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Would you like to see Yuji Naka return to Sonic Team?

Discussion in 'General Sonic Discussion' started by Agobue, Feb 18, 2020.

  1. SuperSnoopy

    SuperSnoopy

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    Slice of life visual novel, coming soon...?
    It was probably made with Japanese phonetic in mind, and ended up sounding super goofy in English.
    Sonic Adventure 2 had it rough with its English localisation, man :V
    edit: and if anyone reading this hasn't done so already, do yourself a favor and install the sonic adventure 2 retranslated mod for the PC version. When I'm saying I think SA2's is the best Sonic story, I'm really talking about the Japanese version. The English translation for this game is abysmal and I'm pretty sure it's one of the main reason people shit on the SA2's story so much nowadays.
     
  2. Dark Sonic

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    ^ @SuperSnoopy Oh that's absolutely the reason. But in a game where they still had Eggman say "yosh" in English I don't think translation was high on the priority list :V
    No this is good though because then instead of Eggman blowing up Prison Island he'd blow up the Lost Hex and those assholes would go with it.
     
  3. Billy

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    Definitely have mixed feelings about the idea of Yuji Naka coming back. As others have said, if there's something he could add then go for it, but if not why bother? I think a lot of people have a longing to go back to the style of games they enjoyed. Yuji Naka was a part of that, sure, but so was Iizuka. I think people latch onto Naka because he was the most public and thus easily identifiable member of Sonic Team at the time. People do the same thing with Iizuka now. To quote Overlord's Python code signature:


    All that being said, a shakeup of Sonic Team might be interesting. Though I'm not sure if 'something new' is exactly what's needed. One of Mario's Odyssey's biggest strengths was that it scaled back a little bit to the Mario 64 formula (the Galaxy games and 3D Land & World were more linear and less about exploration), but still had plenty of new to offer. Perhaps a mix of new and old could also work for Sonic? By which I don't mean shoehorn in classic sonic again with inaccurate physics.

    Mostly, I'm just worried that if they ever do make an 'Adventure 3', that they'll bring back all the bad with the good.
     
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  4. Frostav

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    Nah bro. Hold that L. Millions--MILLIONS--of people my age played these games on the Gamecube years ago and we're not gonna pretend they're bad just because a bunch of meme youtubers and people who never played them said they are. No amount of "the games you loved as a kid are Bad Actually" will stop us. I am a proud member of the Adventure subset of the Sonic fandom and I will absolutely never brook anyone telling me that the game I bought eight fucking times over and which is literally THE sole reason I'm a Sonic fan is bad. Nah, man. Nah. Hold that L, boomer.

    We were all kids on deviantart making recolor OC's while y'all were angrily yelling about Sonic having green eyes and screaming about Tails being in a mech on yahoo mail groups but we're adults now and we're still fans of these games. We're making entire engines based off the way these games play, fuck we're making entire ORIGINAL games based off these games.

    Newsflash: people don't spend thousands of hours replicating the way a game plays if the game sucks. They don't literally single-handedly make entire 3D platformers inspired by those games if they suck, either. "Nostalgia goggles" aren't real. Clearly the Adventure games have merit. You guys had complete domination of the fandom for a long while but y'all Classic dudes are just gonna have to deal with us Adventure kids finally having grown up and sitting at the table too. It was bound to happen eventually.

    The Adventure duology has a shitload of flaws (I'd get rid of shooting stages and focus solely on speed stages and emerald/mcguffin hunts, personally) and honestly, something like Sonic Robo Blast 2 with their aesthetic and tone would be the way to go, but the idea that it's absolute 1/10 garbage no one can earnestly like is pure clownshoes.

    (Everything mainline game post Adventure 2 besides Mania and Gens sucks though, make fun of those games all you want.)
     
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  5. Antheraea

    Antheraea

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    I actually absolutely disagree with this on the basis of hating everything involving GUN (the enemy designs, boss designs, "realistic" locations that are just grey and brown and dull all over). This one single introduction, more than anything SA1 did, basically needlessly fractured the series' aesthetic for yeaaaaaars. Eggman makes robots shaped like animals containing animals, secret childish bases with his face (who didn't want a hideout in a pyramid growing up...?) but they're now in the same game as humanoid mecha enemies that still blow up in one hit, Metal Gears with actual guns, an entire realistic military installation that Eggman just blows up without it being brought up again...

    a bit much, you think?

    also, you even admit it yourself that 1/3rd of SA2's gameplay style sucks. I'd go farther, because the shooting stages are the longest bits of SA2, which to me, as someone who has cleared the game 100% emblems, feels like half. You're admitting you'd jettison half the game while accusing us of being too negative. lol

    I legitimately have yet to come across a single game that was recommended to me as a good game with the caveat "but half of it sucks". I haven't even come across that with "but a third of it sucks". Usually games with shit sections are like ... "there's one really annoying stealth bit here", not "a third of your play time is gonna suck, but this game is really good tho".
     
    Last edited: Feb 19, 2020
  6. Wafer

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    I'm not any kind of YouTuber and I have played every main series Sonic game bar Lost World and I'm here to tell you that nothing has frustrated me more in the entire series than the mech and emerald hunt levels in SA2. What's left is like 10% of the game. That includes the entirety of '06, and I'll even throw in Sonic Labyrinth.

    You like SA2, that's fine. It's valid, even! But you shouldn't discount another opinion just because it goes against your personal preferences.

    Also "hold that L"? Are you six years old or something?
     
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  7. DreamsComeBlue

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    Why isn't anyone talking about the fact that Yuji Naka is a brilliant programmer? I mean let's put aside the fact that he has a more grounded idea of what makes Sonic cool than Iizuka, isn't as wishy-washy a leader, and wouldn't have experimented with werewolf transformations, Mario Galaxy physics, and delivered by all accounts the words Sonic sidescrollers ever conceived, Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episodes I and II.

    Let's set all of that aside for just one moment.

    Yuji Naka is a genius coder and was the only person at SEGA who understood and could interpret at a glance every single line of code in the Megadrive trilogy. If he were to return to Sonic Team we would at the very least not be lamenting over lazy mobile ports elsewhere on this forum. As wonderful as it is that SEGA allowed fans like Taxman and Stealth to come in with their own classic Sonic inspired engine, I can't see how it would be anything but a very, very good thing if the guy who is so familiar with Sonic's source code that he was able to give M2 exact instructions over how to add spin-dash to Sonic 1 by e-mail, if that guy was still at Sonic Team.
     
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  8. Dek Rollins

    Dek Rollins

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    Why do people have a fit when someone calls Naka the creator of Sonic? Sonic literally started as Naka's brainchild for a game he wanted to see happen, and he then programmed a ball that gained speed and momentum with movement to create that game. The other co-creators of Sonic obviously deserve credit, but IIRC Yasuhara joined the project after Naka had started programming his initial tests, and Ohshima joined last with his concept art.
     
  9. Wafer

    Wafer

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    ... That's really not that astonishing. The games were written in assembly. I could interpret every line at a glance.

    That's not to say that he isn't a great coder, because to do what he did in the '90s without the wealth of information available to us from disassembling his original work, he absolutely had to be. But go back a few pages and you'll see me wax lyrical about how Sonic Team doesn't have programming challenges so much as they have design challenges. Sonic Team doesn't need another programmer.
     
  10. Antheraea

    Antheraea

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    also, being good at assembler really does not translate well to being good at modern games.....
     
  11. Sid Starkiller

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    What the fuck is this? I don't even really know how to respond here. I didn't say "absolute 1/10 garbage no one can earnestly like". I admitted that I like parts of the game, and that parts of it have merit. But the fact that you felt so much rage for saying anything about what is apparently your favorite game ever is a problem. You yourself said you would remove the shooting stages from them. That's literally 1/3 of the game. You would literally cut out 1/3 of your favorite game, and you expect me to treat it like some masterpiece? Not happening.
     
  12. Wafer

    Wafer

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    Tell me about it. I've been coding my own VDP graphics editor in Python for weeks now, and despite how much I love Python I can't shake the feeling I'd be done already if I just wrote the entire thing for an Amiga.
     
  13. Frostav

    Frostav

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    Almost like I've spent a decade and a half having to endure people trashing my childhood games and I'm getting tired of it. These games have the completely unearned reputation of being absolutely unplayable shit and I (and a whole bunch of people too for that matter) are tired of it.

    I'll stop being this hostile when every fucking article ever on Sonic doesn't include a dig at Adventure 1 and 2 even when it's literally out of nowhere, alright
     
  14. Sid Starkiller

    Sid Starkiller

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    No, not alright. Let me ask you this: when was the last time you replayed it? Do yourself a favor, the weekend is approaching after all, replay it. All of it. Including as many of the optional missions as you can. If you can do that, and then tell me that it's EXACTLY as good as you remember, then I'll...well, not actually do anything. You need to understand that insulting the game is not insulting you. And if you think it is, maybe try therapy.
     
  15. DreamsComeBlue

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    Cool, then maybe you should get a job at M2 because if stories given in interviews about their Phantasy Star and Sonic ports are to believed, evidently they do run into difficulties understanding Naka's code.

    Dude, I didn't even mention the modern games. I was not implying that Naka is some god at programming and debugging 3D games; obviously he's not, otherwise SA2 and Sonic Heroes wouldn't have so many floor clipping glitches. The entire post was about Naka's expertise with old machine code and its useful to have someone around who's intimately familiar with the original games' source codes.
    Because he's literally not the creator of the character and has never claimed to be.

    Nah, I grew up with the Genesis games and I don't think his reaction was entirely unjustified. It's your "time to take the nostalgia goggles" line that set him off. It's insulting and could easily be taken as flame-bait, so don't be surprised next time someone thinks you're shitting on their childhood by implying that their love for ____ is due to nostalgia blindness.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 20, 2020
  16. Sid Starkiller

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    At the same time, I could ask why the opinion of some random nobody off the internet matters to him at all.
     
  17. Dek Rollins

    Dek Rollins

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    He's not the creator of the character, but he is the creator of the game. Our speedy blue friend, and the games that made him special to us, wouldn't exist if Naka never started the (literal) ball rolling. Naka's concepts informed Yasuhara's design, and both informed Ohshima's art.
     
  18. Hukos

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    Hot take: Sonic Adventure 2 isn't good or bad. It's just really boring. I honest to god forget that this game exists if people aren't arguing about it.

    Nights into Dreams is one of my favorite games of all time. I deeply respect Naka's contributions to Sega. That being said, no. His later era Sega work was just kind of... not great. Besides, Sega doesn't need more rehashes, they need new blood flexing their muscles.
     
  19. DreamsComeBlue

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    I would take any of those no games over another Sonic Lost World or Sonic Forces. It's... really disheartening to see members of the Sonic Retro community undervalue certain original members of the Sonic Team and underestimate what they still have to offer in 2020. There's more I could and would like to say about that, but I'll bite my tongue for the sake of not starting a shitstorm that will bring us off topic.
     
  20. Wafer

    Wafer

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    Don't even go down that road with me. I'm trapped in customer service roles because I have no other professional experience and no qualifications, and even if that weren't the case I'm in no position to relocate. I'd do almost anything to be in any programming role, but I need to recoup some of the down-payment on my mortgage before I can even consider looking for apprenticeships.

    What I was actually pointing out is that interpreting a line of assembly at a glance isn't that big a deal for anyone familiar with the architecture in question, because there's not that much complexity that you can fit into a single line of assembly.

    Maybe M2 should hire Naka, if he wants the work, but you're the only one here talking about M2's work. It makes no sense for Sonic Team to hire him for his knowledge of the MD platform and games given how little they actually work with those games.