SAGE 2023 - NiGHTS: moonlight dreams...

The lore's getting quite deep.

It bothers me more than it should that they never address how Sonic's friends are suddenly able to physically interact with things now despite still being cyber-ghosts. I haven't seen all the side conversations yet, but so far, the closest they've come is one between Amy and Knuckles where Amy complains about Knuckles' punches working when her hammer doesn't (even though it does? Cyhammer???). Also, new ｄｅｅｐｅｓｔ　ｌｏｒｅ just dropped (sorry I didn't catch all of the first lines):

But that's you.  Fully enjoying the Sonic Adventure games, the first a bit more than the second, depends entirely on whether you like all of the play styles included, and it's quite a brash assumption on developers' part that most people will.  I'm not saying it's wrong to prefer that because that's sort of how I feel too...aside from the fishing  I can just as easily say it's a brash assumption on developers' part that people will enjoy the less varied gameplay of Classic Sonic more as they get better at it.  Still, those games made the franchise huge doing what they did and it was a big risk trying to bring in other sorts of gameplay, especially when it's mandatory. On that note, I consider the single biggest sin of game design to be the "Battletoads" issue where by far the hardest part of a game is one bit that plays nothing like the rest of it, and you also have to pass that bit to get back to the sort of gameplay you actually bought it for.  Thus if a game has to have alternate playstyles, I feel they need to at least be substantially easier than the main event.  An example of that advice being heeded, to positive results, would be the Big the Cat segments of Sonic Frontiers.  It's not really "good" gameplay, but it's easy and doesn't last long, unless you want it to, and it's totally optional, albeit useful.  Meanwhile, The End garnered a lot of fan ire because a bullet hell game isn't what most of them go into Sonic wanting. But having said that, I think there's a balancing act in these situations because for any sort of gameplay to be truly good, it needs to move past just the basics.  The shooting segments of the Sonic Adventure games leave me rather wanting, and unlike most people, for me that's not because they're slow.  Gamma isn't actually that slow and the SA2 mechs, though much slower than Sonic, are close enough to other 3D platformers in pace that I still find their platforming fine enough.  The problem for me is their shooting mechanic of just locking onto things and then releasing the laser button to destroy all of those targets automatically is just too basic and one-note for it to be an engaging gameplay style on its own.  If they had worked in a few innovations, like additional weapons that worked well (the gun is really too slow and inaccurate and the melee attack is, well, a melee attack) and enemies with HP, then the mechanic would come into its own, and therefor, Omega has been surprisingly one of my favorite characters to play as in Project 06, because he's got those Adventure laser-and-missile attacks but others as well, and a greater variety of things to blast.  Again, though, that's just me.  I love that sort of gameplay but the haunting question remains, if you need to make a shooter complex and challenging to make it a good shooter, but doing so makes it less of a Sonic game, is that even worth it?  I'm thinking no.  Maybe Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic Forces came closer to making that work than the Adventure games, though still probably not "there", but striking that balance between interesting enough for shooter fans and approachable enough for non-fans is still very arguably more trouble than it's worth. On the other hand, I feel the "treasure hunting" segments of the Sonic Adventure games aren't actually too far off from being Sonic-appropriate gameplay, and thus deserve another look by the developers.  The characters can still move quickly, exploration has always been part of Sonic game design, and having multiple different "goals" in a stage, as evidenced by the main gameplay loop of Sonic Frontiers, is a good way to compensate for the inherent problem of protagonists who are so much more mobile than those in most platformers.  Only the arbitrary restrictions really bogged it down in the Adventure games.  If they could divorce it from the obligation of every stage (assuming there are stages) requiring you to find exactly 3 items, de-nerf the radar, make the characters just a bit more mobile and give them more to do besides just finding those mandatory macguffins, then what they'd arrive at is something fitting of 3D Sonic gameplay and not too far off from the direction they seem to want to take Sonic himself in.