(Note this review was made somewhere around 2020, before I even made a Backloggd account.)
Originally the next review was going to be Dr. Mario for the NES (that review never happened btw) but I had to talk about this. This game is something else and I don’t really know what motivated me to replay it but I have done it and I need to discuss it.
The story of this game starts off with Amy fighting Lyric until Sonic interrupts to call Amy to see what’s going on which leads her distracted enough to get mind controlled by Lyric’s device to help him with his goals. It’s up to Sonic to find Tails, Knuckles, and Sticks and join up to rescue Amy and defeat Lyric. I should point out this game is in a different continuity to the Wii U game. There’s even a comic you can view in this game that explains more of why Amy is fighting Lyric to begin with and why she is even there to begin with.
Now with the actual game. The first types of levels I’m going to talk about are the main levels in the game. You’ll explore and speed through eight levels to collect blueprints and crystal shards and reach the end to collect medals. You need to do this to open more levels up and you’ll have to redo levels to advance through the game. You’ll have four characters to play as, Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Sticks. Sonic’s special ability is to air dash two times horizontally and one time vertically. He can also spin dash but it’s practically useless. Tails can hover over vents and also use his tails to hover, like RoL you can’t fly with Tails. He can also throw bombs but not only are they so slow to even throw out but you even have to wait for it to explode on contact. He can also do another thing I’ll discuss later. Sticks can throw her boomerang as an attack and can even throw it a long distance to hit switches or even grab items, you can guide the boomerang by holding the attack button and guiding it with the circle pad. Then we have Knuckles who can dig in specific sections of the level and also can do two attacks with one having some good distance and range to it. The digging is similar to how the drill wisp works in Colors and Lost World.
There are also moves that are shared by each character like the homing attack. It doesn’t really bother me too much that this is the case because it would be really annoying to always switch to Sonic to do this. What is annoying is not being able to just jump into enemies, now it’s not really the game’s fault but with me playing so many Sonic games for many years, my reflexes always tell me to jump when an enemy pops up and then I get hit like an idiot. They also brought back the run button from Sonic Lost World letting you dash at any time by holding Y. You can also do a ground pound by holding down and pressing X though only Sonic can break dash blocks with this ground pound so keep that in mind. The last move you can use is the Enerbeam which lets you break off enemy shields and let you swing off specific machines in the air.
Like I mentioned in the plot, you’ll only have Sonic in the beginning though you’ll unlock each character after level 1, 2, and 3. Now there is an issue with this. Remember when I said you needed medals to advance, well you can’t get some of them in the first three levels due to not having everyone to get specific blueprints and crystal shards. This means you’ll have to do the first three levels again which is annoying but once you do this you never have to worry about this so it’s just really dumb padding.
Now about those levels. I’m going to just say it now, the level design is terrible. Now it doesn’t seem bad at first. It’s a pretty basic explorative level where you can find different branches to find some rings, shield, or even one of the two important items you need. With no exaggeration, the level design you see in the first level is the whole game. This also goes with the character’s abilities, when you do one thing that requires them, it never gets any more interesting or challenging. You see a dash block, you use Sonic’s air dash. You see fans, you use Tails. You see ground to dig into, you dig with Knuckles. You see a switch, you need Stick’s boomerang, it will almost always be the same exact way you do it. Do you like those platforms that disappear when you step on them? Well guess what they are in every single level. The only thing that really changes from what I notice is when you dig with Knuckles, they add mines to it to make it more challenging. Even the enemies feel very similar, I swear there are only like five enemies in the entire game and the only reason I get hit by them most of the time is because I got so used to just jumping on enemies in Sonic like I mentioned before. Every level just gets boring and not only that if you’re trying to get everything on the first go, it takes about 10-15 minutes. Even the rail grinding is some of the worst in the series, it’s so slow and is always used in the same way, you sometimes jump over an easy obstacle or to another rail. The only reason it’s not the worst is because Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) is just that awful with rail grinding. Even by the end it feels like they gave up on trying, there are times where they don’t even bother to hide a blueprint piece or shard but in the last level I swear they do this 2-3 times. I even beat the level faster then the previous two, like were they rushed for time?
The only other interesting thing to say about these levels are these containers where Tails can put this little tails submarine in and you travel inside to find the blueprint piece and get out of there in time. You can find clocks to give you more time and you have to avoid explosive mines and touching walls which make you lose time. I actually don’t even know what happens if you run out of time because they are all basically the same, just sometimes they make the path to getting to it longer and more boring. You can even tap the bottom screen to get a view to see where it is and getting there is no challenge. You can also shoot missiles to break walls and mines but again it’s not really all that fun to do and it's only just to get a blueprint piece. They really should have just made these their own level to get a medal for.
Speaking of the bottom screen it can have four different uses in the main levels. The first one is showing what direction on the d-pad switches to what character and you can even touch one to switch to that character if you find that easier. The second one shows you your statistics for the level like how many blueprint pieces you have, how many crystal shards you have, how many rings you have and need for the token and what time you need to finish to get a token. The third one and the one I would recommend to use is the map which can give you some help to find items you need and can even be more helpful with something I’ll talk about later. The last one is if you hit a hint circle, Q-N-C will give you a gameplay tip and this is so annoying like Q-N-C I don’t need your help. I have played this level three times already. I don’t need that hint again! You can’t even turn it off like you could in Lost World 3DS and you either need to quickly tap the button on the bottom screen to make it go away or you just have to wait for it to manually leave but this obscures your map entirely which makes it worse.
The blueprint pieces and crystal shards do actually have a reason to be collected outside of medals. After the first level you can go to Tails’ place and use 6 blueprint pieces to get a new ability like letting the map help you find crystal shards and items easier, giving you a shield after the first checkpoint, keeping 25% of rings after getting hit and even letting your dash do damage to enemies. Strangely if you get five pieces in one level and then one in another level, you can still upgrade which doesn’t really make sense to me, I feel like you should have gotten all six pieces in a level to unlock an ability. Also you have to do this really stupid touch screen gimmick where you piece all six pieces together like a puzzle and it’s so basic and easy I question why they even make you do this. The crystal shards you collect involve you going to Sticks’ location and taking any pieces you have to reconstruct more of the crystal together. What do you get for putting it all together? Well I need to talk about another thing first.
Remember those tokens I talked about earlier when you get a fast enough time in a level or getting a required amount of rings? Well you can go to Q-N-C’s location to use these on a toy vending machine to get a figurine statue of a character or enemy. They aren’t really anything special in my opinion. You can even go to Knuckles’ location to do a little training by pressing or tapping two buttons in rapid succession to get a token but you can only do this one per day. Going back to Crystal, the main thing about this game that’s part of the game’s title, just gives you a purple token to give you a special figurine of the main five characters, that’s really all you get. Strangely these figurines are actually the only time Dr. Eggman’s model shows up in the game, he is nowhere else in the game outside of a silhouette of him in a cutscene when he commands Metal Sonic to stop the team.
Now there are still more types of levels to discuss, you can find one Worm Tunnel level in each world to collect a medal and two tokens in. Worm Tunnels kind of remind me of a special stage except it’s more of just getting to the end goal rather than collecting something like spheres, rings, or an emerald. You move in lanes trying to avoid electricity blocking the way trying to destroy the huge robotic worm at the end. You can dash which you’ll need to break the dash blocks but you also can’t switch in a different lane if you do this. You’re probably expecting me to say this but they are all basically the same, there’s no added challenge to it whatsoever. It’s a shame really, I don’t get why the parts where you use the Enerbeam ever get any challenging. There’s never any obstacles when you ride them. I only died twice during these stages and even then it’s because I was trying to rush due to how boring and uninteresting they are. I guess I can give credit that they aren’t generous about giving the tokens because despite getting all the time tokens, they were very close to the actual time needed and you can’t miss any rings in these stages to get the token for those too. Besides that though, they just aren’t fun at all.
The next type of levels are racing where you’ll race Sticks, Shadow, or Metal Sonic to the end of stage similar to something like Sonic CD and Sonic Generations 3DS. Though unlike those races the opponent isn’t able to interact with you which makes the races a little less interesting. Actually every race track is basically the same, you’ll come across two paths that have one path with no rings and the other having rings, repeat this multiple times in the race and it’s over. I don’t even have that much to say about these, they are so lazily made, the AI will never beat you if you don’t just screw up very badly which you probably won’t and the level design just isn’t good at all. Seriously how the hell did a 1993 Sega CD game do a race better than this and that wasn’t even that good to begin with. Also for some reason in these races Sonic just never shuts up, it can actually get a little obnoxious by the third race.
Once you beat the eight level you’ll be ready to fight Lyric. The fight starts with your friends captured in this ball and you need to keep up with it. Once you make it far enough you start phase one of the fight where the only way you can hit him is when he sends out his hands for you homing attack on to and then homing attack his face or you can homing attack his face when he uses the move that shoots the single laser on the floor that you need to stay in the air to avoid. Once you hit him a couple of times, the chase part will begin again and then you have phase two where it’s basically the same but the floor is a little bit harder to walk on due to disappearing floors as you step on it. Hit him a couple of times again and do one more chase sequence into the final phase where once again it’s just the floor is a bit different and his moves get barely any harder to dodge, hit him a couple more times and finally the game is over. What a lame fight I guess it’s not horrible but the fact it's the only one is what makes me disappointed.
Once you beat him you can go back to levels to get the remaining medals and tokens you missed and once you get all the medals you can go back to Amy’s house to get your reward. That reward being...watching the characters dance and do mostly the robot. Yep, this is really all you get for doing all of that. God this game just never fails to disappoint.
Presentation wise it’s decent. I do think the game does look nice for a 3DS game though it’s not all perfect, some of the models definitely could have used touch ups like Knuckles and the environments themselves aren’t the most interesting in the world at least to me. The cutscenes are actually kind of nice, I like that they don’t just give the characters stock animations but there is only one problem with them, there is no voice acting which is a huge shame because it would have made them even better. The music on the other hand though is nothing too interesting, I was shocked to see this was composed by Richard Jacques. Sorry to sound rude but besides Sonic Chronicles, his other work on games like 3D Blast Saturn and Sonic R were way better than this. There’s nothing that’s awful about it but a lot of it doesn’t really stick in my mind though I do like that he did make two different versions of the song depending where you are on the stage.
Shattered Crystal really just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it’s a 3-4 hour borefest that never actually gets good. It’s like they made the first world and then immediately ran out of ideas and reused the same level ideas for every other level after. This is some of the worst level design in the series for me and yes I can confidently say this is one of my least favorite 2D Sonic games in the series. It’s boring, none of the levels are interesting, the character’s abilities are always used in the same couple of ways with no creative ideas to utilize them and the game even forces you to do some backtracking in an already short game. If you bought this game for $40 back when it came out, I honestly feel bad for you because Shattered Crystal is a bad game and it deserves to be forgotten about. It may not be as bad as Rise of Lyric was with how boring that game was and just all the development hell it went through, but Shattered Crystal just feels lazy and uninspired. Do not play this game even for cheap, it ain’t even worth playing for a laugh because there are no laughs, just boredom.
Originally the next review was going to be Dr. Mario for the NES (that review never happened btw) but I had to talk about this. This game is something else and I don’t really know what motivated me to replay it but I have done it and I need to discuss it.
The story of this game starts off with Amy fighting Lyric until Sonic interrupts to call Amy to see what’s going on which leads her distracted enough to get mind controlled by Lyric’s device to help him with his goals. It’s up to Sonic to find Tails, Knuckles, and Sticks and join up to rescue Amy and defeat Lyric. I should point out this game is in a different continuity to the Wii U game. There’s even a comic you can view in this game that explains more of why Amy is fighting Lyric to begin with and why she is even there to begin with.
Now with the actual game. The first types of levels I’m going to talk about are the main levels in the game. You’ll explore and speed through eight levels to collect blueprints and crystal shards and reach the end to collect medals. You need to do this to open more levels up and you’ll have to redo levels to advance through the game. You’ll have four characters to play as, Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Sticks. Sonic’s special ability is to air dash two times horizontally and one time vertically. He can also spin dash but it’s practically useless. Tails can hover over vents and also use his tails to hover, like RoL you can’t fly with Tails. He can also throw bombs but not only are they so slow to even throw out but you even have to wait for it to explode on contact. He can also do another thing I’ll discuss later. Sticks can throw her boomerang as an attack and can even throw it a long distance to hit switches or even grab items, you can guide the boomerang by holding the attack button and guiding it with the circle pad. Then we have Knuckles who can dig in specific sections of the level and also can do two attacks with one having some good distance and range to it. The digging is similar to how the drill wisp works in Colors and Lost World.
There are also moves that are shared by each character like the homing attack. It doesn’t really bother me too much that this is the case because it would be really annoying to always switch to Sonic to do this. What is annoying is not being able to just jump into enemies, now it’s not really the game’s fault but with me playing so many Sonic games for many years, my reflexes always tell me to jump when an enemy pops up and then I get hit like an idiot. They also brought back the run button from Sonic Lost World letting you dash at any time by holding Y. You can also do a ground pound by holding down and pressing X though only Sonic can break dash blocks with this ground pound so keep that in mind. The last move you can use is the Enerbeam which lets you break off enemy shields and let you swing off specific machines in the air.
Like I mentioned in the plot, you’ll only have Sonic in the beginning though you’ll unlock each character after level 1, 2, and 3. Now there is an issue with this. Remember when I said you needed medals to advance, well you can’t get some of them in the first three levels due to not having everyone to get specific blueprints and crystal shards. This means you’ll have to do the first three levels again which is annoying but once you do this you never have to worry about this so it’s just really dumb padding.
Now about those levels. I’m going to just say it now, the level design is terrible. Now it doesn’t seem bad at first. It’s a pretty basic explorative level where you can find different branches to find some rings, shield, or even one of the two important items you need. With no exaggeration, the level design you see in the first level is the whole game. This also goes with the character’s abilities, when you do one thing that requires them, it never gets any more interesting or challenging. You see a dash block, you use Sonic’s air dash. You see fans, you use Tails. You see ground to dig into, you dig with Knuckles. You see a switch, you need Stick’s boomerang, it will almost always be the same exact way you do it. Do you like those platforms that disappear when you step on them? Well guess what they are in every single level. The only thing that really changes from what I notice is when you dig with Knuckles, they add mines to it to make it more challenging. Even the enemies feel very similar, I swear there are only like five enemies in the entire game and the only reason I get hit by them most of the time is because I got so used to just jumping on enemies in Sonic like I mentioned before. Every level just gets boring and not only that if you’re trying to get everything on the first go, it takes about 10-15 minutes. Even the rail grinding is some of the worst in the series, it’s so slow and is always used in the same way, you sometimes jump over an easy obstacle or to another rail. The only reason it’s not the worst is because Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) is just that awful with rail grinding. Even by the end it feels like they gave up on trying, there are times where they don’t even bother to hide a blueprint piece or shard but in the last level I swear they do this 2-3 times. I even beat the level faster then the previous two, like were they rushed for time?
The only other interesting thing to say about these levels are these containers where Tails can put this little tails submarine in and you travel inside to find the blueprint piece and get out of there in time. You can find clocks to give you more time and you have to avoid explosive mines and touching walls which make you lose time. I actually don’t even know what happens if you run out of time because they are all basically the same, just sometimes they make the path to getting to it longer and more boring. You can even tap the bottom screen to get a view to see where it is and getting there is no challenge. You can also shoot missiles to break walls and mines but again it’s not really all that fun to do and it's only just to get a blueprint piece. They really should have just made these their own level to get a medal for.
Speaking of the bottom screen it can have four different uses in the main levels. The first one is showing what direction on the d-pad switches to what character and you can even touch one to switch to that character if you find that easier. The second one shows you your statistics for the level like how many blueprint pieces you have, how many crystal shards you have, how many rings you have and need for the token and what time you need to finish to get a token. The third one and the one I would recommend to use is the map which can give you some help to find items you need and can even be more helpful with something I’ll talk about later. The last one is if you hit a hint circle, Q-N-C will give you a gameplay tip and this is so annoying like Q-N-C I don’t need your help. I have played this level three times already. I don’t need that hint again! You can’t even turn it off like you could in Lost World 3DS and you either need to quickly tap the button on the bottom screen to make it go away or you just have to wait for it to manually leave but this obscures your map entirely which makes it worse.
The blueprint pieces and crystal shards do actually have a reason to be collected outside of medals. After the first level you can go to Tails’ place and use 6 blueprint pieces to get a new ability like letting the map help you find crystal shards and items easier, giving you a shield after the first checkpoint, keeping 25% of rings after getting hit and even letting your dash do damage to enemies. Strangely if you get five pieces in one level and then one in another level, you can still upgrade which doesn’t really make sense to me, I feel like you should have gotten all six pieces in a level to unlock an ability. Also you have to do this really stupid touch screen gimmick where you piece all six pieces together like a puzzle and it’s so basic and easy I question why they even make you do this. The crystal shards you collect involve you going to Sticks’ location and taking any pieces you have to reconstruct more of the crystal together. What do you get for putting it all together? Well I need to talk about another thing first.
Remember those tokens I talked about earlier when you get a fast enough time in a level or getting a required amount of rings? Well you can go to Q-N-C’s location to use these on a toy vending machine to get a figurine statue of a character or enemy. They aren’t really anything special in my opinion. You can even go to Knuckles’ location to do a little training by pressing or tapping two buttons in rapid succession to get a token but you can only do this one per day. Going back to Crystal, the main thing about this game that’s part of the game’s title, just gives you a purple token to give you a special figurine of the main five characters, that’s really all you get. Strangely these figurines are actually the only time Dr. Eggman’s model shows up in the game, he is nowhere else in the game outside of a silhouette of him in a cutscene when he commands Metal Sonic to stop the team.
Now there are still more types of levels to discuss, you can find one Worm Tunnel level in each world to collect a medal and two tokens in. Worm Tunnels kind of remind me of a special stage except it’s more of just getting to the end goal rather than collecting something like spheres, rings, or an emerald. You move in lanes trying to avoid electricity blocking the way trying to destroy the huge robotic worm at the end. You can dash which you’ll need to break the dash blocks but you also can’t switch in a different lane if you do this. You’re probably expecting me to say this but they are all basically the same, there’s no added challenge to it whatsoever. It’s a shame really, I don’t get why the parts where you use the Enerbeam ever get any challenging. There’s never any obstacles when you ride them. I only died twice during these stages and even then it’s because I was trying to rush due to how boring and uninteresting they are. I guess I can give credit that they aren’t generous about giving the tokens because despite getting all the time tokens, they were very close to the actual time needed and you can’t miss any rings in these stages to get the token for those too. Besides that though, they just aren’t fun at all.
The next type of levels are racing where you’ll race Sticks, Shadow, or Metal Sonic to the end of stage similar to something like Sonic CD and Sonic Generations 3DS. Though unlike those races the opponent isn’t able to interact with you which makes the races a little less interesting. Actually every race track is basically the same, you’ll come across two paths that have one path with no rings and the other having rings, repeat this multiple times in the race and it’s over. I don’t even have that much to say about these, they are so lazily made, the AI will never beat you if you don’t just screw up very badly which you probably won’t and the level design just isn’t good at all. Seriously how the hell did a 1993 Sega CD game do a race better than this and that wasn’t even that good to begin with. Also for some reason in these races Sonic just never shuts up, it can actually get a little obnoxious by the third race.
Once you beat the eight level you’ll be ready to fight Lyric. The fight starts with your friends captured in this ball and you need to keep up with it. Once you make it far enough you start phase one of the fight where the only way you can hit him is when he sends out his hands for you homing attack on to and then homing attack his face or you can homing attack his face when he uses the move that shoots the single laser on the floor that you need to stay in the air to avoid. Once you hit him a couple of times, the chase part will begin again and then you have phase two where it’s basically the same but the floor is a little bit harder to walk on due to disappearing floors as you step on it. Hit him a couple of times again and do one more chase sequence into the final phase where once again it’s just the floor is a bit different and his moves get barely any harder to dodge, hit him a couple more times and finally the game is over. What a lame fight I guess it’s not horrible but the fact it's the only one is what makes me disappointed.
Once you beat him you can go back to levels to get the remaining medals and tokens you missed and once you get all the medals you can go back to Amy’s house to get your reward. That reward being...watching the characters dance and do mostly the robot. Yep, this is really all you get for doing all of that. God this game just never fails to disappoint.
Presentation wise it’s decent. I do think the game does look nice for a 3DS game though it’s not all perfect, some of the models definitely could have used touch ups like Knuckles and the environments themselves aren’t the most interesting in the world at least to me. The cutscenes are actually kind of nice, I like that they don’t just give the characters stock animations but there is only one problem with them, there is no voice acting which is a huge shame because it would have made them even better. The music on the other hand though is nothing too interesting, I was shocked to see this was composed by Richard Jacques. Sorry to sound rude but besides Sonic Chronicles, his other work on games like 3D Blast Saturn and Sonic R were way better than this. There’s nothing that’s awful about it but a lot of it doesn’t really stick in my mind though I do like that he did make two different versions of the song depending where you are on the stage.
Shattered Crystal really just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it’s a 3-4 hour borefest that never actually gets good. It’s like they made the first world and then immediately ran out of ideas and reused the same level ideas for every other level after. This is some of the worst level design in the series for me and yes I can confidently say this is one of my least favorite 2D Sonic games in the series. It’s boring, none of the levels are interesting, the character’s abilities are always used in the same couple of ways with no creative ideas to utilize them and the game even forces you to do some backtracking in an already short game. If you bought this game for $40 back when it came out, I honestly feel bad for you because Shattered Crystal is a bad game and it deserves to be forgotten about. It may not be as bad as Rise of Lyric was with how boring that game was and just all the development hell it went through, but Shattered Crystal just feels lazy and uninspired. Do not play this game even for cheap, it ain’t even worth playing for a laugh because there are no laughs, just boredom.
Angel_Arle
5 months ago