What approach should 3D Sonic take next?

The question about Sonic 06's story being a mess isn't a story of the writers not being good enough. 06 was unfinished across the board, along with the story having changes made to it up until the 11th hour. Story elements were quite clearly scrapped as they were over-ambitious, and had to rein it back, but not enough time to fully remove missing elements (which is why it feels disjointed). Obviously that doesn't fix some of the more.... agregious issues that would still be present even if they had time. As for Shadow The Hedgehog's story, I personally believe that was more them trying something new, and not realizing that it didn't work until they were too far into development. It's not a question of whether they have the ability, at all. It's clear that people at ST *do* have the ability to write a good story, it's just they don't want to.

The point about bringing up 06's story in the discussion, is that when you play it, at least to me, you don't see a team that doesn't care. You feel a team that tried their best under strict deadlines, but missed the mark. It's not a good story, but the focus (at least for the discussion as to future games in the franchise) should be getting back to a team that quite clearly puts a lot of effort into every element of the game, including the story (even if it isn't perfect, or is quirky). People hold SA1 and SA2's story to high regard, not because it's perfect (it's fairly janky), but because you can feel the love for the franchise within it. It doesn't have to be flawless, or completely serious/a completely comedic story, for it to be held in high regard; it just needs to be written by people who care.

Compare that to Sonic Forces, where the story feels not only lazy, but as if the developers just don't care about the game at all. The story feels as if the writers are treating it as a job rather than it being their passion, and themes are shoehorned in due to management telling them something is popular. The most interesting part of Forces story is Robotnik taking over, and well, it's told in a piece of explanatory text rather than showing the audience anything at all. Nobody really cares about Forces years after it's release, because both the gameplay and the story feel like it's half-arsed to meet a Sonic game quota, but feels worse when they add in these loved characters to only pander. It feels like a cynical cash-grab, to reel in fans by creating a story that, on the surface feels like what fans have wanted again for years, but instead is just a thinly veiled disguise for laziness.

(in fact, the reason above is exactly why Mania is loved so dearly. If it had been another Sonic 4, it wouldn't have been loved. But you can feel every facet of the game is just from people who love the franchise. Any references don't feel like pandering, but instead in-jokes by the developers who share your hobby. It doesn't feel cynical, and that's the most important thing. It's dripping with love and care throughout.)

...but yeah, all I want is a story that doesn't make me hate the franchise. The only reason I have a burning hatred for Forces is it's clear they just didn't even bother to try. It doesn't feel rushed, it just feels lazy. Even the most terrible story like 06 has *some* elements you could enjoy.

 

Tbh, changing the style and tone of the plot on each game never worried me that much; I mean, I like the classic plots and settings, and even SA1 is far from what I expected to be the followup of the Sonic games in that regard, but there are so many alternate takes on what Sonic is supposed to be, saying it should be the way I'd like it to be is stupid, and adding new stuff for new people seems reasonable even if it's sometimes misguided. I liked something about the story on every game that really had one, no matter if it was SA2, Colors or Unleashed. Btw, plot-wise, Unleashed feels like the spiritual successor of Terranigma, and the Templezord felt so stupid it became really amusing and epic to me.

Now, that said, I overall prefer mute characters in videogames unless it's absolutely necessary to give them voices, Sonic games or not, to the point that I prefer when they used text boxes on RPGs in most cases. Quality of non-verbal expression should always be a priority.

 

While I don't agree with making the cast completely mute, I do think they could learn to dial back the 'talkativeness' of the cutscenes in the games a few notches. One thing I really liked about 06's story is that there were occasionally cutscenes where characters didn't talk much. For example, the cutscene after you beat Wave Ocean in Sonic's story; it's a short cutscene, Tails has maybe 2 quick lines of dialogue, but Sonic himself is completely mute in this scene- instead, he just shows some irritation that he didn't catch up to the Egg Carrier in time, and runs off. Later in the game, the cutscene after you beat Aquatic Base, there's a cutscene where Sonic is just running through the docking bay and manages to jump aboard the Egg Carrier right before it blasts off- there's no talking at all in this scene, either. Shadow's opening cutscene in 06 doesn't have much talking either- shows some nice action at first, then gets straight to the point really quickly.

I think the Adventure games, Unleashed, and the Story Book games had stuff like this on occasion too, to a lesser extent. In other words, they knew when to shut up when the situation called for it.

In Colors, Lost World, and Forces, it just feels like the characters don't know when to shut up and get serious, and it can get a bit grating after a while.

 

For what it's worth, I quite liked Lost World on the Wii U, and I think the formula could be great for Sonic with a little polish.
Sonic Lost World on the 3ds though...is one of the worst Sonic game I've played, in my humble opinion. Windy Hill is a solid first world, but everything goes downward from here, and the game very quickly becomes a mediocre puzzle platformer with obnoxiously long levels.
This is the game that solidified my hatred for the wisps. I'm not joking when I say you'll spend a good 50% of your time in the levels in wisp form. And that's with the annoying 5 second jingle they didn't have the foresight to remove.

This game is a mess. The last Sonic game Dimps ever did...talk about a lame swan song, from the guys that gave us Advance and Rush. What the fuck happened?

 

I just wish Lost World Wii U would keep score for the individual stages. Forcing competition as time attack only and relegating the score to a useless, NSMB-style infinitely increaseable counter is really irritating, and it's the only modern Sonic game that's done this.

 

I don't know about the WiiU or 3DS version, but I have the Steam version and have not been able to beat it. Maybe it's because it's a bad port, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that it is the worst piece of garbage game I have ever played. I have had more fun breaking my big toe twice than I have playing this game.

 

I can't comment on the quality of the port, but no, Lost World is legitimately an awful game. I literally gave up on the franchise after its release, the only thing bringing me back was Mania.

 

Funny, because Unleashed (Wii, at least), was the very first Sonic game that I literally never touched again after beating the story. So I agree, on par with Unleashed.

EDIT: Just for reference, there was a poll here a few months back asking which version of Unleashed was better. IIRC we were unable to come to a consensus.

 

The HD version of Lost World is a game I'm really divided on, to be honest. I played it twice, once for myself and a second time to stream it for a friend, and... I don't hate it, but it really could have been a lot better. For every positive I can list for something, I can think of just as many negatives.
I like the idea of the parkour system but the controls were finicky and rigid in practice, and even after my second playthrough I didn't feel confident in my movement. I like that they decided to throw in some weird environments, but the focus on tube-based design took away from the architecture variety and it messed with my sense of space when moving left or right. I like the colors and cute style but everything felt too smooth and rounded off, with the robots feeling like cheap toys and the classic callbacks just feeling like references without understanding. I really appreciated the desire to make just about every level stand out with unique mechanics and sometimes themes, but there were so many underwhelming or annoying stages amidst all the interesting ones. The only thing I can't say anything positive about was the writing, which I hated from beginning to end.
It's a game I would consider on on the slightly bad side of mediocre, but with enough charm to be interesting and worth seeing.

The 3DS game, on the other hand, was just awful. It starts out innocently enough as a bland children's game but quickly turns into one of the most tedious, soulless games I've ever seen. Level design devolves into long gauntlets, with mazes, puzzles, annoying wisp timer gimmicks, and janky obstacles that killed me because they didn't feel like working properly that time. The designers just gave up near the end, spamming lots of square platforms over pits and calling it a day. I knew everyone hated the special stages and I'm confident in saying that they really don't get enough hate.
I'd put the 3DS game up near the top of the "worst Sonic games ever" list. It's exceptionally tedious and it just goes on and on and on.

 

I have no problem with the ranking being removed from the normal play mode, I just want the separate ranking mode to rank score as well as time. I don't really like time attack in Sonic games because it involves skipping over as much as possible and not going after rings, enemies or trick actions.

 

In regards to why Dimps put out such an underwhelming game as compared to the Advance series, Rush games, and Colors DS is simply due to their change in actual staff working on the game. To illustrate this, I made a quick spreadsheet comparing the staff across various Dimps Sonic games (edit: just realized I missed both episodes of Sonic 4 ).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ESTKpMGjdODyGThOwHUkydTn6VclVkMgj0UZVFS9AUQ/edit?usp=sharing

One of the first things you can tell is that the Planners are consistent across the Advance series and through rush (Yukihiro Higashi, Masaaki Yamagiwa). I first thought that the people credited under "Designer" would be the level designers and whatnot, but after looking through their other work, it's clear that they are artists. This blog post was the only thing I could get that attempts to explain what the role "Planner" means, and it seems to be in line with this idea of them being a level designer, though it notes that the role doesn't have a precise definition. However, this distinction would also explain why there are no planners starting with Sonic Colors, and why Yukihiro Higashi's name jumps from Planner to Designer here. (edit: the designers that I'm referring to as artists are specifically the ones up to and including Rush Adventure, hence why the credits stop making a distinction between Planner and Designer)

Yukihiro Higashi most recently worked on Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, Masaaki Yamagiwa seems to have gone on to work for FromSoftware and produced Bloodborne (!), and Takayuki Sakamoto has gone on to work on Dead or Alive: Xtreme 3 - Fortune. Ayano Komatsu (another staff member besides Yukihiro that worked on a Sonic game before Generations) was apparently the director for the same Sword Art Online game previously mentioned.

My point is that it's important to take notice of the actual staff that works on these games, not just the studios or companies as a whole. Dimps has worked on many different franchises since the 2000s and likely brings in people who work on other franchises to work on Sonic games. This seems to have definitely been the case for Sonic Generations and Lost World, as almost none of the people who worked on Sonic Generations went on to work on Sonic Lost World, and most people that worked on the design for either Generations or Lost World had no prior experience working on a Sonic game (according to some basic Google searching).

 

Yeah, that probably wouldn't help either.

 

Added development time / resources for a game's production can only go so far to cover for atrocious game design principles. Lost World 3DS could had been punted back to a 2015 release and it still would not had been worth much if both the vast majority of the stages Dimps had already design designed, and the underlying philosophy for designing those stages to begin with, weren't completely thrown out and redone from scratch.

If Sonic 4 wasn't final proof that Dimps needed to step away from making Sonic platformers (which I'd argue, it crossed that line and then some), Lost World 3DS definitely sealed that deal for me in the wrong way. Some would call it hyperbole, but I'm not above citing nonsense like Frozen Factory Act 3 and Sky Road Act 2 in LW 3DS as featuring some of the absolute worst stage design in the entire series. Between the Boost, the Rolling Combo, and the use of the Wisps; it's very clear that Dimps actively hate the idea of designing platformers that don't have mechanics that eat entire levels. To the broader point, they've helped accelerate into overwrite mode the pervasive "Sonic is all about speed" design mentality for the 2D gameplay from Advance 2 and onward much like how Sonic Team did in the 3D games, at times even taking it to an even further low.

If they are ever called back to the Sonic franchise, it should strictly be for a fighting spinoff; because that's clearly the only genre they're competent at. Other than that, I quite frankly don't miss them being gone at all. I imagine if they made a handheld / Switch version of Forces, they somehow would had found a way to make that game even worse, which given the utterly banal level design and half-baked controls in that game speaks volumes.

FWIW, the Steam version is a port of the Wii U version developed by Sonic Team, with some modifications (such as the Nintendo DLC levels being removed).

 

I can't say anything about my personal experience with Lost World (besides demo impressions), but what I can say though is that from seeing the two 3DS levels linked above, I understand the point I've heard of comparing it to Super Mario Galaxy.

What I've seen of other Dimps games (including the Advance and Rush games) leads me to believe that they have a heavy focus on communicating speed via the idea of constant movement. What I mean by this includes the addition of so many speed boosters, their idea of boost (which ranges from encouraging constant movement to giving the play instant access to max speed), and in general putting in gimmicks like springs everywhere so the player isn't standing still at any point. Sonic Lost World in this way definitely seems like a last hurrah type of thing where they went the complete opposite direction and focused on making "a platformer" and not a Sonic game. The fact that it WAS a Sonic game, however, meant that it still needed to have connotations of speed. My guess is that this translated directly in either giving the player a bunch of stuff to homing attack, making autorun sections and, worse of all, giving the player a laundry list of "things to do" in a level, tiring gameplay.

Sonic should always have a degree of freedom associated with the different aspects of his design. Whether its exploration, level design/objectives, environments, physics, abilities, you name it. I almost feel like trying to reign in that energy and keep it under control has been what's made a lot of Sonic's more recent entries, including the Dimps games, look so boring to me.

Remember what I said about differentiating staff vs a whole studio. The people who worked on Advance and Rush are mostly no longer at Dimps. Different people would be making it, and so we'd likely get a different kind of game.

As far as excusing a game for it being a "bite-sized iOS exclusive", I think that games, regardless of platform, need to be treated with enough respect to criticize them for their faults. There are plenty of mobile games out there that, in spite of their limitations are well-made and fun.

 

Damn that sounds just... evil. It's like making Sonic Forces 2 but then Sega demands that it becomes Sonic Adventure 3. Literally nobody would be happy with it.