A critique on emblems (some spoilers)

[Unknownlight]

As they currently are, the 5 hidden emblems per level are a weird mishmash of genuinely clever rewards and needle-in-a-haystack pointless filler. If I were to use Breath of the Wild as a comparison, the good emblems are like Shrines and the bad emblems are like Korok Seeds… except Korok Seeds worked in BotW because they were everywhere, while there's only 5 emblems per level.

Here's an example of a good emblem. You do something interesting and are rewarded for it:

https://imgur.com/a/NO7GPUS

Here's an example of a bad emblem in that same level. There's no reason why there's an emblem in this specific random part of the stage, you're just forced to fly around aimlessly and waste your time until you stumble across the spot it happens to be. It could have been anywhere else in the giant level, but it's here for some reason:

https://imgur.com/a/0BsYUpl

Ideally, I think ALL emblems should be of the former kind. That may sound like a lot of extra development work at first, but that leads me to my second point: some emblems should be easier to find. I think something like 1 emblem per Act should just be placed in an obvious spot along the most challenging path (similar to the Strawberries from Celeste, or similar systems in many other games). In particular, this helps remind new players that emblems are, y'know, a thing that exists in the game. You guys would know better than I would, but I suspect a lot of new players don't collect a single other emblem (maybe 1 or 2 at most) after that first one in GFZ.

Additionally, this would mean that you don't have to come up with some super-special-smart spot for EVERY emblem in the game. There are already enough challenging alternate paths in the current game that can be rewarded with an emblem.

The dedication to hiding emblems in unintuitive spots hurts some genuinely clever emblems too. I think the best example is Amy's emblem in GFZ2. This should have been hidden in a blatant breakable floor smack dab in the middle of the Sonic/Tails room. Maybe it should even be under a rusted gate so that you can clearly see the emblem. That way, players would see it and immediately wonder to themselves how to get down there.

Instead, the breakable floor uses a texture that looks identical to the normal ground texture unless you're right on top of it, and it's hidden away in the upper-corner of the room where most players will never see it until the Emblem Hint spoils the entire puzzle for them:

Backtrack a blocked path
Then go through another one
To prove you love him

The hint had to be written this way because no one would ever think to search that room unless it was specifically pointed out to them. But now there's no puzzle because it had to be spelled out for the player! If the breakable floor were put in a clear and visible location, the player would recognize the puzzle without needing a hint at all. I suppose the new hint could be something like this:

Hammer at the floor
In the place she can't enter
Try thinking backwards...

(...I'm pretty proud of that considering I just made it up on the spot.)

It's more fun for everyone. The puzzle isn't spoiled, but neither is the player totally lost. As it currently is, you don't even know where you should start looking. In general, I think there should be no hunting aimlessly for the one corner of the map you missed—you should be able to intuitively discover every emblem without relying on the hints or radar at all.

 

[Magictub]

the worst emblem I had experienced was the one located at the top of the skyscraper in the lake in aerial garden zone... and you have to platform as fang with his weird springy tail across treacherous platforms scattered about in a specific way... and one mistake will not only take a life, most likely, but you would have to start at the bottom again. I had a hell of a time getting it, I almost gave up on it, but my perseverance pushed me to get the emblem... Idk why, but I loved getting that emblem, despite my hatred of the challenge. Maybe it's just because of the sheer satisfaction of getting something, idk.

 

[Frostav]

As an aside note, it's honestly kinda ridiculous I need FORTY emblems just to get hints on how to find them. I can barely find any as is, and you want me to somehow find forty of these things inside these gigantic, labyrinthine zones before you deign to give me hints to find more?

 

[Eliwood]

As an aside note, it's honestly kinda ridiculous I need FORTY emblems just to get hints on how to find them. I can barely find any as is, and you want me to somehow find forty of these things inside these gigantic, labyrinthine zones before you deign to give me hints to find more?

I'm mixed on this comment. At first I think I was a little unsure as to whether or not I think 40 is a fair number, but then I realized that the game technically (in my opinion) gives you a free 36 emblems alone just for beating some of the stages in record attack. Both in speed to complete a stage and to get the ring count emblem.

Plus, Nights also has a lot of "freebies" if you just look around a little bit in those stages. I do agree with a comment I saw above about having at least one "easy" emblem that's very easy to find so people are reminded they exist. But even then there's GFZ1's where it's.. not even remotely hidden.

A tricky subject, this one is.

 

[Lat']

This post contains spoilers, you've been warned.

As I've just gone through collecting all 200 emblems, I suppose I may as well give my feedback on this thread;

In my experience, the emblems ranged from fun rewards for exploring the stage, to absolutely TEDIOUS tasks I never want to go through again.

Let's talk about those first emblems first;
I'm here talking about the emblems that are in the likes of Greenflower and Techno Hill, these stages are quite concise but in a good way, the player that will just run along everything won't find anything besides the emblem at the start of GFZ1, but exploring the levels gives you a lot of rewards including emblems for going out of your way, they feel as an extra little pat on the back which I truly appreciated, and finding those alongside extra lives and other goodies led me to keep exploring the levels, and to replay them as different characters as there's a variety of areas only Tails and Knuckles can access.
I also found very clever the idea to hide an invisible emblem in NiGHTS stages off the beaten path, but kind of wish some of them were hidden out of practically useless dead ends.
However, after Techno Hill, I found myself completely UNABLE to find any emblem for the longest time, not until I reached Egg Rock, mind you, and I only found those because I remembered them off by heart.
Past Techno Hill, the stages grow exponentially in size and complexity, and even though I was looking through every corner I could find for extra stuff, I didn't come accross any emblem for the remainder of my playthrough.

These emblems, for the most part, aren't tedious, just really obscure to find. Which brings us back to this post:

As an aside note, it's honestly kinda ridiculous I need FORTY emblems just to get hints on how to find them. I can barely find any as is, and you want me to somehow find forty of these things inside these gigantic, labyrinthine zones before you deign to give me hints to find more?

I would be more keen on Emblem Hints being unlocked when beating the game, this gives an incentive for players to be more on the lookout for them when replaying the campaign as a different character, rather than forcing them to go play Record Attack and gring through stages they are not even familiar with the layout of.
Finding emblems then might come more naturally for these complex stages where the player will re-explore them, generally trying out a new path, where they may come accross a specific landmark given by the hints.
By the time they've gone through the campaign again, players should have figured multiple routes they can take to tackle Record Attack and get even more emblems, also honing their skills in the process.
I found Record Attack emblems to be very fun for the most part, yes, even the later ones in the most difficult stages, because the requirements account for mistakes, the length and difficulty of the stage. (I might add that Egg Rock 2's time emblem is EXTREMELY generous as I was able to collect the Rings Emblem within the time limit)



So, we've gone through what I thought was good and what could be done to imrpove it further, now let's go through what I'll call "the bad and the ugly":

Remember how I said I had a lot of fun in Record Attack, well, I can't say I had the same fun in NiGHTS Mode.
NiGHTS is introduced to the player as an innocent side emerald-collecting minigame, which is only a very small fraction of the game. Yet the emblems for it are among the most FRUSTRATINGLY DIFFICULT to get the entire game;

For each NiGHTs stage, unlockable or not, you have to get an A rank to get an emblem, and finish under a certain time limit. And sometimes, those requirements are absolutely horrendous, for some reason, it took me several tries to get an A rank on Special Stage 4 which requires you to somehow get a whooping 240000 points, which I could only acquire by going for 4 laps around the stage, because no matter what else I did, it wouldn't work, to the point where Special Stage 7 is actually way easier to A rank.
I will also add that Special Stage 5 has a very noticeable drought of Blue Spheres before the capsule -I always barely squeeze by with 2 or 3 spheres around the requirement, which is ... not enough -, and that the damaging cacti and VERY difficult to see in the cave sections where the colormap makes them blend in with the background.
To add insult to injury, to punish you for getting A ranks in all the special stages, you unlock an additional stage, Black Hole Zone, which, sorry to the person that designed it, is a culmination of everything annoying in NiGHTs stages, a near perfect precision required, moving hazards you could not possibly see coming from afar, barely enough spheres before the capsule, ...and emblems! This stage will force you to grind it until you've memorized each and every pattern, only then will you be able to tackle the emblems, with the time emblem managing to be infinitely more frustrating than the score emblem, somehow.
Black Hole is NOT the only NiGHTS stage you unlock, you unlock more of them, some are thankfully sweet and don't overstay their welcome (Dream Hill), but my overall thought is that of being fed up of NiGHTs after getting all of those emblems. The requirements should not be so high for a side gamemode.

We are then finally brought back to some of the in-level emblems.
Some of them seem exist purely as a reward for ludicrously tedious challenges. 1 specific map comes to mind, which is of course Azure Temple, namely the first and last emblem of the map. The first one requires Tails to swim through a tight corridor filled with Aqua Buzzes, along the way you will surely bump into a pillar around a fancy 90 degrees turn with stuff you can't possibly see coming. As Tails' swimming acceleration was drastically increased, which is otherwise a blessing for all situations it's involved in, this area, which was CLEARLY DESIGNED with 2.0 / 2.1 flight in mind and not touched up to account for the acceleration change, weaponizes it against you, making you absolutely uncontrollable in such confined areas turning the collection of this emblem into a nightmare where you'll keep dying until you magically get through. ....Or rely on SRB2 jank to nuke all of the buzzes through the wall because that's how physics work I guess.
This stage is also home to another emblem which requires you to carry an armageddon shield to the end of the stage. Without getting hit. Once. (Thank fuck Super Sonic is allowed in this stage!). However after grinding Azure Temple in Record Attack, I actually found this emblem to be a lot more kind than the first one if it hadn't had a cheese available.
I needn't go over the Fang specific emblem in Aerial Garden as it was already talked about in the thread, which felt like Azure Temple's Tails emblem as Fang's ability was clearly not really designed for precision platforming without the ability to even acquire much momentum.

These challenges felt more forced than anything else, there's nothing else like this in the game that truly challenges 1 character in particular, especially for the hollow reward of a single emblem in the last case listed here. The extra goodies don't matter as all of those are secret stages which will have no influence over anything else. I feel as though challenging the characters more consistently throughout the campaign to lead them towards such rewards would be a way more valid option, and would also allow for opportunities for players to hone their skills to the point where the tasks asked in those secret levels feel less like such a gigantic step upwards? As the challenges there are really disproportionate compared to what the player is put through in the existing campaign as any of the characters.

Spoiler: 200 emblems reward

After finally collecting all 200 emblems, you unlock the Pandora's Box, and the Level Select which is a rather redundant feature as the save screen lets you do the exact same thing if you've completed the campaign with a character, while also allowing the extra perks of carrying your lives and emeralds with you.

Inside the Pandora's Box, you have access to cool cheats like setting your rings, lives, destroying all enemies.... 2 features stood out to me;

"Mid-Game Add-Ons", which is literally... just the addfile command?? What was the point of going through 200 emblems to do something I could already do anyway???
and
"Enable Super Form", which felt like a neat reward... Except now I have nothing to use it for! I can't benefit from Super Forms for the other characters as I've already completed all the challenges for them to go through!
Not to mention that for some reason, Tails is not allowed to use this option (which, reading the code, seems to be some really biased decision that may have slipped by before release)
I really feel like characters other than Sonic and Metal Sonic should at least be able to benefit from the on-command invincibility for collecting all 7 emeralds, as collecting them in a playthrough is still utterly pointless for them right now.

You do also get a heartwarming message from the devteam at the door of the first GFZ1 house, which did make things more worthwhile in the end.

 

[Retroben]

The one in Azure Temple that is even more BS is after the puzzle path where you don't have the required item

Spoiler

armageddon shield

which is several leagues back from where that is.
You are forced to go through a kaizo fireball section that you will very likely get hit in and can't even make it past that with the hidden invincibility monitor near the first bubble shield checkpoint because it takes too long.

You can use Knuckles in the hard swim section emblem (as long as you have the bubble shield) to take care of those badniks without worrying about tiring out like Tails does but its still a pain to get through.

The only saving grace is that you can load the level as any character with some lives then grind lives to avoid a game over if you want to.
Otherwise its a grind for 99 lives on a save file then beating the game then finally selecting that file to make things less problematic with way more lives to start out with.

 

[Kaysakado]

<<Spoilers>>

Still need to collect my thoughts on emblem placement, which I agree has issues, but regarding unlockables:

I think SRB2's system is not at fault for not having a serious reward at 200 emblems - in fact, that's what makes it great. The last significant bit of content unlocked by emblems, really, is at 60 with FFZ. That means there's 140 emblems that players can ignore and still not really be missing out on any content. You can pick and choose which types of emblems you really want to focus in on, though you will need at least some from each category to get 60. Someone recently made a point (maybe on Discord? can't find it) that maybe the final unlockables shouldn't be ???s on the checklist, so players know what they're getting theirselves into. I don't think that's a bad idea.

Furthermore, rewards are well-tied to their requirements. Your reward for playing NiGHTS levels are... more NiGHTS levels! If you don't like NiGHTS, don't play them! Your reward for beating difficult stages are... even harder stages! If that's not your thing, fine. No one's making you play Haunted Heights. And on the other hand, the most significant unlockables, the characters, are unlocked relatively easily. Two of them you get just by playing the main campaign. The third you only need five emblems and to beat a not-too-difficult extra level. I'm going to wager that a significant majority of casual SRB2 players will REALLY want access to those characters, but won't be that upset if they never get the chance to play ATZ or Black Hole.

Compare this to SA2. An entire extra stage is hidden behind 100% completion. You need to do everything in the game if you want that significant piece of content. If you don't like chao raising, don't like kart racing, don't like A-rank grinding? Too bad. You need to get through it all for that final reward. That sucks. In SRB2, you don't need to get 100% completion unless you really want to.