Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

Didn't they just post a YouTube short making fun of '06's load times?

And yeah, you can't remake '06 to be a good game without changing pretty much everything about it.

This whole "they should remake bad game to be good" -mentality has gotten absurdly popular within the last few years, and I have absolutely zero idea where it came from.

 

At this point I'd rather just re-use the stages (and music) from '06 and pretends the lore never happened to re-introduce Mephiles again.

And well, Sonic X Shadow is at least doing half of that, and giving us Kingdom Valley. Now, all we need is Mephiles.

 

I'm one of the weirdos who actually likes the story of Sonic 06. I actually like nearly everything about it except the actually game. The stages design sucks and the gameplay mechanics aren't fun so it's hard to salvage anything from it. If you fixed the mechanics and physics then level design would still suck. Honestly props to Generations for actually making Crisis City fun to play.

 

Making fun of load times isn't much of anything, unless there are people who unironically think that long load times are a quality of '06, which I heavily doubt. It's an easy but harmless joke about something that absolutely would not be there if the developers had the choice, unlike things like the level design or story.

The appeal of wanting a bad game to be better is obvious, especially a game like '06, where most positive reception comes from the fact that it could have been great if things were different (which applies to every game, but '06 had particular ideas that were never truly iterated upon because it did so poorly).

But it's mostly just to justify their own preference and nostalgia for the game. People are less willing to go for something new, or even a new iteration, than they are for something old. But for a similar reason, that's why the remasters we have are of games already considered good, like the classics, Colors, and Generations.

But I think the fact that Sega is no longer afraid of '06 is its ultimate redemption. It doesn't need a remake, they just need to stop seeing it as the devil. And it wasn't. It's not a good game but it didn't need to have been the boogeyman it was, because such a reception did not always impact the Sonic franchise positively.

'06 doesn't need to be the perfect Sonic game people imagine in their heads, it just needs to be allowed to exist and be taken seriously.

Hopefully the fandom can act the same way about Forces, the new '06.

 

I think the Bart Simpson comparison also reveals how this is kind of a weirdly gendered issue? Like, I've never heard people complain about "anime boy voice", but I've heard people complain about "anime girl voice" plenty. I know I've done it myself at times; I'm not pointing fingers.

I think deep down, at its subconscious core, this is about people having issues with how girls/women are represented in anime.

The term "anime girl", at face-value, is so innocuous, yet it has a lot of baggage and gets very strong and wildly different reactions from different people.

...sorry if that's a Pandora's Box we don't want to open in this thread, but I can't help but think that it's relevant.

 

I feel like I'd be a lot nastier about the things I hate with P-06 if they took it in and turned it into the "official" version of the game... Much less meddled with the original story in that way.
As much as I'm impressed by the effort of the project as a whole, the direction it would have taken if it was to cover the whole game wouldn't have satisfied me. Pox's test cutscene animations looked too cartoonish, so applying that to the rest of the game's cutscenes would have been a huge no from me, the S ranks became a total joke sometime before or during the Shadow release era, and Silver became too overpowered upon his full release trying to "correct" him not playing exactly like the other characters. I just can't imagine how much else they could mess with it, but bet I'd hate it about as much as I hate the Sonic 1/2/3 remakes. I'd much prefer the game just getting backwards compatibility on Xbox and Playstation figuring out PS3 BC and doing the same.


Anyways, can't wait for the mephiles boss fight.

 

Forces is the new '06 in how it's the boogeyman for the Sonic fanbase. When fans see something they don't like, they no longer go "oh, it's like '06" (even when it's not like '06), they go "oh, it's like Forces" (even when it's not like Forces).

Well, Sega isn't making jokes about Forces and casual/non-fans just plain couldn't give a shit so it's not a wholly 1-to-1 comparison.

 

They're not remake 06 for the same reason they aren't remaking SA2 this year. It's just easier to make new content than retreading old stuff.

 

Yeah, I think it's a perfectly valid point to make, especially in regards to Sonic. A lot of, if not a slight majority of, Sonic fans are women, and yet the series itself has a lousy track record with female characters. Blaze and Trip are solid, but Amy for the longest time fawned over the hero in embarrassing ways, Rouge is a sex symbol, Cream is annoyingly sugary sweet and innocent compared to Tails, Honey and Wave are never used, the plethora of female characters in the comics are stuck to the comics, and Tikal, Elise, AND Maria are all the anime waifu trope of gentle, pure-of-heart, soft-spoken pacifists who clasp their hands together and pray for world peace. Maria's voice, in both English and Japanese, falls into that trope, which only serves to remind me of how shallow her character is.

It's not so much that the voice doesn't suit her character, or that the delivery or direction is wrong; it's the character herself that's the problem. Maria, specifically, is a Disposable Woman. She exists solely so she can die, and she dies solely to be a catalyst for Shadow's character. Unfortunately, there's almost nothing they can do to fix this, no matter how much they portray Maria spending time with Shadow before her death. She can't be Aerith.

And beyond that, on an objective level, the English voice is just inconsistent. When she first speaks, you can hear her being very high-pitched, and we're led to believe that's her natural speaking voice. But when the explosion happens, her voice deepens considerably. I think the actress has a problem maintaining that high-pitched voice when she has to raise it.

 

I actually like a lot Shadow's story in 2006. I mean, no wonder the fandom still talk about Shadow in '06, it was the last time not only him was relevant but also a awesome character.

 

This isn't inconsistent at all. People's registers change in response to stress, danger, panic, fear, etc. so this makes perfect sense. The actress very convincingly pulls off the idea that Maria is panicking and worried by changing that.

And Stephanie Sheh doesn't have an inability to keep the same voice in that situation either. As early as Naruto, she's done it pretty well.

 

You say that as if it's intentional, but I don't think it is. I don't think she's changing her voice like that on purpose, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. The Japanese version doesn't do that. Between the two scenes, if I closed my eyes, I wouldn't even be able to tell it was the same character.

 

No love for Sonic Rush Adventure's Marine.

 

If it's not intentional, it's fully the voice director's responsibility for not giving consistent direction, not the voice actress. The director picks the cast, sets what's needed for each scene, picks the takes they like more and oversees production and post-production. If they don't like it, and the actress didn't deliver what they wanted, it's still their responsibility even when it's not their fault.

 

"I did not care for Maria Robotnik"

 

It insists upon itself!

 

This wouldn't be a problem if they simply...introduced a new character for Shadow to bond with.

And the best part would be that she doesn't have to die, embarrassingly, like Aeris.

 

06 is a weird mixed bag. The story I've come to realize is actually kinda decent with everyone but Sonic (where it's a constant 'Save Elise' narrative where Sonic feels more like a punching bag/plot device than a character). The gameplay can actually be pretty decent as an 'Adventure 3', but inherits some of the more obnoxious things from the post-Adventure titles (health bars, sealed off enemy rooms, vehicle sections). I do think the three major gameplay styles feel a bit more 'unified' than what Adventure 2 was attempting (Sonic and Shadow feel more alike than going from Sonic to Tails in SA2), but I'm not sure if I'd say they're all equal.

At it's core I think there's something there, but at the same time I think 06 did so much damage to the brand name it's better to leave it in the past. An officially endorsed remake would just create regurgitate a lot of that negative buzz back up. I think Sega doesn't exactly want to revisit the Adventure formula either, so remaking something that's closest to an 'Adventure 3' might send the wrong message. I do love what P06 is doing though and I think that's fine as a fan project!

Basically what I'm saying is that I think it's best to have some callbacks to 06 like Generations did, but I wouldn't go full-on remake.

 

Because Shiro Maekawa actually knows how to write Shadow.