Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

With the new, lighter feeling Classic Sonic, a lot of the original 2D Gens levels are more fun to play through. City Escape remains one of my favorite 2D sonic levels, regardless of game.

 

Yeah. That was the first thing I did when I woke up and got back to it. There's an extra scene at the end of Prologue in addition to the one that was in the full upload to YouTube. Animatic seemed interesting but I didn't watch too far into it before I got back to playing.
It also looks pretty damn good quality wise, at least from what I can tell, there's no noticeable compression artifacts or anything.

 

Also kinda disappointed that -spoilers for mid-game-
+ - there was no sonic boss fight, seems like the easiest thing to implement But on the other hand, that was a nice use of the fake emerald after all those years, give him some kind of a win cause he decided to not use doom powers against sonic, the kinda retcons i vibe with  

 

They just sent me Sonic Jam skin code , check your emails.

on that note, how do i access skins/extras in this game? Don’t see an option in main menu, only for Dark Beginnings

 

Additional Content on the menu to select between Shadow or Sonic generations, by pressing Square.

For some reason my Playstation code isn't working and IDK how to fix that.

 

Lol, couldn't disagree more. Classic Sonic feels worse than I ever remember. He's heavy, floaty, slow to turn around and frequently responsive as he has moment when he can't be controlled immediately after landing from mid air. But until proven otherwise by some visual comparisons or datamining, I'm pretty convinced he's exactly the same as he was in 2011. Any differences we think we're are probably just our minds playing tricks on us, especially if you only played OG Gens at 30fps.

 

Or people are comparing this to their immediate recollection of how he controls in Forces.

 

Shadow Gens was better than anything from 3D Sonic in over a decade.

First of all, I was fully ready to hate controlling this game, due to it being built over Frontiers. But I ended up thinking it felt great to play.. though admittedly, I made some tweaks. I set the deceleration speed to 70% instead of the full 100%, put Homing Attack on A, and Chaos Spear on X. I commend them for cutting down how much customization was in Frontiers, and just streamlining it to the things that mattered. With those settings, Shadow controlled like a dream. Best a character has moved since the Adventures. Now all it needs is a roll / Spin Dash.

Level design was generally really good. A lot of alternate routes, some good platforming, and a TON of eye candy cinematics, though maybe with the caveat of some heavy railroading going on. Not quite automation, but a lot of grind rails and auto-moving Doom Powers. That said, the game was super creative with uses on Chaos Control, Chaos Spear and the enemy-launch move. I wouldn't say this game meets the best of Unleashed or Generations in level design, but it's full of replay value, extremely fluid and super creative (hot damn some of the moments in the Black Doom sections are insane).

Everything about the levels beat the everloving shit out of the past three Sonic games (LW, Forces, Frontiers), and I'd say as far as flow and replay value it curbstomps Colors too. Kishimoto's days as head director are numbered. Katsuyuki Shigihara deserves the throne.

The Open Zone White Space area is super impressive too, I spent a lot of time bumbling and playing around in it. THIS is how this should be handled. Sure, it's a bit closer to the Adventure Fields of SA1/06/Unleashed, but maybe that's a good thing. It's concise, it's deliberate in design, it's got a distinct art direction, it's fun to traverse, it's got a lot of collectibles with clear rewards, and the characters within it are very fun to talk to and gather their thoughts. And while I didn't like how many of the missions you had to do, I found relief in finding all the missions to be fun; unlike vanilla Gens where very many of them absolutely aren't.

Story and writing are the best effort a mainline Sonic's put out in 15, maybe 20 years. I'm proud of them. Ian did good work. The presentation and animation is the first to clear Unleashed, and far excels past it; the seamlessness of jumping between crazy cutscene and gameplay is by far the most impressive aspect of this game. The visuals are quite good, though the lighting, color and world detail don't pop quite like vanilla Gens do. The music is the game's most mixed bag, with Chaos Island's music being really forgettable and a lot of Act 2's feeling kinda like bg noise, but it's serviceable.

In short: is it as good as Generations? Maybe not, but that's not the point. My point is that I hope they take a LOT from this game's structure for the future. THIS is what the next Sonic should play like and expand upon. To fork the path a different direction and do a straight-forward Frontiers 2 after this would be a terrible, horrible mistake. I hope this bundle does really well and puts them on the right track. Please!

 

I've played Generations at 60 fps since day 1 because I've always played it on PC, and I was playing the original version *yesterday*. It's not in my head.

Or perhaps we know what we're talking about?

 

Not to derail, but does anyone else's game (on PC) have a SUPER loud boost sound in normal Generations? I had to turn SFX down to 25% for it to even sound close to the vanilla game's; I wonder how this could've happened so drastically.

EDIT: Also, Classic Sonic's player object appears to be different in normal levels vs the HUB + missions, so you can't drop dash outside of the main acts. Threw me off quite a bit when doing a classic mission for the first time lol

 

Really hoping this sells. I’m worried many will overlook the Shadow portion as underwhelming or as like a cute “bonus,” but it’s nearly the same length as the original game.

Hoping the good will from reviews and legs from the movie bring this to at least close to Frontiers’ numbers. I feel like this game could land perfectly for kids as an introduction to Sonic

 

Now focusing on doing stuff in the White World, thought it wouldn’t be much
But they pretty much made a sixth Frontiers island and put it here as a bonus , it’s kinda nuts actually , so much stuff and platforming happening with tons of hidden stuff, it’s great

 

Are you sure it's not just because the drop dash is a skill that can be unequipped like the insta shield? I haven't done any challenge acts yet so I don't remember if skills work in those acts, but I know they don't know the hub.​

 

Oh, so it is! I have no idea why it's a skill for Classic but a regular move for Modern though.

 

Strangely enough though, even after equipping the Super Sonic skill (which takes all 100 skill points, meaning you have to unequip the drop dash skill), you can still do the drop dash in the levels. I'm not sure if it's a glitch or not, but you still can't drop dash in white space with classic.

 

Just beat Shadow's story. I've got a few quibbles - the Frontiers-based handling can still be a bit sluggish at times, the last power is a little awkward, and the ramp-up in challenges required for progression is weird and unnecessary. But damn was it nice to experience. The levels were solid and decently long, giving me Sonic Forces Overclocked vibes in the best possible way. The storytelling, again, stayed sincere despite following up on Shadow "the alien with guns on a motorcycle" the Hedgehog. And presentation and animation felt improved across the board, not just in cutscenes and obvious cinematic bits but even in little ways like how Shadow falls and lands after certain sequences. I didn't even know I wanted that.

Admittedly, it didn't have the highest bar to clear, and we'll see how fun the levels are to replay long-term. But dang if I didn't have fun. I wonder what comes next.

 

Hot damn that was an absolute blast, could not agree more with Azookara on this one I hope we get more like this and that frontiers 2 takes heavy influence from it

You can absolutely tell that they are putting those higher budgets to work already, the animations in this game are better than i think anything weve seen in a 3d sonic game

 

I have plenty of criticisms, but I agree with the hope that Sonic Frontiers 2 is closer to this. Please make smaller open zones like this. Please make Sonic control consistently well in both open zone and straightforward levels. And please for the love of God stop recycling old level themes and layouts.

 

It will sell. It's the perfect christmas gift for a ton of kids who will see the movie soon. SEGA knows exactly what they're doing... for once.

Also, I was at the AX2024 panel for industry reasons, which was packed to capacity. This is the first time I've ever seen a Sonic fan panel at a major con with this kind of reaction/audience, and it's clear the 2000s adventure kids are all grown up and looking to occupy that 20 year Nostalgia spot we occupied back when OG Generations-Mania came out. A whole lot of them want to play this, and technically I'm one among them (I was in my mid teens when SA2 dropped in June 2001).

The game will do well, even if it doesn't outpace something like Frontiers.

 

The game was top 10 on steam for a while, now it’s still in 11th place but it’s very close and good indicator of good sales for deluxe edition