Game Apologist - Knuckles Chaotix

hello there i'm nick and this is the game apologist where we look for the good and bad games and we had a pretty good run didn't we for a show called game apologists i haven't had to do a whole lot of apologizing for the sonic series up to this point i mean it got a little dicey with sonic cd but all in all the classic sonic games are classic i've spent an exhausting amount of time explaining just that going so far as to say that sonic 3 and knuckles is one of the greatest games ever made i've seen that game compared to super mario world mega man x donkey kong country and whether or not you like that game over these other ones it's not important to me what is important is that it was compared to the very best of the super nintendo library because that's how revered the sonic franchise was back in the day that was the general opinion of most gamers but sega went in a decidedly different direction with their next game knuckles chaotix this was a spin-off title for a spin-off system using the popular sonic rival as well as a collection of unique characters to experiment on just about every front everything from the core mechanics all the way down to how you select your character and level there really isn't another experience quite like this game be it in the sonic franchise or in gaming in general and because of that it does have its fans but also its detractors there is a reason why you don't see this game on the exhausting amount of sonic game collections in the years that followed but to even talk about this game we first need to briefly go over the system it was made for [Music] we all know the story by now but it bears repeating lest we allow history to repeat itself this is the 32x a little sega genesis that sits on top of your actual sega genesis it's basically an add-on that allows you to play 32-bit cartridges on your core system you can still play regular sega genesis games but it doesn't really change the experience and the games made exclusively for the 32x can't be played any other way you need this add-on to play that library sega decided to release this horrible tumor of an add-on and release it two months prior to their brand new sega saturn which was already running into 299 problems prior to launch but just to be completely fair nintendo was not above releasing this kind of stupid crap as well remember this was in the same time as the virtual boy and before that they did release the disk drive for the famicom and later would do the same for the nintendo 64 and neither of those were overwhelming success stories and that's just the tip of the iceberg granted sega went a little overboard with the sega cd and would later redesign both that add-on and the genesis itself and then would go on and pack it all together into one little sexy machine that nobody ever heard of but my point is that while we make fun of all that nowadays if sega had just released upgraded models of the genesis that included 32x tech or the cd add-on i mean it really wouldn't be that much different from the ps4 pro or the xbox one x that's the iphone business model and pcs have been outdating their own tech the moment it goes up for sale for decades now how's everyone enjoying their 3ds's with that extra thumbstick attachment oh and don't forget your amiibo nfc accessory also you need amiibos no those are different from the skylanders you have to buy all those separately to get everything out of that oh wait did you buy xenoblade chronicles well you got to throw all this crap out man that only works on the new 3ds i well never mind i guess history was gonna repeat itself anyway but you see my point here sega's bonehead decisions really aren't that different from other game companies with the capital to extend the life of their expensive hardware it's just more apparent when it looks like you're building a snowman out of sega consoles someone had to make these mistakes if anyone was going to learn from them or improve upon the idea of course you could also point out that the sega cd wasn't exactly an overwhelming success so maybe don't do that again but they went ahead and did that again and i would say much less successfully because at least the sega cd had some truly stellar titles that made the purchase worthwhile you had lunar pop full mail snatcher and of course sonic cd the 32x on the other hand had the worst version of doom the worst spider-man game and a bird shmup that was actually a selling point for me as a kid i thought this game looks super rad and that's not to say there aren't good games on the 32x but the libraries are not comparable not even remotely close but the 32x did at least have a sonic cd equivalent and chaotix came out after cd it came out after sonic 3 knuckles but it's not quite the follow-up one would hoped for and many would argue it's not even as good as the messy sonic cd and i should give you sonic warriors a little warning with this game going forward in the sonic series specifically you're gonna be seeing a lot of them on game apologies and not my spin-off show unapologetic that series is set aside for games i feel are truly masterpieces games everybody should play and i don't feel that way from most of the sonic series it's not to say i don't love the hell out of games that are going to be coming up some of them are some of my favorite games of all time but i'm also not gonna pretend there aren't some glaring issues and don't get me wrong the adventure games are gonna get their fair shake i love to explore why people adore those games as much as they do and in those specific cases i can at least cut those two games a little slack since they were jumping into a brave new third dimension but knuckles chaotix is a 2d sonic styled game released after the series had mastered mechanics and clearly defined itself in a bloated genre even with all the pretenders there was no mistaking a sonic game but chaotix took a decidedly different direction and probably wasn't the best choice i was not aware of it at the time but this would be one of the first of many speed bumps stumbling down the peak that was sonic 3. [Music] alright guys we know what a sonic game is we know how to make them real damn good and we have this hot new echidna character that allows you to experience these levels in whole new ways should be a real easy win to spin out another set of levels to placate fans and convince them to throw down for a 32x that should be a nice cheap and easy solution while we work on the sega saturn we have everything we need to hit this out of the park yeah but even with all of this at our disposal i can't help but feel like knuckles is missing something ah perfect in hindsight it might seem like another traditional sonic would have been the right call and for many young fans like myself i would have been perfectly fine with that but that's not what the market demanded we were ready to jump into a brand new experience sonic 3 and sonic knuckles did not sell as well as sonic 2. people were growing tired of the formula and with all these new gaming experiences just on the horizon if sega was going to jump back into 2d sonic they had better bring something new to the table and uh boy oh boy did they bring something new probably too much before we tackle anything else we need to talk about this ridiculous ring tether because this stupid thing binds itself to all the good ideas this game has and drags everything down with it in a game series all about speed and momentum based platforming the geniuses at sega decided that you need to constantly drag around a second animal man through your entire adventure nick you big dum-dum this isn't a sonic title you say and yes you could argue that this is not a sonic game therefore i shouldn't treat it like a sonic game but here's the problem it's not a knuckles game either i still remember the first time i started playing this game finally i'm gonna have a fun adventure with my favorite character to play from the sonic series and immediately i knew something was very very wrong knuckles was slow and sluggish the 32x is supposed to power up my genesis right if you were like me an idiot kid in the 90s wanting a 32x then you more than likely wanted it to play knuckles chaotix and you are also probably very familiar with s3k so you know knuckles moveset going into this game but everything he does feels off and then on top of that you slap a giant lizard on me great this is espio one of the new playable characters of the game and outside of him you have mighty the armadillo charmy b and vector the crocodile joining the echidna on this adventure you'll have a chance to choose one of them after the opening tutorial and i highly urge that you do trust me everything feels a little bit better once you break free of sluggles and they all have their own secondary abilities and a grand majority of them get you up the side of a wall much faster than pinky can also i just need to say it when knuckles is gliding around with a ball flying all over the place it kind of looks like he's going commando for all the island to see his magical meaty clackers oh nick you interrupt again you dumb [ __ ] it's not a knuckles game either his name doesn't even appear in the title in japan oh gosh you're right captain hindsight that was really stupid of me as a kid in the 90s to expect a knuckles game from a game called knuckles chaotix i should have definitely known all those other things going into this look i was excited to play these brand new characters but i was not happy with them doing my boy dirty here and if they had built a game around these brand new characters and their abilities i would have been fine with that but that's not what we got yeah it's not a sonic game and okay fine it's not a knuckles game but it's also not an sbo game it's not a vector game it's not a mighty game it's not a charming game doesn't even belong to the damn bomb this game belongs exclusively to the ring tether and they don't even utilize that mechanic properly to be fair this game does what no sonic game had done up to this point and provides you a tutorial area both in the opening isolated island level and a proper tutorial after that feels a little redundant but fine sure this will let you grow accustomed to mechanics like anchoring your partner building up tension and slingshotting the pair of you across the level or up to a higher platform and the slingshot is here probably to replace the spin dash and don't get me wrong that is still present but it's massively gimped problem here is that it takes much more time to set up a slingshot be much more convenient to just zip up the side of a wall but well the game doesn't want you to do that and take care of what button you're hitting in old sonic games any of the three buttons on the genesis controller act as your jump button and in turn will act as the secondary skill of whatever else you're doing here in chaotics the only button that jumps is the c button the middle b button will anchor your partner character and the a button will call them back to your location at the cost of 10 rings but what if you don't have 10 rings does it just not work no way what kind of capitalist society do you think you live in you go into the red yeah your ring count can go backwards is this knuckles chaotix or a sega business simulator that joke would be way more funny if that game didn't kind of already exist sega's a weird company man as a child you might be wondering how it's possible to give away something you don't have but little did we realize this game was just preparing us for the misery of adulthood and actually this is something i've never come across personally but while scouring through the instruction manual i did come across an interesting tidbit i was never aware of if you go 100 rings into debt and cross the goal in a level the game will restart yikes so i guess that could actually make for an interesting little bit of challenge if you wanted it you have to collect at least 100 rings before you can cross the finish line that'd be kind of cool just looking at this control scheme and playing around with the physics it boggles my mind why they thought any of this was a good idea if you came into this accustomed to pressing the a button to jump that's just where your thumb landed well too bad buddy because that's going to cost you here they have an entire button dedicated to realigning your duo which tells me that this setup has the capability of getting you stuck and if you do get stuck the game is telling you that it's your fault and you're gonna be punished for it you wanna know why people have a problem with this rubber band nonsense just head over to a spring the super common thing that shows up in every other 2d classic sonic game just hop on it and [Music] yeah i don't know how any developer hopped onto a spring looked at this and thought yeah this is a good idea i'm not even sure if there's any point in explaining the secondary powers of these other characters there's nothing in these levels built around those abilities i mean sure they're more vertical in design so climbing up the side of a wall can be very helpful but it more feels like they shoved everything out of the way just to make use of this stupid ring tether and before we even get into the levels themselves choosing one of them help choosing one of your characters is also a game of skill and luck yeah your character selection is a claw crapping game and you have a chance to grab one of these two garbage robots that can either slow you down like with heavy or cause splash damage if they are damaged like with bomb so that's also super fun the levels are no longer in a linear layout like they are with every other sonic game they are instead chosen with this goofy bumper here you only have five zones but don't you fret you now have five acts in each and every one of them oh god and all of them drag along and they're all bare bones because again these are designed to compensate for the random stupidity you can get into when you clap two sonic characters together and chain shot them across the screen and being randomized you can either find yourself in a different zone every time or more unlikely in botanic base four times in a row either way as retropolis zone pointed out in his video boss battles are usually clumped into the back half of your playthrough and trust me uh they are not worth the build up this polygonal effect was uh i'm sure this was real neat for a minute but i mean this lasts for a literal minute can we um can we uh start the fight please what is happening here i mean i like the new cutscenes before every boss fight but why on earth did they skimp out on the animation for the one fight i would have loved to seen that in the metal sonic fight is not great it's inventive enough you have to hit the bumper like you would for the levels but this time it's going to land on a number which will dictate what attack metal sonic uses against you and when you time it right it will land on the x which will damage him and this can go a couple of different ways depending on how well you time it it could be like my first few times where it felt like this fight would never end or it could be a little bit more like my most recent battle against this robot where i just hit it four times in a row and it was over oh well at least i got some kind of encounter with metal sonic prior to the big titan transformation and at least that transformation does look dope i do like his angry fang face looks way better than another crappy final boss battle with metal sonic that skipped the cool base form and jumps straight into some junkyard art installation not today nick one problem at a time and like i said the levels themselves are far more vertical in design they're usually wide sprawling and somewhat labyrinthian and some of those descriptors would work in a game designed around knuckles or even one of these other characters but that's not what you get here don't get me wrong climbing and air dashing certainly helps out you could not make it through one of these levels in a solo sonic experience but considering how varied the character abilities are and the fact that you sometimes just have a bomb strap to you they can't design anything as tightly as they did with knuckles little areas in s3k also what the hell's with the transportation spots in these levels those used to be super quick little spurts of speed that got you right back into the game here you have to wait on nothing and then lazily get moved into a different room or just like lower down into the same room what was the point of all that [Music] this level is called speed slider there's just one spot that you get a drill car and all it does is show this automated segment that slowly drives you through an empty room and then drill through like four walls what is the point of that people whine about needless gimmicks in sonic 3 but at least you get to interact with the damn things i don't even get to control this damn car what they could have done instead is split up this car into like four different pieces and drop them in different spots on the level giving your characters some incentive to explore these sprawling maps but that's not what you get here the closest the game really gets to that concept is having to track down a button that starts a clock in every act of amazing arena and sure it lights up the room but that's literally it doesn't activate doors or springs or any fun platforming puzzles nothing like that you can actually get to the end of the level without ever activating that dumb clock and the game just tells you to go back and get it it's super annoying in sonic 3 we had rings to special stages hidden around all these giant maps and even if you explored a spot that didn't have a giant ring you at least got a monitor or something for your efforts and chaotix does have giant rings hidden around the stages but they're not for special stages they're for bonus stages and i apologize i promise there's a difference bonus stages don't lead you to chaos emeralds or in chaotic's case playskool stackable rings bonus stages just get you nice little extras like more rings or more points or the ability to manually choose your character and level which many would say would probably be a standard thing you could do in most other video games that and it drains your ring count so more often than not it's just not worth your time again though you do still have special stage rings but they once again adopt sonic 1's ability to jump into it that being grab 50 rings head to the end of the level and jump into the ring at the goal post so yeah these maps make zero sense you clear any hazards out of the way so you can compensate for all the goofy nonsense that comes with these stupid tethered abilities and you remove any reason to properly explore these levels which is extra frustrating when you think back to that opening isolated island tutorial area what happened to that you had to anchor your partner on one button while you made your way to another one or use them to levitate a platform and drag you up the side of it i mean there are a couple of kind of similar gimmicks throughout the levels but i'm seriously racking my brain here i don't think we see these particular puzzles ever again which is kind of lame they could have really expanded upon these ideas really make you think these things through but i don't really think there are any proper platforming puzzles that require teamwork also before i forget there are item monitors here but if you were expecting more creative elemental shields you'd be out of luck the original shield is back as is invincibility which weird gripe but the animation feels like a downgrade from sonic 3 and of course you have your 10 ring box but that's all that returns you do get some new ones like character boxes who turn you into well whoever's on the screen at the time and that is a nice little way to add variety and in hindsight these could have been implemented a little better if these levels had specific challenges set aside for specific characters a la mario 64 ds and you also have the swap monitor which well just swaps the two characters on the screen for a little while but you also have monitors that allow you to grow and shrink but once again they're not really utilized this would have been interesting if there are some environmental obstacles for you to overcome but that's not the case here the big sprite turns you into a bruiser for a little while and the small spike just is kind of a pain in the ass you're just gonna end up sitting around waiting for that to wear off the growing and shrinking monitors really are only here to show off some graphical effects of the 32x the blue ring box is about the only useful new monitor here which clumps all of your collected rings into one larger ring giving you the chance to hold on to everything you've grabbed up to that point if you happen to get hit you couple that with the shield it's like a secondary bonus hit this game is it's just a glorified tech demo for the 32x we have a cool set of physics thanks to the tether even if it doesn't work super well in a sonic game and we have some graphical gimmicks that had been done already by nintendo with some super fx ships so this was already outdated by 1995 and these goofy little graphical upgrades would have been just fine for a standard sonic game and yeah maybe that would have been a safe choice maybe it would have been a tired choice but it would have at least been another solid win under sega's belt instead we got a game full of weird ideas that are not properly thought through and sacrifice a lot of standardized design in an attempt to make this tether work and when you have to compromise as much as this game does well most other developers that were at sega's level would have known when to call it quits but sega's gonna be sega and if i'm honest with myself that's what had been intrigued we know about sonic crackers the proof of concept of this game hell we honestly have a great deal of information of the behind the scenes production of this title and maybe it's because of this extra knowledge it gives me the impression that they went above and beyond with their determination to make the ring tether work despite all the changes from sonic crackers to the final design this stuck around and they built an entire game around it maybe not to the best it could have been and maybe just to show off the stupid tricks of the 32x but there was something about this that they believed in and i think even as a kid i could see hints of brilliance shine through i know this is technically not a good game i'm not about to tell you that this is a solid experience that everybody needs to play but at the same time i find it challenging to flat out call it bad as well there's still something alluring about this title something that always keeps it in the back of my mind something that makes me look back on it quite fondly and i know i'm not the only one so while i have spent a great deal of time detailing the negatives of this game i'm now going to spend even more time telling you why i love all of it i never started this channel with the intention of picking apart the classic trilogy truth be told that's been done to death and arguably a lot better by other people best i could hope to do was potentially provide some kind of unique insight and unique jokes and just be as passionate as possible but it's called game apologist for a reason and chaotix is a game i am much more interested in picking apart and trying to understand what is it about this game that makes people myself included overlook some very obvious flaws and still have a good time how do i describe such a specific and surreal experience well a hefty chunk of that is probably because of nostalgia and i mean proper nostalgia like this came from a different time of my life and i only really remember the good and fuzzies it made me feel i never had a whole lot of experience with this game to grow sick and tired of it so chaotix for a long time felt like a dream one of those dreams that makes sense while you're experiencing it but once you wake up immediately everything feels absurd and while it was just so vivid moments ago for some reason i can't quite recall what i experienced but even if the details are fuzzy i still remember the emotions i experienced and that's what this game was for me a weird dream that i could not quite remember but still enjoyed or maybe this is just what hallucinogens look like so yes absence does make the heart grow fonder and i certainly had sega stockholm syndrome i wanted the 32x to play one single game and i really only had that one game i also think i had crappy doom but that game scared the hell out of me and i'm not proud of that but my point is and i'm sure many of you can relate as well i was excited for this game for specific weird reasons and i was determined to love it so i gave it more time than i probably should so yes i'm gonna sound biased and i'm gonna sound nostalgic but i don't always think that's a bad thing i think if you properly understand why something isn't the best it can be and still love it anyway that's a perspective worth looking into and i won't always be able to be as personally invested with a game like i am with this one but for now i am and hopefully through this perspective i can properly detail to you why i love this game so much [Music] here's the thing about all the complaints i spent an exhausting amount of time detailing to you the biggest sin this game actually makes is just that it's kind of boring if you play it too long out of all of those problems none of them were born from frustration i was never worried about busted controls or cheap depths it's a finished game it's not a glitchy mess and it didn't instill blood boiling rage like some of the later 3d games would go on to do but this game still has that strange experimental messy magic of some of the 3d titles i knew the flaws even back then but for some reason i still found myself thinking about this game after i put it down wanting to give it another shot i know a massive part of that is personal preference i have spoken with people who have found this game very frustrating but it's definitely an easier laid back experience for a sonic game in i don't always think that's a bad thing and i notice that about my personal game preferences sometimes it's okay to just dick around and that's what i use this game for sometimes all i need is a couple of levels of swinging around a couple of colorful cartoon characters to some catchy tracks and i'm good and sometimes that's just how you play games as a little kid people still remember sonic 1 fairly fondly just because of green hill zone and i know the fan base nowadays is sick and tired of it and yes the rest of the game isn't quite as good as that first level but back in the 90s sometimes all you had was a demo booth and that one first level and that was all you needed you weren't super concerned with zipping across the level as quickly as possible it was just fun to control sonic and jump around all these hills and find some satisfaction in exploring all these nooks and crannies and yeah it's not exactly straightforward in terms of design but it was still fun to explore even if there wasn't much of a reward getting there and i think as a kid i treated the entire game of knuckles chaotix like that it also makes me think of mario sunshine both games have a heavy focus on a brand new mechanic that's strapped onto something familiar and both games keep a pretty consistent theme now they think about it both of them kind of have a tropical vacation vibe and for some people they're going to be annoyed with the lack of variety in the levels or be frustrated at being forced to deal with a silly new gimmick when you wanted something more familiar but for others if you're enjoying the music the characters the visuals it's not gonna be much of a setback for you and maybe you've had your fill of traditional sonic or in sunshine's case mario yeah yeah have fun with sonic but why not mix that chocolate with the peanut butter and see what you get and no you don't always get reese's but it's still fun to experiment i mean we still love those silly sonic mods for a reason right as deceptively simple as sonic can be and how natural those games flow once you get the hang of them you still have to take the time and learn how the game rolls and while it can and should be a fun process i am aware that that can be somewhat taxing to other players and it's been a very long time since i was a kid so i'm sure the classic sonic games gave me way more trouble than i'm remembering but with a little patience with a little practice the game feels so utterly rewarding just by simply moving around and i think that's kind of the same thing for the ring tether that's not to say you need to force yourself to get good at a bad mechanic but i would argue that it's incredibly rewarding once you know what you're doing and the more i played around with it the more i saw why the developers were so determined to make it work pulling off a proper slingshot is satisfying chucking your partner up onto a platform above you having them anchor you while you build up tension and shoot upwards that's awesome and that's not something you can do with a standard spin dash and that is not to say that they couldn't have built levels a little bit better to take advantage of situations like this but if you tackle those levels with that mindset i think you're gonna have a pretty good time speaking of i know i already pointed out that they had to compromise a lot in level design to make the ring mechanic work and yes it could have been better i honestly don't mind having fewer bad knicks and zero pitfalls and honestly the lack of bad knicks isn't for the entire game that's for a lot of levels sure but i did notice quite a few of them on the back half of the axe so i don't know if it was just for specific levels or they were just adding more challenges as you got deeper into specific attractions i think it's a little bit of both either way the lack of a life system does cut down on the challenge and i wonder if they try to compensate that with the lack of checkpoints i don't know this game so easy i didn't even notice the lack of them until i started thinking about it just now the levels can be a little dull and confusing at points but if you're wanting to just run around the stages are far from offensive and while i don't believe the giant special stage rings are implemented the best way possible i feel like a lot of people agree that the special stages themselves are some of the best in terms of classic sonic here you must guide lemon wings through the maze of the small intestine and solve the riddle of the katata fish like previous special stages this was a chance for the developers to show off some technically impressive 3d gameplay man they just get better and better every time i can't wait for sonic to go full 3d clearly sega knows what they're doing and yeah i know they look a bit dated now but this looked really cool in the 90s and i still think they're a lot of fun today seriously if you had told me that they had started this project with the special stages in mind and the rest of the game was just secondary i probably believe you because it feels like a lot more thought was put into these layouts compared to the game proper i rolled my eyes at infinite blue spheres i mean yeah they were fun but it took me a long time to master them i wasn't really feeling like jumping into another set of them after i collected the super emeralds but with chaotix i would have taken a full game setup like this you don't get a half pipe you get a full pipe at least at first you do have some platforming challenges narrow walkways bumpers pitfalls hazards and this was all pretty impressive stuff not new for 1995 but new for the sonic series i did have a ring out that felt cheap here and there but i do feel like they did a fine job bumping up the difficulty from level to level as i follow my nose to each and every new fruit loop but at times they might be a little bit too forgiving honestly outside of genesis 3d blast this might be the easiest set of special stages they do offer a bit of challenge but they also allow you to swing back around through the track if you miss some blue spheres granted you have to be sure you have enough rings to do that as they will count down as a timer so that is a good excuse to build up some rings before you jump into the special stage ring because outside of that 50 ring entry fee whatever you bring in with you is your starting point for a counter so yes the special stages i think are a lot of fun but they don't give you any real incentive to grab all of them i mean you do get a cameo from sonic and tails which is great also how was nobody talking about naked leg sonic this is the good ending you couldn't even color them correctly dude couldn't even be bothered to put on pants for this event i guess knuckles wasn't the only one going commando you two get the cooler ending if you don't get all of them and um well never mind the low stakes yikes and they don't unlock any super forms which yeah i get it but it's still kind of a bummer there's not much of traditional super form can really do in these stages again this game is pretty easy still would've been nice if it allowed your character to freely move around without the partner or i don't know i'm sure that would have required a hell of a lot of programming for just a silly bonus these levels are designed with a climbing partner in mind after all and speaking of those partners they are both a weak and strong point for this game depending on how you look at it like i've said before if they were so hell-bent on getting this ring tether to work i kind of feel like they should have provided us with characters that didn't have as many abilities as the sonic cast seems to have forcing them to rely on the sling ring and also maybe get a chance to design better levels around that as opposed to just taking a sonic level and clearing the path for you to puts around with a couple of shackled speed demons but that was just one idea in an attempt to elevate the tether and well heavy and bomb but that's not to say you can't have some fun with the rest of the cast there are enough vertical spaces to shoot sbo up the side of a wall and i never got tired of seeing him run around on the ceiling as needless as it ended up being and mighty just being a sonic clone feels nice and zippy the wall jump might not be the neatest trick in the world but it pairs well with mighty's speed allowing you to practically ricochet off a wall and keep your momentum going i can tell you how versatile vector ended up being thanks to his wall climb and directional jump i didn't realize it at the time but triple jazz's sonic freedom alpha features a similar mechanic and while i do love it there i also appreciate how zippy vectors can be sorry i meant no disrespect triple jazz i hope we can still be friends oh no dude it's it's totally okay i just make games you have all the hard work complaining about them and charming good god this little dude just free flies all over the place without the ring tether it practically breaks the game but that doesn't make it any less fun it kind of makes me wish they could have implemented something like this for super sonic that would have been super rad now all these characters feel fine enough even with a tether on them but that is still the greatest drawback because all these characters would probably feel a lot better on their own and despite all of my playthroughs there's nothing here that shows these abilities working in tandem with each other and even if you do figure something out it doesn't feel intentional on the game's part more just skilled players figuring out some neat ways to combine everything then again that forced cooperation wasn't exactly my favorite thing in sonic advance 3 or sonic 4 episode 2 but even in those cases i personally feel like the failures fall on the developers not the idea itself and even saying that trying to imagine developing scenarios that accounted for all the potential team ups and abilities i'm starting to understand why this game did not come together because all these great ideas branch out into a plethora of other great ideas and while there is some extra attention to the sling ring they still didn't really focus on one core set of mechanics here and it ends up being a jack of all trades master of none all of these characters still feel great and honestly i'm glad they exist and still exist but the more i think about it the more i'd like to see them strike out in solo gameplay hell i'd even take more focus on the sling ring and see its full potential there had to be more to this gimmick they clearly had a lot of great and dynamic ideas for the sonic formula so why were they so hell-bent on this stupid tether well the answer is obvious but it's not one i see a lot of people talk about something i found surprising when researching sonic 2 was that apparently the game was designed with two players in mind after all of these years i tend to forget how much emphasis they put on tails inclusion in that game because when i play it now i don't think of multiplayer i was thinking about the streamlined single-player sonic experience there's nothing in these levels that screams two-player to me you don't even need tails on screen hell the special stages are objectively easier without them i'm sorry gilly i know i just came out on your sonic 2 video but tails makes the special stages objectively harder simply by upping the ring count i don't care if he only loses the rings he collects what difference does that make if it's still up to me to pick up his slack i'm still the one that has to collect all those extra rings and the bomb smacks are still super distracting anyway ah well it's honestly not that big of a deal and the game does give you the option to play sonic or tail solo so it's really a non-issue so i hope we can still be friends gilly get out get out of here go home you're dead to me uh get out get out right now it's the end of you and me ultimately whoever was sonic was getting the meat of the experience chaotix after all that time was still trying to solve the multiplayer problem and building it around a system that forced two players to work together was certainly an inspired thought so just to test how well this works when you bond two characters with rings together i decided to bring in someone who was bonded to me by a ring huh it's me i'm not nick [Music] uh so yeah i sat down and played with nick yes and i'm not a sonic player so it was a very interesting experience for me uh no but at first i found it really counterproductive being lassoed to another character just felt like you were yanking each other around in every direction except the one you wanted to go in especially when you had heavy or one of us had heavy oh yeah i had heavy completely accidentally and he can't jump more than two inches off the ground and there's nothing i could do so you just had to pick me up and like carry me yep through segments which was awesome i had the most time playing charmy and that was fun just because i was [ __ ] around and not going anywhere except to the ceiling but it's a good point though like i didn't think about that through this entire rambling nonsense i've been doing there are kind of different levels of experience that these different characters provide absolutely i mean that's pretty standard for any well any well-made game where you've got you know multiple character selections they shouldn't be identical choices that are just aesthetically different it should always be you know skill set and specialty based and that's still the case here you know charming's got his flight and i can just bumble along wherever i feel like it is a medium and spo i played with svo which was good because he can do the wall climbing which isn't as fun as flying but it's a close second it's fun right it's useless but super fun once i got the hang of it it was fun i had a lot of fun like you're like just running across the ceiling i'm just bouncing along the bottom yeah yo-yo effect for sure but i didn't understand what you were talking about with this being you know a two-player thing in relation to the other sonic games because i've always seen you play them but obviously it's always been solo right and um sonic 2 as soon as you turned that on i realized like what the problem was yeah because i've always seen you just zip through all of these levels as fast as humanly possible like so fast that because i'm not a sonic player i'm like where the where are we but as player two like that's still the case and in half a second i'm off screen if i don't know which direction we're going in or what's happening or if i go too far like if i go forward ahead of you again i can't see the next thing to fall off of so now i've fallen off a cliff and i can't see because there's no split screen right you know so i feel like that was an effort that they made to put a second player in there it was uh not a good effort even if i knew what i was doing i don't think it would have been very feasible for me to keep up with you for that reason alone as soon as we we started playing i realized what the point of knuckles chaos was yeah you know um for better or for worse you're completely tethered to the person that you're playing with um and you can't just like ditch them at all no on another hand i didn't see a lot of point to it other than keeping you two on the same screen and connected like there didn't feel like there was a whole lot of teamwork really necessary it was hey can you both not stop each other from getting to the finish line yeah no we spent more time just trying to figure out how to survive a level than we did anything else there wasn't any puzzles laid out for us to sort out well and it wasn't even survival level that would have been something you know you have to team work your way through some enemies but there really weren't a lot of enemies in the levels that we played in chaotix um even when i was playing charmy and we went through all of the levels so no like they're just it was can you make it to the finish line and that was kind of it yeah no i think our greatest challenge while we were playing at those couple of sessions was when i was heavy was just trying to get up the side of a freaking ramp like this basic sonic thing and our greatest challenge was like how do we get up the side of this damn thing end up picking up a robot and just hoping for the best well we kind of did that with spo2 though oh yeah no we did that with everybody you know because you would just automatically spin dash to the little loop-de-loop and i'd be over here like wait what and of course because we're connected it's just yo-yo effect suddenly you're back with me on the floor all right i'm leaving all right thank you wifey warrior 2-2 no okay well that was fun and as she pointed out there were a lot of problems even when you had multiplayer involved but from my perspective i have to admit i did have a lot of fun the experience is so much more enjoyable when you have a real life partner joining in and sure you could say that with just about anything but if a game is designed around a multiplayer experience i think it's important to experience the multiplayer nobody is tails in this setup and yes again it still can be messy if you're both trying to go in different directions it's kind of like that scene from wild wild west anyone remember that move okay but when you work in tandem it brings a whole new life to the game like to the point where i really need to stress that this is how you should play chaotix it's the difference between an arena shooter with real people versus one filled with bots you still get the core idea and can have a lot of fun on your own but the human element makes all the difference and i know this is not a one for one comparison but it's only here did i really feel like i truly understood what they were going for with this game yeah a lot of it's still silly gimmicks but this feels like the ultimate goal they were going for but you still can't discount all the nonsense that is still involved even with multiplayer you have to wade through a lot of crap just to get to this point even getting the second player set up is an absolute chore you need to beat the tutorial level first and by yourself i have no idea why they didn't want a second player involved with this i feel like this would be imperative hell second player mode should have had its own unique tutorial but yeah you don't get that here you have to play that single player mode and isolated island after that you have to exit the game properly i don't really remember i had to redo isolated island like three times before i figured out how to get that stupid option onto the screen which doesn't make any sense to me because i know on some beta builds they had a second player option right there on the title screen i have no idea why they removed it they still give you the option for tutorial even though you're forced to go through it anyway i don't know and ultimately as much as me and my wife talked about it already she did also mention how much better it felt when you were playing one of these characters by themselves they were rare moments but it was truly liberating the ring mechanic works well and can lead to some great fun but no matter how much more development they slapped into this i don't really think there's any change in the fact that a pure single player sonic gameplay experience is just better that doesn't mean they didn't have a fun idea in their hands here but i'm not about to tell you that chaotix is secretly a must play masterpiece when you bring in somebody else for the ride no matter how you play it the game still needed work but if you are going to play it i highly recommend you get a second controller and see what kind of fun you can get when you bring in somebody else my wife doesn't play sonic games but out of all the other classic games despite the flaws i think chaotix might have done it the best i think i've said just about everything i can say about chaotix i've rambled on for quite a long time but even when it's all said and done i still don't feel like i've properly conveyed how i feel about this game let me try and put it to you this way if christian whitehead showed up at my door and told me i had to choose between sonic 3 and knuckles or knuckles chaotix to get a mobile port i would probably choose knuckles chaotix even knowing it's the lesser of the two games even knowing sonic 3k is my favorite game of all time even knowing s3k deserves it way more than chaotix even knowing it's the bad choice that's the selfish choice i would make because as much as i love 3k i've had plenty of opportunities to play the game and again i know that's not the same for everybody else not everybody had a ds or an xbox gamecube genesis saturn and i get that again this is a selfish choice but chaotix didn't get those chances it showed up on the 32x which had a personal experience even back then i can tell you was a piece of finicky trash and on a defunct gaming service called gametap and yes i did sign up for gametap just to play chaotix back in the day and that was the only game i played on that service and i have no regrets but gametap doesn't exist anymore and you freakily should not be buying a 32x just to play chaotix it's a weird little game that i could really only recommend to hardcore sonic fans that are interested in the history of the franchise like i said no matter how much development they put into something like this if they made a solo release of this game on mobile and charge money for it reviewers are going to tear this thing apart and honestly rightfully so even with widescreen support even with online multiplayer even with a smoother set of special stages even with these lovely flourishes that made this the best version of chaotix it still has all those other flaws we talked about a game like this could really only exist in a collection like sonic gems when that's packed in with other weird obscure sonic titles so you can experience this history and also feel like you got your money's worth and yes as much as i love the gems collection the lack of chaotix is absolutely a mark against that disc because personally i feel like they miss the boat when it comes to re-releasing chaotix bringing it out again in a solo experience is a stupid idea regardless as i just said i would happily support it and if i was given control of that kind of insane decision i would make the bad decision because here's the thing about knuckles chaotix if you have only experienced this game through the opinions of youtubers you can't really enjoy all that music while we are rambling away like lunatics these characters these animations this aesthetic this music it all comes together into an experience not quite like anything else you'll ever see yeah it's a little messy here and there but that doesn't mean you can't have fun and i can't properly describe to you how inviting everything felt when door into summer started playing for the first time or how blown away i was when i saw that big red metal sonic it might just remain a weird dream of my childhood and i'd be okay with that because i really don't need a whole lot of reviewers picking apart this game saying i don't see what the big deal is i don't know why anybody likes it like just you don't get it man and it's not like a knock against cyber shells video either he is super familiar with knuckles chaotix like to a level like i can't even compare to i learned a lot just from watching his video so even when he's tearing into that game and the lost potential of a knuckle spin-off series i understand it's coming from a sonic fan who knows what he's talking about so even if we don't have the same experience with the game i had a great time listening to him so yeah obviously meant no disrespect cyber show i hope we could still be friends i don't even know who you are this game is so unique that i honestly feel like you should really play it for yourself really sit down with some patience and some time to figure out the sling ring and what your favorite character is to play around with because if you've been looking at all this footage hearing this music and not really bothered by the idea that this game's a little easier than the other ones you might find yourself falling in love with this game like i and probably a handful of other people have as well because there is still a lot here worth loving i mean for crying out loud i didn't bother getting into a whole lot with the characters in this video because well i've spent two months leading up to this point going into all of them look how much we had to talk about just from this one goofy game there's a lot to appreciate and explore here and even if they didn't bring this game back and remastered it or whatever else you can still tell that there are great ideas that maybe they weren't fleshed out to the best of their ability and chaotics and maybe some of them should have been abandoned but there are other ones that just needed a little push over that finish line and you see hints of that in little bits and pieces in future sonic media i've seen constant comments pointing out how the chaos rings look like the world rings from sonic and the secret rings but let's also not forget sonic colors which also takes place in a theme park and you know those laser diamonds look awfully familiar and of course we can't forget sonic mania we got the triumphant return of mighty they've implemented that blue ring box there's a lovely reference to the giant red metal sonic with metal sonic's other transformation and i seriously doubt studiopolis would exist without some references from this game i'm seeing a lot of amazing arena in this design and maybe the chaotix cast isn't as full as it could be in modern sonic terms but the detective agency is still a great set of characters and comic artists and writers have shown us how much potential we can get just from a silly glitch like the wechnia i've seen commenters saying that they saw that as like a ghost of a guardian past who's haunting knuckles like that's a really cool idea when i was a kid i think what disappointed me the most about chaotix was that i had all these extra characters and i expected this to balloon out into a grand sonic adventure like s3k was and yeah in hindsight knowing why they pushed it out as quickly as they did i understand that was not a feasible option but i don't see why that isn't the case nowadays i mean whatever with mania 2 what if we got chaotix too you picked one of these five characters and explore levels actually based around their abilities or you know what even have that sling ring possible maybe you have elements where you have to disconnect for a little bit while you guys solve separate puzzles i don't know the possibilities are endless whether it be piecemeal to really make these ideas shine or even bringing back that flawed original game i would welcome it with open arms no it's not my favorite game in the franchise and on its own i can't really tell people that they should go out and play it but if you are the type of person that can sit through a video like this engaged the entire time and you have never played the game well then what are you waiting for [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this has been november chaotix this has been chaotix plus this has been chaotic's miss this has been the game apologist and despite all the bad i hope you saw some good in knuckles chaos 2-2 team chaotix [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Game Apologist

Views: 140,973

Rating: 4.9471469 out of 5

Keywords: knuckles chaotix, sonic the hedgehog, metal sonic, espio, charmy bee, game apologist, sonic mania, chaotix mania, chaotix final boss, red metal sonic, eggman, door into summer, cybershell, evening star remix, my new soundtrack, game review, sega 32x, sega saturn, sega genesis, retro gaming, knuckles vs metal sonic, mighty armadillo, sonic colors, chaotix 2, sonic mania 2, classic sonic, chaotix bad ending, chaos rings, chaotix 2 player, multiplayer, chaotix marathon, plus

Id: 4wEXy3xWc6o

Length: 52min 37sec (3157 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021