My problem with Unleashed is just how blurry and choppy things get. Nice visuals are great until everything turns into a big smear. I think the compositions are for the most part great. It's the instrumentation that is iffy. And even then there are some tunes that are still good in spite of that. Love me the Metal Sonic theme from Episode 2.
I don't think anyone really thinks of the Wii/PS2 version unless specifically mentioned. "UnWiished" is a term that's always going to exist in this community. I'll concede that Unleashed can very often looked smeared and blurry, and not just because of the motion blur. Low res textures often got stretched way too much, and some of the shadows were so pixelated that they looked like patchwork. But it was released on the PS3/360 in 2008, when 1080p HD was rarely seen outside of tech demos and many of us still had old CRTs. Unleashed itself only ran ay 880x720, which is sub-720p standard. Saying that the graphics weren't great because "the lighting and shaders carried it" just doesn't make sense to me. It's like saying "without the sauce and the cheese, this lasagne just be boring sheets of plain pasta, and therefore the lasagne isn't good". It generally had lots of detail in the environments that were further brought to life by the lighting. Unleashed manages to be a constantly good looking game, despite it's shortcomings. It very successfully pulled off the aesthetic of "Sonic in the real world", due in no small part to its vibrant lighting and saturated color scheme. One of the main ways that Generations and subsequent 3D games falter is their significantly flatter lighting, even when the design of the environments is so much more creative than Unleashed's real world cities. All of this is reminding of the fact that Sonic Team once did a GDC showcase wherein they showed off the Hedgehog Engine by porting a level from Black Knight to it, with full GI. We're looking at the exact same environment on display there. You could say that the HE/GI version is overly bright to the point that the grey castle now looks white, but ultimately the effect of the lighting is absolutely transformative. It conveys a lot more detail. Unleashed looks great. The lighting was used masterfully, and really does elevate it above many more recent releases. Speaking just about the visuals and nothing else, I'd be very satisfied with a re-release that touched-up just the texture work and left everything else as is. + - But let's be real - Unleashed needs a lot of work doing to it outside of the graphics to make it a game that most people would actually want to play. Whilst it didn't deserve the critical bashing it got back in 2008, the game design is so fucking dumb that its almost as though Sonic Team wanted people to hate it.
Yeah, I think Sonic Unleashed looks great because it got a good art direction, not just because of the "advanced graphics" itself. To be fair tho', I think for its time, the game looked very impressive.
This was one of the primary goals of Unleashed's art direction, here's a relevant excerpt from a blog post by the game's art director Sachiko Kawamura: Edit: Here's the source for this post.
I'll be honest I don't think any of the shortcuts Unleashed 360 took are different from shortcuts other developers then took on the 360. (and even take now). A lot of those games were carried by decent looking lighting effects. It's actually surprisingly simple to make things look good with minimal tweaks. Even Jim's texture comparison is just a simple hue/saturation change, which is more in line with how Sonic Team applied textures before 06. The biggest differences between Unleashed on the 360 and Colors on the Wii is that Colors doesn't use normal maps (which it couldn't take advantage of anyways). Even then, they manage to bake in shadows in a similar way to Unleashed on the 360. Also, it's funny: the GIA application demo seems to actually have less geometry detail than the Wii version.
Unleashed overall is pretty, but yeah I don't think it looks any better than Colors or Gens for people to hype up its visuals the way they do. Not to mention Unleashed has some serious issues where some levels just look like they're made entirely out of plastic or play-doh and others lack interesting color pallettes. Savannah Citadel and Cool Edge arent high in my replay list in part because they don't look good at all, the former looks like plastic and the latter is just a mass of whites and blues in uninteresting shapes.
Even the instrumentation itself isn't unbearable on its own. People make jokes about "cat synths" or whatever, but it's more the fact that the songs almost all use the same instruments. Like, no matter what you're working with, you should be making good use of the tools in your arsenal.
They just need to tell Jun "Hey Jun, make it work on a SEGA Genesis and record it off that" and he'd be amazing at making these.
The instruments were kinda harsh though. It gets rather grating when you play the game(s) for too long, especially when some of the songs are on the short side. (Removing the boss song in episode 2 just to replace it with a twenty second loop was probably the worst decision made in that game, not gonna lie)
its interesting because half the zones in ep 1 have no instruments in common, lost labrytnth is mostly using similar instruments to what he used in sky troops in SHTH, and casino street uses normal instruments, its like people take splash hill as the entire ost. EP2 that complaint stands stronger though
I'll always love this part of the interview: I've never liked Splash Hill 1, either the actually melody of the specific composition used in-game. It's amusing that the director of the name also didn't like it and Jun Senoue insisted on keeping it, only for it to go on to be the poster-child for everything wrong with S4's soundtrack. And then it got that brief reprise in Forces' Faded Hills, another track that's pretty damn infamous to fans. The entirety of E1's soundtrack uses the same, badly sampled S1 snare drum (that was thankfully replaced with a better sample for E2). The so-called "dying cats choir" sing the main melodies for Splash Hill, Mad Gear, all of the boss themes and all of the menus. They also provide "back up vocals" for Lost Labyrinth, if we say that the flute instrument is the lead. There's more, but point is S4E1's music is all incredibly samey. In a strange and misguided attempt to sound retro, Senoue limited the number of instruments playing at any one time and used in any one track. He picked a very small pool and just stuck to that. It did not work out well.
The real reason the dying cat synths suck is they're insulting. Since Jun couldn't get the actual soundboard he wanted for the game, he evidently thought this sounded close enough to the Genesis soundchip that most people wouldn't mind or notice. It's like those "8-bit remixes" on Youtube where they'd slap a MIDI into GXSCC and say it totally sounds like the NES.
It seriously feels like Unleashed was designed to make it as hard as possibly to play the actual game. I like the day and night levels, it's just that everything in between is just so tedious and frustrating to get through, to the point that I've never beaten Unleashed, because it was just that insufferably bad. If Unleashed ever gets a remaster they really need to redo the game's progression system.
Yeah I'm in the camp of 'the Boost games Sonic Team released afterwards were better', at least in terms of progression. The Sun and Moon medal progression system in the 360/PS3 releases is awful and the requirements are absurdly high. If you play the game blind and aren't going for 100%, I guarantee you that you will run into at least two of the medal roadblocks with your inventory grossly below the requirements to progress. The day stages suffer from too many 'blink and you'll miss it' medals with how much speed is encouraged (and the designs of the Medals aren't as immediately eye catching as the Red Rings Generations went with), and the Night Time stages have a ton of forced battles if you want to simply progress and check the open areas you overlooked. It makes the return to previous stages incredibly defeating-feeling and was the reason I never beat it, only getting up to Shamar. If the medal requirements were yanked completely (or given solely to the extra Acts), I'd immediately enjoy the game a lot more. An option to turn off the Night Time fight track would also be lovely. I feel people hold it in a bit too high of a regard just because the critical reviews at the time were perhaps a bit too nasty and they enjoyed everything about the game's personality. I remember there being a lot of criticism towards some fo the critical reviews even when the game was new. The presentation I do think is absurdly good and really feels like the team was giving it their all, but ehh. I'm not saying it's a game without merit and I enjoyed it at the time, but I think it's more of a 'pretty good' time if you're willing to put up with the roadblocks. Yeah I said it before in the Superstars thread, but I genuinely don't think a lot of the melodies Jun came up with for Sonic 4 are actually that bad. It's the 'tinny-ness' and sampling that makes them a bit grating? I actually agree with Jun in that I actually think Splash Hill Act 1 is a pretty good track and I think invokves a feeling of a returning triumph, which is what Sonic 4 was aiming in it's marketing ('classic Sonic gameplay is back, baby!'). I also don't feel as if Sonic 4 is that bad of a game. It just had incredibly large shoes to fill and I think the rebranding it from 'Sonic the Portable' to 'Sonic 4' set the wrong expectations and absolutely should have not happened. Episode 2 feels more like the team is trying their best to make the most out of a situation they didn't really foresee themselves in.
I'm a completio slob so I never ran into the wall everyone else did in Unleashed so it never damaged my view of the game. I absolutely needed those emblems before I found out they were a requirement. Big fan of numbers going up.
Seconding this, actually, to a degree - I don't like the night levels either, though. The Werehog shit ruined the decent half of the game. Anyone who's played the game for any period of time knows that one specific opening drumbeat and trumpets...
