What Made Sonic Forces So AWFUL

Five years after the release of Sonic Forces, and also five years since I started tackling Sonic games, we have finally reached the moment everyone has been waiting: my video on Sonic Forces. It's a game that needs no introduction, having been discussed time and time again by the Sonic community in the half-decade since it came out, but now that Frontiers is about to drop, I figured this was the perfect time to throw my hat into the ring and discuss why Sonic Forces failed to execute on anything it set out to do.
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Chapters:
00:00 Sonic Forces
05:52 It Just Fails
08:53 Modern Sonic/The Avatar Don't Work
14:00 The Level Design
17:18 Classic Sonic Doesn't Work
20:11 Mods
22:43 An Undercooked Game
25:48 The Story
30:20 The Last Straw
33:33 What Does It All Mean?
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#sonic #sonicthehedgehog #sonicforces

[solidskullz]

The biggest problem with sonic forces is that the game just plays itself. They were too afraid of making something that just didn’t play well so they made a lot of the game automated segments

[majoraslayer]

My biggest issue with the story is that 90% of it is told by talking heads on the map screen. The dialogue tells this story of huge battles and an apocalyptic takeover of the world by Eggman, if only we had a VISUAL MEDIUM TO REPRESENT THESE THINGS.

[jinxtheunluckypony]

Knuckles getting 80% of his army wiped out by attacking with everyone on a whim is hilarious.

[JakeRanney]

Holy crap it does NOT feel like it's been 5 years since this came out

[guthou]

I will never forget when they announced a trailer that showed the sillouette of a new playable character without even hinting that it was a customizeable avatar, so people were legit worried that it was the sillouette of Bubsy. Good times.

[MariusUrucu]

I think the biggest sin a game can commit is being boring to play... that is Sonic Forces.

It "works" but it feels bland and lifeless gameplay-wise, it just makes you look back to the past games and make you think what we lost along the way.

[Phos]

What I always found remarkable about the custom character creator is that I don't think anyone was actually able to actually recreate their characters, the possibility space of the editor just didn't overlap with the sorts of characters people were making up.

[SamWickens]

It's kind of funny that this is the second time the writers didn't understand the difference between time travel and being from a different dimension. See Blaze the Cat's appearance in 06.

[mindtraveller]

I think the reason people associate the term "Meta Era" with "bad" is because many of us are just sick to death of meta-ness in pop culture generally. Every story these days seems to come with its own riff track. They're constantly winking at the camera going "Isn't this stupid? See, we know we're stupid. We're making fun of our own stupidity and that means we're cool." I think what people miss from 2000's media is it's earnestness. We're tired of irony, bring sincerity back, even if its cheesy.

[tiruliru]

I'm surprised you didn't talk about how characters were treated in this game. Tails was at his WORST in Forces. In this game, he hangs out with Classic Sonic, cowers in front of the Egg Pawns and Chaos, can't even repair Omega, doesn't even use his Tornado and _"True dat"._

I could pretty much say the same thing with Sonic, Silver and Knux, but I don't feel like ranting about it, so rant over.

Edit: Turns out J talked about Tails cowering in front of Chaos 0 at 29:56. Sorry, my bad.

[Fluxuation]

The fact that we’re literally counting how many seconds we get to play the game per level is astounding

[raulbastidas]

The biggest issue/ wasted potential (besides, you know, the whole game) was the execution of Infinite's powers/character. I remember a little while after the game's release there was an AMA one of the writers of the game (If i find the link I'll link it in an update) where they [the writers] listed a few concepts they wanted to try but were denied either because Sonic team didn't like it or resources.

1) "Sonic's Torture & the Fake Sonic"
It's mentioned in game and never touched upon. If I remember correctly the original idea was that Sonic would be "tortured" mentally. Infinite would put Sonic in different illusions making him believe he'd escape only to find out it was just an illusion, breaking Sonic's confidence. These illusions would be used as the tutorial stage. Inifinte's constant mentioning of 'data' is because he was using data collected from Sonic's reactions to different scenarios in order to create a fake sonic that would infiltrate the rebellion and HQ so that eggman could snuff them out for good. The fake Sonic would indeed do this and the invasion on the HQ would occur however mid battle Inifinte would be distracted by Silver and the illusion would go wrong, classic Sonic would show up through a portal and a boss fight would ensue against the fake sonic or "Sonic.exe" (Yes they wanted to canonize SONIC.EXE, they thought it'd be a nice reference to the 'Fun is Inifinite' screen where the concept of sonic.exe came from and a nod the fandom would get)

The reason this was shot down was because Sonic Team said that "Sonics not allowed to be sad or be shown as the bad guy" also they didn't like the idea of referencing sonic.exe

2) "Tails and Classic Sonic"
After the Sonic.exe fight Tails has a sort of mental break, "If they can't trust Sonic, who can they trust?". This is why when Chaos shows up Tals is not mentally in a place where he could fight, So classic sonic shows up to save Tails and that gives him hope, classic is from a diffferent dimention he finds out and is therefor guaranteed not an illusion so they can trust him until Tails can create a device that can determine what's an illusion and whats not.

This idea was scrapped because the Sonic.exe fight was denied

3) "The Avatar's Original Role"
Leading up to forces there were a lot and I mean a LOT of theories that the playable character was somehow involved in Infinite's backstory, in the AMA this was confirmed a part of the original concept. Again, if i remember correctly, the custom character was originally planned to be a childhood friend of Zero (Infinite's original name before it was changed to just be inifinte) and the whole game is trying to save their friend after their encounter with Inifinite, as shown in game. Because of this encounter they join the main cast and knuckles sends the avatar and the Chaotics to go investigate Infinite's origins. after a few levels the custom hero would find a computer with information on the phantom ruby as well as the location of the real sonic. The avatar would release sonic remotely and run to try and join him but is stopped by the Real Metal Sonic and a boss fight occurs. Meanwhile the real sonic escapes and the boss fight with Zavoc happens. Later the two would meet up and arrive at resistance HQ only to witness the tail end of Infinite's invasion. The two would split up Sonic saving silver and the custom hero finding tails to tell them about what they've learned about the phantom ruby. The avatar would learn about the fake sonic and that even tails doesn't trust sonic at this point because of what just happened. This would lead to Sonic and the avatar's close relationship because they are currently the only ones who know the truth.

Scrapped due to crunch time and other issues that Sonic Team had with Sonic and Tails portrayals

4) Misc Cuts due to crunch/budget/other obvious reasons

Sonic and shadow would have a moment where the two discuss being confused for illlusions

In the cutscene where infinite drops the sun Metal Sonic would Challenge Infinite due to it being jealous Inifinte beat sonic and if he kills him Metal would never get the chance to do it, this stalls long enough for the heroes to stop the Sun illusion

Super Sonic was going to be in the game, originally the Sun illusion was powered by the seven chaos emerald and while Inifinte was distracted the player would run to collect them to stop the illusion

Avatar would get their own unique "super" form by combining all the playable wisps

It was mentioned once that maybe the phantom ruby was a shard of solaris' core and infinite would actually be zero possed by mephiles but that was more a joke than anything.

[Handguns]

"sonic forces me to sit through 3 hours of boredom with little to no actual impact" is a pretty fitting description for this game ngl

[inksicle]

I think the funniest part about this game is when i went to buy sonic forces at gamestop, they gave me the pre-order package for free because nobody pre-ordered the game

[salvatoreocello]

“Do I have regrets?…I have a few!!!!”

Sounds like a villain monologue 😂

[grantgarbour]

I love that unleashed and Black Knight are finally seen as decent games. Because I loved both of them, much more than any recent 3D sonic game

[delightful_pov]

my biggest problem was that it promised so much and delivered so little 😭

[KingTvlip]

I can't believe you're finally at the end of this series. I've been here since the beginning of the Sonic Retrospective, and it feels like a dream now that you reached Forces. Godspeed to you, the rest videos and the Frontiers video!

[valettashepard]

One of my favorite reviewers played this and made his avatar another sonic, so the forces of eggman were defeated by the combined forces of Sonic, Sonic, and Sonic. Probably the funniest way to play this imo.

[retrogamer]

14:38, One of the worst things about this stage is that the enemies and Wisp capsules at the beginning are positioned like groups of bowling pins. It's almost as if the designers knew how lazy the level design was.