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pixelheartthrob · 2 months

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In Defense of Princess Elise.

When I first got heavily into the Sonic franchise in 2020, I had already heard of how bad 06 was and that Elise was the worst part of it. While 06 isn't a great game by any means, Elise is definitely not the biggest problem. The fandom made me believe that she was an uncaring, selfish person who liked doing...inappropriate things to animals. Once I played the game, however, I saw that this is the complete opposite of how she is. The fandom and the entire internet (because the hatred people have for Elise extends far beyond the fanbase) lied about this character and everyone went along with it for decades.

She had an arc where Sonic taught her to open up, enjoy life, and made her feel genuine happiness for the first time since her father died. I thought it was a sweet and simple arc, and compared to how headache-inducing the time travel stuff can be, I prefer the simplicity of Elise's story. A lot of people blame Elise herself for getting kidnapped but it's not really the character's fault, it's the contrived plots fault. It's common for fan rewrites to try and fix this by changing Elise into a fighter with capabilities on the same level as the other characters, but that's not really fixing. It's more akin to replacing because Elise isn't a fighter. Even worse, there are rewrites of 06 that straight up replace Elise with Sally or Blaze. It reminds me of people saying Elise would be better if she was an anthro character, but her being human isn't a problem. It's just the art direction that needs improving. I actually think Elise being human is one of the things that makes her unique (and her controversial status as Sonic's human love interest is what she's most well known for, so if Sega was to remake 06 and she suddenly showed up as an entirely different species, it'd be a bit jarring lol). You can also considerably lower the number of contrived kidnappings without changing Elise into something she's not. Elise's story and character are more emotion-driven than action-driven, so there are other ways she can be strong. She's already a strong character in an emotional sense. In fact, she's the most emotionally strong character in the series.

For example, I think Elise blowing out the Flame of Disaster (or the Flame of Hope, as it was previously called) is one of the most powerful moments in the franchise.

People give Elise a lot of crap for her breakdown, mostly her "I don't care what happens to the world!" line. This line gets blown out of proportion by a lot of Sonic fans and gamers in general because they aren't very observant and take everything at face value. People call Elise "selfish" for this outburst but just put yourself in her shoes. Imagine if you had to give up the only friend you've ever had ‐ the only person who made you feel genuine happiness in years. All the moments you spent together would be erased from both of your memories. I don't think most people would be able to make such a sacrifice. Get off her back, guys. She's not selfish. Everyone has had moments where they got upset at how unfair the world is.

She obviously didn't mean it, because she regained her composure when remembering Sonic's words and blew out the flame shortly afterwards. People also claim she's being dramatic and crying over someone she's known for a few days, but they conveniently forget that Sonic was literally her only friend and the only one she felt happiness around since the death of her parents. It's understandable that she'd get attached. The fact that Elise blew out the flame and put the world's needs above her own despite all she's been through and despite knowing that she'll lose her only friend shows how selfless she is. She does care about the world.

So, how would one fix Elise without completely altering her character? It's simple, really. Just give her more screentime. Maybe explore how she feels about her parents (especially her father) and how she coped with their deaths. The "not crying for 10 years" thing is the only problem people seem to have with Elise's backstory, but I think there's an easy fix for this, too.

In the scene where Sonic is killed, we see a glimpse of Elise remembering her father's words. At first I wondered what this flashback was showing, but I think this is meant to show Elise's reaction to the news of her father's death. As we can see, she's not crying, but is gently clutching the blue chaos emerald and seems to be in a trance-like state. My idea is that maybe the energy of the chaos emerald regulates her emotions and she carries it around for comfort. It could also help her cope by detaching from the situation or reality altogether.

We can see her clutching the emerald during the first cutscene at the festival when Eggman threatens to take it from her, too. She is understandably reluctant to hand the emerald over because it was given to her as a charm to ease the pain of her father's death, so she holds it dearly. She probably had the emerald in this cutscene as emotional support just in case anything went wrong during the festival because other than that, I can't think of a reason for her to be carrying it. There are also moments where she blanks out or has hallucinations.

So that's my idea as to how Elise went for so long without crying. Elise is a decent character that just needed more screentime, not a complete character overhaul like people say. In my proposed fixes, I didn't make many drastic changes or remove anything from Elise's character or backstory, I just added to it. The main problem is that Elise was underwritten, not badly written, as there were things that should've been explored more regarding her backstory and her parents. I'd like to mention what I said at the start about people portraying her as a creep whose into necrophilia and beastiality, mainly because of her kissing Sonic. People really overreact to the kiss scene as if it's a scandalous moment that Sega tried to sneak into a kids game, but it's...really not. It's clearly meant to be reminiscent of a fairytale and the kiss was obscured by a light. It's quite literally the most tame thing in the universe. Plus, Sonic's spirit was present during the kiss and the first thing he does upon being revived is thank Elise. It's also not beatiality because Sonic isn't a literal hedgehog. He's an anthropomorphic cartoon character that's able to walk, talk, and think like humans do.

Just like how people will portray Elise as a creep, they'll portray Sonic as being disturbed by her very presence or Amy wanting to kill Elise because she "stole her man". This obviously contradicts everything in the actual game because Sonic is shown to enjoy Elise's company and Amy has a lot of respect for Elise. It's kind of misogynistic to think that just because two female characters have a crush on the same guy, they have to be at eachothers throats. It's also strange because Sonic fans will throw huge fits when the characters are written poorly, out of character, or flanderized, but that's exactly what they're doing to the characters. Writing Amy as hateful and violent towards Elise just turns Amy into the crazy, overprotective, Sonic stalker that fans hate to see people accuse her of being. If Sonic was to act like a jerk towards any of his other friends, fans would consider that out of character, so why do those same fans portray him as acting like that towards Elise - someone he is shown to appreciate and consider a friend? I guess it's okay to wildly misrepresent a character or flanderize them, but only when it's directed at another character that you don't like. This fandom makes no sense.

#sonic 06 #princess elise #sonic the hedgehog #sonic series #Elise deserved better #amy rose #sega

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edgy-ella · 8 months

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A new era begins!

(It’s hard to hear, but Sebastian said “criiiiinge,” which is why I told him to shut up)

I’ve wanted to play Sonic 06 for a long time. Not because it’s good, obviously—this is one of the most infamous video games of all time, perhaps the most to come out of the new millennia. No, I wanted to play it because I felt obligated to.

Of course, everyone “knows” 06 is bad, but how many people have actually played it? I hadn’t, and I don’t think it’s fair to shit talk a game no matter how bad its reputation is. I mean, I have my fair share of games that I like that have been critically panned as well as my fair share of games that I dislike that have been critically praised. No amount of lets plays and reviews can substitute actually experiencing a game for yourself. So, play it I shall. I also see it as a sort of hazing ritual as a Sonic fan.

A few years back, I got a used copy of the game on PS3 at GameStop for $10. Problem was, I didn’t have a PS3 to play it on. I thought one of my friends had one, but it turns out that she has basically every Sony console except the PS3 (as it truly had no games). This turned out to be a common trend with more and more people. But now, finally, I have a console to play it on—the PS3 at my college’s gaming club. So every Friday from 5-7 from this day on, I’m gonna be playing Sonic 06 until I beat it.

(A lot of people have asked me why I don’t just emulate it; you don’t understand. This isn’t just any game. This is Sonic 06. I don’t want to even for a single second blame any of the game’s…quirks on my computer’s poor specs or the emulator not being properly optimized. I want to play 06 the way God intended.)

After having played through Sonic’s campaign up to White Acropolis, I can say that it’s definitely the worst mainline 3D Sonic game that I’ve played. Wow, shocker I know. But, I think there’s a lot more to talk about here than just saying “game bad” and writing it off entirely. As someone who grew up hearing horror stories about how bad this game was, it is absolutely fascinating to analyze now that I’ve gotten a chance to actually play it.

I don’t think that Sonic 06 is inherently a bad game. A lot of its biggest issues are technical—the camera is awkward to control and often gets stuck, Sonic‘s physics paired with the awful camera make him a chore to move around with (though I don’t think he feels as sluggish as I’ve seen some people say; it’s more that everything else is fighting against him to make him feel slower than he actually is), the frame rate is HELLA inconsistent, yadda yadda yadda. With all that being said though, I don’t think the game is full of bad ideas, just bad execution.

The level design so far is okay. I’ve played through worse levels in a Sonic game, but I am also not very far into 06. Once again, the poor technical performance of the game is what holds the levels back, not their layout or geometry. Fun loop de loop sections are held back by Sonic being flung off them into the ocean because he was one degree off center, and the game doesn’t correct you on it like in similar parts of other Sonic games. I think the Mach speed sections would genuinely be a welcome addition to Adventure style games if Sonic had better handling (especially in the air). So the ideas there aren’t inherently awful, it’s just their execution (though you could argue that Wave Ocean plagiarizes Emerald Coast enough to say that the level design is lazy for taking so much from a level in a previous game).

Perhaps my most controversial example of this good idea, bad execution philosophy is with the boss fights.

Let’s talk about Silver.

The first boss fight against Silver is one of the most memorable things from Sonic 06. When people talk about the game, if they don’t think of the cutscene where Elise kisses Sonic or the more recent Real-Time Fandub, this is what they think of. It’s no use!, Silver’s voice line where he grabs Sonic in this game, ended up becoming something of an unofficial catchphrase of his (though the comics often have other characters say it to Silver instead). I remember seeing multiple Top 10 lists back in the day where this fight ranked among the worst video game bosses of the 2000s. Not just for Sonic. For all video games of that era.

Needless to say, I was not optimistic going into the fight. I expected to get stuck, to rage, to curse the day Italian hedgehogs ever gained telekinesis. But I have to say…

The fight really wasn’t all that bad.

Granted, I had hindsight on my side going into it. But for a fight that I expected to suffer through death after death after infinite loop after death for upwards of twenty minutes, I ended up getting through it in a little less than five minutes. And I know that exact number because I had someone else at club record me playing from the second Silver showed up in the cutscene to the second I saw my A Rank after I beat him.

(In case anyone’s wondering; I don’t want to post the video since other members of the gaming club appear throughout it, and I don’t want to publicly post a video of any of them online without their permission)

The fight is annoying for sure, but that’s more the fault of the game’s preexisting issues. Sonic's poor physics and camera control really work against you in boss fights. But this is nowhere near the worst boss fight in a Sonic game, let alone of any game in the 2000s.

Now that I've actually played through the fight, I can kinda see what the devs were going for here. You start out right in front of both Silver and a circle of rings, both of which you are naturally drawn to run towards. This will prompt Silver to grab and throw you when you get too close to him, but the timing of how long it takes each of you to reach the circle of rings means that you should have at least one ring on you before Silver catches you. The devs likely wanted to use this as a way to safely teach you how to fight him: keep your distance and wait for him to pick up something else so he can't pick up you.

This is a fine idea in theory, but there's a few things that hurt this approach:

1) It's extremely unlikely that you will beat Silver on your first try. The more you replay the fight, the more you are conditioned to avoid Silver—meaning that you will want to avoid the circle of rings he spawns right in front of at the start of the fight. This makes it much easier for Silver to come in and one-shot you, since you most likely won't have any rings to back you up. I fell into this trap once, and I'm sure there's video evidence of a bunch of YouTubers doing the same. Though, with that being said, there is a Ring container in the southeast corner of the arena (if Sonic starts facing north), so if you’re clever you can book it there at the start of the fight. Which is easier said than done, because of…

2) THE CAMERA. Once again, the game's awful, awful camera control really bite you in the ass for boss fights. This was also an issue I had with Egg Cerberus, but Silver's smaller character model and faster attacks really elevate the issue. Since there's no way to lock onto Silver and turning the camera is so clunky, he will often manage to sneak up behind you and grab you before you have a chance to find him. In that sense, Silver almost feels like an enemy in a horror game here; you'll move the camera around a little bit, get jumpscared when Silver comes into frame, and hope you react fast enough to not get instakilled by him.

3) The homing attack has a habit of locking back onto Silver even when you try to homing attack away from him, so keeping your distance after you hit him once isn't as easy as it should be. This isn’t that big of a deal because you can just drop down and walk away from him, you just really need to fight muscle memory to avoid it

Once again, this is a case of 06 being hurt by its execution and technical implementation rather than just being full of bad ideas. There’s other examples of that in the fight too, like Silver desperately needing a cooldown after he grabs and throws you. This would fix the infamous loop where he traps you against the wall as well as the problem I ended up running into where he throws you towards the sky then grabs you again before you can reach the ground and grab more rings.

Is Silver secretly the best boss fight in Sonic history? No! But I understand what the devs were going for with this fight. If the camera and controls were more polished, I don’t think anyone would think twice about fighting Silver, wall loop or not. I can see why the Project 06 mod has been lavishing in such high praise from the fandom; buried underneath 06's rushed, sloppy coding is a solid framework.

So overall I’m…cautiously optimistic for the rest of the game? I can’t believe I’m saying that about Sonic 06. Sure, the physics and camera is a mess, but the game isn’t unplayable like so many others have claimed in the past. Maybe it’s because I have a soft spot for the adventure games, but I’ve played worse games than this. I understand that the worst is yet to come, like Silver’s ball puzzle or the multiple one hit kills in the Final Story, but hey, if getting past “one of the worst boss fights in video game history” was a cakewalk for me, then maybe being pessimistic about the future is just no use.

The story is still hot garbage though lol

#sonic the hedgehog #sega #sonic 06 #sonic next gen #project 06 #shadow the hedgehog #silver the hedgehog #princess elise #mephiles the dark #gaming #Ella essays

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