Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

Be that as all this may be...this actually doesn't change anything. CDPR and Marvelous are willing to bite the costs for consumers, SEGA could too especially with how well their games do on Nintendo consoles.

Maybe there has been confusion from these third parties on why people bought the physical switch version of games, not because it's most people's only console, but because it was nice to have it on the go and the full game on the cart (90% of the time).

It didn't help that the switch 1 didn't have a lot of space on the system so being able to play the game on the cart was a god send if you didn't have a huge SD card. And the switch 2 has more space but considering how big the games are, it will fill up FAST.

These might be a little more enthusiast aimed but in an era of Steam Deck, AYN Odin 2, and ROG Ally's (I have the Ally), we have so many options to play these games on the go already, so I see little reason to double dip when companies won't meet me half way. Especially when Steam sales are so great.

The Switch famously still sales more physical games than digital, despite the way things have trended in the last decade, and if you see a clear direction in the way an audience for a system engages with your product and you try and abruptly shift it...well we know that never goes well.

Good luck to SEGA all the same.

 

The jump to game key cards being so enthusiastic from publishers compared to Switch 1 is a combination between the higher-end, significantly faster NAND required for a Switch 2 game alongside the absolute state of the economy and supply chain. Nintendo may not have known about the second part, but they knew the cost of the chips would be greater despite Switch 1 carts already being more expensive to produce than BD. Nintendo's giving them an out, as they honestly should, and publishers are taking it.

To be clear, I'm never buying a Game Key Card - at that point I'd rather just go digital as I've slowly been doing anyhow with Switch 1. But at least it can be traded in or lent to friends. Like digital games now can with the virtual card system, I guess.

 

I'm with you on that. I try to buy physically wherever possible unless there's no other option - folks who've read my posts over in the Freedom Planet 2 thread will know this, as I patiently waited years from the initial PC release for some kind of physical copy to materialise. I do buy the occasional digital game when there's no other option - I recently picked up LIMBO for a grand total of nothing, as I remembered enjoying it back on Xbox 360, and the handful of Gold Points I had negated the already-cheap 89p sale price. However, I'd never buy a release purporting to be a physical copy that's really just a way of accessing a digital version, be it Code in Box, Game Key Card or otherwise. At that point, I'd just go for the regular download version instead, as I refuse to support the absolute wastefulness of producing a physical box/card/disc for a download version of a game.

 

It's not supposed to change anything. I'm just explaining the situation so that we can be pissed off for the right reasons. Switch game cards are an expensive medium, Nintendo are greedy and most third parties are complicit.

 

How does the game-key card change that? It's still proprietary tech that probably costs more than a blu-ray disc.

 

Sorry, maybe my previous post wasn't clear enough.

Switch game cards are available with 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB capacity. I don't remember if 64GB cards were eventually introduced for the Switch 1 in the end, but CP2077 clocks in at 56.8GB on Switch 2 so that means that it's definitely using a 64GB card. Higher capacity cards are more expensive than the smaller ones, and game key cards will simply be the smallest capacity cards available. Game key cards have no actual game data on the card itself, just an access code to download a game and to verify that the card is in the console when the game is being played.

Nintendo have given publishers a cheaper option than was previously available.

 

Ok, that's fair, that makes sense. But I suspect the real cost savings is not having to go gold three months prior to release date. They could be working right up to the wire since don't have to flash a file to the cartridge.

 

I mean... That's what day 1 patches have regularly been used for. SXSG (and SEGA's other Switch 2 ports) aren't new games. They're just ports that SEGA has been working on for an undisclosed amount of time. Games don't have to "go gold" in the same way today as they did a generation or two ago, because Internet access is better and patches are more standard. I'm pretty comfortable guessing that Switch 2 ports by both SEGA and other companies aren't being worked on down to almost release date in any way that's different to their original releases on existing platforms.

It's definitely a cost cutting measure against the production of physical media and not to do with the production of the game. And I bet you that game key cards will become increasingly common for even brand new Switch 2 games that are released simultaneously on other platforms.

 

That's fair, you're probably right.

 

Thought-sharing time! Had oven macaroni and beat Shadow Generations for the first time today.

The last time I spoke about Sonic X Shadow Generations, I said the Sonic portion of that game didn't feel good to play anymore. Turns out I just needed to get the hang of the controls again. My bad. Still couldn't give a rat's ass about Chao Rescue though.

As for Shadow Generations, while still sharing a lot of its DNA with Sonic Frontiers, it throws out way more of that than I expected. Bringing it more in line with the White Space thematic was on the menu, and it shows. New White Space is more traditional HUB area than Open Zone. A bit of a shame, since those were such a neat idea. All the Action Stages are great though, and this is what matters most. Less wiggle room movement wise than I would have liked it, but still great. The boss fights were a highlight as well. Very happy to see the Biolizard and co. once more.

The main characters were a letdown though. Skato the Revengeful One is as bland and generic as ever. Same with Maria and Gerald. Not enough complexity at display to make their relationship genuinely believable imo. At least the voice actors' performance was badass. Rouge, of all characters, turned out the coolest, which is weird thinking about it.

Anyway, I can see why people prefer Shadow Gens over Frontiers, but we sorely need to get a better grip of the characters.

And with that, time to get all the collectables! I wanna check out the Collection Room. Really looking forward to CrossWorlds and whatever comes next!

 

Just wanted to ask, is your impression of Maria and Gerald based on just watching the cutscenes or did you also kept going back to talk with them after every action stage?

I'm genuinely curious about how half the fandom thinks SXSGenerations made them care about and like Maria more, while the other half thinks the exact opposite. Are we even playing the same game? Personal preferences could play a role, but what I'm suspecting is that a lot of people accidentally skip over almost all the conversations in the hub area.

 

Chiming in here...

I talked to each of them multiple times between each level to get all of their additional lines of dialogue. Gerald and Maria are still disappointing in their lack activity. I'm really not interested in characters just standing around, lore dumping and telling me how much they love each other. There's one scene where Shadow gets angry and then Maria says "wah don't be angry" so Shadow stops being angry, the end. That's the height of their involvement involvement in the plot and meaningful interaction with Shadow. Some of the extra dialogue is nice, but it's doesn't add to the characters as we know them. We see their personalities, but it doesn't feel as though it's presented naturally. It's a shame that their dialogue is mostly just lines of text where they talk at Shadow and he stands there in silence. It's a really naff way to develop characters. Although I was happy to see all the other White Space characters (Big and Omega <3), yes I'd gladly have traded them in to see a proper plot with Gerald and Maria. Instead, we got Shadow overcoming hisanger and his past... Again. And defeating Black Doom... Again.

So, my favourite character in the series is Knuckles, right? But if I'd only played Sonic Generations, I'd feel nothing for him. That game doesn't do much with any of its characters, especially the supporting ones. Maria and Gerald only get off slightly better for their actual appearance in Shadow Generations, with the supplemental material in the diary and Dark Beginnings being where the real insights are.

 

I can agree with the diary and Dark Beginnings being highlights, which is a shame (and in the case of the latter it's not even in the game unless you get a specific version). I think part of that is the game's story not being allowed to deviate too much from what we see in the original Gens and how the structure of the game works. I hope for the next mainline game they find out a better way to tell a story in this more open kind of game what than Frontiers or Shadow Gens did. There's good moments in both, they just gotta tell it better.

 

There's not much for other characters to do in white space, is part of the problem. I think the other part is that the open zone style doesn't lend itself to being shuffled towards different locations and actions, without many plot mechanics for characters other than Sonic to interact with. Frontiers made the most of this by having characters actually talk about their feelings for once, but it still stuck everyone other than Sonic in a box for most occasions. Forces was the last game to really have an involved plot with multiple characters doing multiple different things in different locations. I hope Flynn and co. get to offer their take on that sort of story in the next game.

 

I shouldn't have to go out of my way to access additional conversations in order to feel this games story was good.

Can anyone tell me one thing about Gerald and Maria that we didn't know before this story? We knew Gerald was a nice guy before he fell. We knew Maria was a sweet and intelligent girl.

Seeing them more didn't make me care about them more than SA2 achieved in 10 minutes of screentime, because they did nothing interesting.

There's not a single moment on the level of Maria telling Shadow to fight for the Earth or Gerald's breakdown. I havent seen many scenes as intense as the latter in 90% of video games I've played actually.

 

Eh? Which cutscenes? I must have skipped them. Nah, just kidding.

It's cool we get to talk with NPCs RPG-style, but their interactions should have been more fleshed out. Remember the hidden cutscenes from Unleashed or the flashback scenes in BotW? Both great ways to show the characters' personalities.

I could have lived with some fourth wall breaking addressing Gerald's nightmare fuel scenes in SA2 or Maria's massive glow up since 2001.

 

Well, yeah. Of course it would be about defeating Black Doom again (and Mephiles again and Biolizard again etc.) because the selling point of Generations is to re-experience past events, travel to past locations and defeat past enemies. It is a retrospective from the beginning to the end. The only truly new character is the Time Eater.

inb4: "but Chaos Island is from the future"

It's from the past in the sense that it's from a game that was released before Shadow Generations. It makes no sense to add previously unseen locations or completely new characters to a game where the entire point is to re-experience the history of the Sonic world. That's why I don't think there's any issue with Shadow once again going through his anger problems and once again defeating Black Doom. Now, if this were a regular mainline game in the series, then yes, I would be angry about the lack of originality and how the story and characterization is moving in circles or even backwards instead of forward. But I ain't disappointed that a game that sold itself on being a retrospective turned out to be a retrospective. Quite the opposite, I'm extremely happy I got to see key events featuring Maria and Gerald recreated in high quality graphics and voiced by competent voice actors with a proper voice direction (the graphics and voice acting in SA2 aged so badly, I can't recommend it without caveats to people unfamiliar with the Sonic series).

The original Sonic Generations was released during a time when most people were against the idea of having a complex story in Sonic, when people hated all of Sonic's friends and wanted the games to just get straight to the gameplay part. Had Sonic Generations instead released today, I think it would look closer to how Shadow Generations turned out. It still wouldn't be Frontiers-level storytelling, but at least we'd see other characters do more than just cheer on Sonic during his fight with the Time Eater.

"I am sorry I put you on this path, Shadow. But I am proud of how you have walked it. I believe in you, son." - Gerald

I teared up at this part, and judging by the reactions on youtube and elsewhere, I wasn't alone.

 

I cringed. ‍

No, really. Whilst not as egregious as the last time a Robotnik called their creation their child, it was not an earned moment.

This is one long non-sequitur. It has nothing to do with what I said about Gerald and Maria.

Shadow pretty much repeats the same arc he went through in his 2005 game. A new story could be told in White Space with the context of Time Travel, but very little story is even told at all. I don't even think the story is stopped to be a retrospective. The levels and set dressing, sure, but not the actual story.

 

I would say Shadow at least gets a little more explicit closure in SHGens, since he kinda had to force himself through the dark in Shadow the game, whereas his actions now have made it so that Maria knew what was coming and made her same choice anyway. I was always annoyed that Shadow the game made her know Black Doom existed and saving Shadow was in part an effort to protect the world, but making it a result of her seeing Shadow in the future and knowing the kind of person he would become thanks to her actions does repair that a bit.