2.1 Emblem Feedback

The best example of what SpiritCrusher is saying, naturally, is Sonic Adventure 2. Forcing the player to tread through all 180 emblems, including the chao emblems (which took an eternity) regardless of whether they liked going for them or not, just to unlock Green Hill Zone (arguably one of the best levels in the game) was downright terrible.

Our entire plan was to avoid that. There's still a reward for all emblems to give a small semblance of achievement for those that really want to do it, but it's not a major reward on purpose. If you like hunting for all the emblems, good for you! If there's something you don't like, however, don't bother with it! All the major unlockables should be easy enough to obtain without forcing you to do things that you don't like/want to do.


As an addendum, none of the score emblems take the Perfect Bonus into account, and none of them assume that you'll spend 30 minutes herding enemies around to get a good enough score. The 1ups in Record Attack also turn into points for Score Attack purposes, so you can seek them out to help as well.

(I had a thought, actually, of whether making the enemies return to their spawn point after a few seconds of losing sight of the player would help. I'm not sure the "herd all the enemies around" mechanic is something to be encouraged or removed; I'm leaning towards the latter. It's just... enemies are a lot easier to dodge and herd around in a 3d game than a 2d game simply due to the nature of movement.)

While SpiritCrusher and Inuyasha did a good job of explaining why relevant unlockables stop at 100 emblems, I also have an old and extremely in-depth explanation of why there isn't a serious reward for max emblems here: https://mb.srb2.org/showpost.php?p=684351

Even if we miraculously had a ton of new unlockables to put into the game, you shouldn't expect any of them to have a requirement above about 75% max emblems. We don't want to force players who may not like some aspects of the game to play them over and over just to unlock something they may like better

Neo Chaotikal said:

I kind of feel that there shouldn't be any emblems in Black Hole, since it's already the ultimate unlockable. It's a going a bit overboard to have to go through the challenge of getting all A ranks, and then unlocking the ability to try to unlock everything in the game. If that makes any sense.

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The skills required to A rank Black Hole are similar to the skills required to A rank Egg Satellite, just with some more stage memorization required. I'm not saying that these emblems aren't brutal, but they're no worse than the Armageddon Shield emblem in Azure Temple, which is a similar style of memorization and muscle memory in a stupidly hard stage. I think the problem here with players is that the skill required to complete the stage and the skill required to do well are actually pretty close, but after all the losses getting to the point where you can complete the stage, it FEELS like it would be impossible to complete the stage well, when in fact if you've completed it you're already most of the way there.

Zwip-Zwap Zapony said:

The Score attack feature should still be there, and it could give emblems in mods, but it's really un-SRB2-y to me in vanilla as it is right now.

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I really don't understand the "un-SRB2-y" comment here. One of the goals of the emblem system is to encourage actions that would otherwise not be rewarded. Score/ring attack both require a slow, tactical approach to the levels that generally isn't something players actively try to optimize. The requirements might be too strict since all the players on the dev team had been playing around with it a while and therefore got really good at it, but the whole point is to make you play through stages differently than you ordinarily would.

Zwip-Zwap Zapony said:

Also, ERZ3 + Time emblem? No. ERZ3 + Ring emblem? Acceptable, if the boss fight wouldn't be there. Only acceptable if there still was that time "limit" before the "checkpoint", though, as otherwise it would also be a slow un-SRB2-y run and such. ERZ3 + Score emblem? No.

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The score emblem and ring emblem are very similar due to the existence of the guard bonus. The purpose here is to test your skill at actually not getting hit by the boss, which is a pretty decent challenge. I'll note that if you get the shield, it's totally possible to get this emblem while getting hit once if you got enough rings to make up the loss in guard bonus.

Expect to see more score emblems in boss acts in the future, because it lets us check whether you can complete the boss without getting hit.

Aegix said:

You certainly live up to your name, SpiritCrusher!

Some of those time attack emblems that I had to retry a good 20 times, trying to shave off every possible second and nail every shortcut perfectly are now meaningless! *cries in a corner*

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Remember that quite a few of the people in our community have been playing this game for a very long time and have gotten quite good at it. Of course you're going to have more trouble beating the emblem requirements if you recently discovered the game as opposed to having been playing this game for over a decade.

The requirements were aimed to be a challenge to players who are still new to the game. None of the requirements were intended to be the least bit difficult to someone's who's been at this for years and has already memorized the stages.

Kaysakado said:

I'd also like to give props to ATZ for having, imo, the most segregation between the ring and the score emblem. While the score emblem involved using all the armageddon shields to their fullest (and honestly not at all having to rely on ring bonus), the ring emblem has the player nabbing the force shield (if they're smart) and making it through the map without getting tossed around too badly.

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I personally think that it's actually a good thing that the ring and score emblems are generally best done in a single run. It takes a lot of time to do either type of run, so letting players double up makes things a lot more reasonable in the long term.

Mystic said:

I really don't understand the "un-SRB2-y" comment here. One of the goals of the emblem system is to encourage actions that would otherwise not be rewarded. Score/ring attack both require a slow, tactical approach to the levels that generally isn't something players actively try to optimize. The requirements might be too strict since all the players on the dev team had been playing around with it a while and therefore got really good at it, but the whole point is to make you play through stages differently than you ordinarily would.

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You already stated what I meant by un-SRB2-y. Slow, tactical approaches. Even though the Ring emblems require slow tactical approaches, they aren't that slow (for me, at least), but Score emblems? Yeah, I'm not one of the developers, and I'm not one of the really quick and skilled learners, so I have to spend at least 30 minutes in a stage, 25 of which are herding enemies together, to get a decent score. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but at least 15 minutes for me of at least 20 minutes per stage is spent herding enemies together to get a high chain and such.

If it were up to me, I'd say either remove Score emblems from vanilla, or at least loosen the requirements. (I should really get a controller again, and hunt down some more Record Attack emblems...)

Edit: The reason I think Ring attack's slow, tactical approach is SRB2-y while Score attack's slow, tactical approach isn't, is because Ring attack, in my case, usually consists of running/thokking/flying/gliding around, gathering rings, avoiding being hurt, while Score attack, in my case, for the most part consists of standing still in the same spot, occasionally moving a bit backwards to avoid getting bit by the enemies one is herding. It's the "standing still" and "herding" part I find un-SRB2-y.

Inuyasha has already stated that herding enemies together for 15 minutes isn't the intended solution to any of score emblems. It's possible in some stages, but there are always less tedious alternatives.

Zwip-Zwap Zapony said:

You already stated what I meant by un-SRB2-y. Slow, tactical approaches. Even though the Ring emblems require slow tactical approaches, they aren't that slow (for me, at least), but Score emblems? Yeah, I'm not one of the developers, and I'm not one of the really quick and skilled learners, so I have to spend at least 30 minutes in a stage, 25 of which are herding enemies together, to get a decent score. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but at least 15 minutes for me of at least 20 minutes per stage is spent herding enemies together to get a high chain and such.

If it were up to me, I'd say either remove Score emblems from vanilla, or at least loosen the requirements. (I should really get a controller again, and hunt down some more Record Attack emblems...)

Edit: The reason I think Ring attack's slow, tactical approach is SRB2-y while Score attack's slow, tactical approach isn't, is because Ring attack, in my case, usually consists of running/thokking/flying/gliding around, gathering rings, avoiding being hurt, while Score attack, in my case, for the most part consists of standing still in the same spot, occasionally moving a bit backwards to avoid getting bit by the enemies one is herding. It's the "standing still" and "herding" part I find un-SRB2-y.

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If you really think ring attack is more tactical than score attack, you really should try something new to get score. Every ring gives you 100 points at the exit and there's not many maps where you can gather very much enemies to the same place. You can also get a little time bonus. 4000 points mean 40 single enemies or 40 rings.

SpiritCrusher said:

Inuyasha has already stated that herding enemies together for 15 minutes isn't the intended solution to any of score emblems. It's possible in some stages, but there are always less tedious alternatives.

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Green Flower Zone act 1. It has an alternative that takes less than a half minute, sure, but it still requires skill, luck, and most importantly patience to try getting that invincibility chain high enough while still reaching the goal in less than a half minute. That's probably a far more tedious alternative than herding.
I went with the herding method, which took me 12 minutes and 12.6 seconds as Tails, most of which I believe were waiting for those ungodly slow Crawlas to gather up, the rest of which I believe where gathering enough rings for the Perfect Bonus.
I'm not a skilled guy at Sonic Robo Blast 2, I have to take the herding methods to get enough points in most stages. Though I have to admit, that's the only Score emblem I have. (I seriously thought I had more...) When I get a hold of a controller again, I'll probably try getting Score emblems in other stages. Sorry if this sounds like ranting or something.

Oh, and by the way, "no amazing rewards past 75% of the emblems"? I think 160 out of 160 emblems is a tiny bit more than 75%...

Zwip-Zwap Zapony said:

Oh, and by the way, "no amazing rewards past 75% of the emblems"? I think 160 out of 160 emblems is a tiny bit more than 75%...

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Pandora's Box is just a shortcut menu for various commands you can do with DEVMODE on. It's barely anything worth unlocking. Except for the Ultimate Cheat, of course.

Zwip-Zwap Zapony said:

Green Flower Zone act 1. It has an alternative that takes less than a half minute, sure, but it still requires skill, luck, and most importantly patience to try getting that invincibility chain high enough while still reaching the goal in less than a half minute.

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GFZ1 was *intentionally* supposed to be one of the harder/hardest score attack emblems to achieve; I liked the thought of the first map requiring a decent amount of skill to achieve. And luck is something it doesn't require; a good knowledge of the enemies' locations and a well-thought out path through them will give you much more than the 125k requested.

And yes, that alternative is the intended way to do it. Again, herding is the slow, wholly unintentional way that only really exists because of the nature of 3d gaming.

D00D64 said:

Pandora's Box is just a shortcut menu for various commands you can do with DEVMODE on. It's barely anything worth unlocking. Except for the Ultimate Cheat, of course.

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This is only partially true; "Destroy All Robots" is also exclusive to Pandora's Box, and is sort of useful if you want to clear them away for testing purposes.

D00D64 said:

Pandora's Box is just a shortcut menu for various commands you can do with DEVMODE on. It's barely anything worth unlocking. Except for the Ultimate Cheat, of course.

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While that might be (and is) true, I still really like and want it. (I know Pandora's Box from my totally 120% legit full save for 2.0.7 which I totally didn't download from the internet.)

Zwip-Zwap Zapony said:

Though I have to admit, that's the only Score emblem I have.

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...well, that pretty much explains everything. Most of the other score emblems in the game don't require you to get high kill chains, collecting a bunch of rings and a few extra lives is usually enough.

SpiritCrusher said:

collecting a bunch of rings and a few extra lives is usually enough.

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But you can't even get extra lives in Record attack. 100-Ring lives are disabled, and extra life monitors are replaced by score monitors. *Shot*

Well, it would certainly had helped my opinion if the first stage wasn't the hardest for Score attack, scaring me off from trying the rest without a controller, silly developers.

(Also, I just checked again. I do have a Score emblem in RVZ1, though I got that simply by trying to get the Ring emblem, and then I noticed two 10.000 point monitors on the way.)

Alrighty, so I guess the solution here is to explain some MMORPG terminology, because having some common terms to talk about this is important if we want to talk about whether we want to stop people from doing it.

First off, some definitions: "aggro" (also known as "threat") in MMORPGs can be a very complicated affair, but in SRB2 it's really simple: the player that "has aggro" is the player that the enemy is targeting. Those of you who have played Coop have probably noticed that the enemies and bosses in SRB2 don't necessarily attack the player closest to them. This is aggro at work. I was going to explain the actual mechanics at play in SRB2, but apparently they've changed since I last looked so I don't know them anymore.

"Kiting" is the commonly used MMO term for what you guys are calling "herding". The idea is that the enemy is a kite, and the player is holding the kite's string. As the player runs away, the enemy runs after the player because the string pulls the kite along with you. In games where the enemies run faster than the players, this doesn't tend to work very well, but in SRB2, the player runs WAY faster than the enemies, so kiting enemies is trivially easy. While this sounds like a trivial issue, in MMOs it's the source of a ton of exploits, and therefore there are a lot of things that designers do to get around it.

The most common one called "leashing". After a certain point, the enemy drops aggro and runs back to its spawn point, like the enemy is a pet being stopped by a leash held by their spawn point. In a lot of MMOs they even make the enemy completely invincible while running back, but that wouldn't be necessary in SRB2. There are two different "points" when leashing tends to occur, depending on the game:

1. When the enemy gets beyond a certain distance from the player with aggro, he drops aggro. This is what Inuyasha was suggesting earlier. This style of leashing allows kiting, but the player has to actively involved or the enemy will lose interest and go back to his spawn point.
2. When the enemy gets beyond a certain distance from their spawn point, he drops aggro. This style of leashing completely disallows kiting, but looks really quirky when it triggers because no matter how close the enemy is to getting the player when they hit the leashing radius, they just turn around and ignore the player at that point.

So, with all those definitions, where am I going with this? Basically, preventing kiting in SRB2 is hard without some kind of leashing mechanic. The problem is that there are a lot of things going on in SRB2, and even worse, our aggro mechanics are heavily inconsistent at this point. To prevent framerate issues, some of our enemies will drop aggro entirely after their target leaves a certain distance, but they don't leash. Other enemies have no such drop and will continue to follow their target until the death of either party. Yet other enemies have completely hardcoded, specialized routines for deciding on a target. Hence, there are a couple of directions we could go from here:

• Not worry about it. This is a common default state, because Score Attack's requirements were all made with the assumption that the player wouldn't kite enemies anyways. If we nerfed the requirements more, this would become a complete non-issue as most people wouldn't even think of kiting. Since it would only matter for players who are attempting to beat other extreme records, and players going to extreme lengths for optimization generally have no problem spending half an hour kiting enemies into perfect positions, we could simply not worry about it.
• Implement a leashing system to certain enemies. I presume most of the people complaining about this are complaining about Crawlas, since Crawlas are incredibly slow and therefore take a ton of time to kite. A few enemies in CEZ probably also qualify as an issue for this. For this purpose I would suggest spawn point leashing, since player distance leashing just makes leashing even MORE tedious. Problem with doing this is that we'd just be adding even MORE inconsistency to an already inconsistent system.
• Put leashing into the core enemy AI for all enemies. Essentially, this is the "proper" fix, but it would take the most time, as it would require fixing a lot of issues that have been in game for eternity as well as removing a lot of the quirky aggro exceptions. For this either type of leashing would work, but I would still suggest spawn point leashing since it makes long-term kiting across stages entirely impossible.

There are other quirks of adding leashing to SRB2, like how the enemies would decide to path back to their spawn and how it would make enemies face away from you when you walk backwards down a route you've already taken, but these seem like solvable issues if we really think this is a problem to Score Attack's viability.

I got 95 emblems. Every "scavenger hunt" emblem on non-extra stages, every special stage time trial, and A ranks on every special stage except RVZ's special stage (and therefore not the SUPER SECRET SPECIAL STAGE either, nor the Mastery of Nights emblem.) I also haven't gotten the emblem for getting a Perfect Bonus.

The hints were super fun and I found a lot of the emblems that way. The only main campaign emblems I had to consult a guide for were the RVZ emblem on a spring in the ebb-and-flow tide room and the emblem in the waterslide spout above the checkpoint before that fun water half-pipe in DSZ2- I had actually suspected an emblem of being there, but spent 5 minutes flying in as Tails trying to get it and got bored and tired. The speed of that pipe, coupled with the sheer length of it, makes getting that emblem a chore.

In contrast, for the extra stages I only got that Emblem underneath the fountain in AGZ. The hints are unhelpful to the point of irritation- find three buttons? Same as the last emblem, but two?- and their methods of activation make the emblem radar completely useless on that map. I haven't even managed to beat the nightmare that is that water map, so I haven't even tried getting that map's emblems.

The record attack requirements are not fun. Well, maybe the time trials- those are interesting, as I enjoy speed running - but everything about score attack is boring and ring attack being seperate to score attack is a goddamn chore.

I loved scavenger hunting. Non-time-trial record attack can go choke on knives.

How many emblems did you get?

I got 110 emblems and got a fun time looking for them. Some were very clever and well hidden to find, some where were in plain sight. But I like it, it's the most funny feature of Srb2.

Did you like the emblem hint and radar system? if there where any hidden emblems that you still couldn't findand had to resort a guide, which ones were they?

Nothing more to say, I love the hint and radar system. Some emblems I could not find where some in Aerial Garden and Azure Temple. But besides that, I found all emblems in all the other maps in no time.

Did you find the record attack requirements reasonable? Again, if any of them felt too hard (or too easy for that matter), which ones were they?

I think we have to take our time to do it, I found some easy to do and some really hard. But with time and practice we can do it in no time.

Did you find the emblem collection aspect of 2.1 fun?

I found it so funny, even more funny than having only 1 emblem per character in older versions. I can say I dont want it to change. I love Srb2.

SpiritCrusher said:

This is quite intentional. Emblem hunting is supposed to be fun, and those that don't like that kind of thing shouldn't be forced to do it just so they can access the content they're really interested in. A game that tricks you into doing something you don't want to do is honestly an insult to the player.

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Personally yes and no... I mean: every game have cool content after some hard or tedious part. Yeah, the last part of ACZ1 may be tedious at first and not that fun, but that doesn´t mean I should be able to get to RVZ without finishing it.


I understand that a level is something a lot different than a score attack, but why not add some bonus after that? Even just a harder version of the same mode could be cool. Getting all time emblems could lead to some developer ghost mode, getting all ring emblems could lead to a get all rings in each stage challenge, and score attack... I just don´t know :P


What I´m trying to say is that, as a player, I expect something for playing hours on a mode that barely is fun at all. Just something. Even some kind of helper like the hint and radar system made for the score attack mode would be awesome.

犬夜叉;757396 said:

The best example of what SpiritCrusher is saying, naturally, is Sonic Adventure 2. Forcing the player to tread through all 180 emblems, including the chao emblems (which took an eternity) regardless of whether they liked going for them or not, just to unlock Green Hill Zone (arguably one of the best levels in the game) was downright terrible.

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I personally enjoyed that :/ I understand people unliking it, but I personally enjoyed a lot more the emblem hunting in SA2 knowing there were unlockables after them than without them.

犬夜叉;757396 said:

(I had a thought, actually, of whether making the enemies return to their spawn point after a few seconds of losing sight of the player would help. I'm not sure the "herd all the enemies around" mechanic is something to be encouraged or removed; I'm leaning towards the latter. It's just... enemies are a lot easier to dodge and herd around in a 3d game than a 2d game simply due to the nature of movement.)

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If score emblem aren´t meant to be earned doing herding, I would agree to somehow downgrade that possibility, even if I´m not that good at that mode at all and I´ve surely exploited the thing on some of the previous Score Attacks. It just feels that´s the way to earn them when it shouldn´t.


Why not add some kind of HUD with the enemies you have killed, 1ups you have earned, etc VS the total on the stage? That could lead to more exploration in the stages, which would in turn make the mode a lot more fun. It´s not the same thing being stuck on a level after 30 minutes of playthrough than knowing there´s some more rings, enemies or items to earn on some corner... Or if you are supposed to mix time/rings/getting things together to earn a score emblem, make the score attacks more streamlined somehow. Maybe get x points after x seconds or you fail. That could lead to a more fun mode too.


Just as it is, it personally lacks something to keep you trying or playing. Even replaying the same level for the 100th time without a goal seems more fun. That shouldn´t happen at all.

Mystic said:

The skills required to A rank Black Hole are similar to the skills required to A rank Egg Satellite, just with some more stage memorization required. I'm not saying that these emblems aren't brutal, but they're no worse than the Armageddon Shield emblem in Azure Temple, which is a similar style of memorization and muscle memory in a stupidly hard stage. I think the problem here with players is that the skill required to complete the stage and the skill required to do well are actually pretty close, but after all the losses getting to the point where you can complete the stage, it FEELS like it would be impossible to complete the stage well, when in fact if you've completed it you're already most of the way there.

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Personally the only problem with Black Hole is that it overuses things moving forward and back or pulsating ones all the time, so you either memorize and play exactly the same on each run, or you slow down, or it seems random. I think Nights mode needs some more variety in gimmicks to keep that last zone interesting, just as if Egg Rock Zone were just lots of platforms and pits could get boring too.


In contrast, Egg Satelite is awesome and feels a lot more fun IMO, even when you keep failing at it. Maybe Black Hole only needs something different to keep it fresh...

Mystic said:

Expect to see more score emblems in boss acts in the future, because it lets us check whether you can complete the boss without getting hit.

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Why not just add an emblem for each boss if you beat them without being hit to keep it simpler?

Mystic said:

Hence, there are a couple of directions we could go from here

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Just to throw some more ideas:

• Do the chaining system really matter that much on Score mode at all? Wouldn´t removing the chaining system just fix the problem?
• If the chain system is considered needed on the Score mode, why not max it sooner so it isn´t as exploitable?
• If it´s still considered important to keep the current high max score per enemy, then why not add a penalty if you don´t get score after x time so herding is a lot harder? (Herding enemies WHILE you keep getting points). Or like I´ve suggested earlier, some kind of "you must get the first 2000 points in x seconds" goals so you just can´t stop and take so much time earning the points?

I don´t want to be negative... I enjoy most of SRB2 and I think it´s an awesome fangame which plays better than many many commercial games. I love the new emblem system, and personally it´s nearly perfect. But Score Attack needs something more to be interesting IMO. I don´t know if the goal of the mode is to find a good route towards the goal which grants more points, or if it´s get nearly everything on a level, or if it´s just meant to play with the core system differently... But I think that goal should be streamlined. You cannot earn a time emblem being too slow and you cannot earn a ring emblem without exploring or not being hit. Think about what the mode is expecting the player to do, and make it more clear. Right now it feels like filler, while Time and Ring modes feel like they add something different to the game.

Personally the only problem with Black Hole is that it overuses things moving forward and back or pulsating ones all the time, so you either memorize and play exactly the same on each run, or you slow down, or it seems random. I think Nights mode needs some more variety in gimmicks to keep that last zone interesting, just as if Egg Rock Zone were just lots of platforms and pits could get boring too.


In contrast, Egg Satelite is awesome and feels a lot more fun IMO, even when you keep failing at it. Maybe Black Hole only needs something different to keep it fresh...

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The difference you're noticing between Black Hole and Egg Satellite is that Egg Satellite is meant to fit better with the mechanics consistently introduced in the earlier stages. It's more action-based.

In contrast, Black Hole is very much a tempo-based special stage. With everything that moves, there's a pattern to it and it requires a certain amount of prediction and precision that the other special stages just don't have with them. There are points where you need to be able to figure out how to slow down/wait for safe entry without losing momentum in order to keep up with the hazards.

This is also the reason Black Hole requires an A rank in all the other special stages to get to. It's a massive skill jump from Egg Satellite and requires thinking outside the box a little, which getting the A ranks in the other stages also forces you to do.

Ah, how did I not see this topic?

How many emblems did you get?

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I think I'm at about 110-ish right now? I haven't checked in a small while, though.

Did you like the emblem hint and radar system? If there were any hidden emblems that you still couldn't find and had to resort to a guide, which ones were they?

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I didn't really bother for the hidden emblems until I unlocked the Emblem Hints unlockable (except the ones I remembered the locations of from previous playthroughs, ofc) - After getting Emblem Hints, I managed to get enough emblems just by hunting to get the Emblem Radar - I managed to get all the main level emblems except the one on the waterfall in Deep Sea Zone 2 - that was the only one I needed a guide for. Note that I'm not counting the unlockable levels here, only the main "story" levels.
But yeah, the hints and radar were especially useful, especially the hints. I also like that they're all in haiku.

Did you find the record attack requirements reasonable? Again, if any of them felt too hard (or too easy for that matter), which ones were they?

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Most of the main level times were quite reasonable, though I did cut it a bit TOO close on some levels. (got the Techno Hill 2 time emblem by miliseconds)
The score, however.. I think I'm just really bad at accumulating points in a level, as I had to resort to a guide for every one, bar GFZ1, which I just used rings and time to accumulate enough points.

Did you find the emblem collection aspect of 2.1 fun?

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Yes. Yes I did. And it added some considerable amount of replay value to the singleplayer game, which it sorely needed.

How many emblems did you get?

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All 160. I made sure to back up my .dat file because I never want to attempt this from scratch again.

Did you like the emblem hint and radar system? If there were any hidden emblems that you still couldn't find and had to resort to a guide, which ones were they?

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These were welcome additions and made emblem collecting less of a chore than in previous versions. Though since my enjoyment was determined by the level I was playing, most of the ones for which I had to resort to a guide were located in the harder stages, because I didn't feel like spending a long time trying to look for them in levels like ERZ or ATZ. I also checked the wiki for some of the later NiGHTS stages since I didn't have an inkling on where any of them were, even after going through the trouble of A-ranking Black Hole.

Did you find the record attack requirements reasonable? Again, if any of them felt too hard (or too easy for that matter), which ones were they?

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For the most part, yes. I really like time and ring runs, but the one I can probably do without is score attack. I didn't find (most of) the score attacks unfair, in fact a lot of them were perfectly doable with easy to figure out strategies. It's just that having to collect hundreds of rings and hunt down 1up boxes at the same time honestly isn't my idea of fun. But this is a pretty subjective viewpoint; I think score attack is just as viable of an addition to the mode as time and ring are and I wouldn't want to see any of these three categories removed from future versions.

However, there was at least one stage where I thought the score requirement was absolutely ridiculous and unreasonable. I spent a long, frustrating time in Aerial Garden Zone killing every last badnik in sight while collecting as few rings as possible so that I didn't risk losing them, and once I was sure that I wiped the entire zone clean of them (a good 30 minutes later), I went back and spent another hour backtracking and scouring the stage for every ring and 1up box I could find. I barely managed to scrape 150,000 points and 1500 rings, which added up to the total I needed to get the emblem. Oh, and I didn't successfully do this on my first try.

I have a feeling that I just did this stage the long, hard way and there's something I missed that could have made this task a whole lot simpler. So I'm curious about how the player is expected to go about meeting the 300,000 point quota for record attack. If the way I did it is indeed how one is expected to go about it, then I think AGZ's score requirement needs some serious adjustment. For comparison, I thought Azure Temple Zone's score requirement was deceptively easy, and the only challenge after that was to simply avoid death. Since ATZ is supposed to be the harder level all around, I'm not sure why AGZ feels so disproportionately aggravating.

Did you find the emblem collection aspect of 2.1 fun?

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Once I unlocked the hints and radar, I did. I'm not a fan of item hunting without some type of in-game guide, so I mainly focused on obtaining score attack emblems first. Despite the reservations I discussed in this post, I think this system is a marked improvement over older versions.

Is this topic still open ?

Mystic said:

How many emblems did you get?

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I got 60, but I didn't play srb2 for some months and didn't do a lot of emblem hunting, going to continue the game soon so I'll get more.

Did you like the emblem hint and radar system? If there were any hidden emblems that you still couldn't find and had to resort to a guide, which ones were they?

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Didn't unlock the radar system yet, but I saw it in a video. It's nice to have that and hints but I feel like they should be unlocked a bit earlier to make it easier for unlocking stuff.
Maybe a little guide for the ring/score/time emblems could be added(score=a good place where you can get a lot of points, rings=maybe hidden places with monitors and time could have shortcuts).

Did you find the record attack requirements reasonable? Again, if any of them felt too hard (or too easy for that matter), which ones were they?

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Ring and Time ? Yes. Score ? Not that much, thought that I had to get a lot of points by destroying enemies, finding hidden things and stuff like that, you know exploring the level. But some of them, for example GFZ1 are about speedrunning with a invinciblity powerup and hoping to hit a lot of enemies with it, didn't try a lot of the other score emblems but I think that a lot of them need you to use the blast of the shield on a lot of enemies.

Did you find the emblem collection aspect of 2.1 fun?

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I like the idea of having emblems and I think it's better now in 2.1 where everyone can get the emblems(even custom characters if you use savefiles or a mod). Some of the Emblems are very had to get and I think that the Emblems are more made for veteran players, but it's still fun.