Sonic X Shadow Generations announced, releases Autumn 2024

My initial post was encompassing both the idea of a side act with nonstandard level design and stipulations ala Unleashed/Generations and the extra objectives given to existing stages like in Adventure 2. I can't imagine having a "get x many rings" or "finish under a time limit" mission would be that big a deal, especially since Unleashed has both, and Generations sorta does too. It's still padding, but it's a kind of padding that makes a lot more sense.

Also...if Lost World is designed to have more main levels instead of side missions, then that would mean it is not designed in the mold of the game that did have side acts, and then put them in the main campaign. Also, again, it does have side acts.

Uh, no? That's just a level gimmick. I'm not even sure it's exclusive to a single act. I don't see how that's any different to, like, the bubble rides in Mania, Superstars and the 8-bit games.

 

... this act is identified in the game files as one of the main acts

 

To the people c̶o̶m̶p̶l̶a̶i̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ expressing concern about the fact that the trailer shows virtually zero actual gameplay, while I agree with that observation, Sonic Dream Team trailer did the same thing and yet it turned out to play very well.

As for me, while I understand why they would make the Black Doom the antagonist, I personally would be excited if they also brought back Mephiles and Infinite and make Shadow fight the trio. Especially considering that Mephiles ties thematically into the original game's story way better (time travel), and Infinite's powers make a perfect excuse to bring up all sorts of crazy stuff into the story/gameplay.
Just no Zavok, please

 

The recent 3D Sonic reveal trailers almost never show substantial gameplay. It took what, seven months for them to actually show Forces gameplay after the reveal? An entire year for Frontiers? Usually takes a few months before we get a proper look at it.

 

Lads, I'm just glad that after Frontiers and Superstars, we finally get to return to Sonic's one true home, Green Hill.

 

And that is only because canon Sonic Prime canonically stated Green Hill is his canonical home.

 

We've been there for the past 20 years

 

When is Sonic Team going to learn the homing attack is not a real mechanic and that homing attack chains are not interesting gameplay?

Pretty sure that bit with the gun soldiers was a Black Doom boss fight after watching Game Explain's trailer breakdown/slowdown video. And that is ridiculous.

But then again, Sonic has never had good bosses so...

I see little reason to have interest in this.

As far as story, I am 100% certain they're going to get stuff wrong about where Shadow's past and where he is (should be) as a character right now. Entirely because going by Shadow the Hedgehog's true ending, Shadow actually does not care about his past anymore.

As far as gameplay, the level design shown so far along with the team's recent efforts does not inspire confidence

 

10 more years! It's Green Hill Baby!

 

I don't think anyone is under the impression that showing virtually nothing in the trailer is a sign the game is bad; rather, it's that they haven't shown any gameplay to actually be excited about. We've had to pick through a bunch of stuff just to make sure it's not based directly off of Forces and that Shadow does indeed throw a chaos spear at some point. Which is different than, like, seeing Superstars's reveal and instantly being able to recognize that it has good level design and physics.

 

Why does the original story context matter at all when Gens eschews all original story context to begin with?

 

"Fucking Green Hill, again?" - an 11 year old whose first Sonic game was Frontiers

 

This feels exactly like what they did with Tails Knuckles and Amy in Frontiers. It's not really about treading any new ground, but reestablishing traits that haven't been relevant in a long time and the promise of there being more to come in the future.

So I'm not expecting much more than just retreading what SA2 and Sth did, and then establishing a direction for Shadow in the future, whatever it may be.

This is less "exploring" Shadow's character and more just telling the the newer audience just who he is, convoluted backstory and all.

 

This will be the Greeniest Hill, of the Green Hills.

 

RGB(0,255,0) Hill

 

To my understanding, Japan likes to use "X" in place of "Cross" or "Crossover," so to them, it's normal, and it makes sense. They probably could call it Sonic and Shadow Generations outside of Japan, but I guess they wanted to keep it consistent.

Was not expecting a remaster of Generations to happen, especially with new additional content. I'm kind of hyped in what they got planned for Shadow. I imagine Black Doom probably won't be voiced by Sean this time around, but I could be wrong. What I'm also curious about is how many levels they're gonna use. I'm not expecting it to be as big as the main game, but there's 3 games to pull from, 4 if they decide to use a '06 level. We see Final Chase, and I'm guessing the other is Westopolis with some Radical Highway mixed in? Maybe they could take more than one level from each game? I'm guessing they're picking levels and bosses based on importance of the story.

Hopefully we'll see more soon. I'm pretty interested.

EDIT: Don't know if this was posted or not, but did like the reference to SA2's intro.
https://twitter.com/tamagawa2525/status/1752960660248670370

 

Because it contributes to what makes the level such a highlight! The game's meant to be a celebration of Sonic's history, acting as a 'best-of' compilation of the previous games, and yet its choices of levels are just baffling: a third of the game's levels are their corresponding game's first level, which is hardly flattering to those games to say that they peaked at their beginning; meanwhile another third of the game's levels are city levels; and yet another third are Green Hill lookalikes. It's all so samey, despite the huge variety of locations that there was to pull from. Instead of a unique level that was central to its game's identity, we just get either something generic (Rooftop Run), the game's tutorial stage (City Escape), or both at the same time (Seaside Hill)!

 

I think we're just in a weird transitional period with Sonic right now, tbh. They been ignoring the past in any meaningful way for the past decade that now they have to play catch up and get people up to speed.

There were some call backs and overall throughlines of Adventure 1 to 06, but that felt natural (for the most part, I know Shadow's game went off the rails lol) since it's one after the other and isn't the major focus, just a nice detail. Games like Frontiers and possibly the new Shadow game treats as if they were still keeping past events in mind all this time when in actuality, they were very much ignoring it or putting it in the backseat since 2008. I find that made some of the self referential bits in Frontiers especially clunky because it felt every single character regained their memories and go "oh yea, the ARK!" "Remember Dark Gaia??".

 

Sonic's been in a weird transitional period for at least a good decade, if not two. Sonic doesn't have a singular good direction going for it atm because Sega tries to please everyone all of the time (and usually on limited resources), resulting in nothing being particularly in-depth or fully thought out. I'm not saying this as an absolute bad, but I do think it leaves a lot of things feeling flat.