Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

Though I would have loved to see a Black Comet stage, from a narrative point of view I understand why Radical Highway was chosen for the final level.

 

I don't.
I understand it from a marketing/nostalgia point of view. But narrative? Black Doom has nothing to do with Radical Highway.

 

Shadow has everything to do with Radical Highway.

It was where he promised vengeance on humanity. This was him at his lowest, which is where Black Doom wanted him to be.

 

I think Black Comet would've made more sense as a replacement for Chaos Island. It would've fit totally with the goop doom power mechanic given Black Comet had exactly the same kind of goop.

 

I still don't agree with that. Black Doom was constantly creating the Doom Zone throughout the course of the game, and his tactics didn't really seem to be about dragging Shadow back down to his lowest. Doom's strategy seemed to be get Shadow incensed and powered up only to eventually claim his power through their inherent link.

It was satisfying as far as "Generations" and nostalgia goes. But Radical Highway was narratively a strange choice to me. I think Doom would have been more inclined to choose the Black Comet for the final stand and from which to begin his conquest upon his expected victory. It was still a really, really good level in gems of layout though, especially act 2. Fully designed to be played both with and without the wings and tons of variability for run through. And the music is fantastic!

 

The Black Comet appears twice in Shadow05. Final Haunt, which starts with Sonic and Shadow leading the assault on the comet, and Black Comet which starts with Black Doom recalling Shadow so that he can help him fend off a human counter-invasion.

In both cases, Black Doom is on the defensive. This is not something he wants Shadow to recall.

What he wants Shadow to remember is the time when Shadow launched his first attack on GUN in order to avenge Maria. In SA2, Shadow promises vengeance on humans and starts his rampage. In Shadow Generations, Shadow instead declares that he'll overcome Doom with his new powers. Thus, Shadow finally makes amends for his previous actions.

So, to summarize:

Stages:

• Space Colony ARK - Shadow's birthplace and where Maria died 50 years ago
• Rail Canyon - Shadow arrives here after being spooked by Eggman's "You have no past" comment, determined to find and interrogate the doctor.
• Kingdom Valley - Where Eggman ambushes Shadow, causing the Scepter to break and Mephiles to assume Shadow's form.
• Sunset Heights - Shadow rushes here to warn Sonic about a fake Shadow tearing apart the city alongside Eggman's robots.
• Chaos Island - This is where Sonic loudly wishes that Shadow were here to help him.
• Radical Highway - Where Shadow promises Maria vengeance on the people of Earth.

Bosses:

• Biolizard - Shadow as a failed prototype of the search for immortality.
• Metal Overlord - Shadow as a fake Sonic, obsessed with surpassing the original.
• Mephiles - Shadow as the sealed away destroyer of the world.
• Devil Doom - Shadow as the Black Arm's servant and champion.

 

I mean, that doesn't really hold up with the levels the fact Shadow is seeing levels from the future (including a place we don't even know if he'll even visit) and that Doom's recreation of Radical Highway is a twisted, warped and distorted version of reality. The Black Comet is place where Black Doom should feel powerful and in control. Even if Shadow overcame adversity there, it's not like it was a good time for him. It's a fitting location location for the climax moreso than Radical Highway.

 

Well, he was calling for Shadow to bail him out, so I wouldn't say he was feeling powerful or in control.

If I were Black Doom, would I remind Shadow of:
a) The place where Shadow was really angry about humans
b) The place where Black Doom suffered the indignity of humans invading his evil lair

I don't think this is a difficult choice.



Tasukete kudasai Shadow-sama!!!

Yeah, I think Doom wants to forget this part.

 

Black Comet was more than just the time Shadow visited it. Black Doom and his species lived there for however long.

 

You can kinda twist a narrative reason for almost anything Shadow has been through. Black Comet should have been in the game because it's a unique theme, has direct relevance to the villain, and we'd already spent plenty of time in Radical Highway as-is. Shadow the Game is so muddy and low-res, I would have killed to see that design reimagined in HD.

 

They seemingly picked some of the levels to double-dip existing level assets and scriptable objects too.

• Ark has similarities to Chemical Plant Generations.
• Rail Canyon 2D copies the background GUN truck mechanic from City Escape 2D.
• Metal Overlord and Sunset Heights take from Forces.
• Chaos Island could’ve been Black Comet mechanically, with all the goop traversal via the doom power, but they had the Frontiers assets. (Also, honestly I think Chaos Island has more visual appeal and variety than Black Comet.)
• Radical Highway makes sense to include thematically, but it also borrows from Speed Highway, Crisis City, and some assets directly from Perfect Chaos Generations.

The Black Comet would’ve taken the most time to create new assets for considering there isn’t really anything else available to reuse for it in terms of visuals, and it has unremarkable level-specific mechanics other that floating over the goop, enemy kill rooms, and force fields. I wouldn’t be surprised it they considered it at one point though.

I’m just hoping we’ll get a new game with (finally) mostly if not entirely new material.

 

Alright. Let's talk about the Black Bull elephant in the room: The utter lack of any Shadow05 stages in Generations.

Why is that? Some would say it's because Sonic Team is ashamed of Shadow05's notorious reputation. But I don't think it's that. Sonic06 has an even worse reputation, yet stages from it do get representation in Generations.

Personally, I think the main reason is because it's impossible to faithfully replicate the stages from Shadow05 in Generations without raising the ESRB rating from E10+ to T.

Yes, I know. Shadow05 was also E10+. At 2005 levels of graphical fidelity. A 2025 game where Shadow gets to shoot humans or spindash them to the dirt would not fly with the same rating. A Shadow Generations demake to 2005 levels of detail would absolutely receive an E rating. The ESRB treats "fantasy violence" more severely the more detailed it is. Which means you can get away with more brutality if it looks low-poly enough.

Now, could we remove the gunplay from Shadow05 stages when porting them to Generations? I don't think so. The gunplay isn't used just to shoot enemies. It also plays a role in destroying obstacles and activating switches, for example. And suppose we changed the stages to make gunplay obsolete, there would still be the problem of human enemies that Shadow can kill immobilize by hitting them real fast. OK, so let's remove them too. But at this point can we say we're still faithfully reproducing a stage from Shadow05 in Generations? Isn't the point of the game to play old stages with a modern paint? Because right now we've done more than just repaint it.

My theory is that Sonic Team was aware that any attempt at modernizing Shadow'05s stages would bring forth the fury from purists who would decry how unfaithful to the original they ended up being. Yes, the audience would definitely point out the lack of guns and human enemies, and this is a topic Sonic Team does not want to revisit. People would also point out if the guns were kept and the rating ended up being raised.

Thus, the best solution was to skip the Shadow05 stages all together.

 

What the hell are you talking about? They put Chaos Island in a game about Shadow, they don't care about doing what makes sense to hardcore fans. Final Haunt, Black Comet and Last Way don't even have many shooting-based mechanics (arguably Final Haunt's vacuum gun thing is a negative number of shooting mechanics), but even if they did, Shadow already has a damn ranged move in the game. He already kicks the crap out of aliens in the game. He already attacks human GUN soldiers in the game. This is a completely bizarre line of thought and the asset reuse argument makes way more sense, even if I don't know that I wholly agree with it (I'd say it's more that they just didn't like Shadow's stages enough or think they'd be worth the effort compared to the path of least resistance).

 

i assumed the lack of an 05 level was just for asset reuse reasons - the same reason they have chaos island, a level from a game shadow's not even in. they had readily available hd assets for kingdom valley, chaos island, and sunset heights, so that was three in the bag. if they had already locked in a target of six levels, one slot had to be taken by an ark level given its relative importance, and radical highway had both asset reuse (they seem pretty clearly repurposed from the frontiers city theme - not that that's a bad thing, i think they did it well) and meta significance going for it.

the only real oddball inclusion is rail canyon, but if they were gonna make new hd assets for an sixth generation stage, i'd imagine they'd want to pick the one that was mostly rails over a bottomless pit!

 

I don't think that's the case.

A big part of Heroes is the team mechanic—arguably even more than the gun mechanic in Shadow—and they completely removed it to accommodate solo Sonic. You could ask the same question: Did they faithfully reproduce the Heroes experience by getting rid of team gameplay?

When Generations was released, people questioned why CD (despite the Metal Sonic boss fight), Shadow, and the storybook games didn’t get stages. Keeping it to three levels per era was a cleaner choice and prevented the project from becoming too large.

For Shadow Generations, I think the goal was to celebrate both the character and the franchise as a whole again.

This approach allowed them to include levels from newer games without having to force them into the base game, while also justifying Shadow's presence in these locations.

The Ark could be considered a SA2/Shadow 05 stage, but I think exclusion of another 05 stage was due to the same issue as in the original Generations—limited time and resources and sticking to the Sonic focused games.

That said, incorporating Black Doom and the Black Arms was a major nod to Shadow 05 of course, and his Doom Powers serve as a natural extension of his abilities from that game.

So it's not like we didn't get anything from that game.

 

Calm down.

Did you even read my previous comment? I don't think it's a coincidence that they added the one stage which Sonic hoped Shadow would have seen.

Where? To borrow your language: What the hell are you talking about? There are absolutely no enemy GUN soldiers in Generations.

Only the Tokyo stage has one (1) soldier, and even there Shadow goes out of his way to save him.

Some people believe it's a reference to a similar scene from Dark Beginnings, but I have my doubts. Shadow05 was the only game that featured human enemies to kill beat up. What's more likely there's a SEGA mandate that disallows having human enemies, which makes it problematic to faithfully bring back Final Haunt due to how the entire point of the stage is an alien vessel swarming with human invaders.

 

We are not a class of schoolchildren, and you are certainly no teacher. I am allowed to use the word "hell" when I think you've said something silly. If you want to make more disrespectful remarks like this, I would much prefer a simple and honest "go fuck yourself", it's a lot less condescending.

I did read your previous comment, I ignored what you think because you should be thinking something else. It is utterly insane to suggest that the entire reason they put a stage in the game is to reference a throwaway line from Frontiers that the overwhelming majority of players never heard, which adds nothing and means nothing. He doesn't even say he wanted Shadow to see it, just that he'd accept Shadow's help because he's losing energy by that point in the game. Your entire rationale here is completely ridiculous.

And? He still attacks him and blows up a helicopter. There's nothing there that they couldn't do in a theoretical Black Comet level if it mattered to them so much, rendering your entire argument pointless. Or, well, it would, but your argument is already pointless, because as we've established, that absolutely does not matter to them in the fucking slightest. The idea that SEGA gives two-tenths of a shit about "faithful recreations" in a game where, again, they put Shadow in a level that he has absolutely no context for, past or future, is placidly absurd. You're inventing crank logic to justify decisions that any sensible person would absolutely guarantee ranged only from "we thought it would be cool" to "we had the assets".

 

Not to be awkward but I am a teacher. Checkmate.

 

Right then. So I wonder aloud about the reasons why we didn't get certain stages in Generations, and you respond by shouting at me for no reason whatsoever, and then call me "disrespectful" and "condescending" for asking you to stop being this absurdly furious for, I repeat, no reason whatsoever.

But calling someone "insane" and "ridiculous" is totally not disrespectful. It's only disrespectful when I tell you to tone down your inflammatory language.

Yeah, we're done. This is no way how to discuss frigging video games. Calm the fuck down and then we can continue if you wish. I'm not gonna respond to someone who treats me like some fucking punching bag for daring to have an opinion on Sonic games.

 

No, I said "what the hell" exactly once (an extremely normal and mostly neutral thing) because your posts are filled with moon logic (which is not "shouting at you", this is all the same size lowercase text), and you decide to treat me like a child for it. I'm not obligated to respect that.

I didn't call you either of those things. I've never met you, for all I know you're perfectly reasonable in-person, but your lines of reasoning here are drinking wacky juice out of clown shoes, and that's not something I get to control.

Good news! Nobody did this. You made the claim that things like "Sonic says Shadow's name on Chaos Island" and "Shadow the hedgehog has human enemies" were what determined the level choices in Shadow Generations, and I scrutinized this. I am someone who casually uses swear words, and I'm not going to change that when you decide it necessarily has to be intended as a personal attack. I am not making any claims about you as a person just because you had a very silly and poorly-founded idea about game design (which I'm not really convinced is "daring to have an opinion" since you're attempting to dissect the developers' logic, and they're all almost-certainly more logical than your ideas would suggest). But you did, indeed, have a very silly and poorly-founded idea about game design.

Sorry I said fuck too many times when pointing that out, I guess. I don't always know when my casual swearing may come across as offensive. I nearly got fired from Toys R Us back in the day because of that.