Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

the fact that you can reasonably backtrack instead of constantly feeling like you're moving forward on rails has me very interested in starting this

 

While the level design is linear, Shadow Gens generally doesn't hold you down to a path like Forces. If you can find a way to skip a section, the game will let you do it. It's very reminiscent of SA1 and 2 and it's real nice.

 

I'm honestly not sure what "goes so fucking hard" about this part of Kingdom Valley. It's one of the least interesting portions of any level in the entire game, and can't even hold a candle to the 06 original. It doesn't have the same speed, the music, the challenge or the intense thrill that the original managed.

 

Hell yeah brother

 

So the wall run I randomly got to happen on the cylinder in the big room of Ark can happen with other objects and might even be able to be done reliably? Now we’re talking.

 

Honestly...it's pretty weird how simple and straightforward that section is compared to the Crisis City equivalent in Generations.

But then again, the same can be said for the original too...this specific mach speed section is the most basic one out of all of them, there's not much going on here outside of dodging pillars and jumping over pits. That said, they should've integrated the water running bit...even as a simple quick time event that would've made this part more interesting.

 

Just like the Crisis City Generations ending section.

It still looks fun to me though.

 

I was mostly talking about aesthestic and atmosphere itself than the level design, even tho' I think it's good anyway.

 

The aesthetic is really cool, no argument.

But I'd still say that that 06 takes way better advantage of it. The Kingdom Valley mach speed section is a great climax to the level in 06. Being on rails works thematically; sending Sonic to run up on the waterfalls, perform insane but seemless jumps between the ruins and run at incredible speeds is so intense. I'm gonna ignore the fact that the mach speed sections play like ass (as does the rest of 06) and just focus on what they did with the aesthetics. They took full advantage of the gameplay to match the aesthetic, enhancing the end result.

Shadow Generations version is... just the same as the rest of the level. A wide flat path with the same obstacles and the same tame speed. And it only lasts for about 30 seconds, maybe less. It's not even got a even a dramatic cutscene like in Sunset Heights with the Death Egg Robos or any of the Radical Highway transitions. If ShGens goes hard here, then 06 is titanium.

 

Well, the only difference is, I'm having fun with Shadow's Kingdom Valley, which wasn't a thing I had with original '06.

Yeah, this section is really short, but I dunno, it's impactful enough to be memorable.

 

Babe, wake up. New pillar skip just dropped.

 

Was any of that in the actual story, or was that side content ? Regardless, I didn't enjoy any of it, especially not with the hilariously generic dialogue. I literally laughed out loud when Gerald called Shadow "son", because Ian Flynn couldn't just show they had a strong bond, he just had to add that piece of generic dialogue.

Why wasn't Shadow tempted at all by Black Dooms offer? I'd say a consistent trait of a Shadow story is him having to choose between doing the right thing for everyone, or going for his own desires. Realizing Maria wanted him to save humanity and choosing to despite what GUN did to him. Choosing to protect humanity rather than help lead Black Doom's army. Knowing there's a possible timeline where humanity betrays Shadow, and locks him away, and still choosing to stop Mephiles.

Not once does Shadow even have a forbidden fruit moment. Black Doom could have offered to save Gerald and Mariam, and keep them in White Space, as long as Shadow helps him take over the earth. And in the final moments, he chooses to protect humanity's future while sending Gerald and Maria to their ultimate tragic fates.

There's no stakes, and nothing that happens that makes me care about the story or the characters. The only feeling I got was laughter at such classic lines like "The time has come Shadow for you to fulfill your destiny" that I have heard in 1000 things before, or Maria's long winded speech about how Shadow got his name.

Between Frontiers, Dream Team, and Shadow generations Ian Flynn is 0/3 for stories for me. Good thing I play games mostly for the gameplay these days, because if I still cared about story in sonic, I'd have said much more much sooner.

Brevity is a strength in story telling. So is telling a lot with a little. I got everything I needed to on Maria as it pertains to Shadow's motivations in SA2. We see their conversations about the Earth, about Shadow trying to figure out his purpose, then Maria in her dying moments asks Shadow to be a hero and protect the happiness of those on Earth.

If a character has to have dozens of scenes to make you care about them, that's not an issue I've ever had to deal with.

 

Yes, yes.

Shadow doesn't really have much of a dynamic with Maria and Gerald, that's just the way things are. This is not the kind of game to "re-tell" this type of story. Unless they added more cutscenes...but no.

 

Gerald called Shadow "son" in Shadow '05. Ian Flynn didn't add it because he "couldn't show they had a strong bond", it's a capstone to what has already been established.

What "non-generic" word would Gerald use? He created the dude. Shadow is his son. Why should Flynn deliberate on word choice for what is, and has always been at its core, a pretty straightforward dynamic and story? Getting loquacious wouldn't make the story better or more engaging.

You predicting the story isn't a flaw of the story. It's predictable because it set the steps to get to these moments. It shouldn't violate what it established just to be "different."

Shadow chooses the wishes of the sweet, innocent little girl and the kindly scientist who only wanted to help the world over the desires of the devil. The attention put onto this plotline and its sheer contrast with how Sonic stories normally are are what makes it interesting, not the idea that it's original. Because it's not.

And that's not Ian Flynn's fault. If anything, he gave the story the most nuance it ever had in viewable text (though to be fair, a lot of the details were established before him, he just wove it into an actual, coherent [emphasis on coherent] narrative).

Through Ian Flynn, I can actually picture the ARK tragedy as a family torn apart, instead of just something that made Shadow sad and angry.

Sure, it sucks that a lot of the details are in optional content, but it's still part of the game. If you are interested enough in the characters to be disappointed that they seemingly don't get development, why you dismiss the extra content? That's like only playing the main quest in an RPG and complaining that your party members lack depth.

Later, you call Maria's speech to Shadow about his own name "long-winded." I disagree, but we would both probably agree that adding EVERY SINGLE DETAIL about their relationships and dynamics into the main cutscenes would be even more long-winded, right? And you'd see why not everything is in the main story.

What offer? He offers him nothing. Black Doom feels entitled to having Shadow's body and will. That's Black Doom's most interesting characteristic; the fact that he feels entitled to Shadow simply because of his blood, in contrast with Shadow's bond with Maria, which is born from their actual experience with each other.

Any actual serious attempt to portray Black Doom's "offer" as something Shadow would consider would not only be predictable, but make Shadow look dumb. Shadow, the lone wolf who never asks help, would look to the devil to save his family? Uh, no. He'd beat the shit out of the devil. Which he did. Twice. He doesn't even have the leverage of an amnesiac Shadow desperate for answers.

Making a faustian deal with the devil is already established with Shadow's very creation, and the main thing there is that Gerald was about to lose something and because of the deal lost more than he imagined.

Unless Shadow loses something more than his already dead family, which would make him look even dumber for trusting the devil, it wouldn't work.

I fail to see how Black Doom going "uhhhh I can save Gerald and Maria so you should let me take your body, bing-bong" and Shadow being the biggest dipshit in falling for it for even a second is more interesting than Shadow's name having meaning.

What's funny is that I don't disagree with the idea that Shadow should have made an actual choice. I would have preferred if Shadow knew from the start that killing Black Doom would send Gerald and Maria to their fates. It would not require that Black Doom make an "offer", it simply means that Shadow would have to choose between having Gerald and Maria, but violating their wishes, and fulfilling their wish, but losing the actual people.

So you think the characters and story are underdeveloped, but you don't want more things added to them?

It should be even shorter, removing key scenes like Maria christening Shadow, but it should also have more development, silly things like a post-Shadow '05 Shadow buying into Black Doom's bullshit?

Since you also criticized how a lot of details are in side content, are you saying they should just straight up not exist?

I don't get it. "Brevity is the soul of wit" doesn't literally mean "don't add details". "Show, don't tell" doesn't literally mean "never tell."

You could call it "brevity" that Shadow suddenly realizes that the little girl DIDN'T want the world blown up in Adventure 2, but it is, in my opinion, a contrived way to get him to suddenly stop being bad, and would have benefitted from more scenes explaining why he would come to his initial conclusion.

 

If your argument is that because Shadow the Hedgehog, a game most people agree has poor writing, did something so Ian Flynn should do it too then you've already lost me. But I'll explain further why I didn't like it.

I know Black Doom didn't give Shadow an offer. I think it'd have been more interesting if he did. Especially because, as I noted and was ignored, every Shadow story before this deals with him having to make the choice between personal desires or being a hero. There's nothing happening in this story to make me care especially when I already know how it's going to end. Black Doom is defeated and Maria and Gerald leave. There's no nuance or anything deeper than that boring generic story.

They didn't put a lot of focus on detail into any part of the story here. Most of the Shadow and Maria scenes in the game focus on what you need to know to get to the next objective, not their relationship and friendship together. Except that hilarious speech she gives on Shadow's name at the end full of some of the most cliche and generic dialogue I have seen from a professional work of fiction...frankly ever.

Why didn't we see more of how Shadow and Maria interacted? Little injokes, favorite things they did together on the arc, maybe she could even ask him is the Earth as wonderful as they always dreamed? I don't feel a deeper connection to either of them by the end or that we learned much more than we knew before. She gave Shadow his name? Okay? That doesn't really deepen anything for me, if anything it makes the world smaller.

Ian Flynn's video game writing so far has not been good for me. It does not have nuance. Ian Flynn is the worst person to write someone like Gerald Robotnik who's too modes shouldn't be "evil old man" and "nice old grandpa" he made Gerald the most generic kindly old man ever in Shadow Generation. Eggman and Sage was a good idea in concept but I don't feel any of the execution earned the "Dear Daughter" moment for me at the end of the game.

And most of the other characters are the most 2 dimensional they've ever been. And they don't even have memorable lines to say because he goes for the safest most generic dialogue possible.

You can like Ian Flynn's writing, as long as the gameplay is good I don't care as much as I used to. Which is why I didn't bring it up when talking about the game before.

Edit : Snooze added the paragraph about Brevity later and I'm not going to respond to it because I already made this post and it doesn't change my mind that SA2 did enough to make me care about them.

 

If your argument is that Gerald calling Shadow "son" is bad because Shadow the Hedgehog has bad writing, then surely you must hate that Kingdom Valley and Sunset Heights--levels from bad games--are in this good game (and therefore Shadow Generations is bad).

Even so, Shadow Generations fixes a lot of the issues raised by Shadow '05 (namely how it whitewashes the fact that Gerald conspired to blow up the world, like, two days later) by actually depicting Gerald as how he was before he lost his mind, as well as having him confront the consequence of his faustian deal.

He was a kind man who made a big mistake that doomed his son to a battle he didn't ask for. He is not only apologizing for what he created Shadow for but, implicitly, what he will do in his future. Ironically, it makes it more believable that such a man would go from "I hate that the government is making me build a space laser" to "fuck humanity, I'm blowing this shit up".

I don't think it's interesting for Shadow to act really dumb. There is nothing nuanced about listening to the devil just because he happens to lie about exactly what he happened to want. At least Gerald really did get the Ultimate Lifeform out of his deal. You know that Black Doom will never save Maria or Gerald, even if he did mean it.

Shadow's objective is to stop Black Doom. Shadow giving into his corruption and Maria being scared shitless has nothing to do with his objective. Whether he gave in or not would just mean Black Doom dies more violently, probably. That is important literally only because of how it affects Maria. It's the best way, within the context of Shadow Generations, for us to see how Maria would act to the vengeance-filled Shadow from SA2, since Shadow after that is closer to how Maria remembers him.

One critique I would say is that "stopping Black Doom" and "saving Gerald and Maria" are two unrelated goals until they're suddenly not, but that doesn't mesh well with the critique that "their interactions are only for the plot".

Those things are literally in the game. Maria mentions that they had a teacher and Shadow was late on his homework, etc. Similarly, she also remarks on how different Shadow is acting, despite believing he's from her time.

What the fuck does that even mean

Genuinely

That's literally gibberish. If we didn't have that explanation, then the only reason that Shadow is named "Shadow" is because he's fucking black. How does that "make the world bigger"

I've heard that dumb nonsense about Chemical Plant being named "Chemical Plant" and no one can actually explain how places having names is bad worldbuilding.

"One does not walk into Mordor--uhhhh I mean, dark evil lava world."

Also, you forget that Shadow is pretending to not be from the future, so Maria would not ask him what the Earth is like.

If you think that the story has no nuance (I disagree) and it's bad (I disagree), that's fine, but I'm baffled in the insinuation that it's an Ian Flynn problem, as if Sonic was previously known for its nuance, depth, and subtlety, even though many of the things you critique about Ian Flynn are sourced from previous games and content that did less with it.

What generic kindly old grandpa ruminate on making a deal with the devil and lamenting giving his son a battle he couldn't fight? Again, I don't know how it's Ian Flynn's fault for traits Ian Flynn did not invent but in fact added nuance by creating a Prof. Gerald who could realistically go from "evil old man" to "nice old grandpa". He wrote a literal book about Gerald's slow descent into madness, where you can physically see the signs of a man who would drop a colony on the planet because his precious granddaughter died.

Who cares about how unique the words are. That's literally the least important thing. Prose in a video game like Sonic is borderline irrelevant, if that's what you're talking about.

It's not even true. Ian Flynn absolutely excels in character voice and these character all talk different from each other. So I wonder what you mean by "generic". You critiqued Gerald calling Shadow "son", is it the fact that he said "son" and not "my genetic spawn"?

 

I'm not going to continue talking about an aspect of the game I already said I didn't like and didn't want to talk about. I gave my reasons why and you can't just "nuh uh" them when they're based on how I felt from my experience playing it. I didn't want to talk about Shadow Generations story anyways I just felt inclined to give why I didn't like it when two separate people quoted me about it.

Feel free to feel you've won or whatever I don't care enough about this to go back and forth with you with paragraph long responses to single sentences. And if the writing comes up again I will continue to say I don't like it or Ian Flynns work on the franchise.

 

I can "nuh uh" them, they're pretty easy to "nuh uh" because "it's bad worldbuilding that Shadow has a reason for his name" and "Gerald shouldn't call Shadow his son because 'son' is a generic word" are legit gibberish, I'm sorry.

If those sound like bad faith interpretations, that's literally all you've given me.

But they're all minor nibbles compared to insinuating that "Sonic writing not having nuance" is specifically an Ian Flynn issue when it objectively is not. In fact, you critique him for trying to give nuance (like, again, giving Shadow's name an actual in-universe explanation).

By "nuance", do you mean "ambiguity"? It's not ambiguous, no. You can no longer come up with your own reasons why Shadow is named "Shadow", and I guess that's Ian Flynn's fault.

Genuinely, I think if you think Shadow Generations has no nuance and is bad for it, you must hate the other games' stories. But then it wouldn't be about Ian Flynn...? When you do something like that, it sounds less like it's about "the story Ian Flynn happened to write" and more about "Ian Flynn writing it specifically".

And I've seen too many people literally just hate a story or a scene specifically because Ian Flynn wrote it, up to and including blaming him for shit he literally didn't do, to not raise an eyebrow.

 

I don't like the games story or Ian Flynn's writing for the Sonic games. I do not wish to talk about Ian Flynn's writing that I do not like.

You can see my earlier posts for why. I won't be responding any further to you.