Well this is Sonic's 15th anniversary game... so I guess I'll give a quick walkthrough of my support with the series before getting down to main drill. It all started in 1999 with the Sega Dreamcast... I remember getting one on Christmas Day. Soul Cailbur and a Sonic Adventure demo. I didn't play Sonic Adventure and only played Soul Cailbur. However, my cousin came over with a copy of Sonic Adventure and played it. I didn't play but I heard the Emerald Coast music and liked it. Then in 2000, I played it... and that started my interest in Sonic. I then got Sonic's 10th anniversary game: Sonic Adventure 2 (it broke but then got the gamecube version). I started off bad with Sonic but of time flew by I started to improve and started rocking at Sonic. I bought a lot of other Sonic games afterwards and I loved Sonic for a long, long time. I heard about a Next Gen title and awaited it. I played it... I loved it... but however... it was disappointing at the same time. Storyline- In the city of water, Soleanna, lives a beautiful (meh, don't think she is but whatever) princess named Elise the Third who is only 17 years old. She lost her father several years ago at the tender of age 7. However, one day at the Sun Festival, Dr. Robotnik aka EGGMAN attacks the city, seeking the Flames of Disaster. Suddenly, Sonic the Hedgehog aka the Blue Blur (or Blue Wind) zips in and saves the day. However, he loses Elise again. Along his quest to save the world, he starts a disturbing relationship between and encounters familiar faces like his buddies Knuckles, Tails, Amy, Rouge, Omega, Shadow, and more. Not only this, he encounters a mysterious white hedgehog known as Silver who hails from the future and has came to the past to eliminate Sonic from existence as he believes Sonic is the Iblis Trigger due to Mephiles. As Sonic continues his quest, he must save Elise and stop Robotnik, avoid Silver's ambushes, and get his butt saved by Shadow who is on a mission to find Mephiles. 3 hedgehogs... one game. hack40/LightSpeedBlast's input- I thought Shadow and SIlver's storylines were great. Sonic's however was just poor. I don't like the whole princess thing. It starts getting freakier and freakier as you play the game. Even if it wasn't a human, it still would have been lame as I'm not a fan of romance. I hate romance to be honest. In my opinion, Sonic's storyline should have been him stopping Dr. Robotnik from unleashing the Flames of Disaster. NO PRINCESS TO SAVE. The Solaris Project's backstory should have been an accident but it was sealed in some device and Robotnik wants to steal it and awaken Iblis. Mephiles wants to kill Sonic because in order to merge with Iblis and become Solaris, he must sacrifice someone. The Sun Festival should have just been random people lighting the damn thing with no princess. That's just my opinion, agree or disagree. Aside from the plotline, the presentation is good I guess. Despite no intro, I thought it was good. The menu options work fine(I wish there was an option to switch to the Japanese option but aside from that... WOOT!I^_^). I liked the opening cutscene. Despite Elise's presence, the graphics and music in it rocked. The voice acting was great in that cutscene (later on in the game, the people start sucking more but a few stay good). Guess that's it for the presentation... Before I go to the gameplay, reply value, or sound... I'm going to go talk about the graphics. Now, the character models look very, very nice. Very Nice Gen and greatly nice. The environments... well they look good indeed but at times... they look so un-next gen. I've seen other 360 titles and they looked way better in terms of environements. The environments do look great most of time though. However, prior to the game's release... I saw that people were way too amazed with the graphics. Graphics aren't everything, so deal with it. Anyway, in conclusion the game looked cooler back then (before the game was released). Okay, now the gameplay: For 15 years... Sonic's has been amazingly fast in most of his games. Sonic carries his speed to this game. However, he could at least be faster. His running speed without dash panels isn't as fast as expected. Sonic Adventure/DX's speed was incredible even without dash panels. When dash panels are touched, Sonic blasts off in a burst of speed. This doesn't always happen. Sometimes when taking dash panels, you don't always go fast. There isn't even the Speed Up/Super Shoes effect you can find (it only appears in multiplayer). The Spin Dash is quite fast but isn't compared to how it worked in Sonic's previous titles. Luckily, there are gems where you can perform special actions. The Blue Gem offers a nice amount of speed which rocks. However, there are glitches that effect your speed. Like in Wave Ocean, after you go through the first loop you'll be sliding in water and there will be a loop with a dash panel. However, when you touch it, you usually go through it and fall off to your doom! A freaking glitch (However, sometimes it works but you do not go fast. Now THAT was also a glitch. I have gotten the loop to work at times and Sonic would go much faster). Speaking of glitches, this game is full of them. Especially in Sonic Stages. However I find them easy to avoid when you know about the glitches you've activated and how they can activated. Sonic's signature attack in this game is the infamous "Homing Attack". With this, you can bop enemies in the air by pressing A twice. You can also destroy multiple enemies with this without even landing as usual in fully 3D Sonic games. Adding to the homing attack, Sonic can bop enemies with Sonic's kick, a slide kick, Sonic's well known Spin Dash (however, though it is fun to use... it was way better in the 2D games and Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. Those are the games where it was perfectly executed), and when unlocked: The Homing Smash Attack with power of the White Gem (and though I fail to see the difference in power, I like it because Sonic's makes a new, cool pose when you hit with it a second time!). They all work nice. It's innovative to bop enemies with it. However, due to camera faults... it may be hard to aim. You can even homing attack to your doom. And sometimes, when homing attacking something, it doesn't work. GLITCH!!!! One of favorite parts when playing as Sonic is his Mach Speed/Super Speed section. In certain levels, you can enter this. The speed is just awesome. When I first looked at this game in 2005, Gamespot said this would have exciting speed changes. Now THIS is a great speed change. However, it sucks that you can't control where you land after jumping. You jump to your death and it sucks. Wave Ocean's Mach Speed is pretty easy if you ask me. Crisis City's... well not hard... it can be hard though to dodge all those damn flying cars. That made it kinda hard to S-Rank (I've already S-Ranked it though). Radical Train's is easy too. Kingdom Valley's is pretty easy if you know where to go. THEY ARE ALL AWESOME. Adding to this, you can switch to "Amigos" at times (Ex. Tails, Knuckles). Most of the Amigos have a unique style of gameplay. However, not all of them are fun. I find only 3 to be fun: Tails, Blaze, and Omega. I thought Tails was fun because though he is slow... I had fun flying and throwing dummy ring bombs at enemies. He was even funner to use in Team Attack Amigo. I thought Blaze was fun because she had the speed and awesomeness of playing as Sonic and Shadow. I thought Omega was fun because I had fun destroying enemies with his lasers and weapons. The others are mediocre or even bad. Knuckles' punches aren't even useful. He can't run fast and there is even a climbing glitch where, when you climb to walls, you can't get out unless you mash the A button. This glitch is also present when playing as Rouge who plays like a combination of Tails and Knuckles in this. That isn't bad but... her bombs aren't so fun to use while Tails' are actually fun. She also carries the problems of Knuckles. Amy is the worst out of all of them. She is the slowest and her Piko Piko Hammer is useless. It's hard to attack with her slow speed and it doesn't even have rapid fire. Not only this, but it takes Amy time to recover from executing this attack. Amy sucks in this game, seriously. Now, the other solo playable characters are Shadow and Silver. Shadow plays a lot like Sonic except he is slower (which sucks as Sonic and Shadow are supposed to be equal in terms of speed), is more combat-based, and can jump unto vehicles like in Shadow the Hedgehog. Attacking enemies is very fun and the combat system is very nice. He can do a Chaos Spear attack that paralyzes enemies and a enhanced kick attack where you can do a tornado by kicking 3 times. Also, he has 3 levels of Chaos Boost. The first level is an even more enhanced Homing Attack. It's called Chaos Snap where you can teleport to enemies and beat them up. I think it can be executed by holding A after hitting a Homing Attack. Level 2 is an enhanced Chaos Spear that not only paralyzes the enemy, it actually damages it. Level 3 is Chaos Blast. However, Chaos Blast sadly sucks in this game. Why? The range is freakin' short. Shadow the Hedgehog had bigger range. In my opinion, Chaos Blast is freaking useless. Shadow is fun to use but they could at least speed him up. Silver the Hedgehog is the new kid in the streets and he has psychic powers. It can be executed with the RT (Right Trigger). I thought those were pretty cool and he can also do a melee attack to paralyze enemies. I thought that was okay. Silver may be slow but this was intended. So I explained the characters. Anyway, the gameplay is great and is even better in Very Hard Mode and the rest of the Xbox Live Downloads. Now the Sound- The effects are good but it is pretty easy. The voice acting is bad as it is 4kids. Some are good such as Blaze, Dr. Robotnik, Shadow the Hedgehog (he sounds way too EMO, depressed, and monotone. Too mellow), Silver, Amy, and Mephiles (awesome laugh). Tails sounds feminine. Knuckles sounds decent. Sonic's voice sucks (he sounded good in his opening cutscene though). Rouge is still a hooker. Omega sounds horrible. Elise is voiced by Lacey Chabert (who is hot) and I thought she sounded decent in this one. I liked the music despite some crappy tracks. His World was good, All Hail Shadow remix sucked, Dreams of an Absolution was good, Elise's theme song sucked (it could have been good if it weren't about a romantic disturbing relationship between a hedgehog and a human), and the Sweet Dreams Akon Mix was good. That's it for the sound. I thought the reply value was good and even better with Very Hard Mode and the rest of the downloads. CLOSING COMMENTS- This game may have been good... but the problem is... it was rushed. I thought this game would give me the feeling I had with Sonic Adventure... it didn't. Sega, don't rush games. If it wasn't complete in time... DELAY IT. A patch,a freaking director's cut! Looking at the hacks... this game would have been way better. So it may be good... do not believe the hype. Great game... but please SEGA, DON'T RUSH YOUR GAMES!! (make a patch or a freaking director's cut)
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