Bashing Sonic Generations

My only complaint is the level selection for the 3ds version. It really should have been a celebration of Sonics handheld history with unique levels from the GG, Advance, and DS eras. Bridge zone for the token green hill esque level at minimal, we didnt need the console games repeated again. I may have bought it with more unique picks. Imagine the Rivals being Nack the Weasel for GG, G-merl for Adv, and Blaze for the DS titles. Could have been great, but is just wasted potential.

 

3DS level selection left a really bad taste in my mouth because, as much as I dislike Sonic Advance 2 and Sonic Rush, I'd really have liked them to be featured. The GG/Advance/Rush games have some of the most creative and pretty levels in the series. Here's a small list of kickass stages we could've had:

• Bridge Zone
• Sky Base
• Sky High
• Aqua Lake
• Sunset Park
• Egg Rocket
• Music Plant
• Techno Base
• Toy Kingdom
• Cyber Track
• Chaos Angel
• That one water stage in Rush idk everyone likes it
• That other stage from Rush people like
• Sky Babylon

But we didn't have any of it. No Altar Emerald remix either.

Besides that I'm not a huge fan of Generations. Really cool ideas, especially in Classic Crisis City, but as mentioned above, Sonic controls like shit. Also the level design doesn't feel very organic to me. See, there's this thing about playing Sonic that I like, which is how you're always throwing yourself off cliffs and "exploration" is directly tied to taking leaps of faith. You have to have attitude to play Sonic! But not so much in Sonic Generations. It just doesn't happen. It feels like I'm doing what I'm supposed to. Instead of going "hey! What I did just now was pretty cool!" I'm always going "hey! What the game did just now was pretty cool!".

It's like a fundamental flaw for which I'm not sure I can blame Sonic Generations. But it's there.

 

...Water Palace from Rush WAS in 3DS Generations...

 

Ah, you're right. I tend not to remember either way because I don't really like it. My bad.

 

Every single 2D section in the Modern stages is pointless. Planet Wisp in particular is straight up ruined by Sonic Team clearly running out of money and making it like 80% 2D.

 

I seem to recall that the 3DS game also tended to just recreate the levels wholesale for Classic Sonic, but I've never actually played it. If that's the case, it seems like a really lazy move on the part of DIMPS.

 

I don't think it's laziness, I think it's a lack of time. There's evidence that the 3DS version was most likely developed in a short time frame, by a team that had never worked on (the then-brand new) 3DS hardware before. Look at how barren GHZ's score tally looks in June...



Versus the final release in November:



Heck, not even the music was done, resulting in Retro managing to preserve an in-progress version of the Big Arm theme without even trying to! Generations 3DS doesn't reach the aspirations of the HD version, but it's still pretty fun, and it's remarkable that it holds together as well as it does given these (likely) constraints.

But yeah, the level layouts for act 1 of Green Hill, Casino Night, and Mushroom Hill are all lifted directly from the Genesis games. I _believe_ Water Palace and Tropical Resort act 2 are directly from Rush/Colors DS as well, but it's been a while.

 

I wish Hang Castle or Mystic Mansion included in the game. I don't know why they didn't use most memorable stages of sonic heroes.

 

Generations was just so tiny. A celebration of Sonic's 20th anniversary reduced to 9 levels, 3 bosses, 3 rivals and a handful of remixes? The rest of the game was obvious padding, from the White World to the story to extra missions... Urgh. What a let down. It was a small game by regular standards, but by big celebration standards it was even worse.

For a game so small to give equal representation to the 20 year old Sonic 1 as it did to Sonic Colours, which was a few days shy of a year old when Generations came out... Nah, that didn't feel right. I know why they included every mainline Sonic game (including condensing S3K into a single title for the most part), I just don't agree with it. It should have stopped at Heroes or '06. There really was no need to go back to Unleashed and Colours.

If the console version featured rival battles against Metal Sonic, Shadow and Silver, then the 3DS version should have included Knuckles, Blaze and Jet. Seriously. What a diving cop out. The 3DS battles were just the most brain dead races anyway. They'd hardly have had to anything more than model swaps.

 

Yeah, the small scope of the game felt pretty bad and it just gets worse in hindsight. There are so many favorites that didn't make it.

 

Sorry to be nitpicky, but it was in development for at least two years. The 3DS version is actually what became of the canceled PSP version, which we know for a fact was in development by November 2009.

Of course, the shift to the 3DS probably caused problems and played a huge role in why it ended up being the way it was, but I thought I'd just point this out.

 

I haven't finished the 3DS version. The final boss told me it didn't deserve the effort. The 3DS version, overall, is disappointing, the mission mode has awful challenges. We have that fantastic version of the Big Arms boss music thanks to its existence, though.

I don't remember this; I suppose it was one of the missions, but it sounds more like it happened on some Olympics game.

Yeah, they were memorable as the first time I felt I was playing a Mario game as Sonic. That couple of levels would be the first thing I would delete from Heroes.

 

On the topic of level selection--as much as plenty of us gave Sonic 4 shit for taking this approach (and rightfully so, IMO, on it supposedly being billed as a sequel); I think Generations going the rehash route for its stages would had actually been the better option for an anniversary game. Pick a bunch of level templates the series has used before (tropical/grassland stage, city/casino stage, water stage, factory stage, space stage, snow/ice stage, sand stage, etc.) and just pack them in with as much level decor, stage gimmicks/mechanics, and enemies you can find from all of the franchise's zones that correspond to that level theme. Ergo, you could have a generic "Grass Hill" stage that had stuff ranging from Green Hill and Turquoise Hill to Seaside Hill and Sunset Hill and everything in between.

The excess rehashing/recycling would be justified in the sense of it being a nostalgia trip/anniversary game; and it would also allowed for both for a much stronger variety of levels and a much wider representation of material from the franchise, as opposed to the "Greatest Hits" collection of city/green stages that's in the actual game. Some of the levels in Generations already do this (such as Seaside Hill Act 1 having an underwater section borrowed from Hydrocity), as well as Mania with its own remixed stage; but I'm talking more in the sense of just running around the world with this concept, four times over.

I'm also going to cop that I don't like the whole notion of establishing the Genesis-era designs as the "younger" versions for those characters that "grow" into Millennium-era designs, and I don't like the changes it made to sell that effect. Such as having the Genesis designs to be shorter in height (even though I'm pretty confident that Sonic across both the Genesis and Millennium games has been consistently described to be 100cm tall) and de-emphasizing G. Sonic's coolness to be more childish to contrast against M. Sonic (I think G. Sonic's "cool and cute" design factor, as well making him deliberately mute would had been a good enough dynamic contrast against M. Sonic's ability to talk and his more pronounced edge/attitude.) It's why that while I'm not too big on the whole "two dimensions" canon that Forces retconned G. Sonic into, I actually prefer that approach a lot more than Generations's timeline approach.

 

I love how Mania had some levels inherit mechanics and design elements of similarly-themed levels. I'd have loved if this game did that too, giving us big fusion zones that celebrate so many levels at once.

 

This mission.

 

Never played it, but I do own the soundtrack, and I kinda wish that the tracks for the genesis levels spruced them up a bit more than "leave the original synth melodies in but punch up the percussion and that's fine"...

 

There was a small degree of this, in the Classic Sonic stages at least. Green Hill had an Emerald Hill Zone corkscrew, Speed Highway had elements of Starlight Zone and Seaside Hill had elements of Labyrinth Zone. It's definitely something they could have done more with though.

I've never seen anything official regarding Sonic's height prior to Sonic Adventure, which established him as 100cm.

However, the Japanese Sonic CD manual says that Metal Sonic is 765.4mm (76.54 cm) tall. So presumably Sonic was intended to be around that height too, back in 1993.

The art assets DVD, circa 2008, had a height chart that gave the Classic Sonic cast the same heights as their Adventure era versions.

So Sonic Generations' depiction of Classic Sonic contradicted that art assets disc, but was closer to what they had in mind in 1993.

 

I know this is supposed to be a "Bashing" thread, but there is one compliment I feel Generations deserves. The final boss in it sucks, but hey - it's the only 3D Sonic game of the 2010s whose final boss fight isn't a rip-off of the Nega Wisp Armor Sand Scorpion from Sonic and the Secret Rings. (Seriously, what is Sonic Team's obsession with this boss fight?)