my thoughts on sonic dream team

I just finished the story of sonic dream team - shoutout to one month free trial of apple arcade i will not be renewing it. honestly i was expecting the game to be really mid going in because not only is it a mobile exclusive right now but it feels really directed at young audiences and like its slotted into the main continuity as a marketing point at best. 

in truth yeah it was half that. but honestly for all that its what everyones said, the gameplay was pretty fun. for the first time since the mid 2000s we've been able to play as rouge & cream in 3d, and the first game in a while designed to be playable with multiple characters in the main story, it was actually really well controlling. flight and gliding were a little weak but matched the scale of the stages, and all of the characters felt intuitive and really comfortable to control

the story is pretty standard for a sonic game with the classic 'heres a new mystical gem with magic powers' (see chaos emeralds master emerald sol emeralds phantom ruby time stones seven rings so on & so forth), but the requiem isnt really all that awful of an idea tbh, it feels very unlinked to everything but it could honestly be worse. plus ariem as a character is pretty fun and while we wont see her in another mainline game obviously id love to see her make a cameo or show up in the idw when they do their jump to post frontiers (not confirmed im manifesting so hard). on which note im mostly fine with the story of the game - sonic and later friends one by one save each of the gang from dream space prison whatever - except for two issues:

one: this is the same story as frontiers. dream team takes place after frontiers, and though we dont know how long, its literally the exact same 'sonics friends get trapped in a realm because of eggman and he saves them and then they save the world' like what happened to sa2 era stories where stuff actually happened TwT

two: i forgot. just reiterate the point above please i really hope the next sonic game can have a cool adventure era story. adventure through unleashed were all really good (idk anything about colours) and then generations was a lot and after that its been lost world (extraterrestrial threats) forces (eggman takes over the world but you dont feel that at all) and frontiers (extraterrestrial threats). what happened to us

however on the whole? i really liked dream team. a direct port would be hard because the game controls on two buttons and the uis are all blown up to work on ipads but a remake for pc/consoles would be cool if the apple arcade exclusive license expires. it controlled well, the story was easy to follow, and the gameplay was actually enjoyable enough to stick it through. would recommend if you have an ipad and a free apple arcade trial you havent used