yeah pretty much this. After seeing the game in motion, I don't see any reason to doubt those earlier leaks anymore lol
Why does everything need to be in eras anyway? The concept was coined by Generations as a loose way to group its levels. Heroes isn't an Adventure-like game, and 06 has more in common with Adventure than it does with Unleashed and Colours. The meta-era, as far as I've seen, is generally used as reference for the writing under Pontac and Graff and I don't think that's something that particularly needs a shorthand dedicated to it. Nobody would call Mania a "meta era game" despite the fact it has released during that same time period. The idea that we need to separate things into distinct groups at all times is nonsensical to me and not even consistent. Regarding Ian Flynn's writing, I'm not sure how the process works because he's keeping very tight-lipped about Frontiers (and rightfully so), but I believe the general idea is he was probably given a starting point or a skeleton of the overall narrative to be delivered and then he fleshed it out into something full, with SEGA then reviewing and providing course correction.
I disagree that Heroes isn't an Adventure-like game. Sure it deviated significantly from Adventure's core gameplay, but in terms of environment design and locales, story, character interactions, and many other non-gameplay-related things... it was much more Adventure than 06 after it, which attempted to reboot the entire series and reinvent the wheel... and was suddenly also vaguely medieval. Heroes' stages are also just stylistically similar to the Adventure stages, and the Generations eras are honestly just an excuse to group stages together. But I agree that not everything really needs to be an era. Especially when this series changes direction so much that it's hard to decide where an era would start or begin, other than the canonical ones like "Adventure" and "Classic". I don't even know when the supposed "meta era" is supposed to begin, since the series has been very "meta" since 06 in the way that it consistently attempts to start fresh and reinvent itself. But then it doesn't really become "meta" in a self-referential way until Sonic Generations, but that was an anniversary game... so being meta was the entire point of the game. So does the meta era begin with Lost World reinventing the modern gameplay and bringing back badniks into the main series? Or does it begin with Forces cementing Classic Sonic as an actual staple of the series, and not just an anniversary game thing? Does that mean the "meta era" is only one game long? It doesn't really make any sense to me, and I don't think it's a particularly useful classification, nevermind the fact that it's also a divisive one. I personally think we shouldn't attempt to "era-ify" the post-Adventure games because there hasn't been an actual series of games in a long time. The classic games were Sonic 1/2/CD/3K, which were all a series (CD obviously went in a different direction, but let's not be pedantic). Adventure 1 and 2 were a series. Since then, we haven't even seen the number "2" in a mainline Sonic game a single time. It's all just been vaguely "modern Sonic" games. So until Sonic Team does one thing and decides to stick with it, I will hesitate to think of anything as being an "era".
What difference does it make? There's no specific reason to call anything after Heroes "adventure era", and the only reason I give Heroes is because Generations says so. For my youtube channel I cut "The Dark Age" off after Black Knight and before Sonic 4, but Free Riders is still terrible and Unleashed is better than...I dunno, Lost World 3DS maybe, but it's certainly not any less "modern" than the rest of the modern era. I'm not gonna cover them at different times just cause of that. "Meta era" is the only categorization out of these that is dependent entirely on a given person's opinion of not just the games, but significant personal investment in the writing (hence treating any Sonic game that dares to have jokes as "meta"), and deliberately excluding Mania even though it should count as part of it. It's just another division, and you can already see complaints about "meta era fans" from people on the shittier sides of the community like reddit and twitter. And yeah, I know what you're gonna say, "Don't go on those Devin you fucking chode", but it's still annoying! Regarding "the leaks", I think part of our problem is that we don't have a very good definition for which leaks are "the leaks". Sometimes a leak is a detailed account of Sonic's new moveset, the look of the environment and one of the bosses, and other times a leak says that the game has nine playable characters, a chao garden and a personal blowjob from Iizuka in every box. With all that said, it's that same leak, the one that gave us so much more interest in this game than we would've had with the metaphorical crop-dusting that was the original teaser, has just one thing (well, two, but Super Sonic is kind of a given at this point) left to confirm: what exactly these "Generations-style" levels are. They're described like a special stage in the original leak, requiring certain criteria to enter and awarding chaos emeralds, but most special stages do not play like Sonic Generations. What could they be...? I hope this is what's answered tomorr- Uh. Later today, I guess. Shit, I should get some sleep.
Doesn’t the movement look like the wonky instant accelerated kind from Forces? The homing attack too kind of. Eh that’s not so good. But maybe I’m imagining it. Still, something looks off. Also, everything still kind of looks empty…
Yea they're definitely reusing Forces animations, they've made Sonic that royal blue again instead of classic Sonic light blue, but that jump ball is from Forces, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the punches and kicks were ripped from a combo of Forces Zavok fight and Lost World's homing kick. The animations to me were the weakest part of the trailer, but the question is does it play well and is it fun? Because that's what's important to me.
That's right, my mistake. From your second point, I got the same impression. The leaks mentioned holding the Y button to perform the spin-cycle—perhaps the movement speed slows down while this move is in use. The rest of the gameplay could be using a style more similar to the Boost games' slow acceleration. I noticed Sonic falling off the colossus during the short clip of him running up the leg, it's unclear if this is scripted or bad physics.
I hope that all we saw till now is just one of the few zones the game has to offer. Hoping for an industrial ruins era, something akin to land of darkness in Sonic OVA. Also, somehow the music from trailer reminds me of Kingdom Hearts I, the part where you are choosing weapons
I prefer the boost games to the Dreamcast-style games and I'm fine with the "meta era" term. Whether you love or hate Pontac and Graff's writing, the tone, style and characterizations in their games are different from the games that preceded it, and do tend to have more meta jokes. The older games didn't have stuff like Tails wondering where Sonic keeps all his rings, for instance. In fact, they didn't even mention rings to begin with. And yes, gatekeeping sucks. But insulting people that prefer the older games' style by repeatedly ranting about how they just love awful/dumb/terrible stuff and such isn't any less obnoxious in my book.
Wondering if what we saw yesterday was even a "level" or a kind of a extensive "hub" area. I still think this game could be something similar to Super Mario Odyssey.
Yeah, what largely threw me off-guard were the reused animations and assets for Sonic. Now, I don't mind the practice of recycling assets, except that Sonic's look and animations in Forces are... awkward, to say the least. His running animation is especially weird there, I just can't wrap my head around it.
To me character animation is so closely intertwined with gameplay. How the character is animated to move and react to inputs plays a huge role in making the game feel satisfying to play. I think this is a big reason why I take so much offence when people brush this off as "nitpicking" because it's really not. I wish people wouldn't devalue or underestimate the importance of good animation. And in general, Sonic is the kind of character who is supposed to have a lot of style and flair to his movements so any potential downgrade feels so disappointing lmao
Usually the practice of recycling assets is about recycling things that work, rather than things that don't haha :P That one animation looks extremely janky, the one where there's no animations and he just whirls around the enemy. I don't even know why they'd put that in the trailer, it just flat out looks bad. If that's the best they can show... then yikes.
They were probably hoping it was too fast to catch in the trailer, those poor sods. At any rate, I’ve every confidence it’ll be fixed by release.
I wanna say this before we see the full gameplay reveal today: do not expect the adventure style but with combat moves. This is probably going to be something different. It’s understandable if you’re not interested in it... but being different does not inherently make it bad. It could wind up being bad but that wouldn’t necessarily be due to it being a new gameplay style.
The story and world building portion of the video game is an important part of the video game, if whatever Adventure fans keep claiming is the peak of the series is to be believed. I can see what they mean, splitting the modern games by the overall writing style trends is very convenient for general sorting. That cuts everything into the '98-'08 era, and the '10-'17(possibly present) era. Lumping in Adventure + Dark Ages together makes sense given how similar they are in presentation and scope, and lumping everything Pontac touched + the botched classic aesthetic pandering (ala 4 + LW + Forces) together works out. I've never been a fan of the "Meta" name, but it's so short, sweet, and to the point, that you'll have a hard time convincing the fandom to switch it for something else.
