museum dedicated to the life of Gerald Robotnik and all his accomplishments, not the least of which being the work on Project Shadow, intended to safe the life of Ivo’s own cousin. The bodies of both the late Robotniks were recovered and are now kept in a mausoleum in Professor Robotnik’s former lab inside sterilised glass coffins adorned with flowers. The Sonics and the Avatar can take audio tours of the ARK in the adventure field, which includes all the gory details surrounding his original good intentions for the Eclipse Cannon, how Shadow even existed, the ARK massacre, Gerald’s insanity over Maria’s death, his own execution and ending with a video recording of Eggman executing the very people responsible for Gerald and Maria’s deaths, as seen first hand in Station Square.

The new levels here include remakes of Space Gadget and a rebuilt, no longer collapsing Cosmic Fall area. Both designed as training courses for the ARK security team. The artificial chaos have all been reprogrammed as part of that team, and Cannon’s Core appears as a special exhibit, detailing how the cannon works and what would have happened if the now fully dismantled Crash Program went ahead.

8. All major ocean stages, above and below are either in a lot shallower water, or gone completely, with the skeletons of sea life and wrecked ships littering the resulting wasteland. Transport trains between major Eggman Empire cities including Adventure fields run through here on elevated Mag-Lev tracks, with refuelling/maintenance depots along the way. Terrain from any stages taking place under the sea can still be found in the levels taking place here, but it’s all high and dry; desert mountains the only changes in the cracked, sandy plains and mazes that make up the former ocean floors. with volcanic areas being covered in black dirt.

[Ikagura]

Автор сообщения: El

This is a garbage fire of a self-insert furry fanfic. It's like this was made to pander to the lunatics who infest the likes of DeviantArt.

I agree.


Also the best story is probably Sonic CD's

[Ikagura]

Also: you're forgetting that we have an cartoony hedgehog that destroys robot & stoping an mad scientist from taking over the world. How would you want a serious story out of it?

[NBOX21]

Автор сообщения: Ikagura

Also: you're forgetting that we have an cartoony hedgehog that destroys robot & stoping an mad scientist from taking over the world. How would you want a serious story out of it?

I already did. It's called Sonic Adventure 2.

[Dark Redshift]

Автор сообщения: NBOX21

Автор сообщения: Ikagura

Also: you're forgetting that we have an cartoony hedgehog that destroys robot & stoping an mad scientist from taking over the world. How would you want a serious story out of it?

I already did. It's called Sonic Adventure 2.

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