They want you to be super invested in the story but it's swiss cheese bullshit where the most interesting thing is why they never address the fact a time traveler character is just there for the entire duration of the game without any explanation of where they came from or if they're going back to their own timeThat
That's not even the worst part, at least they kind of explain it in the prequel comic. The worst thing is that time traveler is a telekinetic that's his thing, like shadow's thing is time space fuckery, that's silver's thing. And he is fighting a guy , who could be easily be surprised and beaten by this power he instead flies at him like a dumb ass untill he gets knocked down and sonic saves him.
And that just sort of speaks to every narrative problem, and where your swiss cheese analogy hits home. I know sonic games don't got best narratives, right. But this is something else, things just happen. Nothing is explained, nothing. They have this entire cast of characters, from eggman to sonic to charmy the friggin be effectively do nothing and really get nothing done, to push infinite a character in retrospect no one seems to like much and doesn't do anything himself. Its a game where nothing happens entirely in service of trying to get a character over, who does nothing. Things just happen. And i'm a fan of dumb silly stories with flimsily explained stuff if its enganging, this is children's media it doesn't need rock solid lore, but it fails even a basic level of telling a story.
For some people gameplay is king , and that's the worst part. Understandable. But for me , narratively this game's failure kind of facinating. Because every element of its narrative could be used to tell a much better story , but its just not.
Like even with some weird things about it, there was recent precedent it could follow to success, but it still managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
On a narrative level its wild.
Like ok, let me break out my writer bag real quick.
You got infinite , this character who can create illusions. They just have him just...shoot lazers at people and fly. Instead of I dunno and here me out here, use those illusions to sow distrust among the characters. They stop being friends and when isolated that's when eggman takes advantage and enacts world domination. You create your character, and your character loves these old heroes and are trying to investigate why these old characters are gone, in that investigation you find silver a guy who's looking for his friends but they can't be found and who can are acting strange. Your character explains to him what's up and you get your first " partner" character. And essentially the game is you going through levels and going through the story uncovering the mystery of what happened to break these friends groups up to destroy this aliance and uncovering it was masterminded by eggman's new mysterious lackey. ( and it would problably be more focused around the " buddy" character and there would be multiple types of partner characters with team up abilities to really push home the friendship is cool angle) You eventually get the bands back together, team up and beat eggman saving the day.
That sounds like a much better scenario. Now obviously making a game is easier said than done, but its baffling that the game does nothing with in its own narrative to use its parts effectively or to reinforce any of its ideas as rudimentary as they may be.
Like there are so many things done in this game to get cheap pops but the pops don't work. Like " villain " trailer instead of that , the first trailer instead of classic sonic its every single sonic character running to fight eggman. And then the next trailer is like " Months later " or " a year later" and then its some unknown wolf kid running down instead of the villians, its all the sonic characters in these like dystopian ass gangs, fighting. That's mystery everyone would be confused, there would be a thing to buy your game and find out out about. Instead of a cheap plot twist everyone figured out from trailer 1
But instead of that or any other thing i'm sure any of you could come up with . Its just a really really poor attempt at doing a sonic adventure kind of thing with infinite. And its just bad, they clearly don't know why shadow works, and even with in this missed opportunity there was another missed oppertunity which is infinite when his whole story is layed out runs parrallel to shadow considering the connection they made dlc to create and point out , the entire story is just him having nothing to do with any of that and doing nothing. So they made this character a shadow derivative. Who runs opposite in terms of morals and goals as an established character, where the narrative would work best showing you how opposite these characters are. And not only is this is not executed, it is not even noticed by the staff making the game. If you wanted to capture a specific kind of nostalgia THAT'S HOW YOU DO THAT. Instead of " hey look chaos is here, you all like chaos right " . Half the conversation around that trailer was people being upset why this litteral angry spirit who had found peace was once again around , but bad. It didn't even get the pop they wanted, how did they not know , do they know anything about why people ANYTHING.
I just... I just can't with this game.
" Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" is right.
Everything in this game is bad version of a thing that already exist or potentially a bad version of a thing that could exist. I just... I just don't
