I “finished†Sonic and the Secret Rings last night, by which I mean completed all the missions; so I figure it's a good time to write up my impressions of adventure mode. This is a rather long essay detailing the fine points of the game, so if you already know a lot about it or don't care to read several pages you might want to skip to the last few paragraphs. It's pretty spoiler-free aside from a few mission/unlockable requirements and skill descriptions.
For those who aren't quite accustomed with the game, the general idea is closer to Star Fox than Mario 64. You tilt the remote left and right to make Sonic weave left and right, but he always runs forward unless you pull back to send him backwards, hit 1 to bring him to a halt or 2 to send him into a jump. The jumping itself is also rather different – tapping 2 initiates a low, distance-covering jump, whereas holding 2 charges a high leap. In both jumps you can hit 1 or 2 to 'cancel' and fly into the ground or thrust the controller forwards to either fly forward or, if an enemy is close enough for a target to appear on it, home attack into the enemy. The controls work pretty well, but for those accustomed to the usual Sonic formula, take a lot of getting used to; I was still occasionally trying to home attack with 2 halfway through the game. The one wonky spot in the controls is walking backwards: you have to tilt the controller back about 135 degrees to start him back, but if you tilt it too far he goes forwards again, so it takes some getting used to.
In general, the game is definitely a shift from the usual Sonic formula, mostly for the better. The gameplay is quite constrained due to being 'on rails', and its effects basically define the game. There's very little in the way of branching paths – some levels split off occasionally a-la Heroes, but for the most part you won't see more than a couple brief branches per level. The cleanness and stability benefit from the rails change immeasurably. The camera is much better, though for some reason it doesn't pull back when you go backwards. There are much fewer times when you die and aren't quite sure why it just happened, and glaring deficiencies like falling through floors are completely absent. In 20 hours of gameplay so far I've seen only one glitch, in which I used a superspeed move while Sonic was flipping out on a crazy twisted path and he ended up falling in a somewhat awkward corkscrew around it for about 5 seconds before returning to the path.
Though the rails change is the most obvious, it doesn't stop there. Sonic and the Secret Rings is a reinvention in the sort of way that Mario 64 was a reinvention – they basically left no element of the game untouched and revised the entire concept of the franchise, focusing on its core elements. The concept of a soul gauge similar to Sonic Rush is added, which you power up by collecting “pearls†(red orbs) and defeating enemies, and discharge on Speed Break (a superspeed Rush-on-steroids) and Time Break (bullet-time slowmo for pinpoint obstacle evasion). Monitors are gone, Eggman is barely present, any characters post-S&K are all absent. No spindash, no robots, no Chaos Emeralds. You can't even pick up rings when lost, though you only lose 20 at a time. But to think of the game as having thrown out a lot of stuff misses the point, as it's more that they simply aren't a part of the vision.
And the vision is a marvelous thing. Once you master the controls, the game -flows- in a way that no 3D Sonic game really has. Running through Sand Oasis at top speed and flying around over and through obstacles is a visceral thrill that simply has not been delivered in 3D Sonic, not at these speeds and not with this beauty and the sheer competence of it all, where you're not worrying about a punch sending you over a cliff or executing a bounce instead of a lightdash but just running and jumping and hitting things and winning.
But that brings me to the next issue – how long it takes to get to the point where you can fly through Sand Oasis at top speed. The game has an RPG-style levelling and skill system, which for the most part is an interesting way to progress and improve your skills, but which severely nerfs you in the beginning and which I suspect competitors in particular will find stifling. You start off with under half of your eventual top speed and acceleration, which I assume is so that people have a chance to get acquainted with the controls before they're flying along at super speeds, but not even having the option of going quickly stings a bit. It'll take 2-3 hours of gameplay before the game starts ramping you up in a serious way, and 7-9 before you're really flying. The game gives you bronze, silver and gold medals based on your speed, and you'll be doing well if you get a bronze on your first go-around of each level; there's no way to get golds without returning better equipped.
But aside from the quibble of the initial nerfing, the level and skill system actually works better than you might expect it to. You get experience points based on your score plus a bonus for the first time you beat each mission, and this increases your skill points, max ring count (every 5 levels – if you're WTFing at this, I'll explain later) and soul gauge capacity (every 5 levels once you have it). There's over 100 skills of various skill point requirements – but it's more accurate to say that there's closer to 30 enhancements of three potency levels and a few dozen unique enhancements. Rather than actual new abilities, they're moreso powerups along the lines of “increased defense while sliding†or “speed up on landingâ€, with some quirkier ones like “use soul gauge to resurrect on death†or “expend rings on landing to charge soul gauge†or “flip over an obstacle when you dash into itâ€. And since you have a limited number of skill points, you'll always be making judgment calls between what kinds of skills would benefit your current mission and which are unuseful or even keep you from winning – you don't want a skill that attracts pearls in a no pearl mission! Thankfully, the game gives you four configurations to switch out, so you can have one focused on speed and one on precision or what have you. My only other complaint is that the XP bonuses from beating missions for the first time are much larger than the XP you get from score, so once you beat most of the missions your levelling rate will hit the floor. It's unfortunate that they didn't give XP bonuses for medals to keep the momentum going.
There's another thing that might keep you from enjoying the full splendor of SatSR – and that's that it is freakin -hard-. I am deadly serious, as is the game. Just finishing the missions is harder than A-ranking Shadow. It has no lives, rather giving you infinite checkpoint continues, which is helpful on the main missions but is small comfort when you're attempting a perfection mission in which even one hit means starting over and you're running amongst explosions and cascades of falling spike balls. While to an extent the missions are made easier by heavy use of the brake button, that again will be small comfort if you're trying for gold medals, which are purely time-based. If you're a completionist who tends to throw controllers, you might want to factor another $40+ into the cost of the game because it will rip you to shreds. As I recall, designer Ogawa had cited 10 hours to win the game and 30 hours to do everything; while the first number is about right (it took me 9:40), I can only assume that the latter number is based on just finishing the missions and not actually gold medalling them. The game recognizes its difficulty and keeps the hardest quarter or so of the missions locked until you've beaten the game, and it's taken me another 10 hours just to beat those.
Though as I alluded to earlier, it's not a completely unfair challenge. The difference between SatSR and something like Heroes is like comparing bench pressing to a mugging. It might be hard as nails to beat a tough challenge, but there's always the feeling that with a better mastery of the controls and a better knowledge of the mission you'll get closer to beating it. And since death rolls back the timer to a checkpoint and the medals are time-based, dying 5 minutes into a challenge isn't the exercise in frustration that it is in most 3D Sonic. The main drawback on the difficulty is a common refrain in gaming in general – on some of the later missions with hard failure conditions like no hits, you'll find yourself running through the initial areas a lot in order to master the later ones.
That's not the only way in which the game challenges you to push yourself to your limits. The “special book†is full of unlockables, with 15 pages of 15 each ranging from concept art to in-development versions of movies to music, each with a brief flavor blurb from the developers. A good deal of these are unlocked through medalling – you'll get something for each gold medal and every few silver/gold medals. The more interesting ones are the last three pages, which are emblazoned with ? ? ? through the game but once you win are gradually marked with either crazy directives or esoteric hints. Things like, “beat 20 missions with 4 or fewer skills equipped†– and charge jumping, quick jumping, home attacking and dashing all count as skills! Most missions also have 3 'fire souls' to find, which appear to unlock party games; if they're mentioned in the special book, it's in one of the 22 spots still marked ? ? ? in my book.
As for the story... well. It's the complete opposite of Sonic06, which is to say that rather than melodramatic it's totally cheesy. It almost feels tacked-on; unlike previous games, you play the 'side missions' during the story, in a form that doesn't really make sense. How does beating 20 enemies in a level help you find Sinbad? Who knows? You sure don't, as you're given no direction on how to progress the story except the general inclination that beating more missions is a good thing. You might as well just skip through all the story segments unless you're interested in the Sonic lore. Japanese voices are included this time around, but I haven't tried them.
And it's worth noting that the 'side missions' are actually the majority of the game. These aren't Adventure-style running through a level five times with different objectives, it's a dozen missions that're based on the same basic level structure but all have object placement tailored to the particular task at hand. Those tasks are almost all from a set of molds consisting of speedrunning, ring collection, 0-ring-finishing, pearl avoidance, death avoidance, hit avoidance, enemy bashing and ring chains – collecting rings in rapid fire with a chain reset if you go over a very short time limit without collecting one. They do tend to be shorter than the main missions, at a minute or two rather than 4-8 minutes, but also get much much harder, as described earlier.
One thing competitors are likely to be interested in is the score algorithm, and it's rather different from the usual and results in significantly lower scores. The three components are Action Bonus, Enemy Bonus, Ring Bonus and a general Score Multiplier. According to genus, Action Bonus is a straight number of collected pearls. Enemy Bonus as far as I've seen is 50 x enemies beaten (or 1000+ for bosses), and Ring Bonus is 3 per ring collected -regardless- of whether you lose them later, go over your ring limit, or start out with rings from skills. The multiplier is a bonus for evading hits, which is why you still want to avoid hits despite them not affecting Ring Bonus. It starts at 2.0, and I believe it lowers to 1.5->1.2->1.1->1.0 each time you get hit, and simply locks at 1.0 if you die or get hit a lot. Failing a mission sets the multiplier at 0.3, and death resets all your bonuses to 0. The end result is that scores rarely go over 5000, and only go over 2000 with long levels and/or lots of skill.
I'm hesitantly anticipating competition for a few reasons. While time attacking, your time rolls back to checkpoints on death but your soul gauge is untouched, which I'm guessing will result in annoying charge-gauge-and-die shenanigans on main missions. In score attacking, as I understand the algorithm there is no place for time, which would make high scores a matter of scouring the land for any pearl or ring or enemy and restarting if you're unfortunately hit. Ring attacking... may or may not be ultimately restricted by the Ring limit, but certainly is until you level quite high; after beating all the missions I still am under 200 rings.
To give my conclusion, a sidenote on the development on the game may be instructive. Sega originally intended to port Sonic06 to the Wii, but ultimately decided that the Wii ought to have its own specifically tailored game. The result is that SatSR was created by a different dev team (R&D1), led by a designer who hasn't done a Sonic game since Sonic Adventure 1, and with only a year rather than the usual two for development. All of these have profound effects on the finished product, of which the most obvious at a glance is the outsourcing of a Party Mode to shore up the game's beefiness. As for the main Adventure Mode which was the product of Ogawa's team, the general impression is that it's the product of a very talented set of designers who weren't given quite enough time to really bring the whole production to top notch. They worked within the limits of their schedule to the best of their ability, so it's a great game if you're up to the intense difficulty and give it the time to get into the controls and some better skills, but it still feels like they missed the opportunity to be nearly perfect if they had the time to give it a layer of polish and a few more levels and bosses. The ending credits strongly hint at the possibility of a sequel, and I can only hope that it happens because the gameplay has the potential to build a game near the 16-bit games in quality and feel. As it is, we'll have to settle for the best 3D sonic thus far – which is still a pretty good settlement if you ask me.
