Sonic Unleashed: The Post-PC Port Discussion Thread

My head canon is they should have cast Ristar as Light Gaia and given him the nighttime sections, functionally combining Chip and Werehog into a single character. I've always felt half the problem with the Werehog is the concept alone was extremely off-putting - Unleashed came out in the context of having just followed "dark Sonic with a gun and he swears" and "Sonic gets killed on-screen and his human girlfriend brings him back with the kiss of life," and right before "Sonic with a sword." It just seemed like yet another attempt by Sega of bastardizing the character for the sake of making him seem edgy and cool, and I'm sure it was conceived that way even though the game itself plays everything very light and silly.

I think giving that gameplay to another character, like Ristar or Knuckles, would have still been criticized from the perspective of "you don't even play as Sonic half the time," but that was a common enough complaint about the 3D Sonic games that I doubt it would have stood out as much as the Werehog did.

 

The premise of the Werehog isn't really the core issue with. The character design is actually pretty great. I think the fuzzy concept art takes too much of the edge off when ideally something like Sonic turning into a werewolf would look kinda cool. The series has always balanced on the knife's edge of shonen anime and cartoon, and it's usually hitting the spot for me when extremists of both sides are pissed off. The werehog is too edgy on the front end that it annoys people who want Sonic to soften up, but it's too silly on the backend to attract the Shadow powerscalers and Dark Sonic AMV posters. Sega might have done their job a little too well here since it's probably the least talked about Sonic pivot outside the absurdity of it but it works well enough for me.

I still think the Werehog is Unleashed's biggest failure, but it's 90% on the execution side. There's no character you can paint over it to make it work because the motif is barely the problem. The Nighttime half of Unleashed is a bad action game, with bad puzzles breaking up the pacing and bad bosses bookending each continent. Reviewers and fan modders have argued for a long time that expanding Sonic's kit early takes a lot of the edge off, but the problem is more fundamental than even that decision to lock upgrades in a linear track.

A good way to test how addicting an action game is isn't the amount of moves and combos your character has, but how good it feels to hit things, and in Unleashed hitting things feels like smacking wet balloons around. The audiovisual feedback is almost universally terrible across the board regardless of the enemy type, Sonic's sluggish moves pair with his lack of animation cancels to make him feel like you're fighting enemies under water. Defensive and movement options are unreliable, railroading you into mashing enemies into a knockdown state and awkwardly shambling around them when they bother to strike back. The lack of enemy variety is the killing blow because it means the amount of tactics you actually need to employ to beat them is few, making Sonic's expanded movelist redundant. If you have a string for burst damage and a string for crowd control, you've solved Sonic Unleashed. The amount of strings stuffed into the system is admirable, but the reason other games have wide tool kits isn't just for show. They're all made to respond to a variety of situations. Dante doesn't juggle enemies just for the sake of rule of cool, but because it allows him to single out a target while keeping him safe from getting mobbed by the hordes on the ground.

Animation cancels and large movesets aren't the only way to make a great action game. Compare the relatively slim kits found in Streets of Rage 4 and how that game throws a large variety of enemies, bosses and stages at you instead to keep things interesting, or how Ninja Gaiden 2 places an emphasis on more committal animations and combo strings. More important than any of that though, it feels good to smack people around in all of these games. So good that you're going to want to do it for hours and hours even if nothing else changes. That's the key. That's step one. Without that, you're done before you've even began. If Unleashed were to take anything from it's similarly flawed big bro, God of War, I wish they at least took that.

Add the puzzles that you usually mentally solve as soon as you walk into the room but have to spend two minutes pushing blocks around to actually solve, and those shallow clock tower grapple sections don't seem all that worth it, do they? They can't be for the majority of folks.

And this is all in service of a story that isn't really all that satisfying to begin with. Such a fundamental change to Sonic's being doesn't alter his outlook on life it all, doesn't create any new problems for him to solve, no inner darkness to get over. Yeah, it's a cool subversion that Sonic is basically immune to all that stuff, but how does the story service us instead, with that angle firmly blocked off? The answer is that it doesn't. All that we're left with is an aquired taste of a character design and what could have been. Again.

There's no hard feelings from me, though. Sonic Team was just not prepared to develop an action game alongside reinventing the core platforming only two years after 06 came out. Knuckles and Ristar would not have fixed that. Going a step further and them into treasure hunting levels instead might have blunted a lot more damage, since you'd at least be platforming, but I'm not sure Sonic Unleashed needed an extra gameplay mode at all to begin with. What they needed after 06 was a crowdpleaser, and Unleashed is so steadfast in being that in most regards that a gamble like this is especially insane.

 

I think the Werehog would've been better off being either goofy or edgy instead of not enough of both for what's a very goofy, edgy concept. I just really dislike how the final design gels with the gameplay. The thick arms and small hands make the stretching look unnatural and he just generally looks too muscular for how strangely weak he is in-game.

 

These combat hotdog challenges for the day stage of Dragon Road are funny. Like, this level is brimming with enemies, with even the hardest challenge being easily doable with 10+ enemies beyond the threshold. That definitely isn't how some of these other stages have went, especially Cool Edge and Rooftop Run. I wonder if maybe it's a sign that the stage changed around really late in development? Regardless, I absolutely adore this stage. It's immaculate, in my eyes.

Speaking of hot dogs, anybody else just love Don Fachio's animations? He's telling you the greatest hotdog-related story of all time.

 

I think it might’ve been safer had the nighttime levels transformed Chip or something. Daytime-ish gameplay with added powers from the support character. That’s a different game though.

 

Unleashed has been getting a lot of love on the Japanese social media side of things lately, they even uploaded a video of a dude playing Windmill Isle blindfolded

update: I figured out how to embed a youtube short lol

 

I specifically remember an article mentioned the Werehog levels were basically Ristar in 3D. I was like...wow they’re right! The stretchy arms, pole swinging and slamming enemies.

I would love for Sonic and Ristar to crossover (they coexist in my head canon, especially after they included that bush bomb in Superstars). Ristar needs his own new game first and clearly it can be done in 3D so I hope it wouldn’t be a 2D Pixel Art game just for the sake of nostalgia.

 

I got to the Egg Dragoon which is piss easy compared to... pretty much everything before and after it.
That gauntlet level only took me like 65 minutes, which is fine for me in comparison to others' ~40 minutes.

I'm on the third running section of Dark Gaia and I'm tapped out. I can't focus; I've played it so much now that everything about it is being repeated and is making me numb to it. So I'm just leaving the game paused in the background until I feel energized enough to try again because fuck me if I game over and have to start this shit over again.

Any tips? I didn't even realize my life count went from 70+ (maybe 99?) to right around 30 with the "punch the fireballs with the Gaia Megazord" bits.

 

If you need more lives and if you have the DLC levels, play Dragon Road 5 to grab a bunch.

 

Sure enough, after writing for help I got past that phase. Thank you though! I'll keep that in mind in general.

Now how about Perfect Dark Gaia? Is it really possible to paraloop the tentacles ala NiGHTS? 'Cause it hardly seems possible between the way Super Sonic handles, keeping track of Chip's health, not realizing I'm getting hit because of either a sudden meteor explosion or PDG's firin' his lazer...

 

Its been a while but i remember beating PDG without ever paralooping. For me i just got as many rings as i could on the flight over and booked it over to the nearest tentacle and just ram it head first. If you're quick you can hit it and circle back around in one turn for easy repeated hits

 

That's what I've seen in a few Let's Plays. I'll probably give it a couple days before trying again. It seems like grabbing as many rings as possible is one key to victory, so I'll try to memorize some routes to collect them and dodge rocks... and dodge those damn front-charging tentacles.

 

I've owned and played quite a bit of both the HD and SD versions of Unleashed, but actually haven't beaten either of them.

On the SD version I beat the Eggmanland Day stage, saw that there were 6 Warehog levels and decided "Nah, I'm good" and just replayed the other day stages as desired. I only ever bothered to slog through the Warehog because I wanted to play Day stages in the first place, and didn't really care much for final bosses at the time... so there was nothing to gain from playing them.

On the HD version I was never able to beat Eggman Land.

If I ever get around to setting up Recomp, I might have to give it another try. Having an improved refresh rate will probably help quite a bit.

 

I think Eggmanland is totally fine if the werehog is leveled-up enough.

 

Played Unleashed as a kid on PS3, playing it now with the recomp port. I didn't have fun then, having fun now. I'm a simple person. What a wonderful life!

 

Figured I'd share this here since it's Unleashed talk:



Been working on this for a bit, using the best available sources.
Enjoy!

Also Japanese version:

 

I played Recompiled with the following improvement mods (in mod load order):

• Customizable Results Music
• Varied Sonic Voice Lines
• Improved Progression
• Optional Improvements
• Foreign Input System
• Remove Purple Walls
• Disable Werehog Camera Pans
• Press B Once for Levers and Doors
• Faster Final Boss
• Faster Sonic in Towns
• DLC Medal
• DLC Stage Gates
• Spawn Outside Pickle's Lab

And with all these combined, plus the codes in HedgeModManager and the features already included in Recompiled, I can safely say Unleashed is...good. Not great, not even "very" good, just...good. Period. Not having to collect medals to beat the game, and the Werehog being more responsive and with move cancelling, already makes a huge difference on its own. But it is still very flawed. In order to truly fix the Werehog, the following still needs to be addressed, and it likely won't come until code modding is supported:

• The complete lack of a drop shadow. Especially with the Werehog, this is egregious and makes precision platforming a pain in the ass. Come the fuck on, Sega. Even Bubsy 3D had a drop shadow.
• The automatic camera. For daytime stages it's fine, but for the Werehog it's infuriating. Some sections, especially those godforsaken spiked beams in Skyscraper Scamper, would immediately be less irritating to deal with if the camera was totally manual. I wouldn't want the automatic camera to go away completely, since it does help in some areas, so ideally R3 would swap between an automatic and manual camera system.
• Needing to press a button to grab ledges. I shouldn't have to explain how stupid this is and why no other God of War knockoff does this. If you're touching the fucking ledge, you should grab it. Same goes for poles and whatnot.
• The knockback and delayed recovering from it. Anyone who's played Skyscraper Scamper knows what I'm talking about.
• Not being able to double jump when carrying stones. This is more of a minor thing, but specifically Dragon Road Act 2 is very problematic without it.

So that's the Werehog, which encompasses the major problems, but there are others.

• I don't think it's a hot take that Unleashed's daytime stage design ranges from quality, to questionable, to an outright trainwreck. Act 1 stages don't need a complete redesign, but what they do need is new alternate pathways to replace the ridiculous amount of bottomless pits. Other acts, namely the DLC stages, desperately need redesigns.
• Sonic needs to be more responsive. Those scripted sequences have got to go. Generations-style controls and physics would go a long way.
• The lives system. I don't care what anyone says: fuck lives systems. You can give yourself infinite lives, but this is more of a bandaid solution. Adding Tails Saves ala Colors Ultimate would be cool.
• The missions. I'm not asking for Yakuza-quality substories, and I can accept fetch quests, but I draw the line at needing to replay the same damn levels with a bunch of spike traps lining the path. Those missions should have uniquely designed levels. That would at least feel more worthwhile.
• Hotdog missions. Jesus christ. Improved Progression already adds its own improvements to this, but to me the entire system is flawed. You already replay these stages enough times with the town missions, why do you need to play them 10 more times on top of that? I think there should be a way to have it where instead, the guy reads your score/kills/rings record for a stage and just gives you the hotdogs depending on how far you got with each record. That would make going for S-ranks more worthwhile, too.