Sonic and Combat Systems: Can It Work, and Who Did It Best?

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Following Frontiers' release, the series has taken back a new stance of trying to integrate combat with enemies within the main gameplay loop again, and with the release of Final Horizons, which I feel does enough different in Frontiers' combat that it substantially changes it + how you can look at it that I think it could be worth warrant a discussion about all of the tries to use combat systems within Sonic games, and which game did it best, how it's been handled, and if they should even continue to handle it.

To go back way to the very start, I think it's relatively fair to say that the first signs of combat mechanics in the game could be traced back as far back as Sonic Heroes back in 2003, and for most, it probably became clear how different this would be when we got to the first boss, Egg-Hawk. 

For most people, this is the very first time experiencing a boss that's got a large health bar - 99 hits to be exact - and for most of Heroes' run-time, despite the fact there's no dedicated combat systems in the game, you can argue this is where you could find some of the traits that would later appear with dedicated combat systems. Between enemy health bars that incentivise switching to a certain character type to deal out more consistent damage (flying enemies with Thundershoot, shielded enemies with Speed Tornado, etc), along with enemy gauntlets acting as bosses, and in certain rooms.

This could really be seen as the first real attempt to combine regular Sonic gameplay with aspects of combat. Aspects that would later come back in Shadow with the health bars and such, and the gunplay. 

Most people would generally agree though that the first major attempt at adding combat into the series was the Werehog in Sonic Unleashed, where inspired by an era that was absolutely overflowing with hack and slash titles that was riding off the success of God of War in the late 00s. I don't think I really need to say that at the time, and even up to now, the Werehog is pretty contentious among the fanbase. Some like the combat of the Werehog, some absolutely despise it and hate Unleashed for it, some tolerate it for the other aspects Unleashed has to offer.

For me personally, I would say Unleashed's biggest problem in terms of combat is all style, but not much substance. There's a lot of flashy animations and combos when it comes to the Werehog's capabilities, but to me, it doesn't really feel like many of those attacks hold much weight, or impact within them. Most enemies are spongy and take a lot of damage, meaning it's usually easier to resort to the most basic heavy attacks to dispatch enemies, rather than taking the flashy combo attacks that the Werehog has in abundance. 

Following that however, and the contentious nature of the Werehog at the time, it didn't take long for the combat aspect to be scrapped, and both Colours and Generations would opt to focus in on the daytime stages. 

However, it would be with the Boom Initiative that another crack at adding combat systems to the franchise would be made. Which makes sense, considering in this game, they disregarded all of the speed elements with Sonic altogether in order to just make a pretty bog-standard platformer that had little to no ties to the franchise's identity.

This image from Rise of Lyric's trailer is probably the first sign of just how different the game was going to be from typical Sonic affair (for the worse). Team Sonic surrounded by enemies, while they hold battle stances, making it evidently clear that combat would play a major part in this game. Especially when the announcement trailer showed very brief snippets of Sonic and Amy teaming up to take on mooks in-gameplay.

Now, I think most know that it's impossible to tell really how this was originally going to pan out. The original announcement trailer was made for totally different technology, and Big Red Button basically had to crunch in order to get the game ported and downscaled massively to work on a Wii U, on a incompatible engine. For that, perhaps the combat, like everything else about RoL was planned to be more involved and deep, and it getting cut down to size was a unfortunate result of the awful situation SEGA lobbed the team into when making a exclusivity deal with Nintendo.

Either way, it doesn't change the fact that most would agree that the second (or third, if you count Heroes/Shadow) attempt at combat didn't pan out particularly well. Like most aspects of Rise of Lyric, it was about as deep as a shallow puddle of water, and was one of the things they mostly fell back on for the main gameplay loop. While you could at least argue that there's a bit more impact to attacks compared to Unleashed, because enemies usually aren't as spongy as Unleashed, there's no combos, no additional moves, and not much if any evolution to the battles in Rise of Lyric, leaving it ultimately half-baked, much like most, if not all aspects of the game.

Finally, we get to the last, and most recent attempt at integrating combat systems into the series, and arguably the one that is most divided in terms of like/dislike. Of course, it's Sonic Frontiers' battle systems.

On the surface, it's pretty easy to jump to Frontiers far and away easily being the best of all of the attempts so far. For a start, all of the combat moves that Sonic has is mostly based upon his capabilities and using his speed and regular moveset in various ways. From powerful stomps, to creating Sonic Wave kicks, to creating whirlwinds to give him extra oomph behind his attacks, if nothing else, it's the best attempt to try and connect Sonic's regular speed-based gameplay to a combat system, compared to previous games which would divide out the experience via the Werehog, or dedicated speed sections in RoL. 

Furthermore, unlike previous games, there is some strategy to the combat system within Frontiers. Most enemies have different patterns and tricks to them that incentivise using specific types of moves to dish more damage and deal with enemies faster. From the quick cy-loop trick on Sumo, to the momentum trick on Tower enemies, to parrying Ninjas, and even using counters to deal damage to the likes of Shinobis later in the game. Generally speaking, Frontiers does manage to mix in quick enough combat with enemies who mostly don't waste your time too much (exceptions like Tank and Caterpillar excluded), albeit with the parry system being much too forgiving.

More importantly, the game would even integrate the combat in a more important way via the boss fights against the Titans, having all of Sonic's moveset translate over to Super Sonic, all of them upgraded to match, giving each boss fight spectacle and a interconnectivity that we haven't seen with Super Sonic fights before. 

However, much like most things in this game, Final Horizons seems to have just done everything in it's power in order to expose all of the cracks within the combat system. Enemies are heavily tanky and are outright damage sponges. It's hard to really plan or strategize for them, as most of them, Ghost excluded - spams you with so many attacks and garbage that it becomes more luck than anything to avoid them. Worse than that, the combat design behind them means that what was originally fairly speedy fights for most of them in the base game, as long as you knew the strategy, now extended out to minutes at a time, even if you know the strategy to beating them.

This on top of Guardians being taken out of their gimmicks, turned into more straight fights, yet being so unsuited for those fights without their gimmicks that the best the game really has to offer is just having the likes of Caterpillar or Tank rapidly spam projectiles all around so that even when you do manage to get close enough for an attack, you're likely to be hit and lose your chance anyways. In short, it becomes a mess, more or less, and incentivises spamming the same attacks over and over.

It can be seen the most with of course, the trials, which range from either absurdly difficulty, to absurdly easy, with the final trial being a boss rush mode of the Titans, which seems to exist to expose the tricks behind them and lose all impact, flair, and fun that there was to experimenting with Super Sonic's moveset to take the bosses down, with the final trial's best trick, as most now know - to just be to spam stomp repeatedly to build a quick cy-loop, and then stomp again when they're stunned. 

No more is this made more obvious than with Wyvern, where the perfect parry is critical for fighting the boss due to the ridiculous requirements, yet the boss and game wasn't designed well enough with this in mind, not giving obvious cues to the parry timing, and changing the parry timing halfway through the fight, blindsiding and causing a lot of unnecessary frustration. To say that Final Horizons really exposed a ton of flaws with the combat system with it's requirements is a understatement.

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All of that to bring us more or less to the point of this topic. With so many attempts being made at meshing combat with Sonic, do you think it's worth it? On first glance, it might seem obvious that a fast-paced platforming series should never meet hack and slash combat, but it's not to say there isn't a short number of good and fast-paced hack and slash games out there like Devil May Cry V, Kingdom Hearts 2/3, Bayonetta, or Metal Gear Rising: Revengance that could fit well for a spin-off title, if nothing else.

Which attempt do you think was best, or at least held the most potential? Which game do you think had the secret sauce that if expanded upon, could actually provide a fun combat system to mesh with Sonic, or do you think it would be better if they didn't try at all? Has your opinions on the matter changed any with hindsight (Especially with so long having passed with Unleashed and RoL), or even Frontiers, with Final Horizons pushing the combat system beyond it's limits, and even adding in combat ideas for Tails, Amy, and Knuckles. What's your take on the matter?

Edited November 11, 2023 by Ryannumber1gamer

[Sega DogTagz]

Sonic has developed into something of a power fantasy niche, and I don't think combat is something that can be avoided if you want to lean into that. I also think that Frontiers had the right idea. Save for a small handful of opponents who's mechanics "trapped" you and forced you to fight, there really was no need to engage enemies en mass if you didn't want to. In update 3 for example, you can skip every single one of the roid'd up guardians on the world map, and not feel penalized because portal gears are more than plentiful utilizing other methods of collection.

Its not too different from how games like Zelda handle base mook combat. Raiding bandit camps is largely optional, and the rewards for doing so may be ammo or stronger weapons, which in turn are mostly utilized in raiding the next bandit camp for those that choose to do so. Its a solid gameplay loop.

Frontiers separated the platforming an combat enough as to where the fighting didn't interrupt the speedy platforming. It didn't get in the way of progression, or break up the flow of traveling from point A to point B.

Edited November 11, 2023 by Sega DogTagz

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

I'd say Frontiers was the best one yet, but it still shows problems even before you do Final Horizon.

Not that I'm against combat systems. I like the attempt, but if you asked me on how it could work, I say it should be less about comboes and more about just straight up killing the enemy as fast as possible for Sonic's case. Much as I love games like Devil May Cry and Metal Gear Rising, they don't have Sonic's level of speed nor his degree of platforming, allowing them to focus more on fighting with as much flash as possible.

Anyone remember their Shinobi Series (or in my case the game Nightshade on PS2)?

I was thinking Sonic would better work on that. And if you have to have comboes, make it on how many enemies you kill as fast as possible rather than how many hits you deal on a single non-boss enemy. Interestingly enough, it actually does kinda regress back to the constant use of Sonic using his Homing Attacks against multiple enemies, but you could still add variety by using it as a means to pinball toward another enemy rather than bounce of and shooting back at them again, or by changing the effect of the attack. Health Bars should really be relegated to at least sub-boss enemies and bosses as opposed to making some of the basic enemies take more than 2 hits to down.

[Wraith]

Not once has it ever been worth it. It's hard to justify a system that slows the pacing of the game down to focus on something other than movement to that degree and those games do a pretty poor job making the case for it.|

Every single time, it's been introduced with the intent of padding out the playtime first and actually enhancing the experience second. It's why Heroes and Unleashed are okay with sending you the same enemies to take down over and over again. Making an activity that was easy to recycle between platforming challenges is the goal. Otherwise, the combat would layer in complexity the same way the platforming does. Because of that it mostly becomes a slog before the game's even over.

Frontiers gets a lot of praise from fans for making a lot of the combat optional which should be a red flag on it's own. In games where the combat is fun, you don't want it to be optional. People who enjoy it will jam with it and everyone who doesn't enjoy combat just won't play an action game. Frontiers betrays a lack of commitment on the designer's part off rip and when you actually dig into the combat it's easy to see why. It's, again, not anything to write home about. The cyloop is an interesting mechanic that ties back into Sonic's movement in a fun way, but it's underutilized compared to the threadbare beat em up mechanics they centered the trailers around.

I've talked at length about this game's combat in other posts so I'll try to keep it simple here: It's based around a mix of the unwieldy homing attack and a bunch of cinematic burst damage moves which means interruptions are constant and you barely feel like you have any control of what you're doing. The parry defeats the entire purpose of the parry mechanic, enemies are one note and feel "solved" after the first time you fight them, and since the system is so limited that the designers can't mix them with other enemies or platforming challenges the game is just dull. Good chunk of the enemies don't even interact with the core combat system anyway. Enemies like the shark are just QTEs that don't offer any flexibility.

Because of how passive the game is as far as making you engage with this stuff it a lot of people gave them a pass, which is why I'm glad Final Horizon came out and shined a light on how sloppy this stuff is by forcing you to engage with it to progress. The way FH is structured makes it a frustrating slog, but every actual problem it has has been there since release. The low overall difficulty and loose progression just made it less obvious.

Content added with such ill intent should just be called out and avoided every time. I don't care how bad certain Sonic fans want the series to be a licensed Superhero game. It doesn't serve the movement or platforming in any meaningful way so it should just be left out unless they can find a way to do that. The Cyloop is a step in the right direction but I half expect it to be gone in the next game and for them to double down on the beat em up stuff instead
 

Edited November 12, 2023 by Wraith

[Indigo Rush]

I may have deeper thoughts another day, but for a platformer like Sonic, combat being an ancillary mechanic in service of forward momentum is the way to go. Any ability that results in bounding Sonic over, forward or through an obstacle should be prioritized over flashy anime combat.

Sonic is very kinetic, so attacks that ask him to stop and dish out punches and kicks, as impressive as they may look, does the opposite of this. One of the issues I have with Heroes, Shadow and '06 is the implementation of health bars on enemies forcing you to pause and mash buttons before moving forward again. With all the grief we give homing attack chains being mere stepping stones, they're at least a sensible addition that moves you forward. 

Some of the better Frontiers mini-bosses are the ones that turn into little mini-games that make use of existing platforming setpieces to overcome the enemy, but following up with the brainless combat mechanics to whittle down the health bar undoes the praise I have for them. 

[A super No.1 washedupgamer]

I'm gonna throw my two cents in,

Combat should be faster paced and fun for sonic, he's not just a stop and flashy kick type of fighter, he's much more momentum and speed. I agree with others that Homing attack should carry momentum and bounce around to the next enemy,

An idea I had drawn up:

sonic bouncing back and forth between the enemies he's fight as his main combat move. at the bottom is an example for a big enemy or airship.

this is a spindash that carries 2 or more enemies with sonic that he can use as sort of a mobile "charged" attack against bigger enemies or a group.

Finally, this is a riding move that works great on mobile badniks that sonic can use as a weapon against them. These aren't perfect so if anyone have anything to add or criticise, feel free to quote this post.

Also, One thing I liked about the two airship bosses In sonic colors was the way it felt so satisfying to take them down with either sonic's normal move set or color powers. Every time you Homing attacked the ships, you could feel the damage you are doing. The hits really had impact as you take them apart piece by piece. A couple of the best boss fights in the series.

Attacks need to feel like this again, instead of hitting the boss one time and then the phase changes, hit the boss multiple times to chip down it's health before it slips into another phase. Sonic rush adventure and the titan battles had something similar to this.

Edited November 12, 2023 by A super No.1 washedupgamer

[castell-neath]

Oh, i think i may have blocked out the silly combat in heroes. The silly amount of hits, button mashing, urgh.

Frontiers (base version!) Is my personal preference so far -not perfect at all, but generally quick, some variety and decent skill level needed.

[Iko]

Some of the melee moves in the Advance games had a double function: attack enemies, and bring more movement options:

- Amy's hammer attacks in Advance 1 could be used to increase the strenght of springs and launch the player higher; Amy's hammer can also be used for that flip jump but sadly that move didn't have any attack box.

- Sonic's somersault in Advance 2 was useful to defeat badniks on small platforms without falling, but it could also be used as a way to climb small ramps (by exploiting the little speed boost at the beginning), to do a fast step into a spring and cancel the endlag, or to fall from a ledge and turn into a ball without having to jump (and optimize movements for speedrunning)

- Cream's canceled flight in Advance 2 allowed her to fall onto badniks and kick them, then bounce back to the original falling height; it was not much different than just jumping on a badnik while holding the jump button for bouncing, though it was activated from flying (you had better control on positioning and speed, it was possible to calculate and execute very precise jump arcs from any height).

- Knuckles' uppercut move in Advance 1 could make him jump a little and move forward a bit. Sadly it was executed after a 3 attacks combo, so it couldn't be chained into any useful movement, but if there was an option to use it alone, I could see a couple of uses for it, maybe to jump over a small pit like with Amy's bunny hop, or something.

- Most of the R-tricks of any character in Advance 2 could be also used as a way to attack enemies.

I think that you can add moves from other games in that list as well, such as Sonic's bounce from Adventure 2, quickstep as a way to attack in Sonic Colors, and even the Cyloop to an extent.

In my opinion, that's the way to go. Combat can be a part of Sonic's moveset, but the biggest priority should be that every combat move should also bring a different movement option, so that you can both move and fight at the same time, without having to change the playstyle. The enemies should go down fast, health bars are not suited for Sonic, nor is having to wait for the weak spot to show.

Big enemies that are in fact platforming challenges/level design themselves, like Asura, are also welcome, as long as they are well designed, and there isn't an health bar on top of them; they can be strategically placed into levels and work as level gimmicks that will let you reach higher routes or secrets, and you don't necessarily have to defeat them, you can also just use them as platforms/pieces of a level and run over them.

[Scritch the Cat]

As simple and repetitive as it was, I am tempted to say Sonic Rush did it best, certainly not in terms of depth, but in the arguably more important terms of fitting with Sonic's broader gameplay philosophy.  The combat in that game still utilized Sonic's standard moves, plus the boost, and because enemies still had HP in that era, the boost didn't totally replace those moves; you could boost through enemies but not reliably recharge your boost by doing so.  The combat was that game's version of the padding that has almost always been a part of Sonic game design, but it managed to be fairly innocuous because of the Sonic-appropriate attacks being used; even when you weren't going forward, you were still going fast.

So I do think some combat systems can work for Sonic, and while I wouldn't advocate copying Rush's approach wholesale, I do think a standard to shoot for is that combat should feel like part of Sonic's speed-focused gameplay rather than an interruption of it.

It's not normally popular to advocate Sonic to copy what Mario has done, but when playing Sonic Frontiers and having the music and cameras abruptly change to urge me into fighting an enemy, and some encounters subsequently locking me in, I couldn't help but think of what the Mario RPGs do and wish that game did something similar.  For clarity, the Mario RPGs are mostly real-time, with turn-based values, but the two approaches are synthesized in a pretty nifty way; you and your enemies can still attack each other in the real-time segment.  Whoever lands the first hit on the other gets a free first-strike in the ensuing turn-based battle sequence.  Sonic should have some similar ideas, not that it should make its battles turn-based but rather that Sonic's movement outside the battles should affect the battles. 

To beat this horse again, momentum should be important.  I've been an extremely vocal detractor of the boost games' many instances of Sonic just effortlessly boosting through a bunch of wafer-thin enemies, but as much as I hate how brain-dead it all is, there's merit in the notion of Sonic smashing though things by going fast if it could be turned into something that qualifies as actual gameplay.  Assuming that Sonic games have moved back into the realm of of enemies having HP, with the ire that would cause a portion of the fandom, I think a good concession would be to let Sonic deplete all of their HP and keep on going if he hits them at a high enough velocity, but there needs to be some actual challenge and skill involved in attaining that high velocity.  Boost can stay as an acceleration button but it shouldn't be an "instantly attain top speed" button, and I also feel Sonic should need to roll or do a flying kick, etc, to transfer that momentum into an attack.  Maybe as a compromise, if he didn't do that he could still damage enemies by hitting them at high speed, but not as much and he'd also lose rings.

I feel the same about the Cyloop, probably subject to a rename in the near future.  The idea has potential because it fits Sonic thematically; the problem with the attack as done so far is that its powers don't really have anything to do with how fast Sonic is going.  So for a bullet list of proposed changes:

*A tornado effect should kick in the moment Sonic closes a loop, not when you release the cyloop button. 

*Meaning you could also draw multiple loops in succession to increase the tornado effect.

*The faster you're moving while drawing the loop, the stronger the tornado effect it spawns should be.

*The tornado's strength should also increase inversely with how much space you leave between the target and the loop's perimeter; ie Sonic circling the target more closely, while inherently more risky, would also reward that risk if you could pull it off.

As for the more conventional hand-to-hand combat they tried in Sonic Frontiers, well, I think some of it could stay but I'm pretty skeptical about the parry.  Reading their explanation for why their "parry" has no timing requirement, such that it did at some phase of development but test audiences found it too tricky, I instantly wondered why their choice was to defeat the purpose of a parry system instead of just taking it out and implementing something more Sonic-appropriate.  Like a dodge roll; that fits Sonic perfectly and it's technically in the game.  Also, I fully denounce the boss battles that require you to wait around to parry something at a specific time so that you can get to the rest of the boss battles.  One of the things that should be most cautiously avoided in Sonic game design is making players wait and giving them no power to decrease the wait-time.  If these sorts of moments have to be in the game, then at the very least there has to be some other way to damage the boss in those instances than just parrying.

Note that the above pertain to combat done as Sonic himself.  Playing as certain other characters, such as Knuckles, Rouge and maybe Amy, while speed is still an important thing to shoot for, more emphasis on fighting in a a fixed location is acceptable.  But a balance still needs to be struck to appease players who aren't fond of doing that; maybe allowing those characters to hit harder with their base attacks but without the ability to power up their attacks with speed to maximize damage the way Sonic can, so either way combat doesn't last too long.