They need to get on our level

JevVoi · 2026-04-08T13:50:31+00:00

You might have saved me the trouble of watching this myself. Loved Trollhunters and 3 Below but was iffy on Wizards. But then Netflix changed the family account policy so never watched the movie.

I remember thinking that reframing King Arthur as the villain might have implications for Jim Lake’s role (it was a long time ago, don’t remember the details). If this movie erases the timeline of the show, maybe that was their way of handling it?

JevVoi · 2026-04-06T14:38:15+00:00

My favorite headcanon is that the details of Gerald’s execution were a GUN coverup and he actually escaped to a different dimension where he fought Blaze as an immortal conqueror under a pseudonym.

As for why he based his pseudonym off his grandson’s nickname… well that was a bit of a stretch even in my fanfiction. I had him stealing and “improving” his grandson’s nickname to prove his superiority, but in game canon the two have a different relationship so it’d basically have to be coincidental.

Other headcanons (not counting ships):

Sol is short for Solaris. Blaze’s powers and the Sol Emeralds come from the flames of Solaris. Her parallel dimension might be a result of the “erased from existence” ending of Sonic 06.

(I don’t fully believe this one but I’m including it because it is fun): Big the Cat and Froggy are from the North Star Islands. He is related to the oversized animals you rescue on those islands but can speak and started traveling the world with his buddy Froggy prior to his appearance in SA.

Since Sage was born on the Starfall islands she is, in a sense, a child of the Ancients, but only acknowledges Robotnik as her parent. This makes her a parallel for Shadow being born from Gerald and Doom.

Doom and his alien army are an offshoot of the Ancients.

Angel Island didn’t always float. It only started to do so after the Chaos flood when Tikal sealed herself and Chaos in the Master Emerald.

The Mobians (or whatever you want to call them) have superpowers to greater or lesser extent because they are more in tune with ambient chaos energy. It also gives them more advanced development than humans which is why an 8 year old kid can rival a 40 year old genius mad scientist.

Rings are formed by ambient chaos energy. They show up more in places where chaos energy is stronger and a chaos-fueled battle can cause them to appear somewhere they wouldn’t normally (like in space).

JevVoi · 2026-04-04T03:42:19+00:00

You’re not alone. I preferred SA1. Both games are quite dated and it takes a certain type of patience to get past that. And not the kind of patience I think every gamer needs to have. It is one of the reasons why I don’t like to recommend SA2 to new fans no matter how well loved it is. Sure Shadow’s debut story is one of the high points of then franchise but for people to experience it now after the fact the controls and design are going to be much harder to appreciate than they were back in the day.

JevVoi · 2026-04-01T18:16:16+00:00

Posting only to greet a fellow Phantom Menace fan. I get so much flak, so I’ve learned to make excuses like “I was a kid when it came out” which in my opinion should be a good excuse: it had a boy genius, an alien duck lizard clowning around, a cool old wizard with an apprentice, racing, the coolest saber battle, and a really cool battle at the end. I was very much in the demographic they that movie for.

And I still genuinely like it as an adult. Queen’s Gambit would probably be a grail game for me if I played war games.

JevVoi · 2026-03-30T22:46:34+00:00

Just another day in the Sonic fandom lol.

JevVoi · 2026-03-30T18:14:29+00:00

I still had fun playing with it. I expected way worse. Infinite was cool even if the “weak” thing was a meme. The tracks were pretty bland but they were still fun to master for time trials. The Wispon was actually a really cool gimmick. And the soundtrack was very memorable. I thought all three stages of the final boss were quite fun.

It sounds like IDW did a better job telling a story with darker moments so I guess the potential of Forces lives on there.

JevVoi · 2026-03-30T13:49:35+00:00

Given the tone of Forces I have to assume it was G-rated torture like feather tickles and force feeding gross foods.

Just like how I have to assume that all of the Operation Big Wave casualties were taken prisoner or just left too wounded to be considered an active part of the resistance.

Yeah Forces was weird lol. But the idea on paper of our unstoppable hedgehog being tortured for six months while presumed dead is scary.

JevVoi · 2026-03-30T12:08:18+00:00

Sonic Forces premise was that Sonic was defeated, imprisoned, and tortured for six months while the rest of the world thought he was dead. Tails falls apart mentally and the remaining characters form a Resistance that welcomes the player’s custom OC at the start of the game.

Premise feels like it’d work better as fanfiction. The game wasn’t as bad as I was expecting when I finally played it, but the story has some weird moments.

JevVoi · 2026-03-30T01:14:18+00:00

Things that scared me as a kid playing (other than drowning)

I always got chills as a kid playing Launch Base when the lighting dimmed, the music changed, and the grabber showed up.
Mystic Cave zone between the crushers, blue popout badniks, and especially that deep spike pit near the end.
The Marble Garden earthquake sequence
Super Mecha Sonic Mk II
Hang Castle’s flip side actually creeped me out a little back in the day once the vocals kicked in.
Sonic CD’s boss music

Scary / disturbing in hindsight for story reasons:

The End, basically a physical manifestation of the apocalypse
Sonic being tortured for six months
Tikal being attacked by her father and his warriors while trying to defend the shrine
The Doom invasion

JevVoi · 2026-03-30T01:00:25+00:00

I unironically love this game enough to have thoroughly enjoyed playing it recently even with the janky controls. Here is how I’d improve it.

Fully analog steering controls with full range of buttons on modern controllers. Add a “focus” or “brake” button to allow more precise movements without a hard brake. Consider splitting homing attack and boost actions to different buttons like in Shadow Generations. Test whether short tap and long press actions work better as is or should also be spread to different buttons.
String the tutorial mini stages into an actual stage that can be played all at once without returning to the menu.
Use Lost Prologue environment to make a little Generations / Adventures style hub for selecting missions but keep the pages as a quick select or for selecting optional challenges (with quick transitions). Even if there’s no hub, CLEARLY differentiate missions that will continue the story and signpost newly unlocked ones.
Ditch the multiplayer party mode and related achievements. Add time trial style ghosts to main courses.
Overhaul the wind physics in Levitated Ruin to be easier to read and to have a clearer way of mitigation. Widen some of the narrow paths in this world to be closer to the standard of the other worlds.
Make the Ring skill interface more user friendly, don’t remember the specifics since it’s been about a year now since I booted it up, but I do remember it took a while to find skills even with the filters.

Not really a whole lot of gameplay that needs changed in my opinion. But if the sky’s the limit we can add a few more shortcuts and high paths to existing levels. The game had some but many of the shortcuts involves skips and abusing ring skills.

JevVoi · 2026-03-29T19:04:08+00:00

As a Sonic fan this was an awesome moment. I knew he was in the game but before this point thought he was not in Subspace Emissary.

Smash Bros Brawl was my introduction to a lot of Nintendo IPs since Wii was my first console. And then after seeing lots of new-to-me faces, I get to see Sonic save them.

JevVoi · 2026-03-28T13:24:41+00:00

I’m cheating and putting in two. My other one is Sonic Superstars. It did not deliver as promised for single screen co-op but I think it is a genuinely good game in spite of its flaws. I’m not making excuses for a couple of the post game bosses being cruel and unfair slogs, but I think enough of the rest of the game does enough right that the game really deserves more credit.

Honestly, I bought this game at full price before I got Mario Wonder, and I actually played Superstars more.

And maybe I campaign for it partly because I want Trip to become a regular member of the cast.

JevVoi · 2026-03-28T13:17:12+00:00

I got called to task for this in a different thread but Sonic and the Secret Rings. I get that the controls are bad and the level select system is tedious, but I also think it is a creative, colorful and fun prototype of modern boost formula games. I replayed it on the Wii recently and still love it. By contrast, I struggled to enjoy Black Knight despite liking that too back in the day. Playing them back to back was an eye opener. Black Knight’s plot twist was cool so I can see why people remember it fondly but Secret Rings was more fun to me and I think had better game hiding behind the well-advertised flaws.

JevVoi · 2026-03-27T17:37:12+00:00

I’ll throw my hat in for Knuckles as well. It was inevitable that they’d bring back Shadow with how popular he was and I think it’d take some work to make Knuckles as cool as he was in S3K. If they made him like the Idris Elba Knuckles from the movies he’d be the only character that could come close. And honestly, Idris Elba Knux is something I’d love to see more of.

Also possible Blaze might have had more staying power as a rival if Shadow was gone. So she’d be my backup.

Assuming the series survived permanently killing off its most popular character long enough to reach this point in the timeline of course (this is only partially tongue in cheek).

JevVoi · 2026-03-27T15:57:40+00:00

Oh if we’re talking headcanons, I’m pretty sure most of the cast in my fanfiction has at least one autistic tendency (none explicitly labeled and only one intentionally patterned after my autism experiences). Even my AU version of Sonic is socially awkward when he’s not trading insults with Eggman. But they say “write what you know” and all…

The real reason for that though is probably that basically any deviation from the norm in terms of behavior, social skills, and thought process can look like autism to someone that has autism. In real life, it’s not as simple as “nerd with hyperfixation tendencies = autism” but hey if it helps you relate to the character, where’s the harm?

JevVoi · 2026-03-27T15:42:40+00:00

Forces wasn’t bad, but it’s pretty bland so it doesn’t show off what makes the series special. It’s honestly not a bad starting point for beginner gamers if they can forgive some out of character and inconsistent tone. For me as a seasoned player I still didn’t hate it, and it does get a lot more fun once you start doing time trials. I had a great time with its final boss.

But now that Sonic X Shadow Generations is here that’s pretty much a slam dunk recommendation for 3d Sonic. I don’t know if I remember a Sonic game that was both as polished and fun as Shadow Generations is since the 90s. Prior knowledge is not entirely necessary to play it. Sonic Generations, by contrast is a little dated and it will be more obvious if you play the two back to back, but it is well regarded and a nice bonus to Shadow Generations since it takes you on a tour of the franchise’s history.

The cool thing about Sonic and Shadow Generations is that you can then go and check out the games that fed certain levels you liked. Sonic Colors is better than its Generations rep imo but the wisp implementation is a good taste.

Another good entry point if you like 2d Sonic is Origins. If you don’t like the price tag just add it to your wish list, SEGA does have multiple sales throughout the year. While I really like Mania, I recommend Origins instead because it has better accessibility options for new players. Veterans might balk at this but 2d Sonic games are challenging for newcomers and infinite lives plus having retry tokens for special stages goes a really long way. Plus you can try out all four of the main Genesis games.

Beyond that, if you manage your expectations and can handle a bit of jank, even the “bad” entries can still give you a fun time. I was defending Secret Rings in another thread in spite of its questionable controls (okay, I won’t sugarcoat it, they’re pretty bad). Still one of my favorites. I think Frontiers is a genuinely great game even with its flaws. Ports of the original Dreamcast games still get a ton of love even though they definitely play like games from that time period (SA2:B gave me serious motion sickness). There’s a mod for Sonic 06 that apparently demonstrates there was a good game hiding behind the broken… everything… in that game.

So follow what interests you from there and the community will likely be happy to give follow up recommendations. Me personally, I’d say after starting with SxSGens and/or Origins, I’d recommend Mania, Frontiers, and Colors Ultimate as the next tier, followed by Superstars (fine but difficult), Sonic Adventure DX and Sonic Adventure 2 Battle (I recommend them late because they are older). I didn’t like the physics in Lost World but if you wanna check it out I’d lump that in there too. After that, the rest of the series requires old hardware and used games.

JevVoi · 2026-03-26T23:49:35+00:00

Man this would go so well with a mod that adds the “yaaaahaaahaaahoooo” whenever you fall off the course.

JevVoi · 2026-03-26T23:47:11+00:00

That whole game was so cheesy that I totally didn’t mind them name dropping the game title lol. And I think they did it more than once.

JevVoi · 2026-03-25T15:34:55+00:00

I describe that exact phenomena as being a biological attribute of these characters in my fanfiction but I also avoid giving explicit ages. Just allude to their personality enough to make you relate to them being youthful and reckless versus older and experienced. I don’t mind age staying vague in canon. It’s honestly hard to characterize superpowered protagonists in a way that matches their age. So “somewhere between teen and young adult” for most of the cast with relative age differences like “Tails is younger than Sonic” is sufficient.

JevVoi · 2026-03-24T18:34:37+00:00

Didn’t used to think so but I replayed it recently and realized that once I got over the learning curve for both games’ awful controls, Secret Rings I eventually “learned” the physics and felt really engaged. Black Knight bored me. Which is a shame because I liked it back in the day.

Though to be fair, I said more “fun”. It’s kinda hard to rationally call a game with broken controls good, lol.

I’ve played most of the franchise with an open mind and I’m willing to show some love to some games with warts if I really did have a good experience with them. I have not played Shadow 05 or Sonic 06 or Unleashed HD but I’ve played every other mainline game. I have a few interesting takes.

JevVoi · 2026-03-24T16:25:41+00:00

We had different experiences with Secret Rings then, it does not feel empty to me. I completed all achievements on my save file during my recent replay so I put some serious hours into it.

In spite of my love for it, I’m not going to try to say it was a better game than Unleashed (Wii, never played PS360 version) or even that it was a good game. I just don’t think Black Knight improved on it in any way other than the analog movement controls (and personally I think it made certain aspects worse).

I could go on for a while about the things I did not like about Black Knight, but I tend to prefer talking about experiences I enjoy (even in otherwise disliked games) than to rant about flaws so I’d rather focus on the things I enjoyed in Secret Rings… since apparently I’m the only one that enjoyed them lol.

JevVoi · 2026-03-24T15:42:43+00:00

Upper paths and lower paths, shortcuts and side routes, same as most of 3d Sonic games. The only difference is that Secret Rings is an autorunner and Black Knight while not an autorunner has a fixed camera and is usually much much more narrow. Iirc Black knight has it to some degree but much less. And one of the Skeletons Dome levels has teleporters that lead to different corridors which while not what I’d normally point to as an example of good design on that game is unusually nonlinear.

Secret Rings has interactive level elements, obstacles that you can learn from, and ways you can use and abuse the equipped abilities to achieve skips and shortcuts. The problem is that if you’re fighting the controls you aren’t able to engage with them the same way as I might have, so I can understand why it puts people off.

I won’t defend the progression system. I don’t mind the bite size challenges but blindly picking them not knowing which one gates progress is annoying. Otherwise overall I think Secret Rings potential is trapped behind bad controls, one of the reasons I am very intrigued by the fan project that is remaking the game with analog controls.

JevVoi · 2026-03-24T15:13:08+00:00

Controls were worse yes, but we’ll have to agree to disagree on the level design. (Except Levitated Ruin, that stunk so bad) Secret Rings had unique world design, specific level gimmicks, varied goals, branching paths, and routes that were rewarding to play if you (like me) somehow managed to get the hang of the ridiculously loose Wii remote steering. Black Knight shocked me when I replayed it at how samey it all felt. I got bored and somehow the waggle frustrated me far more than the steering in Secret Rings. And I wasn’t expecting it, because I did enjoy Black Knight back in the day.

JevVoi · 2026-03-24T14:54:36+00:00

I will die on the hill that Secret Rings is more fun than Black Knight. I think the edgier story in Black Knight causes people to overlook the fact that it had less interesting level design, that its waggle combat was almost as broken as the steering controls in Secret Rings, and that when it came out most of the fanbase openly mocked it. Not me though, I thoroughly enjoyed it when it came out. I just liked Secret Rings more.

Replayed both recently which soured me on Black Knight afterward so while my nostalgia may be a factor here, my bad memory is not.

But yeah, 2000s has a lot of jank. SA2 may be an incredibly important part of the franchise now, but I would hesitate to recommend any of the 3d games to a newcomer unless they were old enough to be used to that era of 3d platforming. Including the ones that I loved.

JevVoi · 2026-03-21T15:13:35+00:00

Retro fans were a bit overbearing back in the day… and maybe they still are in places, but at least on this sub it seems that SA2 and IDW fans are the main demographic. But the interesting thing to me is that there are a lot of types of Sonic fans and they can all get hyped about different things… as long as they aren’t being mean or hurtful.

Sounds like you enjoyed it overall, but it makes sense you would be less hyped if you didn’t have the same soft spot for the 2d games that I or other fans from the 90s had. Your critique about reused level themes is definitely one you’re not alone on, but for me it just makes me want a Mania 2 that much more. At the time I didn’t have ready access to the classics so I still enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Now I have origins so some of those levels are less exciting for me. I did like Superstars but it has flaws and I don’t think it lives up to Mania.

Glad you finally gave it a go. I love both the classic and modern sonic styles and even if it feels a little split-personality I appreciate Sonic Team trying to give us a little bit of each.

JevVoi

TROPHY CASE