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

The only thing I didn't care for is that you actually shoot instead of locking onto targets. I think you can have both like in SA2, but to get rid of it wholesale is a bad idea imo. Sonic thrives on arcade-like experiences, and to take that mechanic away takes away something special in the process.

 

The animations and presentation are really good but there needs to be some sort of lock-on, yeah. It doesn't have to be as easy to cheese as SA1's, but Gamma threading the line between Sonic game and rail-shooter is one of the best things about his levels.

Also no MODE CHANGE car mode so 0/10 I guess.

 

DX jankiness stained the original preception a little bit.

Current Sega "care" and "polish" would drive Adventure into the ground.

Hope you're ready for easy "jokes" on the internet for the next 30 years, like the current and super fresh topic that is 06.

 

I just played thru Sonic's story on a long plane ride - a first since like 20 years or so...! And I have to say: SA1 is PEAK 3D Sonic gameplay to me - yes it's buggy, you get stuck, the camera doesn't know what to do, but those are all problems you could ERADICATE with a remake - I am ALL for it! At times when there's no bugs and the camera follows you perfectly, it's a BREEZE to play, and SO MUCH fun - I felt like being 12 again, a really nice feeling, I want that for the whole game

 

Well said. The game is so much fun to play and while its aged I don't care. I loved Sonic Adv at time and don't look to play or judge a game on how it will play in 20 years time. It's all about when it launches and Sonci Adv was amazing in its day.

 

I think it’s not only the gameplay aspect, but the overall feeling of the game. There’s just something special in late 90’s, early 00’s Sonic games, that’s almost impossible to replicate with newer titles. Everything just clicked, Uekawa designs, Senoue music etc.

it would be very hard to replicate that feeling, for example - main cast voices. It’s not Sonic Adventure for me, if it’s not Ryan Drummond voicing the blue blur himself. And while I doappreciate Pollock Eggman, it’s Bristow who steals the show as “Sinister” Eggman, perfect for that game.

However, on the bright side, Crash N.Sane trilogy turned out pretty well, and I can always change voices to Japanese cast, so there’s that.

 

Sega is kind of at a lose-lose when it comes to the VA for a hypothetical remake. If they use the modern cast, older fans will get angry, and if they get the older cast they wont be able to use the whole ensemble since Amy and Tails' actors don't do VA anymore and Deem Bristow passed, so it wont feel the same.

Even if they just reuse the old clips people will still be mad then since the audio clips are so low quality and SA1's VA is kind of infamous for not being great in some areas even if the fans find it charming.

 

It's really hard to imagine a remake that would become the definitive version of the game. From the VA, to the graphics, to the music, to the physics, to the level design, to Big the Cat: there are a lot of things that a remake could potentially "improve" upon, but they're also things that would piss some people off if they were overhauled, or even slightly changed. People have spoken in this thread of "improving the good parts" or "building on the foundation of the original"... but what are the good parts? And what foundation does SA1 establish, that a remake would supposedly expand upon? I would say "Sonic's basic gameplay", but someone in this thread suggested making Sonic play like the boost games, so that's apparently not the answer.

And even if everyone agreed on what the game even is... Is Sega in a position to give us a good remake? SA1 is probably the game in the series that is most brazenly a product of its time and place. It's a showcase for a new console, and was given the budget to match. It's a game developed and released in the late 90s, inspired by a trip around the world and the culture and atmosphere of that time, and of the trend among games to become bigger, more realistic, and story-driven. A game made by many of the same people who made the classic games, but who chose to create something extremely ambitious and freeform, that didn't really have an obvious point of comparison. None of those things would be true of a remake.


Here's my attempt to predict what a remake would actually be like:

• A lower-budget side project, though still handled in-house. Whatever you think of Frontiers' production values and overall level of polish, this will not clear that bar.
• There's no new content. Everything that was in the original is still there, but it hasn't been added to, only replaced with an equivalent or kept the same.
  
• The graphics are decent. It uses the player models from Unleashed, and Speed Highway reuses assets from the Gens version. This will not be a stylistic reset for the series.
  
• All cutscenes are revoiced and reanimated. There's a toggle to use the original lines but they fit awkwardly over the redone cutscenes. There will be superficial changes to the story that are explained as "bringing it in line with the modern canon" but the changes don't actually do that and just make everyone confused.
  
• The OST is a lateral move but generally feels less cohesive than the original. You can toggle the original OST in the options but all the tracks are too quiet.
  
• Level design is basically identical but some of the progression gating/time spent in the hub worlds has been streamlined a bit.
  
• The controls go from "fluid, but busted" to "less fluid, but less busted". Some movements feel identical to Frontiers and it clashes with the level design sometimes. There's marginally more scripting of level setpieces than the original but it will be close enough for most people.
  
• All the playable characters are still there and play mostly the same. Tails' flight has been nerfed by invisible walls but it not enough to make a meaningful difference. Big sees the most tweaks but it's still fishing. Same deal with Gamma.

Maybe I'm too negative, but this seems like the most likely outcome. Taking into account Izuka's comments, this less-than-stellar showing is likely the reason he doesn't want to do a straight-up remake - he knows it wouldn't get the time or effort it needs to actually be worthwhile.

And if the remake does come out, then what? Do we get more new Adventure games to follow? Would they be promoted to mainline status? If so, does that mean Frontiers was yet another 3D Sonic game that seemed to set up a decent starting point (in spite of its very obvious flaws) whose sequels were all one step forward, one step back, and one step sideways? And does that mean people will be asking if a Frontiers remake is a good idea in 25 years, and arguing whether or not the asset pop-in is a core element of the game's identity?

 

Who's to say they don't have master tapes for the VA? Game studios will often record full quality audio and then reduce the quality to meet the hardware or storage demands. SA1's probably so low quality because the whole game had to fit in a single gigabyte.

 

I agree. Maybe a spiritual successor, would be better, so they can experiment a little. SA2 beta route, 3 playable characters: Sonic, Eggman, Knuckles would be an interesting concept.

 

Wasn't that FUD spread by someone who's no longer relevant?

 

Yeah I've always agreed that doing a spiritual successor was the move. You can then choose to focus on specific parts of SA1 to expand upon without committing to it's more ambitious quirks like 6 playable characters.

 

Adventure remakes would be just another branch for the franchise , just like Classic Sonic, can also pave the way for Adventure 3 in a seamless way, but at any case the existence of remakes even if they were kinda promoted to mainline games status doesn't indicate a flow in mainline games, Resident evil series is able to produce both remakes and new mainline games at the same time and both are equally important, if anything, given how open world games take long time to develop and Frontiers successor would need a long development time, releasing remakes/smaller games in-between can be the perfect solution, in fact they already doing Shadow Generations which is just that, a smaller game

 

I don't think the Sonic series will ever have the same resources allocated to it that Resident Evil does. Maybe some day.

 

From that interview Iizuka did where he mentioned he was interested in remaking Adventure, it seemed like he views the game the same way George Lucas looks back at the original Star Wars trilogy, which is to say he sees it as messy and incomplete and he wishes he could fix it.

Now, I think Iizuka's far more justified in thinking that than Lucas ever was, but for that reason I expect an Adventure remake, if it ever happens, to make major changes to how the game plays out, at least if Sonic Team is the one who handles it. Which... is the approach I'd prefer, if I'm being honest. I'd much rather see a new take that tries to reinvent the game for a modern audience than a safe remake that amounts to little more than a slightly better (or worse) looking SA1 with remixed music and different voice acting.

 

I'd prefer something in the vein of the remakes of the classic games that Taxman and Stealth did: remade from the ground up, fixing bugs, and adding some quality of life improvements, but keeping the audio/visual experience mostly the same.

Guess you'd need some hardcore Adventure fan techies in order to pull off even a pitch for that, though. Not sure what the state of that scene is.

 

From what I understand, both Adventure games have been pretty thoroughly dissected and have active, dedicated hacking scenes. I don't think the Adventure modding scene is as large as Sonic 1/2 ROM hacking or Generations modding, but it's not too far off.

 

The X-Hax discord server is moderately active. I think the main drive with those games is to restore Dreamcast functionality that was butchered in the ports. The Dreamcast Conversation mod for SA1 pretty much accomplished that, and now we have the RenderFix mod for SA2 doing similar things graphically.

SA2 also has an ambitious "modernization" project in the works but I'm not terribly fond of it honestly. It makes changes for the sake of changes aesthetically and the gameplay doesn't look all that different.

I think as far as a remake from Sonic Team goes, the Emerald Coast mod for Generations might be a decent taste of what that could look like.

 

I've recently been seeing a project popping up on my Twitter feed of seemingly an accurate recreation of Adventure 1's gameplay within Unity/Unreal. I know I had seen it being tested in one of 06's test levels and SRB2's Greenflower Zone. I was surprised by it's accuracy. I'll be sure to share it here once I run into it on my feed again, but I haven't seen it today. You know maybe I should do 5 seconds of research before opening my mouth.