Sonic Colo(u)rs Ultimate released for Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Epic Games Store

https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/WWCE-31490

Japanese-only, like all good things.

 

My wallet's gonna end up filling a restraining order against me with all these Japanese imports I've been doing lately. Oh well

 

I think this might be an EGS issue in general. Rocket League has been doing this to me as well when launched via EGS.

 

Yeah, every so often the game will seem to freeze, while the music keeps playing, and I have to click on the screen to get back into focus. It's not the end of the world after I realize that's all it is, but it always makes me shit bricks 'cause I think the whole game has crashed.

 

By any chance, are you using Steam input to force the game to detect an unsupported controller? I lose focus on SA1 and Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin when I'm trying to use my third party switch pro controller.

 

Listering to the soundtrack right now, and I have to say the Act 3 of Sweet Mountain remix is actually pretty nice and way better than 1 and 2.

 

I may have to give those a listen then. To be honest, I thought the remix of act 1 sounded really cheap compared to the original act 1 theme.

 

Nah, I generally don't have Steam open unless I'm playing a Steam game. My regular PC controller is just a Logitech F710. Too lazy to try my third party Switch Pro controller with SCU as it's not quite as comfortable for longer gaming sessions and only sorta works as-is with other games.

 

anyone know how that maxed out token bug is triggered yet?

I just triggered it today.

 

That's how I feel about some of these remixes too. I have to remind myself they're remixes for a reason, but damn I'm gonna miss the funk of the original Sweet Mountain when I play it.

At least I still have the original Planet Wisp!

 

Arriving with some sales updates. Due to the delay of the physical releases to October 1st, we're only now going to see how Colors Ultimate will perform on the charts in Europe. And at least for the UK so far, some good news. GamesIndustry.biz just reported yesterday that Colors Ultimate rounded out the region's top three games sold in its debut week, behind FIFA 22 (#1) and MK8 DX (#2). The Switch version made up a little more than half of the sales at 53%, followed by the PS4 version at 32% and the XONE version at 15%. Mid-October will also be when the NPD chart for September is posted, so we'll have an idea for how Colors Ultimate did in the US. (Although given historical trends, not expecting much.)

On the downside, the performance in Japan has been...bad, even by Japan's "bad" standards of Sonic sales.

On it's first week, the Switch version (and only the Switch version, no PS4 or XONE SKUs to be seen) debuted on #27 on the charts, at 2,689 units. The game has since fell out of the Top 40 list entirely; failing to show up in the charts for the following two weeks.

When looking at historical OW debuts for Sonic games in Japan (the ones that are listed there anyway. Titles like Boom: Rise of Lyric or Mania Plus never did well to be counted in the charts at all), that's the worst debut for a Sonic game since the 2014 JP Wii U release of ASRT; and out of the four Sonic Switch releases we have (Forces, TSR, and M&S Tokyo 2020), Colors Ultimate is the worst-performing one of the lot. Forces -> TSR - > Colors Ult also highlights a broader decline in sales for Sonic Switch releases. (M&S isn't counted due to M&S in general being a successful outlier.)

The situation also doesn't look much better when you compare the remaster to the original game on the Wii and DS. Neither of the 2010 games have any data for its debut week, but they still each ended up with a LTD number of 11K+ copies respectively; so it looks likely that Colors Ultimate will lowball that, since it has yet to get back on the charts.

On a final note, I've also read how quite a few of the previous weeks in Japan have had either nothing but Nintendo releases (and even nothing but Nintendo Switch releases); stacking the top charts demonstrating a near-total collapse of sales of PlayStation games/SKUs in the region--and the PS4 version of Colors Ultimate failing to chart only re-affirms that mindset. So it looks like the Switch SKUs will have to do all the heavy lifting for sales of Origins, 2022/Rangers and any other future Sonic games for the time being

 

Meanwhile Japan gets all the cool pre-order shit and we got a key chain.

Just... idk stop trying to appeal to Japan with Sonic its not going to happen. It's really annoying to see Japan get all the cool shit when they don't like the franchise while we get garbage. I know Sega's a Japanese company but still, know your audience.

 

That's good to hear but the Japan sales...Yikes. The fact that sales are dependant on Switch sales really says a lot considering the Switch version of SCU being the...inferior port. If it did well in Europe, I'm hoping the sales will be just as, or, even, better in the US (although it most likely will be the former).

I'm not completely surprised that the sales are not close to the original. Remasters don't always do better than the original unless if they're drastically different. If people already have the original, then they might've just decided not to get Ultimate. At least, that's what I know.

 

It was also on a super popular console that everyone and their mom has, and it's a Nintendo console which means that it likely still works. Add also that those with WiiUs can still play Wii games on them if their Wiis no longer work...

I think it's pretty telling that there have been a LOT of WiiU re-releases, since that console sold like shit, so you'll have less of a chance of large swaths of people having the original to begin with. Not so much Wii games, with a few exceptions (Skyward Sword)

 

You're telling this to a company that shot itself in the foot in the 90's about this stuff lol.

Colors was never really popular in Japan; for reference, FORCES performed better over there lol.

I don't think its that Sonic isn't popular in Japan, its just that they don't care for the heavily Americanized version of the series I guess and that definitely started in Colors.

 

Nah, I think it would be a lot more accurate to say Sonic isn't popular in Japan, and never really was. I'll bust out this 1997 interview with Saturn Power magazine again:

Sonic was shaped by both SoJ and SoA, with Sonic Team notably resenting some of the changes SoA made to the character (softening his look, removing his fangs, telling them Sonic couldn't have a human girlfriend...)

So the "Americanized" version of the series hardly started with Colors; It started from the moment in 1990 that Mark Cerny handed off Ohshima's concepts to the SoA marketing department, and SoJ took their input to heart in the name of making Sonic an international success. Maybe Sonic could have been a bigger success in the Japanese market if Sonic Team had been allowed to push forward with their original intention, but Sega's goal was always to establish a mascot that could rival Mario and counter Nintendo's market share worldwide, and the very fact that "Sonic" is still a household name in the western world 30 years later speaks for itself.

 

I wasn't trying to say it "started" in Colors, just saying that it was never a direction Japan cared much for. I actually speak with the few Japanese fans on forums like 2ch and other sites. One of the main reasons Sonic never took off in Japan was more because the Mega Drive simply wasn't popular over there, which Sega did not like. Hence the whole kerfunkle with the Saturn, which ironically DID do better lol.

But bringing it back to Sonic; the Adventure games, being very obviously more Japanese, were very popular in Japan at the time of their release. And I was only really speaking in relative to each other.


SoJ WANT the Japanese market; they wouldn't bring the IDW comics, or bring in popular voice actors and V-Tubers if they weren't trying hard to get their country of origin interested.

 

When you look at how the Mega Drive, in general, was received in Japan; Sonic's historical handicapped presence in Japan almost seems to be a predestined fate. I know Sonic5993 just beat me to raising that point, but it doesn't hurt to repeat. There's a cruel irony where the console where you made your debut; never functioned as anything other than an also-ran against the SNES and even the PC Engine on your home turf, but made you a household name overseas.

With all that said. While Sonic was nowhere near close to giving Mario a run for his money in Japan, various games in the series did manage to bring in tens if not hundreds of thousands of LTD units for the first decade or so. The Adventure rebrand with the Dreamcast and initial third-party debut actually showed an uptick, with the series earning its best OW and LTD numbers to date. But then it just seemed like things permanently collapsed after the release of Heroes; and outside of the M&S games, the series has never recovered since then. The OW for Sonic games back in early 2000s, now rarely marks the LTD total of Sonic titles released afterwards, all the way up to today. (IIRC, I've read some commentary about how Heroes significantly underperformed Sega's expectations in Japan, given that the game was the series first multiplatform effort; and how they ended all hope on making Sonic a viable IP in Japan afterwards.)

 

I feel like if Sonic was in some sort of prominent media for them, then there would be some sort of appeal. But maybe that’s just me.

 

Just received Sonic Colours Ultimate. I never played it on Wii and I was quite excited. While the darker stages and the over-blooming does not bother me that much, the upscaled cutscenes are a punch in the face as they were rendered from the old version of the assets.

SEGA said that they will release new patches over time (https://twitter.com/sonic_hedgehog/status/1437793265303101449) but the last patch was three weeks ago. After the initial spike of sells, let's see how much they will keep the promise of update and fix this remaster.