Sonic X Shadow Generations announced, releases Autumn 2024

Is this referencing Street Fighter:The Movie game on console which iirc was pretty much just Super Turbo with the sprites being the actors from the movie? If not, I have no idea what else you could be referencing as game movies usually don't get made back into video games.

 

Everything he’s done is great except for his Sonic games. I want him to make more original stuff rather than whatever 06 and Forces were.

Spoiler

and Billy Hatcher 2

 

Other than people not liking them, I struggle to see what commonalities 06 and Forces have where you could actually point to his influence. An unearned soft-sung ballad for the credits theme, I guess?

...I don't think his presence can really tell us much, is me point.

 

How much power do producers have in terms of game development?

 

we know samba de amigo party central (2023) bombed just like rhythm thief (2012) and billy hatcher (2003) before it, so sonic is his fallback

wait another 10 years and his retirement project will be billy hatcher 2

 

Nakamura has had a pretty good track record as a game designer, he was a field designer on Sonic Adventure and puzzle designer for Chu Chu Rocket. I feel bad that for the longest time most people only knew him as the guy who made '06. As far as I know I think he was assigned to '06 partway through development, basically made captain of a ship that was already sinking.

 

yeah also, once Sega had decided that Sonic Team needed to be split up midway through 06's development to go work on Secret Rings, 06 was doomed no matter who would be at the helm for it.

 

Wasn't the split early on to port the game to Wii before they decided the console wouldn't be able to handle it and make Secret Rings though? Don't know how much they were actually contributing to development. I mean, how late was it in development when Yuki Naka took some staff with him when he went to start Prope as well. There were 20 or so programmers on 06, and he had 10 sega staff join him or some such if I remember right. I wonder if there was overlap in that too. Seemed like they might have just been fleeing a sinking ship at that point though.

 

Not many people joined Naka. To be honest was the only really the notable name of Prope. Here is a quote which to me actually makes alot of sense considering we know of Naka now:

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/yuji-naka-on-new-beginnings-at-his-studio-prope

 

10 Sonic Team members joined him

 

so the wikipedia article with citations says this:

Naka left in march of that year, but with the state of the game as it released it probably needed at least a year or more of work for it to not be awful...though, I say this but given how features like the upgrades are just outright unfinished, the game is technically released in an alpha state as not all gameplay features are implemented. thus I'd more say that it was less that Naka and the split happened late and more that the game was released early.

 

So who do you bet will be writing Shadow Generations? (if this has already been discussed, I apologize)

 

#KnowingSmile

 

Darn.

 

Why do people hate Ian Flynn's writing so much? He's hardly the one responsible for the bevvy of references, he was told to do as much by Sonic Team for Frontiers. His stories get the characterization down well so I'm really puzzled (and a little annoyed) that everyone makes him out to be a problem...

 

People don't understand this, for whatever reason, even when they're directly told by the writer. A little while ago I posted a tweet from Warren Graff in which he explained that everything in the games he and Ken Pontac wrote was what Sonic Team told them to write (down to the exact words and character traits) and was immediately met with people who thought they knew more than the people who literally worked on the games themselves because the niche comic that no one read had different writing

 

To keep it brief, because I'm at school (I'm a very sneaky lady) I just find his writing kinda boring overall. I went over this in detail in the Unpopular Opinions thread, and I'd rather not repeat myself so soon. In regards to Shadow, I think he's just kind of a dummy in IDW, and Archie Shadow might as well be a different person, even if I like that person. (Similar feelings towards Sonic in Archie as well.)

The reason for my "Darn." was because I was personally hoping Toyoda would be writing. I quite like his stories for Sonic Channel.

 

I think the thing is Frontiers maybe wasn't the best game for Flynn to start on. If he had gotten to write something like Forces, with an involved plot and featuring a bunch of the series' staples, he probably would've saved big parts of that story (though not much can be done for how much of the story is simply not told in that game), and the nods to other parts of the series would feel more fitting in a game chock full of them.

As it stands, Frontiers is a game full of great character bits, but the references in the dialogue feel forced because the rest of the game fails to compensate with anything meaningful. I don't think that altar on Ares Island really does look like the one from Angel Island...but it should have! The dialogue is intentionally full of callbacks to signal what a change of pace Frontiers is from a writing standpoint, and I think people would have reacted better had the rest of the game taken that celebratory approach to the series' history (I am not calling for just reusing shit per se, I think I mean more like how Lost World reinvented a bunch of classic badniks?).

My guess is, assuming the next core Sonic game returns to some of the series' hallmarks in terms of setting and character usage, we'll probably see people cool it on the outrage about tone, callbacks and such, assuming SEGA isn't literally lying to us about a lot of the Frontiers hallmarks being specific to that game.

I haven't watched most of Dream Team's cutscenes (I would like for it to become a real video game first), but it sounds like the overall tone and writing are fine there, so I think it's fair to say a lot of the things people complain about in Frontiers are not specific to Ian.

Though that said, some people are just fuckin zonked-out with regards to Flynn and company. I think weird culture war bullshit is part of it, as well as the resurgance of people nostalgic for dad's belt reevaluating their opinions on the dark age games and their writing, and we're never gonna have everyone be happy. If Maekawa or whoever actually did come back to the series, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that they would make one or more very silly writing decisions and fans would be calling for someone else again.

 

Get back to work

 

Affirmative!

(Edit: Alright, school's over! Heehee)