What I wanted was an RPG. Sonic Chronicles? No. In fact, I don't really see myself enjoying that game. I tried to watch a playthrough of it (something that's become somewhat of a past time for me this year, watching playthroughs of video games) and I didn't get far for two reasons. First of all, the story was poorly written, and secondly... I was not in the mood to watch a Sonic game of Sonic doing something that doesn't express his speed. It's a deal breaker because how he expresses his speed is a big deal. (Why do you think there are so many people throwing in custom Sonic voices in Generations? Voices from Unleashed and Adventure 2. To put it simple, it brings him to life.) So I picked up FF13 - yeah, I said it. A non-Sonic game in my blog. You know... this is actually something I've been wanting to point out, actually (especially since I've been playing Unleashed lately). When I was looking at what people were saying about Final Fantasy XIII, they seemed to say two things about the game that were very similar to what some people were saying about Unleashed. Yeah, you guessed it.
1. Linearity: Now, if Role-Playing Games happen to be something new to you, or you've never played any games in the FF series, I'll try to keep it simple. RPGs such as FF have always offered a sense of diversity and openness. On a large scale, you get a world map with plenty of exploration, a variety of ways to travel, a long story, a battle/character development system and hopefully a thoroughly developed cast. On a smaller scale, you get various vehicles, various mini-games, side-quests that have various tasks that offers either a reward or if you're lucky, it can add to the story, sometimes optional characters, a ton of monsters (some of which may aid you in battle), tons of items that rank from useless to too good to use unless it's the hardest battle in the game (though it still may never get used), side-bosses, weapons/armor, etc.. 13 was in fact missing a lot of things longtime fans were accustomed to. No world map, no various transportation, no sense of exploration (everything's mostly a long narrow hallway), no mini-games (maybe one). Final Fantasy XIII is really an all or nothing game, and people bitched.
Sonic Unleashed's linearity was criticized in it's level design of course and people bitched because it didn't have much of a platforming game.
2. Auto-play: In FFXIII, people said that the battle system requires little to no effort thanks to auto-battle. Now this was only true up to a certain point. First, if you didn't reach the part of the game where the character development system opens up (give it an hourish) then you'd eventually learn that you can not just mash autobattle. The irony of this is that most people who started the series (like myself) played FF7, and honestly, that game's battle system in comparison was extremely linear. Everyone pretty much leveled up the same and your physical power would eventually reach a point where you could just HOLD down the button that selects the command while you waited your turn and just auto-attacked with your normal attack. I have never, ever died so much in a FF game like I have in FF13. It does to a very solid degree, require a lot of micromanagement to develop strong characters and to earn high scores in battle, you must be strategically efficient with your attacks (which will also depend on how you developed your characters). It does boil down to making the right decisions fast enough.
Sonic Unleashed's auto-play, you've heard it... boost-to-win. I've probably already given my opinion in the past on what I think of that term. Personally, I think it's a scrubby term that suggests to me (when referring to Unleashed) that the game requires little or no effort to get from point A to point B. Some people may argue back that old school games were just hold right-to-win in some cases. Again, like in FF13, if you do not reach a certain point of the game, you will soon find out that braindead boosting doesn't work for very long. The linear level designs won't allow it. Another thing is that there is a reason why in Sonic games, the clock ticks forwards instead of backwards. There is a huge gameplay in Unleashed that's still to this day being developed which dictates how fast Sonic gets from point A to point B to point Z. I don't think many people get it. Just because you get from point A to point B in Sonic Unleashed by holding down the boost button doesn't mean you win. It means you just aren't able to figure out the other things Sonic is capable of in terms of creating speed. It's not that simple as pressing a button in Windmill Isle Act 2. (I had something else to say, but I forgot.)
In the end, FF13... for what it was worth, I felt it was a pretty decent game. It may not have been closer to it's roots, and it did have room for improvement (yeah, 13-2 pretty much let me down by dumbing down the battle system and making a story I could hardly consider captivating.).
Unleashed on the other hand... yeah, you think I'm going to start bitching about the Werehog? No. For what it's worth, it took a while for me to appreciate Unleashed, but it somehow seems to surprise me to this day (even moreso than Generations) what people can do in that game to make the fastest time. It's NOT EASY. I felt like Generations sort of closed the gap a bit with how advanced you can be in the game (granted it's newer and yeah, I've still been paying attention to it - the D and even M-speed is possible in Generations, though it's harder to execute.) Unleashed really had the makings of a great 3D Sonic game with the daytime levels.
Well, that is all... oh wait... almost all. Yeah, I made a vid. I'll go into details about it later.
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