How far in are you? A lot of people hold the opinion that 3&K>2>3. Once you've finished the & knuckles portion of the game you may think differently, the end game is amazing.
And if you're like me, you'll constantly switch depending on how you feel. There are times when I'm absolutely enamoured with Sonic CD too despite some of it's weird weird level design. That's more to do with the art and music, though.
The thing about Sonic 3&K is that it had art and music and "dialogue-less scenes". It told a story without giving the player text, did it fast enough to keep the player moving, and some of the animations spoke volumes. It had multiple characters for you to play through as, and if you did everything right with respect gathering all Chaos Emeralds, the final boss for each character is different. Sonic3&K has a breadth and depth of content, one of the more decent special stages in the series, and more spectacle than its predecessors. Its final, final Sonic boss tends to be of the style over substance sort of thing, but that's something we've come to know the Sonic games (at least some of their final bosses) for at times.
Then there are other times when I like Sonic 2 more because it's the game I learned how to speedrun. Level design in that game had more variety and colour than its predecessor (and arguably more player-friendly), and some obviously focused on speed (Chemical Plant) while others were slower-paced (Metropolis).
I think they're both excellent games when all is said and done. That's why I constantly switch. There are certainly things that one does better than the other.
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OH SPEAKING OF PLATFORMING. I'd said that the final dungeon in FF13-2 had
butt platforming. Lightning Returns has one dungeon that encourages the physics-less platforming in the game
and you have to deal with respawning if you decide to fall off in some areas (and you kinda have to since there are some treasures you want to get and the paths are divided enough that you have to fall off and retrace)
and you have to deal with periodic HP sap (which wouldn't be fun if you had substantially lower HP than I did)
and some of the platforms disappear after a while so you've gotta do it fast while reorienting yourself to factor in that Lightning has no physics
and some of the areas where you want to platform aren't as apparent because of the lack of lighting in the game
and you still have to deal with the game's in-game clock while not using the Time Stop spell to ration time (since I tried doing this before the game recalled me back to the game's hub and my time for the day ran out) because you need all of that stuff for the boss battle up ahead instead.
Like...
Fucking
why? Who sat down, didn't realize the character had no lift and momentum, decided to put regenerating enemies there that you should probably run from (btw you have a sprint meter have fun with that), forgot that the game barely has lighting, made narrow areas for you to platform on (above another floor of an area where if you fell down, enemies would respawn and you should probably reorient quickly and run from them because fighting can be a waste of the player's time), made backtracking kinda dumb where I had to backtrack to the first room in the dungeon instead of being there in the hallway before the boss, made some of the platforms quick to disappear (which was a problem in just two areas cuz I wanted a spell and opening treasure takes time to animate), and so on?
See, I thought the time door dungeon was going to be the worst one (ie: doors open and close every in-game hour), but this is just plain bad. Lightning has no momentum in her jumps and her jumps are weird enough that you can probably fall down to another floor while trying to reorient the camera for more precise platforming as you probably would in an AC game or maybe another platformer. I know qq more and Noi watched me experiment with the platforming a bit in the demo when I streamed it once and they had a laugh, so it's certainly not my imagination.
It's not
hard by any means because I was smart enough to leave this part of the game to last, but it's just... annoying? I feel like it's an inconvenience. Especially to other players who may not be as successful. What
if I did this dungeon earlier? I would be more critical of it because I'd have less HP. What if I had no experience with the platforming genre? What if those "hey maybe I can jump on that" instincts didn't set in with me and I was stuck there for a few in-game hours wasting time? What if I didn't realize that in those battles that I sometimes accidentally run into it'd be more beneficial to use Tier 1+ spells instead of Tier-3 since they animate faster and cost less so battles would be done faster? What if I didn't realize that backtracking to the first room in the entire dungeon would allow me to a) get out and restock items, and b) there would be someone to teleport me to the area boss in the first room of the dungeon out of convenience? I'm getting flashbacks to Tower of Babel in Xenogears, and at least in this dungeon I'm not getting encounters mid-air.
When you construct a dungeon in a video game, there are a lot of "what if" scenarios that you have to probably take into account. What if the player did this? Should I make backtracking easier? How frequent should encounters be? How powerful should enemies be? How should the map be drawn? Which areas could and should the player go into? I feel like some of these dungeons (esp. Time Door and this platforming dungeon) were just there because they wanted to make use of some of the mechanics afforded to the player, but it wasn't thought through enough.
I remember when I was younger, I wanted this company to do a Final Fantasy platformer. I... no longer want them to do a platformer. This is crap. Even FF7-FFX-2's "press a button to jump/climb and we'll do it auto for you" wasn't as bad.
Rant over. I've wanted to bitch about that at length since last night, lol.
I found conflicted info on some of the sites so that's really helpful.
