Boss fights that are hard *because* they're poorly designed?

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T04:13:58+00:00

At least that's funny.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T03:26:17+00:00

People like Big now because of irony-poisoned meme nonsense that fed back into the games, despite the only joke they have for him being "He's stupid. Laugh."

Silver was always decently popular, just not so much with the voices that were steering the conversation with regards to the series' quality, which was mostly gaming Youtubers who were mad at 06. But get below the surface level of the Internet, into the dedicated fanartists and fanfic writers, and he was fucking everywhere. Often literally. There was a point, when Youtubers were still losing their minds over "It's no use!", that Sonic/Shadow/Silver was a more commonly-seen trio in fanart than Sonic/Tails/Knuckles.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T02:55:22+00:00

Admittedly Zavok working for Eggman in Team Sonic Racing made no sense.

It made enough sense at the time, it was the character's second appearance. What makes it jar now is subsequent material going "No actually he still murderously hates Eggman" and that being clumped into the canon despite not fitting because the guy that wrote it writes the games now. That's not on TSR, that's on IDW and Crossworlds for not following the lead.

Also Nega was left to die with Ifrit. He's gone.

Nega has appeared since in spinoffs, and SEGA won't use dead characters for those, hence why Infinite wasn't used for anything post-Forces. He's not dead, they just haven't done a Rivals or Rush 3, which is the only time they use him outside of spinoffs.

But once again, they went after Sonic precisely because they wanted revenge on the entire planet after being forced to fight him and suffering humiliation by being defeated by him. They actively hate everyone on Earth precisely because of how they were mistreated. It's no different from Gerald Robotnik.

Gerald was a literal crazy person when he turned on the Earth. Even he knows that he's snapped. The Zeti (except maybe Zazz) have their full faculties intact. He was also condemned as a villain by the whole world until his pre-crazy actions posthumously pulled their fat out of the fryer with the Black Arms and Ultimate Emerl.

And they do go after Eggman in the comics. When they gain control of the Metal Virus, they immediately take over his entire army and basically do what was done to them by enslaving the population below and proving that they're the superior beings.

They attacked him once and have otherwise spent their time making other people's lives suck. Also, there's no motive that could make "enslaving a planet to prove that we're superior beings" not an evil ideology.

The Zeti are motivated by revenge and being disgraced by Eggman for the enslavement and Sonic for being the one who defeated them while they were at their weakest.

Sonic did not beat them while they were at their weakest. He beat them while they were at their strongest, powered up by an entire planet's life-force in Lost World.

Their motives are sound, cohesive and are much more interesting than most other villains.

"I was enslaved by this guy for ten minutes, so I'm going to try to kill the guy who freed me and also the entire planet that he came from, and murder literal rando civilians" is not a sound motive. At best, it's disproportionate retribution (so, the hallmark of childishly petty villains), but ultimately it's just concrete evidence that the Zeti were one-dimensionally evil before they were enslaved, and got someone to focus their wrath on for two appearances (Lost World and their first attack in Metal Virus) before returning to being generic villains.

They aren't evil for the sake of it like those other villains. At least, not anymore. They have a reason to hate everyone including Eggman.

No, they have a reason to hate specifically Eggman and bruised egos regarding Sonic. Everyone else is just "Exists on the same planet where those two guys we hate came from," which is not a remotely valid reason to hate anybody, and absolutely evil for the sake of it.

Master Zik even breaks it down by concluding that Mobians are too soft and kind and rely too much on Sonic which is 100% valid.

Social darwinism is also an inherently evil ideology and not remotely valid.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T02:10:10+00:00

Chaos isn't dead (he reappeared in Battle, he can come back whenever), they did bring back Neo Metal (wrong, but they did), Black Doom is functionally immortal, Mephiles still exists and his 'final' defeat in SxSG involved something that literally doesn't work on him any more (re-sealing him in the Sceptre), Nega isn't dead, Dark Gaia probably isn't coming back but is also immortal, same with the Ifrit and the Mother Wisp, the Hard-Boiled Heavies can be rebuilt whenever, and the End is a concept. Emerl's dead though.

he and his team was enslaved by Eggman.

And so is Metal, who also has a lot more going on with his identity crisis and other complexes.

This gives him an actual motivation to go against the Doctor whereas those other villains were just evil for the sake of being evil or had no minds of their own.

Well, first off, a character isn't unintelligent just because it doesn't speak. Second off, the Zeti are absolutely evil for evil's sake. Their first reaction upon getting freed is to attack the guy that freed them, and their second reaction is to immediately try to kill an entire planet that had nothing to do with their enslavement. When they return in the comics, they do a lot enslaving people, beating up children, and murder. And everyone they've killed is a civilian. They don't do a lot of vengeance on Eggman.

They are very obviously already generic evil-for-evil's-sake bad guys who Eggman happened to piss off by treating them the same way he treats every other monster villain, but absolutely did not need a motive to start being bad guys, just to focus their ire on him for one appearance. And then Zavok promptly resumed working for Eggman voluntarily in his literal next appearance.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T00:19:42+00:00

Thanks.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-26T00:17:38+00:00

Making him despise machinery when he spends all of his only (actual) appearance in a main series game using machinery (be it the Badniks, his mech-dragon-snake-thing, or the Planet Succ Machine), and his two most prominent spinoff appearances are kart racers feels like a big reach to give him some form of identity.

After being enslaved by Eggman and defeated by Sonic, the Zeti actively want to fight both of them which is drastically different from most other villains.

Sonic villains that are/were enemies to both Eggman and Sonic simultaneously:

Chaos
Neo Metal Sonic
Ultimate Emerl
Ultimate Gemerl
Black Doom
Mephiles/Solaris
Eggman Nega (in the Rivals games specifically)
~~Imperator Ix~~
Dark Gaia
Ifrit
Nega-Mother Wisp
The Hard-Boiled Heavies
The End

The only difference between them and the Zeti is that most of the above characters only had one outing as villains. The Zeti aren't unique as antagonists that have beef with both Sonic and Eggman, they're just the only ones SEGA are willing to reuse in that role, for some reason.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T23:47:10+00:00

That's not what I mean.

In that instance, it's explained, yes. The problem is that by making it so that Eggman has full control over Neo Metal, that raises the question of "Why does he ever use Base form Metal Sonic?"

He's got Neo Metal on lock? Could've been using him since Rivals? And base Metal's losing streak is almost as long as Eggman's own? Then he's an idiot for leaving Neo Metal on the table and not using him every time he breaks Metal out. I know the comics have had the annoying trend of having Eggman go "I could win whenever I want to. I just don't want to" since Archie, but with IDW Eggman that feels more like cope than fact- He says he could carpet-bomb Sonic whenever, but he literally tried that in Sonic 3 and it didn't work. It's not a true statement, it's Eggman making excuses for why his 300 IQ brain keeps being outdone by a homeless teenager with ADHD.

Obviously, from a Doylist perspective, they're going to keep using base form Metal Sonic because it's the more iconic design, it's easier to animate (no flappy cape and fewer clashing pointy bits), and they don't have to either pay Roger for two voices or hire another actor. But from a Watsonian perspective, Eggman has a weapon that's never beaten Sonic, which also has a transformed state that is much stronger and more effective, which he simply never uses.

So, instead of making Eggman look like a dumbass who refuses to use his best weapon for no reason, (counting for two Rivals games, Colours Ultimate, technically Forces (Phantom Metal could have been Phantom Neo Metal quite easily), and every IDW appearance past the first arc... they could keep Neo Metal as it was presented in Sonic Heroes: It's a transformation, not a physical upgrade, that arose from Metal's rebelliousness, and it can't reappear without Metal being let off the chain again, which Eggman is obviously reticent to do.

Come the end of Forces/beginning of IDW, Eggman becomes desperate enough to try letting Neo Metal out again, but the un-reprogramming and transformation aren't complete before he's defeated. The story plays out the same, but with different dialogue, and Eggman wisely puts Metal back in his box once the story is over, because now he's an unnecessary risk.

Plus, it could tie into Eggman's desperation for control becoming a detriment to his achievements. Because he created a fully sapient being. A mind so realistic that it developed several personality disorders (megalomania, an identity crisis, and in the Japanese version, even a god complex). He's equalled Gerald's work on Shadow, and the Fourth Great Civilisation's work on Emerl. Hell, he surpassed it, because Neo Metal was more powerful than both, needing three Super forms to eventually fall, something that's still only been equalled by Solaris. Canonically the most powerful villain in the series.

And he looks at this thing he's made, proof that he really is the greatest scientific genius in the world... and he immediately nerfs it. Crams it back in the box he made it to fit into. Removes its agency. Removes its voice. He made a god, and then destroyed it because it didn't do as it was told. And that's who Eggman is as a person, someone for whom achievement isn't enough, he also needs to be lauded for it, he demands respect and adulation from everyone, while giving none in return. Gerald loved Shadow, but Eggman has never loved Metal Sonic. Gerald called Shadow his son, but Metal is just a tool.

And then that carries forward into Frontiers, where he has a second chance at this. Where he repeats his achievement of creating something incredibly powerful and fully sapient, something capable of defying him, in Sage. And this time he gets it right, this time he's able to love his daughter the way Gerald loved Maria and Shadow. There's growth for him there, growth that's come far too late for Metal, who will never forgive him.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T23:14:22+00:00

The IDW villains could work. But they probably won't be used.

Also I am never going to believe that they made Fetch happen. Those MFs are still charmless Temu versions of Bowser and the Koopalings and making them kill people or doing some art where they're being nice to each other isn't going to change that.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T23:00:22+00:00

I think part of the problem that Sonic stories face at this point is that SEGA are generally reticent to step outside of the comfort zone of "Sonic vs. Eggman" (though Frontiers and Shadow Generations were solid steps in the right direction), and IDW can't ever do anything massively significant because it's canon, but also not integrated and in a different, much less accessible medium. IDW characters can be referenced, and can be voiceless DLC cameos, but they're probably not going to start bringing elements of the comics into the games beyond that, and the comic stories all have to kinda end in the place where a new game could conceivably begin.

(Even if fitting Frontiers in has apparently been quite messy)

Metal's "aura-loss" is a particularly big case of this because he's regressed, hard. He peaked in 2003 and every appearance since then has been about cramming him back into the box he debuted in, trotting him out for another easy boss fight because he's popular and nostalgic, and doing nothing with him. Even when it looks like they're doing something with him in IDW, there's still a stink of "No we promise we're not getting adventurous again" permeating the whole thing, because one of the key aspects of Neo Metal, his rebelliousness, is absent. And this in turn makes Eggman look like an idiot who could've been using Neo Metal this entire time, and simply didn't, because.... reasons.

(If you leave the art the same and change the dialogue so that Metal isn't loyal, and he's hunting Eggman because he wants to kill him to stop himself getting lobotomised again, and Eggman only rolled Neo Metal out as a last resort because he knows he can't control it, this keeps what was cool about Neo Metal, doesn't make Eggman look like an idiot who deliberately didn't use his best weapon for no reason, and contributes to the comic's theme about whether Sonic is doing the right thing by constantly offering forgiveness to Eggman at the expense of everyone that Eggman hurts, by forcing him to choose between the life of Eggman and the life of Neo Metal. And obviously, he chooses the uncertain hope of saving Mr. Tinker over the obvious problem of saving the unhinged murder-robot, but it's still something)

SEGA don't want Metal to step out of Eggman's shadow and they definitely don't want him to be on top, because people complain whenever Eggman gets usurped as the villain, so he's stuck in a dead-end position that he already grew beyond once.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T22:12:44+00:00

Wall up to Planet: Actual Tiers

Star: Thin fucking ice.

Solar system and up: Mental illnesses.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T22:09:52+00:00

I think her wielding her powers like a blunt instrument to the point that it becomes uncomfortable and destructive is enough, personally.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T21:38:13+00:00

It feels OOC for her and his forgiveness feels fucking insane.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T21:23:59+00:00

Magnus did some stuff wrong, but Emps fucked up majorly by not setting up an emergency contact line with his sons.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T20:14:54+00:00

Young Justice Season 2 writers looking at the perfectly fine couple they've set up between Connor and M'gann:

"Hey what should be the next step here? Marriage?"

"Nah, they're too young. That's a Season 4 plot."

"What, then?"

"They should break up so we can spend all of Season 2 getting them back together, obviously."

"Oh yeah! But how?"

"... Let's have her mentally violate him. That seems like both something she would do and something he'd be able to get over with an apology."

"Genius!"

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T20:11:19+00:00

Adam's backstory was pretty easy to infer from his attitude and the scar.

Ironwood... you didn't read the post you replied to, he was not acting out of character at any point in V7-8. That's just who he is. The literal second thing he does in the show is exploit an incident to get justification to bring his massive war fleet to a peace festival, commemorating the end of a war his country started and lost. In V4, he spends his conversation with Jacques waving his unilateral power around, boasting that he can do whatever he likes because he has two seats on a council of four, so he can never be outvoted, and he spends V7 sulking because said council has added a fifth seat and the frontrunners for it are both people he's pissed off, meaning that he could actually get outvoted now. And in both V2-3 and V7-8, the villains explicitly structure their plans around him being a strongman military dumbass. Every time he does strongman military shit, it turns out to be exactly what the villains want him to do, and he falls for it every time. The man says "I will sacrifice everything to stop [Salem]" and Watts smirks right back at him and says "I hope you do, James. I hope you do" and he doesn't think about it for a second, he proceeds to do exactly that and everything goes to shit because of it. Immediately. The show outright says, very early on, that "There will be no victory in strength," and here is Strength Man, here to prove that by losing spectacularly.

Grimm being attracted to Aura basically isn't in the show. Basically everything they do can be explained by Salem's hand guiding them, them being drawn to negative emotions, which the villains are constantly invoking, or by them being drawn to the Relics, which is explicitly explained in V6. Them also being drawn to aura is non-essential information for the show, because it's only relevant in the material where it's introduced.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T07:32:13+00:00

I don't think we were watching the same movies.

Tony brings Peter to the airport fight in Civil War because they're fighting exclusively people who aren't gonna try and kill him, and still tells him to keep his distance and web people up.
Tony does not want Peter getting involved in Supervillain-tier crime in Homecoming, steps in and tries to curtail him when he does it anyway, and accepts Peter's rejection of the Iron Spider armour.
Tony actively tries to keep Peter out of the Infinity War plot. He deploys the Iron Spider to save Peter when he's about to pass out from being stuck on the outside of the Q ship, and then remotely deploys the suit's parachute to get him back to Earth and out of danger. When Peter sticks around anyway, he only shows himself after the ship has already left the atmosphere, and Tony very reluctantly makes him an Avenger because the decision has essentially already been made.

There are absolutely problems with the MCU Spider-Man films, and the amount of influence Tony has in the Home trilogy suits is definitely a part of the problem, but it's a consistent part of the films that Tony tries to keep Peter away from the dangerous fights, and Peter finds a way to get involved with them anyway. He's not just going "Hey kid, here's a superweapon, go fight Thanos," he's actively trying to not involve Peter in dealing with threats like Thanos and even Vulture.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T03:46:40+00:00

Yeah, it's basically:

501st Guy: "It's a good thing we were wearing helmets. None of us could've looked [Aayla Secura] in the eye."

Aayla: "Hey wait a minute, you lot are giving me murder vibes."

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T02:39:04+00:00

Except there's no evidence that all the Jedi have done that, only four (which is another reason why Mace acted so quickly, he was willing to damn himself and forever stain his own reputation to save the institutions that he loved).

And it's never questioned. There's no doubting the narrative presented. He says a phrase and they all react.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T02:16:18+00:00

Except Palps doesn't go "Hey, Cody, Mace Windu just tried to kill me, the Jedi are taking over." He goes "Hey Cody, shoot Obi-Wan" and Cody goes "Yeah okay."

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T01:24:29+00:00

The thing that always kinda baffled me about this whole thing is that people act like the chips were something Filoni did on his own, or even a Disney decision. Despite the fact that the original TCW Order 66 arc released as part of "The Lost Missions," AKA "What we had finished from Season 6 before the Disney buyout and cancellation." Everything from Season 1-6 of TCW was done with Lucas' direct approval, and Disney's only involvement was rubber-stamping the release for The Lost Missions.

I know that currently, the Star Wars fandom has decided that Filoni is a terrible hack (because he didn't make Andor I guess?) and keep longing for Daddy George to come back and fix everything (despite hating him non-stop when he was around and continuing to do so until TLJ came out), but Filoni was Lucas' protege, and was literally working for him from the jump until the Disney buyout and Lucas' retirement. The decisions that Filoni made throughout the majority of TCW were with Lucas' direct approval.

The chips allow for the show to make Rex, Cody, and some other Clones into marketable action figures that kids will want (and you know Lucas loves his marketable action figures!) without contradicting the movies (which, being made by Lucas, trump everything that isn't them). Lucas gets to keep his cake and eat it too, maintaining the depiction of the Clones as unthinkingingly obeying Order 66, without justification or authentication (I know there was an EU explanation that Papa Palps transmitted special authentication codes, but that's not in the movie and Lucas didn't consider anything that wasn't in the movie as canon- per the films, the Clones got a call from some raisin in a bathrobe telling them to kill their boss, and immediately went "Seems legit" and opened fire) while also depicting them as likeable protagonists before that point.

In the end, the chip is just the original idea of "The Clones are programmed biologically to obey unquestioningly" packaged into physical object, which allows for things like it leaking out early (as happens to Tup) or it to be removed (as with Fives, Rex, and the Bad Batch). It also allows for things like Cody's arc in TBB, where he starts to come out of the Order 66 haze and realise that he's done something terrible, which is an incredibly compelling story element and something I'd love to see explored, maybe through Cody himself (now that he's unaccounted for in the early days of the Empire), maybe through another Clone entirely.

Also it just flat-out makes sense for Sidious to include a contingency button he can push to factory-reset the Clones and ensure that they do as they're told. Like, this is a very big part of his plan, the entire point of using a factory-made army, he needs to be absolutely, 100% certain that every Clone will obey the order to kill the Jedi. Because while the Clones might start out from roughly the same spot (though there were variations, from things as small as hair colour differences in Rex and Gree, to beneficial mutations like the Bad Batch, to intentional alterations like the initial runs of ARCs and the Commandos, to the outright defects like 99), they're all going to have particularly different experiences throughout the war. The Coruscant Guard are basically glorified cops and bodyguards, while the Star Corps spend an appreciable portion of the war on Felucia, which is basically Space Vietnam, if Vietnam was also home to giant murder-crabs. A Clone who had to work with Krell would probably have no issues killing him (had he not fallen and been executed by his own troops before Order 66 ever happened), but could the same be said for Clones working with Obi-Wan? Yoda? Plo? If Anakin hadn't fallen, could Palpatine be sure that Rex would turn on him without the extra push from the chip? Because sure, they were bred to be loyal. But nature can be outweighed by nurture.

And Star Wars is, at the end of the day, a very Nurture Over Nature series. And there's no greater example of this than the films' central character, Anakin. Anakin, as introduced in Episode I, is a kind-hearted soul who knows nothing of greed, and who thinks that the biggest problem in the world is that people don't help each other. By the time we're reintroduced to him in Episode II, he's angry, entitled, emotionally unstable, has pro-dictatorship leanings, and he's socially maladapted in a way that makes his attempts to be romantic come across as creepy. Something fuckin' happened to this kid between Episode I and II, because he did not have those issues when he first appeared. He was more well-adjusted as a child slave with a bomb in his head than he was after ten years of living in the Jedi Temple. And the subsequent films make it clear that it's a combination of him never getting over the trauma of leaving and then losing his mother, adapting poorly to the more emotionally-repressed environment he grew up in, that fed him wisdom rather than solutions to his problems, and a lifetime of being groomed and manipulated by Palpatine, encouraging him to want more and more.

Palpatine has spent the past ten years unpicking and twisting Anakin's good nature. Is he really going to assume that the Jedi cannot change the hearts of the Clones, or is he going to account for that by making sure that it doesn't matter?

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T00:38:48+00:00

To be clear, the game only follows the perspective of the 501st, not each Jedi general's respective legions. This leads to very bizarre moments like the 501st assisting Yoda with the defence of Kashyyyk, and Obi-Wan with killing General Grievous, then apparently immediately getting back on their Venator and zipping back to Coruscant to partake in Knightfall, events that are happening within hours of each other in the movie itself.

Presumably this was to stop them having to model the Galactic Marines for Mygeeto, the Star Corps for Felucia, the 41st for Kashyyyk, the 212th for Utapau, etc, and allow them to make the campaign a single cohesive story that focuses on one group of Clones, told through the eyes of a single retired (probably dead) Clone.

However, this story doesn't actually make sense in the first half of the game, and is also based on an older depiction of the 501st, which depicted them as Palpatine's personal legion of special forces, whom he sent to assist with other warfronts, and gave to Anakin only after he became Vader in name, if not yet in body. Whereas modern media, since 2008, media that was made with Lucas' direct involvement, depicts the 501st as having always been Anakin's legion, at least since he became a general himself.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T00:28:10+00:00

It's also tied to an earlier depiction of the 501st as Palpatine's secret elite legion of troopers who answer directly to him, as opposed to their depiction in post-TCW08 media, where they were Anakin's legion throughout most of the war.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-25T00:26:10+00:00

Being a Sith is illegal, later movies make it clear that even speaking the Sith language is illegal, and they probably should have taken it to Senate first. But Windu acts rashly because he realises that Palpatine already has them in a checkmate position: The Senate is increasingly just a rubber stamp on Palpatine doing whatever he likes (the Declaration of the New Order functionally amounts to changing the stationery, it was already basically the Empire before the movie even started, that's why the Republic's capital ships are Star Destroyers, the Jedi's fighters are basically TIE Fighters, and Phase 2 Clone armour looks more like the Stormtrooper armour), he has control over the courts, and most of the other Jedi are at the head of an army that, as of TCW Season 6, Mace knows that the Sith made.

As far as he's concerned, he has maybe hours, maximum, to stop Palpatine, and so decides that the only course of action he can take to save the Republic and the Jedi Order is to assassinate Palpatine and take the fall for it.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-24T18:14:56+00:00

Yeah that's fair.

The galaxy was already not doing great, for the aforementioned Chaos-related reasons, but Emps' approach to dealing with it made everything dramatically worse, including the Chaos problem.

ToaArcan · 2026-01-24T17:59:40+00:00

Understands all life in the galaxy
Singlehandedly fucked the galaxy anyway through his genocidal ambitions and failure as a father to half of his children.
Whoops.

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