Strap yourselves in, folks, this is gonna be a long one. I have numerous thoughts about Sonic Forces. The latest "modern Sonic" game from Sega to use the "Boost formula", Sonic Forces saw a multiplatform release on November 7, 2017. It features three playable characters: Modern Sonic, Classic Sonic, and a new character called the Avatar, as they work together to stop the evil Dr. Robotnik (fuck you, that's his name) who has already taken over the world, with help from the mysterious Infinite.
Ask a diehard Sonic fan and they might be hard-pressed to find anything good about this game. More likely, they'll probably say "Nothing about this is good, Vector. That's why it's called war." And then laugh at themselves for their oh-so-creative sense of humor, repeating memetic lines from the game. But the game is a good game, just not a great one. It's a step down from Generations and in that respect a bit of a disappointment, but it's not terrible. It's definitely not going to take Sonic soaring to new heights either. Still, I would much rather play Sonic Forces than play a long list of Sonic games. Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Heroes, Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Adventure 2 (yeah I went there)... The real problems with the game break down as follows.
The Levels Are Too Fucking Short
The average Modern Sonic or Avatar level is about as long as Metal Harbor from Sonic Adventure 2. That was a... really short level, in a game that had too little Sonic-gameplay content as it was. But while that was just one level, the entire game is like this in the case of Sonic Forces. Classic Sonic levels are, maybe, about the size of an act from Sonic 1. The thing is, we're used to bigger stages than this. In Sonic Forces, you reach a point where you're finding a groove through a level and having a good time, and then whoops! It's over. The game makes up for it somewhat by packing in a lot of stages (30 to be precise), but I'd rather have 12 memorable stages than 30 forgettable ones.
The Level Assets R Bored ._.
One of the really remarkable things about early Sonic games is what vaporwave kids call A E S T H E T I C S. Early Sonic was aesthetic as FUCK, borrowing cues from the trends in the late 1980s and very early 1990s in graphic design, and especially, old-school CG. If you've ever seen the old Mind's Eye videos and things of that nature, you know exactly where those polygonal palm trees and Escher-esque birds and fish come from. This sort of eye for detail made the early games absolutely beautiful to look at, with the levels boasting streamlined curves and maze-like layouts, bursting with color and exhibiting harmonious balance that was pleasing to the eye. Even the backgrounds were gorgeous -- who could forget Green Hill's shimmering seaside, with mountainous islands and white puffy clouds in the background, or the steel industrial towers rising into the sky in Oil Ocean from Sonic 2, with a heat wave effect around the searing sun above?
What do we get in Sonic Forces? A bunch of boring, rectilinear bullshit, that's what. In fact, the Green Hill stages (way to come up with new locations, guys) just have different-sized checkerboard boxes in the background. Sure, there are some ramps and slopes in the level itself, but they're either straight or just use the same few curves over and over. It's not quite Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric bad, but it's not very good. Also, the same gimmicks are used over and over, level after level, and most of them were taken from Sonic Colors, the first game to feature all-Boost gameplay. Jesus Christ, there's a level called Chemical Plant but it doesn't use the Chemical Plant assets aside from some of the glass tube ramps carrying blue liquid. The elevators, in particular, are samey rectangles instead of the unique Chemical Plant lifts. It's not quite as bad as the bland, depressing, rushed aesthetics of, say, Shadow the Hedgehog, but Sonic Mania and Sonic Generations set our standards higher, with mind-blowingly creative takes on old and new locations.
And the level layout doesn't make any sense because it's not themed to the stage. It's just the same boring shit as every other level. Take Casino Forest, for example. If you remember Casino Night Zone from Sonic 2, you will recall that the entire level was laid out like a giant pinball machine. The slopes and curves seemed to funnel Sonic into the slots when he came across them. Sonic Forces, no such luck. It's pretty much "let's use the same rectilinear corridors and rooms we use for every other level, throw in a couple of ramps -- oh shit, this is a casino level isn't it? Well, we'll throw in some bumpers and slots here and there. Done!" Oh yeah, there's the fact that you can't steer Sonic into the slots very well because you don't have the same level of precision and control. Which brings us to...
Modern Sonic controls like ass. So does the Avatar. They either don't move when I want them to move, or shoot off in a direction I didn't want to go in. Their acceleration curves on the ground are janky as fuck, and when they jump you have to wrestle with the control stick to get them to go where you want them to go. And Classic Sonic isn't much better. He feels "sticky", like he doesn't really want to move when you hit a boost pad, spin dash, or roll. To be fair, none of these are too bad. They don't make the game play like Bubsy, or Sonic '06 or anything. It's just... when old-school Sonic physics is coded into your muscle memory, it can be hard to get used to these foibles in the game's physics and tune your stick and button responses to them.
My biggest complaint is that, particularly in one late-game level, the road curves ahead of you, and with no guardrails to keep you on track, if you aren't holding right hard as you dash along this stretch of track, you will crater to your death. But then there's another stretch of track where the game dynamically adjusts your trajectory to keep you on the track as long as you hold Up, so if you take what you've learned from the previous stretch of track and try to turn Sonic into the curve, you will again fall to your death. That's probably the biggest fuck-you in the game, but it's just in that one level as far as I can tell, and overall the game has a much lower cheap-death count than Adventure 2, Heroes, or Shadow -- let alone '06. (Fuck you, '06 and fuck the fans who say it's good or it can be made good. It's broken.)
So Infinite, supposedly, is more powerful than Sonic. Shouldn't that be reflected in, you know, the boss fights against him? Instead we get two boring, relatively easy fights against him where all you have to do is dodge his straightforward attacks and mash the jump button when he's in range. Sonic games used to be known for neat boss fights. There was one at the end of each zone, and each one was based around Robotnik in his egg vehicle, but they all featured different weapons and upgrades to the vehicle, and thus different attack patterns and vulnerabilities. Later games would bring midbosses at the end of each zone's first act. This formula would be abandoned for the Sonic Adventure series, and I really wish it'd come back. But even then, Sonic Adventure 2 had a variety of interesting bosses, even if they weren't all Robotnik.
Things went really off the rails with Sonic Heroes, which had boring, samey bosses up until the last one or two, and this seems to be the pattern Sega feels comfortable in now. Which is fine, except no, it's not, it sucks actually. And it's particularly galling because this is the game where Robotnik finally takes over the world. It should be fraught with peril and danger for our heroes, and they should have to square off against terrifying robots and creations the likes of which the world has never seen before. But no, it's run down a corridor, hit the guy a few times, dodge his telegraphed attacks and fucking repeat until dead. This is even true of the final boss, which is just a ripoff of the final boss from Sonic Colors. That one was fun the first time, but come on. Even Sonic and the Secret Rings had an imaginative final boss.
Oh, another annoying thing: there are encounters which look like boss fights because they feature huge enemies that must be defeated, such as the giant snake from Luminous Forest or the giant crab thing from that one Avatar level with the giant crab thing in it. But you've been trolled because a couple of quick time events later and you fucking beat it. Jesus Christ, Sega.
So those are the bad points of this game. Here are some good points:
I like the Avatar. More than I expected to. Full background: the Avatar is a custom character created using the in-game character creation facility. The character creation tool is very basic, allowing you to pick from among seven species, two genders, and a variety of head and eye shapes and base skin and fur colors, but that's it. Then again, it's still about as wide a range as the imagination of a typical Sonic fan can muster. Completing missions allows you to unlock accessories to decorate your OC with -- but aside from the Wispon (a gun powered by colored Wisp energy which grants one attack ability and one sub-ability) these do not affect gameplay at all. In fact the only variables that do affect gameplay are species (each species grants a different, specific perk; for example birds can double-jump and cats can hold onto one ring when they get hit) and equipped Wispon.
Adding the Avatar was a brilliant marketing move by Sega. They know what's up. They knew that diehard fans would piss themselves at being able to make their fursona canon in a Sonic game; and ironic hipsters would attempt to recreate Coldsteel or Sonichu in the character editor. Sega also resisted the temptation to decide for us that what we really need is another, vastly different, playstyle from the go-fast modern Sonic style we've gotten used to by now. Accordingly, Avatar levels are Boost levels with a different moveset. You can homing-attack enemies and swing from grapple points with your grappling hook, use your Wispon to clear out groups of enemies, or collect Wisps of the appropriate color to enable an otherwise inaccessible form of locomotion -- like launching yourself into the air with the Burst Wispon or doing a light-dash along rings with the Lightning Wispon. They're not as zippy as the Boost levels, but hey, there can only be one Sonic. Some levels let you play as Sonic and the Avatar together, successfully merging the gameplay of the two characters by putting Sonic in the lead when you press the Boost button and the Avatar in the lead when you attempt to grapple or use Wispon attacks. It's quite seamless, even less clunky than Sonic Heroes, and I love it. They could make a whole game out of this style of play. There are moments when Sonic and Avatar together do a "Double Boost", plowing through enemies and sweeping up rings at hyper speed, but these sections last about ten seconds apiece, in keeping with the game's general theme of frustrating shortness.
Finally, the Avatar is perfectly integrated into the game's cutscenes, giving them a critical role in the unfolding story.
So the plot goes like this: with the power of Infinite and the Phantom Ruby (that weird rock he dug up in Sonic Mania), Dr. Robotnik has succeeded in defeating Sonic and taking over the world. A band of rebels called the Resistance -- led by Knuckles and bearing quite a few parallels with Princess Sally's Freedom Fighters from Sonic the Hedgehog (TV series), aka "SatAM" -- seeks to track Sonic down, wherever he's being held, and retake the world. In Sonic's absence, a new hero (your Avatar), a survivor from one of Infinite's assaults on the population, steps in to help the resistance.
Meanwhile, "Tails", presumably wracked with guilt after Sonic's capture, re-connects with Classic Sonic (the version of him from Mania) and the two eventually lend their help to resisting Robotnik as well.
It's a fairly basic plot. It goes back to some dark themes -- like war and torture -- that we really haven't seen in a main-series Sonic game since Shadow. But there's no self-conscious attempt to be grimdark and edgy, no characters brooding about their past, no "damn fourth Chaos Emerald", and no human-hedgehog shipping. Everything is, still, pretty lighthearted and fun. Which gets pretty weird when you're told Sonic has been "tortured for months" aboard the Death Egg, and yet all he says to his torturers are the usual lighthearted, sarcastic quips. But what the hell. He's a blue cartoon hedgehog. This idea of cartoon animals in a war-torn world reminds me of nothing so much as the North Korean propaganda cartoon, Squirrel and Hedgehog, which even Western viewers admit has a sort of bizarre charm about it -- and that's where Sonic Forces is. Although not with the anti-Western propaganda of a repressive dictatorship.
I like how each of Sonic's friends has a specific role in the resistance: Knuckles is the leader, Silver the second in command, Amy the data analyst, Shadow and Rouge are the recon agents. "Tails" has gone underground to conduct his own search for Sonic. Sonic's cast has grown quite a bit in the past few years, and it's good that they found something for all these characters to do without burdening the story with needless exposition or a surfeit of unnecessary "gameplay styles".
Another thing I like is that they managed to keep Sonic's sarcastic "attitude" without making him a jerk. Looking back on 90s Sonic media, it's noteworthy how Sonic is an asshole even to his friends, and gets away with it because he's the hero. In "SatAM" and the Archie comics, for instance, he never passes up an opportunity to make fun of Antoine. In the British "Sonic the Comic", he's constantly mocking "Tails". In this game, Sonic manages to save his jokes at others' expense for his actual enemies and is quite charitable to his friends (especially "Tails" and the Avatar). At multiple points in the game, upon hearing a report of impending defeat from Resistance fighters, he says something like "You've done more than enough already. Good work, everyone! I'll handle it from here."
That's another thing: they actually found a use for in-game quips from the main character. Rather than Bubsying it up and having him say "there's a bounce pad!" or "I love rings!" every time some game event is triggered, Sonic Forces does a fair bit of story exposition with Star Fox-like radio chatter from the main characters before and during the game's stages, as well as cutscenes. The chatter can be turned off at the player's discretion, but I don't find it too distracting, and some of Sonic's lines are genuinely funny.
If there's anything wrong with the plot, it's that sometimes they seem to raise the stakes, but don't follow through and the situation is resolved in like a minute. Sonic is thought dead in the early game, but a couple of stages later, he's alive. Worse, there's a scene where Robotnik banishes Sonic and Avatar to "Null Space". Ten seconds later, they're back out on the street.
The Boost levels are the most fun ones in the game. When you're barreling down the track at a zillion miles per hour, you don't notice the odd bit of minor physics glitch (except when it sends you clean off the track; I'm looking at you, Metropolitan Highway...). They didn't keep up the standards set by Generations, but they didn't kill all the fun in the game, especially the Boost bits, either.
But that just provokes the question: why didn't they keep up the standards set by Generations? I liked this game a fair bit, but I wanted to like it a lot more. Hell, I want to like every Sonic game as much as I like 2, 3, and & Knuckles. But this is where we are. Sonic has just gone from consistently good, to consistently bad, to just plain inconsistent. Why can't he just stay good?
The problem with Sonic is, I believe, a problem with Sega. It ties back into what I said about the franchise in the past: Sega just doesn't understand which values the Sonic brand represents, from a gameplay perspective. They use him as a media icon, but they have no vision of what the player should expect when they boot up a Sonic game. Hell, the players have a better idea than Sega does, which is why an effective fan game (Sonic Mania) got the highest praise the main series has seen in literally decades!
But here's the thing, Sonic fans: It's easy for you to say that a particular game is bad, and even -- as I've done here -- point out what's bad about it. It's much, much harder for a game developer to find and fix those bad things. Say "the physics are too glitchy", or "the jumps are too floaty" to a game dev, and you may was well say "tighten up the graphics on level 3". Take jumping for instance. There are quite a few variables that go into a game character's jump. A jump can be modelled as an impulse that sends a character's velocity upward followed by acceleration back downward due to gravity. But how big should the impulse be? How quickly should they accelerate back to earth? Do you want to have jump aftertouch (changing directions in midair)? How much aftertouch? What should happen when you jump off a slope? Should the impulse still be straight up, or should it be perpendicular to the slope? (Classic Sonic went with the latter; Sonic Rush went with the former. And now to this day I still can't take Sonic Rush seriously as a platformer in the classic vein.)
Getting games right is hard. Hell, getting slopes right is a test of mettle for any 2D game programmer. What needs to happen is the developers, once they have the basic engine put together, need to sit down and test and tweak, and test some more and tweak some more. Because that's what it takes to make a game "feel" right. And what they found out as they made these tweaks needs to be noted for future developers; it needs to become institutional knowledge.
The big difference between Nintendo and Sega is one of institutional knowledge. Quick, who do you think of when I say "Mario"? Well, Mario himself, but who in real life? Shigeru Miyamoto, right? Gaming's Walt Disney. What if I told you that Miyamoto, who had been producer or director on most Mario titles to date, only had a light touch on Super Mario Odyssey? And Super Mario Odyssey is the best damn Mario game to date! That's because the info on what makes a Mario game good and how to make a good Mario game has become institutional knowledge at Nintendo, passed from employee to employee and generation to generation. It is the ultimate mark of success of any genius that they eventually make themself obsolete, so that their successors can benefit from their knowledge without them when they die, retire, or quit. And Shigsy is coming up on retirement age...
Sega, er, didn't bother preserving that institutional knowledge from the first few Sonic games. And today, the end result is like they forgot it. It's like retrograde amnesia. While playing through Sonic Forces, I was reminded of nothing so much as early, 1980s Sega platformers, like Alex Kidd and the Wonder Boy series. In fact I have the modern remake of Wonder Boy III on my Switch, and the janky movement and floaty jumps from Forces all feel specifically familiar to what I remember from that game. But back in the 80s, you could sort of give them the benefit of the doubt. Nintendo basically invented the modern video-game-character jump with Super Mario Bros., and they weren't exactly forthcoming with that information back then because it was a competitive advantage for them, so other game houses had to either figure out on their own what made the Mario jumps so satisfying to use (Capcom), or else do without them and use a lesser mechanic (Konami, Sega).
But here's the thing: when Sega set about creating a better Mario in the early 90s, they succeeded. Sonic was everything Mario was at the time, and more. But in the early 90s, Sonic Team wasn't really a thing. It was just whoever had worked on Sonic 1. There wasn't a Miyamoto at the helm to set the standards and guide the trajectory for the series as a whole. Yuji Naka doesn't count, and neither does Naoto Ohshima. Later games would be passed from team to team, and while the basic engine remained the same, high-level knowledge of what went into that engine may have been lost along the way -- I'd say the best candidate for such a loss was the "Sonic Winter" of the late 90s, when Sega would go a whole console generation without developing a current-gen, native main-series Sonic title. (Sonic 3D Blast was a Genesis port, and the only other games in the franchise for the Saturn were Sonic R and Sonic Jam.) It was a time of tremendous upheaval for Sega, as they had to recover from the setbacks they suffered from the botched Sega CD and 32X launches, and the failure of the Saturn against the PlayStation and N64. This was also the time when Sonic fandom began to coalesce, and to be frank, the fandom which eventually formed couldn't give two shits about gameplay. So by the time the Adventure series appeared on the Dreamcast, already you could see a break in continuity of vision for where the series was going from a gameplay perspective. Bereft of the franchise's moorings, Sonic Team endlessly tried new things, wanted you to try new things, wanted you to like their experiments. But ultimately what they were trying to do was catch lightning in a bottle, and they failed at it. That's why I call the series "tryhard".
If I were the head of Sonic Team, I would instruct my subordinates to do what the fans already did: go back to the original Genesis games. If I can't find the original source code, I'd have them disassemble and reverse-engineer the ROMs. (That is what the fans did!) Part of the problem with updating OG Sonic physics for today may be that the original games were 2D and pixel-accurate, and largely used integer math to calculate the game state, whereas a modern 3D world would be built from floating-point coordinates in 3D space. Nevertheless, I would try to map the integer constants of Sonic's 2D world into 3D space, fit acceleration curves to what's observable from the 2D games, etc. I would have a model of Green Hill Zone Act 1, or a part of it, built in the 3D engine, and if Sonic does not control exactly as he does in the original Sonic 1, I would order more refinements to be made. This can be checked both through play-testing and by running side-by-side versions of original Sonic 1 and the modern engine, sending them synthetic button events, and seeing whether they match up. Once they do match up, only then would I add modern features like the boost, homing attack, etc.
I would have the programmers take careful notes on the refinements they made, and instruct them to put these notes into a company- or team-wide wiki. I would have them bring in their sons, daughters, or little siblings to play-test it. I would reach out to Sonic fans and select candidates for a limited beta test from among their number.
It's going to take effort and commitment for Sega to rescue Sonic from the scrappy heap. What Sonic Forces showed me is that Sega is not ready to make that commitment. It may be time for them to cut Sonic loose, to sell him to Nintendo or WayForward or somebody. I don't think they'll do that, though, because Sonic is the thing that's keeping their name in the limelight.
