Man, I just can't agree.
I had a great time with Lost World. It's definitely flawed but the good stages are quite good. I wasn't a fan of some of the gimmicky sections but what was wrong with the majority of stages in your eyes?
Secret Rings was very much a decent game for the time. It's not great but it's not bad. Black Knight, well, I can agree there.
I also think the Werehog stages are actually quite decent...but then again, I also kinda like Knack and Werehog is basically what Knack became.
Lost world day stages start strong but become real messes the further the game goes on because Sonic Team, at the time, didn't really know how to amp up the difficulty without basically creating a lot of traps that you have to know about before hand to avoid. When Mania came out, everyone who plays a sonic game like a mario game and is super obsessive about seeing every little bit of the game in a single pass through constantly complained about things like bottomless pits or spikes, things that hinder your progress but don't end your game. Unleash's day stages in the back half of hte game hinge on game failure states that you simply have to crash against over and over, the game seeking absolute perfection. It's a revised take on the issue of the speed rush stages from Sonic 06, laying the idea of the uncompromised speed at the player's feet in lew of good stage design. Colors fixes this, and Generations expands upon the greater level design for the new modern sonic sections for each zone.
But the werehog stuff literally ignores every character action game produced in the past 20 years in order to make something sloppy, repetitive, clunky and confusing. There is not a single good piece of game design in the night stages, not one. The camera is bad, the platforming is bad, the combat is bad, the traversal is bad, the enemy design and behavior is bad, the voice over is EXTREMELY bad. Not every game has to be Devil may Cry or Bayonetta, but if you're going to make a 3rd person combat game, you have to get that shit together.
Even if you like the day stages a lot, none of them are worth slogging through the terrible night stages. That game is irredeemable and I'm shocked, LITERALLY SHOCKED, that anyone would come to its defense.
Secret Rings is....uninspired, let's say, but at least it's not painful to play. Black Knight...just no.
And I think that's sort of the real issue here. People are getting on me with the fact that the two sonic games after generations weren't sonic team proper. Duh, that's not the point, the point is after coming off two games that were generally liked (I know plenty of people who don't like colors or generations, those games are not nearly as beloved as you think they are) Sega of Japan decided to abandon that direction which was working in order to waste time chasing mario again with Lost World, and then to just sell out to mass marketing appeal with Boom. It's the constant shifting of direction that fails this franchise. They don't stick with what works.
Sonic Mania was a success because it went back to a time where people knew Sonic WORKED, not that it was good or bad, but that it was functional. I have seen nothing in Forces that tells me that it's going back to a formula that works; if anything, everything that I've seen seems to be tailored around a lot of customization efforts that are taking away from what made Colors and Generations special. I can't help but look at the footage from the custom character examples and think that the game is being tailored around THAT, and the sonic gameplay is going to take a pretty hard back seat.
Forces feels like a game someone else was making that, one day, was decided to be turned into a sonic game. Time will tell, we'll know in a month, but I don't look at forces and say, "wow, yes, going back to what made this series great," I see a whole bunch of quick nostalgia cash-ins while trying to directly cater to what the sonic fandom evolved into after 2.5/11 good sonic games over the course of the past 15 years, which is people trying desperately to put their own personal spin on the sonic formula in order to save it from itself. And I don't think that's going to work.
As of right now, if you ask me, the sonic franchise doesn't have a future unless Taxman is at the helm. If that doesn't happen, then sonic may as well just become a Mario side character as he'll be in better hands. Like, real talk, the fact that the general prediction for this game from the gaming collective is more dumb bullshit akin to 06 or a gleeful wonderful tragedy like the Sonic Mania announce stream should be telling. I don't have faith in sega to make this work, and neither does the grand majority of people because their track record with sonic is just plain bad, and it's harder and harder to look back to Generations or Colors or half of unleashed with hopeful eyes when they are just as willing to go down a road that makes them literal laughing stocks.
Sega has been fucking up. FUCKING UP!
