This game answers a lot of the complaints people had with Sword and Shield, yet somehow lowers the quality of the work even further.

It's clear that a lot was put into it, you've got a ton of little quality of life features peppered throughout, such as the game turning you to face a waypoint you just created, or not being able to accidentally KO pokémon in auto battles. At the same time, it feels like so much was put into these new features that the base gameplay was left unattended, especially but not only in the performance department.

The world felt empty a lot of the time. Due to the poor pokémon render distance and spawning speed, you can't really use pokémon you want to catch as waypoints since they don't show up unless you're already in walking distance to them. The environments, while pretty, feel devoid of any points of interest aside from the generic looking towers with a fast travel point and a Gimmighoul on them. While it's cool that the trainer classes aren't just a single character repeated over and over anymore, none of them are particularly interesting because you know they're just there to give you exp and count towards your free item at the pokémon center. The tera raids and tera pokémon were fun for most of the game, but after a while you've pretty much seen the whole pool of possible pokémon and have not much incentive to go for them anymore. The tera gimmick in general is really fun to use in battle, but they made the odd choice of only being able to use it once before having to recharge it at a pokémon center, which made me feel like I had to save it for the harder battles... which were none of them.

At the same time, the story was really fun this time. The three paths let you choose what kind of reward you'd rather get at the time between higher level pokémon, mobility upgrades and new TMs. While the Team Star path was lackluster mechanics and rewards wise, I found the character writing in this game pretty good! I had fun learning about all of them and eventually seeing them all come together on the final act. While the story isn't as deep as something like Black and White, I found it way more interesting than SwSh and SM. And despite the game being really easy and not giving you many opportunities to mess with tera and the new items and abilities in a more in-depth way, the competitive VGC scene is looking pretty fun right now (at least until they allow legendaries).

Overall, I've had a lot of fun with the game, but it worries me that people aren't really scrutinizing the state of the game past the framerate aspect - which does matter but is also a result of the short development cycle and (probable) crunch. I hope Gamefreak staff is in good health and wonder how much longer it'll take people to realize that the executives are pushing out half finished games because people buy it either way.

It's a pretty relaxing and chill survival crafting game on the first couple hours. The graphics are pretty and the atmosphere is chill. The only real threat are bears which spawn in preset areas and stay in them, but properly using stealth to get through them is almost impossible and you'll need to after a while to get more non renewable resources. The decision to have some of the main resources you'll need be non renewable (I think?) is very odd to me. But to be fair, those are at least very signposted with the giant towers. The later game renewables are impossible to find even with a guide since their spawn location isn't fixed, so endgame just becomes a boring scavenger hunt with an insane time limit since days are so short.

The theming of this game is also very odd. It's supposedly one of those games were you retreat into nature to live a simpler life or whatever, but the most important resources you'll need are metal pipes, bolts and nails that you collect from ruins of manmade structures. Is this an admittance that you can't survive on the wild on your own as someone who grew up in an urban society? Or did the creators just didn't think about the dissonance? Or maybe that's not the message of the game at all and there's no message because it's just a quick cash grab survival crafting 1/3rd of a game? We'll never know because the devs abandoned it.

It was okay! A lot of game reviewers make it up to be the absolute worst Sonic game ever made along with Forces, but I’ve had a decently okay time with both. With this more than Forces, admittedly, but the latter still holds a special place in my heart.

It really feels like the team at Bioware were trying to go for something unique, despite the horrendously rushed development time. They went out of their way to make intentionally misleading promotional art so as to not spoil that there were going to be new echidnas introduced. They even had a website that took secret codes from the game!

I think my favorite part of it was the story. A rival echidna clan to Knuckles’ that had advanced technology and fighter robots suddenly returning to Earth to finish their world domination sounds like a Ken Penders storyline (derogatory), but when put in practice it’s much less convoluted than it could have been. The cliffhanger ending was very unfortunate, but it didn’t ruin the experience for me.

This game honestly has some of the better characterization I’ve seen so far. I can single out a couple negatives, such as Rouge being weirdly rude and Big being more stupid than usual, and Shadow being on a very fine line between his modern “all edge no substance” character, but they’re minor blemishes for me. They really nailed Knuckles’ dilemma of not wanting to defeat the big bad Echidna in fear of never seeing other members of his race again, making him hesitant without putting a Penders-shaped spotlight over him at all times.

Reformed Eggman was pretty well done while it lasted. There’s one particular dialogue box where Tails gets excited to talk about a scientific discovery with him (and Sonic can reprimand him for it), and it was cute to imagine what kind of father-son or colleague-kindergartner relationship these two could have had in another universe.

I didn’t really like the graphics all that much. I think the models are cute, but something about the art style of the 2D environments doesn’t do it for me. The comic book style animatics could have worked nicely, but they were cheapened by the weird choice of music (which I will talk about later). The human NPCs in particular feel like they were supposed to match Sonic Unleashed’s humans in style, but they ended up looking like something I’d see on Jetix when that was still around.

The alien NPCs are the complete opposite though, I’m very fond of how they turned out. Their 2D portraits benefit from the unfamiliar cartoony style, and their 3D models are honestly fantastic. Their animations are a mixed bag, but some highlights are the Kron Warrior rock spinning and throwing animation, and the Voxai knocked down and getting back up animation. They take a solid chunk of the battle time, but they’re nice to look at.

Speaking of battles, I’ve found the whole RPG gameplay quite nice actually! The battles have GBA Mario RPG (what a string of words) style button prompts — or rather, Elite Beat Agent/Osu! style touch screen prompts that show up when performing or defending from a skill. For defending, they get surprisingly more lenient as you level up, allowing you to miss almost half of them and still get a perfect evade. But for attacking, you still need to execute them perfectly, which was quite annoying at some points. I can understand why that was a thing, most likely to add some stakes to the use of strong skills such as Cream’s Refresh (infinite MP/PP restoration), but I’d still enjoy a middle ground or at least some transparency that I’m about to fail miserably.

It’s a well known fact at this point that half of it consists of MIDIs stolen from fansites, but I don’t feel good calling those bad. They were definitely not pleasant to listen to for the most part, oh no, but what made them bad was the misplaced and sometimes entirely missing MIDI instruments and not the songs themselves. I don’t want to insult a fan’s MIDI remix when the developers are at fault, they got their songs stolen and misrepresented and are already going to be bashed for all of time. Granted, they’re unrecognizable from their originals at this point, but still.

The other half of the soundtrack, the one that didn’t get affected by the legal troubles that made them hastily steal MIDIs, is bizarre to say the least. From hard rock to electronic, none of it sounds too fitting nor too misplaced at the same time. It’s a weird middle ground where you can get used to it but you’re not sure if you should.

I am confident in saying I did not like the sound effects. The sound for when you KO an enemy is a stock boing sound. When you win a battle, there's a stock kids cheering sound. The sounds from getting hit are a random combination of grunts that don’t sound like a character getting hit at all plus robotic sounds that play even for the organic characters.

This game could have been more polished. This game deserved way more development time than it got. It’s a miracle they managed to make something stable with all these missteps. I would be hopeful for a sequel if not for the whole Ken Penders fiasco, and I’m slowly leaning towards it since the game’s mention in the newest Sonic official book, but for the moment I’m just hoping people stop being so harsh.

But I understand where it comes from. There was no credits screen. A handful of names were shoved in about five text boxes and framed as an out of nowhere conversation between Sonic and Tails during the cliffhanger ending, and that was it.

Cutting corners is an understatement. They have made a circle.

My favorite game ever, but not even close to one of the best.

Negatives out of the way first: English dub bad, graphics a little overwhelming at times, story could use some more work. Having to use the wand to turn into enemies to get their attacks is really clumsy, especially since you'll probably want to play as your own creations most of the time. Game doesn't tell you at all what defines a creature's type or moves(although with moves you can sorta guess).

I think some N64DD or Dreamcast games (and Magic Pengel of course) already had the "model your own character" thing way before this game did it, but in my opinion Graffiti Kingdom does it best. 3D modeling with an analog stick sounds like a nightmare, but here it's easy to get something minimally close enough to what you want with varying amounts of effort.

I think the environments are really pretty. The arts and crafts theme might not shine through every level equally, but when it's there its very well done. Indoors are kind of janky, but most of the time they feel good to look at. The music is probably the best thing about this game, give it a listen even if you couldn't get through the whole thing!

Overall this game was pretty good! The use of roleplaying to show the characters projecting their emotions is very interesting and it works well, though I'd say I'd have liked for it to be a bit more on the nose on Effie and Sendaria's threads since they're usually the lengthiest.

Speaking of the latter though, my biggest issues with the game are related to her and how the game wants you to view and treat her to get the best ending. It's a matter of opinion at the end of the day but it really didn't sit well with me and soured the ending of the game for me a bit.