Do you think a Sonic Adventure Remake is a good idea?

It seemed a bit different from the Adventure games. I don't know much about sound to properly express what I'm thinking but the pitch sounds higher. Of course standards for web audio series are different so his performance could reasonably be deemed acceptable by game standards.

It doesn't sound terrible in Sonic and Tails R but it's a bit more evident in other videos like this Iowa Local 5 News interview. It's possible he wasn't doing a perfect impression.

 

I actually thought he was pretty good in Sonic & Tails R; like obviously he's not going to sound like he did in the early 2000's due to a combination of age and just not doing the voice for a very long time, but I felt he was eventually able to get it down.


But yea, a remake is very obviously going to be re-recorded with the new cast; I know that's going to be a very unpopular decision with many diehard fans, but it's literally the most practical. The only other alternative is to get an entirely new cast altogether. Most of the old cast are either dead or grew up, so even if you were able to get most of them back, you'd still have some holes.

 

"remaster" applies to both film and music because it means to redo something from its master copy. From this logic, this also applies to games where you originally might have had to downscale or turn off different parts of the graphics, such as replacing higher resolution textures or putting in better lighting effects, with the source code being the master copy.

This is what makes Sonic Origins and Sonic Colors Ultimate different; with Sonic Origins, no source code (except for the Remakes' own source) is being used. With Colors Ultimate, the source code was reused, and, while they tacked on Godot to handle some aspects they couldn't reasonably handle otherwise, it's still the same code getting run underneath. So that's what makes it a "Remaster".

 

No

 

Well, I'd be all in to play a nice remake of SA1, but Sonic Team/Sega are unable to pull it off in a manner that would do it justice.

So, no, I don't think it's a good idea. I'm also fed up with remakes, just give us a Mania followup with hand drawn graphics and brand new levels, and a 3D Sonic in the style of X-Treme, or the Sonic Jam hub world.

Why does "retro" always have to mean "2D pixels"? I just find the Saturn/early PSX graphics to be the most charming look 3D gaming had to offer.

Also: Make the characters mute again, it was funny back in '98, but is just annoying nowadays, I want gameplay, I couldn't care less about the story, you want story? Go watch a movie or some series, Sonic = ACTION!!

"But what about other characters?" You shan't even think about other characters, if your main character plays like ass, you can't polish a game turd by adding new crap, it just becomes more crap XD

 

If it had been made by the team behind Unleashed, which still had the spark of production quality and ambition, yes. Today’s team? … ehhh

 

I strongly believe that Unleashed was the last "quality" Sonic title. It wasn't perfect, but it didn't feel like a quick cashgrab unfunny cringefest, or buggy mess.

I don't know, just make a deal with Xbox, Sega. Give Sonic Adventure remakes to Toys For Bob or someone capable, so they can make a faithful Sonic Adventure Remake.

I'll even gladly pay more money to hear original Sonic and Knuckles voices.

 

Nope.

Used to want it, but Origins and Colors Ultimate told me enough about how much care would go into it. Just get the Steam version, insert QOL mods from Gamebanana, and call it a day.

 

Kind of sad we're at a point we can't event trust the main developers not to fuck up a 20 year old game, but here we are.

 

The whole Origins debacle and how the devs were treated made me realize just how 'bad' of a brand position Sonic is in game-wise now. For many logistical reasons, no other single title even makes perfect sense to remake anymore.

Making an Adventure Remake for both 1 and 2 is extremely problematic, to say the least. You'd ideally want to keep the engine as close to the original as possible, but also patch out awful bugs/collision which would itself be no easy task. Sonic hasn't had an engine like adventure since 06 at minimum, but more accurately not since at least heroes.

You could redo textures, character models, re-record voices and re-animate cutscenes from scratch, I suppose to modernize them, but that itself is a pitfall of controversy even if it would benefit the overall package. Plus Sonic Team hasn't done the more "cool shounen action adventure serious anime" adventure vibe in so many years that I question their ability to pull it off. Japanese X occasionally had it, but still greatly deviated. The movie, boom, and most other Sonic plots are completely different in feel and tone. Unleashed, Colors, Generations, and Lost Worlds didn't have it. Heroes lost it. Shadow was a borderline parody of it (unintentionally, at times), and 06 had bits of it that were tainted by an otherwise convoluted and uninteresting story.

I don't see how modern Sonic Team could realistically remake SA1 and keep it faithful. Fans? Maybe, but it has to be rebuilt from the ground up by them too. Such an extensive modding project that I think even this fan community would struggle to actually do it justice... and the size of the audience who wants it is frankly not that big. And that's putting aside the problems with non-Sonic gameplay styles too.

Frankly, I think Sonic should focus on re-releasing Unleashed and maybe at most do a retro-engine set of Advanced remakes with redrawn HD sprites/tiles and tweaks to the stage design to improve speedrunning quality. Anything else to me seems extremely impractical to actually make. I think heavily modded SA1/2/Heroes are the best we as a community will ever get from those games. Other titles like 06 get the rather fabulous P06 project.... which itself only works because the original title was so bad that rebuilding it completely with a new engine was the best method. And its assets were modern enough to look good in 4K.

 

I agree with this, it's kind of like how everyone argued how Sonic 2 HD should look like which caused some conflict in the forum - also remembering the Sonic the Hedgehog 4 forum project.

Doubt a remake would be worth it. They are better off making a new game in general. We already got a remaster/hd edition through the many re-releases.

 

Unleased had its own issues with bugs and some of the latter daytime levels needed more polish with their frames, but it was good (if too hard for a Sonic game). I think you're being very harsh on the latter Sonic games. Sonic Colors or Sonic Gen did not feel like quick cashcrabs at all and it was clear a lot a time money and love went into Gen. Sonic Forces was decent, but it feel like it didn't have the biggest budget for a Sonic title

 

If you're just gonna revise the whole game, then why not just make a new one entirely?

This is kind of the inherent problem with remaking old beloved properties as its a tight rope act; you need to change enough to entice new people, but you can't change too much without the risk of alienating the fans of the original.


And completely ignoring the current quality of Sonic games, this is something every company has struggled with and Sega would be no exception.

 

Well, it's a ship of theseus problem, right? How different can an Adventure remake be while still being Sonic Adventure?

Personally, I'd say you just need to tighten all the bolts on what works, and rather than remove what doesn't entirely, just add a good option to circumvent it. There's a mod for SA1 where Big can just...grab Froggy out of the water. If you let players do that and also fish, everyone wins. Sure, Big's story becomes insubstantial on top of being unnecessary, but it also makes the most offending part of it not a serious problem.

But personally, I'm still looking at this as a matter of remastering. We can rant all we want about SEGA not getting Adventure physics translated to polished modern standards, but frankly I've never seen anyone do a 1-1 recreation, or even a 2 or 3 to one recreation (I dunno if that unity thing SF94 was streaming is still going anywhere but it was still in early dev last I saw), so you might as well stick with the more-dated form factor and just polish it to a mirror shine. SA1 when decked-out with QOL mods is not in a bad position at all, really. The jank is there, but I don't think it's in a more significant way than Half-Life 1 or Mario 64 are jank.

If we assume that you just point at all the best mods and say "do that", I'd say the bigger problem is that SA1 and 2's presentation have aged the worst out of anything in them. Iconic in some ways, sure, but the animation is either robotic and stiff in SA1 or has such wobbly mo-cap as to look terrible in SA2. My understanding of both game's cutscenes is that SA1 picks from a limited list of preset animations and SA2 essentially moves every piece of every model individually due to how it was set up, so we're not going to be seeing full-game cutscene reanimation mods any time soon...or ever. Taking the time to make those look and sound better would breathe the last bit of extra life I think the games need before I can unironically just recommend them both to everyone. Nearly every other remaining problem I have with them has been addressed in one way or another.

 

The presentation is the biggest problem with those games tbh. Mods can only fix bugs and add other QoL improvements, but they can't really fix the graphics, voice acting, and character models.

I know the primary concerns are the gameplay, but the presentation is just as important. Even if the ports of these games are lacking, I don't think polishing them would have helped much because we're still talking about a pair of games from the very early period of 3D platformers.

I remember when Nintendo released 3D All Stars, a lot of people were reminded just how rough 64 and Sunshine were in particular and noted it on Twitter. Sonic is already held to an even higher standard than other contemporaries so those games would get similar treatment probably.


But yea, if you're a purist and don't want Sonic Team to "tarnish their legacy" then a remaster is the safest option. But given Origins, I'm fairly certain a remaster couldn't offer anything that isn't already nodded. A remaster would feel superfluous at best if it has anything less than what mods have done.

 

This is actually dope af what.