Long stretches of just boosting or, more often now, just watching everything go by itself.
Replay the levels. It's your choice on whether to speedrun or use Wisps to explore.
Useless padding all over the place, from the drift turn sequences that control awkwardly and serve absolutely no purpose
Planet Wisp is the only part of the game that has Drift Turns sequences for more than a fraction of a second.
to those insipid little mini-acts which appear to have nothing to do with anything going on, none of which can be skipped.
Those are for the Wisp system, replay them.
Zones that drag on for six mandatory acts for no apparent reason other than the designers feeling obliged to.
It's pretty obvious that Zones each having six acts as opposed to 14 individual zones with 2 acts each allows the developers to save space that WOULD be used on re-theming all of the background and art every 2 acts and is what allows the caliber of the graphics to remain so high throughout the game. You getting tired of a theme has nothing to do with gameplay. It also allows for a wider variety of level design, from standard Sonic levels, to special scrolling or gimmick levels, to more puzzle-oriented Wisp themed levels where there's a lot of hidden content if you would stop holding down right on your control stick.
Level design which, in spite of all these big set pieces, just feels randomly slapped together rather than impressing upon the player that you're going anywhere or doing anything interesting - more often than not it feels that you don't find the goal ring, it finds you.
Because a common complaint in the Sonic games was that exploration was taken away in favor of making all the levels a straight run from point A to point B.
(Only when you replay stages after getting more wisps do some of these stages start to make sense, which goes back to the padding problem.)
"Not as an engine limitation, but as a conscious design decision." The Wisp system is there to allow the developers to encourage you to replay levels, something which this generation doesn't naturally incline itself to do, only whining about lack of content when a game is too short.
The "death pit" exclamation icon is a useful idea, but is used as an excuse for the designers to get away with putting blind jumps everywhere; remember those?.
I have no idea what game you're playing, but the only cheap death pit I recall was in the last acts of Aquatic Park, some level that obviously gave you trouble if it colored your perception of the game that much. I for one, was dumbfounded at the sheer lack of pits in the game. When I died, it was usually due to enemies or hazards like spikes, not pits.
Bosses that exhibit the "how did I win, I don't know what the fuck I just did" syndrome from Sonic Heroes.
Now you've just totally lost me.
The 2D areas only pass as a Sonic game in the most bare definiton; in fact many chunks of level are so laughably simplistic that they almost could have been done in f'ing Doom Legacy.
Because complexity equals quality. That's why Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog were such great games!
: D
Sonic not only de-spins while falling in a jump, but they didn't have the presence of mind to NOT leave him vulnerable when this happens, so hello nonsensical hits/deaths from just trying to jump on an enemy (see also: the ill-concieved "hop" jump from a light tap of the button).
Oh noes, jumping doesn't make me invulnerable to all enemies now. Learn to homing attack, it's not exactly the hardest gameplay thing to learn.
Smacking into those pointless walls floating in the way that you have to slide under god knows how many times just because they're there.
I hated those pointless loops in Sonic the Hedgehog 1-4, where you just had to farm inertia for a few seconds and spin around in a circle. Totally pointless, amirite?
Having to turn on the japanese voices and miss out on Mike Pollock's charming Eggman P.A. announcements because I cannot stand Roger Craig Smith's overacting as Sonic.
Because Mike Pollock isn't overacting . . . >_> Now you're just purposefully looking for nonsense to bitch about.
Finishing a level and saying, out loud, "that's IT?" out of disbelief.
There you go, plus the invisible walls out of nowhere, my experience and every significant problem (that I can recall offhand) up to Planet Wisp's boss, after which I gave up. I don't know about you guys, but I exaggerate none of this. Every time I started to think I was having fun with something, it sucker punched me with more stupid bullshit. Underneath the pretty facade and nice music, this is no less mediocre a game than Unleashed was.
It sounds to me like you were specifically looking for the bullshit, or rather - you were running into one or two small problems and then retroactively putting the problems back in levels where they didn't exist in the first place.
Radrappy, you call this an improvement?
Sonic the Werehog.
You have some valid complaints on minor issues, but you exaggerate and misconstrue the game so much (anyone reasonable who has played this game will tell you that sudden bottomless pits are nearly extinct compared to their use in Heroes, Unleashed, and Sonic 2006 for instance) you're doing your argument more harm than good.