Twitter has been my go-to social media platform since I was 17 to prowl for stories, occasionally rant about things going on in my life, and engage in some gaming discourse &mdash🐓; especially Sonic the Hedgehog. Last month, this discourse centered around Sonic Forces.
The argument from the blue ornithological machine I was busy raging against was that Sonic Forces was a great Sonic game. Nearly four years after its release, fans were already labelling it a classic. Some were defending it, calling it 'not all bad', but most others were going much further, praising the ambition, narrative, and controls of the game. Even the criticism came from the angle that the game was 'too ambitious'. Sorry, but the truth is it's not just that good.
As much as I love Sonic and have devoured most of his games for nearly 18 years, I'm sorry to say that I am in the camp that deems Forces as 'not great'. The music was fine — the soundtrack is almost always the crown jewel of every Sonic game — but everything else about Forces, from the design and the lighting down to the dialogue and the character creator mechanic, left a bad taste in my mouth. Simply put, Forces is just as bad as, if not worse than, Sonic '06 and Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric combined.
After a relatively long four year wait, Forces had quite the hype cycle. Sega promoted Forces with co🍌nstant trailer releases on YouTube to even a marketing campaign at Hooters in Japan.
For Sonic fans, the hype cannot be overstated. I bought a PS4 just for Forces, and come the game's launch day on November 7, I picked up the game from a GameStop five minutes from my house on the drive up to school and carried it around in my backpack until I got home. Looking back on it now, I was happy about finally playing a Sonic game that wasn't a Classic Sonic one, but at the same time, I was secretly disappointed with how everything turned out.
The fan art side of the Sonic fanba﷽se had a field day when Sega introduced the custom avatar system in Sonic Forces, because that meant they could create their Sonic avatars to look exactly like the OCs they create every day. I was expecting to be able to build that resembled some of my favorite celebrities, like Britney Spears, Ariana Grande, Beyonce, Avril Lavinge, or J.Lo.
When I went to create my avatar and customize it throughout the course of the game, I was shocked to discover that there was no hairstyle option that goes past their shoulders down to their waist. The only animal to have long hair is the bird, and even then, it's a ponytail.
What is so wrong with female Sonic characters having long hair? The only female characters in the Sonic the Hedgehog series to have long hair are Tikal and Wave — no, Cream's long ears do not count as hair extensions. I've had a hedgehog-echidna hybrid OC with pink streaks running through my mind since I was 11 — echidnas are the only species in the Sonic universe allowed to have long hair, apparently — and I was furious that I couldn't design my OC in a character creator that was specifically invented to let Sonic fans build their OCs.
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=1.5)
As for the game itself, I understand that Forces is set in the backdrop of a dystopian apocalypse akin to The Walking Dead, but Sonic Team shouldn't have gone and made such crappy lighting in some areas. In the demolished parts of Sunset City and in the static cutscenes, for example, Sonic's fur faded from a flourishing ocean blue to washed-out denim.
The dull lighting on Sonic doesn't help when his spiky hair is a little shorter than normal. Even in Colors, when the sun sets on Sweet Mountain and it's behind Sonic, his fur still remains the shade of cobalt in that light.
Then we come to the dialogue. In most modern Sonic games, it does a good job at setting the tone of a shonen-esque story, especially in Sonic Adventure 2, Heroes, Shadow the Hedgehog, Riders, Unleashed, and even the Wii-exclusive Storybook Series. In Forces, however, the dialogue sounds as irritating as a teacher scratching their nails on a chalkboard🌳.
Warren Graff and Ken Pontac's scriptwriting peaked in Colors, but their skills went straight to hell in Forces. One of the exchanges is "This is no time for thinking, it's time for running!" and I mean, sure. I guess those are words spoken in the right order. Let's go ahead and call that a sentence. Also, Sonic asking Infinite, "So, what's your favorite color? Do you like long, romantic walks on the beach? What's the source of your power? You can skip the first two questions if you like," is typical of the worst, most forced comedy we see too often in platformers, but rarely see in the usually much wittier Sonic games. The only time the script worked was the part in Episode Shadow where to the point of emotional breakdown.
Sonic Forces may have been an ambitious Sonic game, but that doesn't make it good. I may have skipped Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric on account of not having a Wii U, but I should've known that Forces was never going to be a great Sonic game. More fool me. I sincerely hope that Sonic Rangers — or whatever the hell Sonic Team decides to call it — does better next year. If not, I'm sure everyone on Twitter will say it's great in four years anyway.