yknow playing sonic robo blast 2 has made me realize. when people complain about the different gameplay styles in sonic it has little to do with the moveset itself. it’s much more to do with the overall game design goals—namely, level deisgn and objectives—are completely different from the actual core appeal of the game that sonic’s stages focus on.
sonic’s stages are often the only ones focused on the actual speed part, which is, y’know, the thing people usually want from sonic games. which is why people take so much umbrage with stuff like being forced to play a slow fishing minigame or trudge through excruciatingly tedious and long god of war levels or massive emerald hunting levels that they’ve been playing for the past 30 minutes and i really just want to get the last fucking key and get out of this stupid cramped pyramid chamber so i can get back to playing the fast-paced platformer i bought. do you see the problem? yes, the movesets don’t help, it’s really not fun to have to maneuver a slow, floaty chicken walker mech over endless bottomless pits, but the gameplay styles overall are trying to create a fundamentally different experience. a break from the speed, instead of a fresh way to express it.
this is one reason people hold up knuckles’ and rouge’s sections of cannon’s core in SA2 as being some of the highlights for them in the game—they’re focused on getting from point A to point B, and they’re pretty easy and fun to flow through (provided you knew to pick up the air necklace earlier), instead of fucking around and looking for items with frustratingly jank treasure hunting mechanics1 for half an hour. actually, there’s also the hard mode versions of their levels, which always have set emerald locations that you can just beeline to, come to think of it, which the people who’ve managed to unlock them seem to think are better than the base levels. (…not that i’m one of them, but that’s neither here nor there)
in sonic robo blast 2, there’s a LOT of different custom characters2, with exactly the kind of variety you’d expect. there’s just as much variation in the level design, because the vast majority of levels are community made, but even in the vanilla levels, with the same level design, just using the different custom characters is like night and day. generally they’re all going for the same core experience of SRB2—that is to say, high-speed momentum-based platforming with precise control and a high skill ceiling—but they all achieve it in different forms through vastly different character mechanics. for instance, vanilla sonic can’t spindash while moving, but has a powerful (if unwieldy) airdash for acceleration called a thok. whereas adventure sonic’s homing thok is always at a set speed, but he can constantly spam spindashes while on the ground for huge amounts of ground speed, and he has a stomp attack for vertical control. meanwhile, deltachars’ kris doesn’t even have a spindash, but they instead primarily gain speed through slide-jumping, which feels totally different but just as fast, and makes you think a lot more about stuff like how you’ll jump, where you’ll land, how to air-control to get where you need to be for the next jump, etc3. this kind of thing is apparently also something pizza tower does really well with peppino and the noise, but i haven’t gotten to play that game yet4 so i can’t speak on how that works.
but the point is, the problem here isn’t different character movesets. you just need to design them to have similar gameplay objectives, but have a completely new and fresh means of achieving them.
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i still stand by my position that emerald hunting gameplay can be fun if it was just designed properly
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i mostly speak for custom characters because i haven’t messed with the vanilla characters much except for sonic and running around an OLDC hub world with metal
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i think high-level thok use can make you consider similar things, since as far as i can tell the thok has a minimum distance, but the way it does it is completely different. which proves my point more!
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buy me pizza tower and i will love you forever