#AND THIS IS THE GUY THAT MURDERED AN ENTIRE CITY FOR SOME CATGIRL ASS

[semi-sketchy]

I finished Chaos Island again

Odd thing to say, but I had a better time than my first playthrough? Like ok, the way I've been playing is map out the entire island then do the story stuff. No needing to stop and do cyberspace or worrying about tokens, I literally just spin in circles for 10 minutes (or fish, but circles is faster) and I'm good for the entire island. It's been nice.

Yes, Chaos suffers horribly from 2D, but the dash pads are just as bad on Ares and at least when I see an island in the distance, it's easy enough to run around the edge looking for a rail system rather than trying to figure which path that's out of draw-distance leads me to the top of a ledge. I like the wider area without walls sectioning things off.

That's...about where the good parts end, though.

I've been avoiding chests I know for a fact are traversal objects, (I'm actually surprised how well I remember?) but the ground is incredibly uneven to the point you can't properly cyloop some stuff. This is also bad because while you go flying half the time, Sonic also sticks to the ground and makes crossing the few lava rivers an actual problem. You jump and his gravity almost follows the curve of the ledge and dunks you. You have to put in some serious effort to combat the wonky physics here.

The quests have always been my least favorite part of the game, but this is abysmal. Bridge the gap sucks ass because you have no control over where the homing attack locks onto and you keep having to reset because oopsie! Sonic wasted 2 seconds by going out of his way to change the homing reticle two frames before you hit the button! I also had no issues with pinball on my first playthrough, but I get the hate now. Look I like pinball and I like pinball in Sonic, it's the one quest that's on brand for him (I will seriously never understand why cutting grass is an actual required objective in this game), but my GOD is that a bare bones and bad pinball table. The score multiplier also gets reset if you lose a ball, so when it decides to off itself, it pads onto your time. Hacking minigame is an odd choice, but I like it? Maybe I should play Ikaruga...

While I like mapping the island, the part I hate most here is two points are locked behind story progress and this is the only time in the game they do this. It's stupid and I hate it. I hate it because it forces me to do the story and this is the point it gets really bad.

Like Kronos was kinda nothing, Ares was entertaining with Knuckles (even though they were trying to gaslight me about Knuckles never leaving his island like I'm sorry have the last 20 years been a joke to you?), but Chaos actually pissed me off. Tails' dialogue is stupid because it's so clearly written by someone who isn't smart trying to sound smart by using big words to confuse others even though they aren't actually complicated. (mutation is not a hard word to grasp, guys.) That's not how Tails speaks and it completely throws the idea of character voice out the bloody window to fit into an archetype.

Man I wanna play Xenoblade. I'll even take Xenoblade 3 with Alvis being reduced to an ageist computer at this point.