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Originally recorded: April 27, 2025
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Well, things didn't turn out exactly how I expected with this stream. But I got the results I was hoping for and that's really all that matters, right?

For whatever reason, it feels like the Egg Fortress stages were the only ones that didn't sufficiently adapt to Trip's new abilities to deliver an even harder experience. Seriously, I had very little trouble with them compared to my first run with Sonic on the levels themselves. Maybe Arzest thought they were hard enough on the first pass to modify them significantly? Either way, I got through both of those fairly quick.

Neko warned me that Trip's final boss might take me the entire session to beat. By my count, it was actually under an hour. That being said, I did do a little research on how to best defeat the boss ahead of time. I would have to say that the first phase was definitely the harder of the two, simply because by the time I could reach the second phase reliably, it didn't take that many attempts to finish things off. Honestly, I think I might've had more trouble with the standard final boss all things considered.

Seeing KI and Dari's dueling opinions on Sonic boss fights might've made things feel a bit quicker too.

That being said, the sailing wasn't exactly smooth on the final bit of the game. Despite my impression that Super Sonic boss fights were traditionally a victory lap more than anything, it turns out that the TRUE final boss was a significant pain in the ass to beat. And a lot of that is owed to the fact that it relies very heavily on Super Sonic's main weakness: wasting time. Factor in that stupid QTE section that wraps things up and you've got a recipe for disaster. Like, most of the time, I'd always choke on the final phase... which was just irritating.

After everything was finished, I decided to just sit through the entire credits this time around. I guess I did that to regain my bearings and to signify that I was indeed properly done with the game this time. However, it turns out that Dari had missed the stages where I played as Amy and Tails, having only seen Sonic, Knuckles and Trip's gameplay. So, I decided to indulge him by using both of the characters he missed in Time Trial mode. Dari was pissed off about Amy's gameplay for some reason... and Bridge Island itself seemed to perplex him. Which is weird, since I'm pretty sure that he was there when I played through it with Sonic. I can at least understand the second criticism: Bridge Island felt like it went a bit crazy with the game's gimmicks, but they get a lot more sparse as early as Speed Jungle. My guess is that Bridge Island was designed the way it was to draw in new players, while the rest of the game was better suited to people familiar with the gameplay.

I'll be taking Thursday off for the most part. Now that I'm done with the main line-up, I've just got to tackle the "SHSLD challenge" before I can move onto the bonus games proper. Unfortunately, we didn't get that first bit figured out early enough to compensate for how quickly I burned through my first eight streams, but it's not like I won't enjoy having a quick break.