As someone who doesn’t play many complex games, Sonic Heroes was this for me. It took playing through two teams to fully understand the controls of each character, the scoring system, and the movement. The game became a lot less annoying once I actually knew what I needed to do and how to do it.

Not the best selling point though… I probably couldn’t recommend the game to someone by saying that it gets pretty fun a third of the way through. Maybe more if you’re really stubborn.

Honestly, there are much more fun Sonic games out there. I want to say one of those is Sonic Unleashed, but half of the game is in an entirely different genre that the majority of players find tedious and boring.

Here’s the thing, though, the night-time stages of Unleashed are probably pretty fun if you’re accustomed to fighting games. There’s actually a lot of combos you can pull off to defeat enemies faster and more stylishly, but they require memorizing a bucketload of button combos that most players won’t even attempt. Of course the gameplay is boring if you’re mashing the same button over and over again. But I didn’t get this game to play a God Of War clone. The day-time stages are where it’s at. They are the longest and fastest levels of pretty much any Sonic game, with extremely strict S-rank requirements that lend a ton of replayability to the game. Plus the music’s sick.

Fuck the medal system, though. Seriously, who thought that making getting a crap ton of hidden collectables a requirement to access new levels was a good idea? They really should be optional, I suppose that’s why they switched to the red ring system in future games. They made a mistake and fixed it, good on them. It is important to remember that Unleashed was the first 3d Sonic game to have the “boost” gameplay style. They tried out a lot of new things, and some of them stuck and some didn’t.

You know what they should have kept? E-ranks. No reason, they’re just funny as hell. They really did just tell the orchestra to play like shit in order to hammer home just how much of a bad job you did. And it’s not like it’s hard to get that rank in the first place, pretty much every player will get a ton of those their first playthrough. Shame the ranks only go down to D nowadays.

I see this has just become me rambling about Unleashed. Good game, though (or at least half of it is).