Shadow Generations makes me want a remake of Sonic 2006

There's no way an '06 remake would turn out well without a complete rewrite and a total rework of the game. It'd be so much time and effort. I'd much rather the momentum be kept with a Frontiers 2 or Adventure 3.

I get the appeal of redeeming Sonic's biggest blunder, but let's see something new maybe.

 

Have you tried Final Fantasy? (runs) No joke though, Sonic ‘06 did seem to be an attempt to make Sonic Final Fantasy-esque.

 

No I’d rather than keep building towards a completely original Adventure style game than wasting time on it’s cheap knockoff.

 

I guess I wouldn't mind a 06 remake that "fixed" it. But fixing it would involve doing so much work that you might as well just make a new game instead.

If we gotta have "fix remakes", I'd rather get them of more important games like Adventure, or half-baked games like Unleashed.

People are still citing this as a plot hole? It was shown that the Elise's emerald wasn't the blue one from the present, but its future counterpart left to her by Silver during his trip to the past.

 

Still makes me laugh at the number of people who still talk of a bloody 'kiss'

I think remaking a game that was rushed out in an unfinished state and looking to right wrongs is a nice idea, it's just the money and team resources needed to make that happen
Sonic Team with Shadow X and Generations have shown the team can use the levels from Sonic 06 and make them work, so it's entirely plausible

But I'll rather Sonic Team remake levels from 06 in their Boost style game and the other line of Sonic Team focus on Frontiers 2

 

I'd be fine with whatever either way. A port, a remaster, a remake, an entirely redone adaptation loosely based on 06, or a new adventure in Soleanna. I like 06 solely on the grounds for what it attempted, but can understand all of its flaws, and why those flaws exist.
While my ideal outcome would be a relatively faithful remake with it's flaws ironed out, here's what I believe would realistically happen:
The adventure gameplay gets replaced with boost gameplay. While I like adventure gameplay, I actually like Shadow Gens' physics a decent bit, so not really complaining there.
Crisis City and Kingdom Valley's assets obviously get recycled Gens.
Silver's gameplay gets reworked to fit in with the boost, all I can see making the transition would be his hover and stomp shockwave that paralyzes enemies. Lifting and carrying stuff gets totally scripted, can't have the player have too much fun with physics.
All the other characters lose their playable status. It's just Sonic, Shadow, and Silver.
Gems and hub missions get removed.
Vehicles in Shadow levels get removed.
S rank requirements are lowered.
etc. etc. Just imagine the past 13 years of modern games but with 06 levels basically lmao.

 

There's been a lot of discussion surrounding this recently with Nakamura's "hey this might be nice" comments that people unfortunately took as some sort of announcement. But ultimately I'm agnostic on the whole affair.

Could it create something good? Yes, but it would also be a waste. The kind of Sonic games I want remade are the ones that might have been fun-but-unremarkable on their own, but can be massively expanded into something greater, or else are held back by dated or weird hardware. Tails Adventure. Sonic Battle. The Riders trilogy. The Rush games (because of the 2-screen thing). Chronicles, even, though not really on a gameplay front. Sonic R.

When people say "I want an 06 remake", what I actually hear is "I want a game that isn't 06, but embodies 06's themes while still using Silver and Soleanna's environments to their full extent". Nearly everything else about that game is subject to change in this "remake", because what people want is to replace 06, to have discussion of the thing we call Sonic 06 to become obsolete and substituted by discussion of a good game. It's the idea that the past can just be retconned, that if they keep the same name, we won't just add the word "original" in front of 06 and keep talking about it anyway (which to be clear, they should rename it, "Sonic the hedgehog" is about the worst possible title they could have given it and may genuinely have contributed to it's whole "destroyed the franchise" thing).

As a point of comparison, way less people ask about remaking Rise of Lyric, and how much was sawed off of that game's potential, and while that's partially because every version of that game would just be a serviceable PS2-era platformer at best, it's also because it's sitting off in its own little alternate continuity where, good or bad, nobody has to acknowledge it while talking about the series' chronology. And that makes sense! Why remake something people aren't gonna care about? It's a money-sink. And it would be for 06 too. Reimagining the whole game as something different, even if it's good, will just shackle it to the game that sucks forever, which if anything would weaken it.

If you want an "06 remake" but you're happy to lose most of what makes it 06, you want something other than an 06 remake. You probably want a game people think is good, but somehow also recognize as 06, regardless of the product itself. And y'know, I get that! I want a really good game with the title "Sonic the hedgehog 4", but it's not because I'm in love with the DIMPs duology. Mostly I want a retro engine sequel with that name, that uses some of the level design and unique takes on its themes while actually including the stages to conclude the damn plot. But this is a fantasy, just better in my case because there's ninety billion things named "Sonic the hedgehog", but not "Sonic 4". We don't want remakes of what these games are, we want remakes of what they represent.

Frankly, no matter what they did, even if the product was good, I think people would still have this "what could have been" attitude. It would just go from "what if it was good" to "what if it fulfilled the original dev vision", ignoring that the vision was what was wrong with the game. People have this idea that Sonic Team just needed to force 06's ideas hard enough for them to work, to spit-shine it to a mirror sheen. But you can't make a bad thing good unless you're willing to recognize what was wrong with it from the start, and Sonic 06's problems started in pre-production. Any meaningful attempt at making a new game to take its place would require criticizing why they tried what they did. 06 reeks of devs going "hey here's an idea" and the suits immediately greenlighting it without any consideration as to whether that's actually a good idea.

It's a game made entirely of first drafts:

"What if there were sections where Sonic went EXTREMELY fast and couldn't stop"
"What if Shadow had mandatory vehicle sections"
"What if we had EVERY playable character with their own unique sections and mechanics"
"What if every campaign had to go through every level even if it made no sense"
"What if every character could play every version of every stage" (this was a real thing they planned at one point)
"What if it looked like Sonic but in The Real World™"
"What if it had an advanced realtime day-night cycle in a game focused on time travel"
"What if Princess Elise had a swan motif going on with her design, even though swans would presumably already be people in this universe, but she's a human anyway"
"What if there were levels where you have to run around holding Princess Elise because you're the hero, no matter how much that waters down the gameplay"
"What if Knuckles was here"
"What if we tried to do Final Fantasy 10 Tidus and Yuna without understanding what made them good characters"

And most destructively,

"What if we made a character that had absolutely no physical attacks, was slower to start than Sonic or Shadow (because having to buy an upgrade to make him fast really proves he's on their level, right? also, we cut the speed upgrade), and had to navigate every repetitive combat encounter by hunting for something to slowly pick up and aim at enemies before mashing the attack button and hoping to the Havok Gods that it connects properly and with enough speed to work".

I'm not saying you can't enjoy any of this stuff, but I am saying there was no way it was all gonna together in such a way that a "finished" 06, or indeed a "faithful remake" of 06, would be some shining example of how dedication and polish turns a bad game great.

There is enjoyment to be had here, to be clear! But the lion's share of it already exists, and it exists in Project 06. That still stops halfway by keeping the horrible ideas, but if all you want is to see that game's ideas in their best-case scenario, there you go. I've been very critical of Project 06 for all the stuff it updates without replacing bad systems with good ones, but I'd sooner take something like that than a "remake" that wastes huge amounts of time and money to not really be a "remake" anyway.

And really, "best-case scenario" is a good standard for what I want from most refreshes of games. I don't want top-to-bottom remakes of SA1 and 2, Heroes or Shadow. If you call it a remake to throw them in a new engine for easier modification, then fine, but none of the FF7/Resident Evil treatment, you get my point. The Adventure games already come close to their "best-case scenarios" with the modded PC versions, I just need the updates and QOL improvements fans have made to be properly integrated and released officially. I guess they should add a homing attack reticle? But mostly they're fine. Heroes and Shadow are much worse games fundamentally, but they similarly have a lot of good work done on them to be taken to a standard of basic tolerance (especially if SEGA could give Shadow the same Adventure-esque physics adjustment that Heroes modders have made). Shadow's horrible mission and story structure is a hurdle, I do want that game entirely replaced with a linear adventure without embarrassing attempts at mature sweary voice acting. But editing, rerecording and maybe animating a new connecting scene or two can do a lot of that without needing, again, absurd time and resources for a big overhaul.

So what I'd say I want, really, is for 06 to rerelease in the one context it makes sense, alongside the other 3D games in a collection, with all of them having received these kind of updates. The only difference would be SEGA pulling a Black Mesa and releasing Project 06 as the 06 representation. Trick it out with new cutscenes and dialogue (you can salvage the character writing, though Time Travel Will Always Be Bullshit), only have the hubs show up in mission mode (it actually makes more sense for the story to flow from Wave Ocean directly into Dusty Desert anyway), and you've got a "basically tolerable" version of the game. Hell, name it "Sonic Wildfire" to differentiate it. That was the in-dev name for Secret Rings, but it fits better here anyway.

To be clear, they will never do anything like this, ever. They may be nicer to fangames than most, but goddamn selling one with their seal of approval as an objective improvement of their own product will create thousands of copycats that actually might stand a chance at diluting their market, all whilst annoying them trying to make that money lightning strike twice (even Valve had Hunt Down the Freeman happen...), and we know that they're really only as friendly with user-created content as they are with Sonic because Sonic needs it. This is all still a huge amount of effort for a load of "SEGA and fan developer collaborate to redeem Sonic's worst game" headlines that might not actually turn many heads, and would be in a collection with a load of other games that don't need all of that as a crutch to draw attention in the first place.

Ultimately, the only surefire way to get people to stop harping on 06 all the time is to make good Sonic games with enough consistency that nobody cares about it being bad anymore. And hey, they're doing okay on that front right now. Sonic hasn't had a negatively-reviewed game in several years. Why suddenly reverse direction? I think, honestly, when people talk about "too much nostalgic throwback" in this series, they're actually just asking for a throwback to someone else's nostalgia, and that's kind of lame.

 

Oh sure, I was referring to the general surge in popularity of mid-2000s Sonic that we've witnessed recently. I wanted to add something like "and yet I don't know what Cooljerk's excuse is" on the end, but everything I tried sounded pointed. You didn't come in here a bad attitude or anything asking for jabs and insults to be tossed your way. So I'm sorry I had to say that and hope you can see the funny side of it that I wanted to get across.

Seeing as I've now said that anyway, it would be fair to respond to some of your points directly.

Personally speaking, the story is one of the worst time travel plots that I've come across.

The game quickly turns time travel into two characters performing a special handshake, and leaves the story with gaping inconsistencies in trying to justify character choices. The entire plot hinges on characters refusing to talk to each other to gain a better understanding of the bigger picture, and always time travelling to the latest possible moment to perform some risky action instead of stopping events before they can get worse. Nobody bothers to understand what's ever happening.

Just want to give a special mention to Blaze who, despite being an incredibly minor character for the bulk of the game who nobody except Silver even acknowledges, gets a very significant and entirely ambiguous send off at the very end. Her entire existence in this game is a huge retcon. It's been brushed under carpet ever since and I think that's for the best.

It's so tempting to go into the nitty gritty of it all, but in short the story of 06 is a terrible mess, and there isn't a diamond hidden in the rough either. The best thing that it did was reset the timeline to write itself out of existence so that nothing it did ever needs to be directly touched upon again.

I mean.... No? Not at all.

We've had entirely new levels and bosses made with locations based upon 06. The gameplay style and level design in all are entirely different to 06. The Sonic/Shadow Generations levels based on 06 are as much as remakes of 06 as the equivalent Green Hill and Space Colony Ark stages are remakes of Sonic 1 and SA2.

Maybe that's that you want out of an 06 remake, but at that point I'd argue that it's not even 06 anymore. It'd be a new game wearing an 06 skin, and at that point, why not just go the whole hog and make an entirely new game that isn't going to step on toes?

How much of 06 do you want to change and how much would you keep the same? When you say that you want an 06 remake, the scope is so broad that I genuinely have no idea what that even means. That's an underlying issue with a total remake of any game, even moreso when the game in question is so ill-regarded and its series has come along in leaps in bounds in the almost 20-years since.

06 is what it is. Whatever "lost potential" it had can be realised elsewhere to better effect.

 

I assume what they meant is that the assets for the stages exist, since building new ones (new old ones?) with aesthetics that are already done takes a lot less time than starting from scratch. It's not like all of 06's themes are that unique anyway.

Buuuut I'd also say that by the same metric, 06's own environments have aged decently. If we're saying that Crisis City assets that would be over fifteen years old by the time a prospective remake comes out are acceptable, then you might as well just upscale the OG textures and put them under modern lighting, which is basically what P-06 does. Frankly, the actual geometry and texture work of Shadow Generations' Kingdom Valley is not a dramatic difference from at least that level of fidelity.

 

Eh, sure, modern assets exist for various parts of 06 (although I'm only count 3 things and not 4 between Crisis City, Kingdom Valley and limited amount of Dusty Desert from the Mephiles fight). But I really don't like the argument that Sonic Team need to rely on existing assets in the first place. Less asset reuse, please.

 

I'm going to go on a limb and assume that this is supposrd to be a remake in the way FF7 Rebirth is a remake, or the Rebuild of Evangelion movies are remakes. So it's really a hyper conscious do over of the original, building on its story while going in a new direction.

But, if that's the case, then it's a massive undertaking. These types of remakes exist because people like the original work and know there is nothing to be fixed. They want to see the things that they like being spun in new ways, not the things they dislike not existing. If you're going to remake 06 just as an apology -- as a "look at how much better I can do it now" letter to... whom, exactly? Fans? Media? Yuji Naka? -- then you're better off leaving the original as it is.

That said: I'd de curious to see how it turns out anyway.

 

Eh I can't view it as a binary like that. Economical use of resources is a tool, and it can be used well and used poorly. I don't think there'd be any problem with suggesting a remake of some stages use pieces of other remakes of the same stages, if not for the fact that we've already been dealing with asset reuse outside of all that. If Frontiers and Forces and Mania hadn't all been cheating off Generations's homework I don't think we'd even be having the conversation.

 

The thing with 06 is that if you were to truly "remake" it, you'd essentially be creating an entirely new game that happens to share some level themes, plot elements, and the soundtrack. The core gameplay is ass, the level design is ass, the structure is ass, the story is ass. Basically everything needs to be restructured from the ground up and I think I would rather see that effort invested into a completely new game than I would into remaking 06.

 

^ Yeah, I agree, remaking any of the 3d games would require so much work and redesigning that you might as well do a new game.

So I think the best thing is to do a "revisit". E.g. Sonic revisits Soleanna and all the levels from 06, but it's a new game with new layouts (and even new areas inspired by the 06 stages). Kind of like how Mania revisited old levels, but we got all new acts (like Green Hill having a new cave act, or Chemical Plant having a new laboratory area).

That way, you wouldn't have to worry about them fixing the kiss, because the game would have an all-new story. I think it would be the perfect blend of new and old (just like Mania was).

It also gives the developers more freedom and flexibility. They can focus their energies on fixing the best bits of 06 and making the best game they can, rather than trying to recreate and improve everything, which might be too big a challenge for the budget they have.

 

B... B-BUT P-06!

 

Okay. That's why I didn't say it initially. But I'm not shit posting. And what's bolded was definitely not necessary.

I love a bit of sarcastic humour, poking fun in a harmless way which is exactly what that comment was supposed to be. You didn't fit the criteria of the younger fan who grew with 06 that I was describing, meaning "I don't know what your excuse is". It really, really wasn't supposed to be an insult, and the post was entirely undirected at you until you quoted me. I regret mentioning it because clearly I've struck and nerve and wouldn't have said anything had I not been fairly certain that that wouldn't have happened. Sorry.

There's discussion in all of my posts before and after the one that you responded to if you're interested at all.