Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out on the 12th

So I got two responses to this:

Firstly, I think that Shadow Gens shows that Unleashed and Sonic Gens were if anything too fast. I don't dislike the games, far from it, but Shadow is much slower and yet still feels very speedy, and the slower speed means that the levels don't require endless miles of geometry to barely scrape past three minutes. I think it's really telling that levels have become more and more open in Boost Sonic the slower they make him: Unleashed's alternate routes are mostly minor shortcuts, Gens has more substantial ones, and Shadow has the most wildly divergent of all three (we're...ignoring Forces and Colors here).

Secondly, I do agree that the geometry in Unleashed/Gens is more detailed, but in all honesty, I prefer Shadow's playable geometry over the two of them. That is, the parts of Shadow you actually interface with, ignoring the visuals, is much less restrictive and generally more open, whereas the previous two games usually corral you onto tiny hallway-esque routes. Just compare Green Hill Modern to Space Colony Ark Act 1--yes, Green Hill is a lot more visually striking, but like half 3D portions of the level are spent running down tiny hallways with wide sweeping curves that funnel you along without even needing to try to turn. Meanwhile, Space Colony Ark takes place mostly on large platforms and the alternate routes often go in different directions before meeting up with the main path later. There's basically nothing in Gens comparable to wide open the room halfway through on the interior section. And this isn't even getting into the fact that like 60% of Modern Sonic in Gens is 2D, which makes integrating the playable level with the geometry significantly easier.

Shadow just generally feels like I'm doing stuff other than just reacting to obstacles and Sonic hasn't made me feel that way in a loooooong time. It's nice having levels where I can move left or right more than four feet and not hit a wall.

I'm going to assume Shadow had a lower budget than those two games, and also I'm gonna assume that merging this more involved level design with the visual environment is trickier, so I can understand why it doesn't always integrate the playable space with the background to the best extent, but truth be told, that is a sacrfice I'm glad they made if it freed them up to make the actual part you play more winding and with more routes to explore. They can try to make them more visually coherent in the next game.

 

It's been over a week now since I beat the game and I think I've kind of settled my overall opinion on it. I'll just bullet point my main thoughts because otherwise I'll write an entire essay. I've put GIFs in the spoilers.

Sonic Generations

• Not much to say, it's still a really fun game, but I understand why people say that it's showing its age in terms of how Sonic controls. You could argue that it didn't control that great even at the time it released. I still think this game is great.
• I like how they kept that glitch where you can play as classic Sonic in 3D
  Spoiler

  
• The drop dash might be pointless in boost gameplay but whatever it's fun. Look at him go.
  Spoiler

  
• The Chao are a fun addition, but I haven't found all of them and I don't plan to anytime soon. I'll probably dip back into it whenever the mood strikes me; I imagine if I tried to 100% complete it all in one go I'd probably go crazy. I like the one in City Escape Act 2 where he's hiding on a wanted poster, that was pretty funny.

Shadow Generations

• The game rocks. After beating it I went back to Frontiers just to get a perspective on how much had actually changed, Shadow Gens is easily the better game. The level of polish here is crazy.
• You actually have 360 degree mid-air movement and it makes a huge difference to the precision platforming. I would've enjoyed Frontiers more if his mid-air control wasn't so stiff, I never want to go back to that again. Give Sonic/Shadow more flexibility after doing a homing attack and we're golden.
  Spoiler

  
• There is a real sense of flow to Shadow's movement, especially with Chaos Spear carrying your momentum. Frontiers did everything it could to kill your flow. You punch, Sonic stops dead in his tracks. You light dash, Sonic loses all his speed. You randomly get locked in a 2D section, you have to stop and find your way out. None of that in Shadow Gens.
• The Doom powers are fun! I like the Surf the most. I hated Doom morph at first but it becomes pretty fun once you master it.
• Having Shadow's homing attack teleport him through walls is a really clever idea, I honestly got tripped up when I played Sonic Gens afterwards because I kept thinking Sonic could do the same.
• I'll give some credit to Frontiers and say that Sonic's turning circle at high speed felt more forgiving in that game compared to Shadow Gens. He also had this move where he could quickly turn in the opposite direction, which isn't in Shadow Gens.
  Spoiler
• The levels themselves are great, Rail Canyon and Kingdom Valley are probably my favourites.
• Shadow's controls are a little different in the action stages right? It's not as noticeable as Frontiers but still bizarre. I wish they would just come up with one universal control scheme for both the open-zone and action stages.
• Overall the game is a lot of fun. Maybe in time its flaws will become more apparent, but who cares. It's good. I'm sure its smaller scale is a huge contributing factor for why it's so focused and polished.

Shadow Gens plays to the strengths of the existing boost formula and that's fine. I wasn't expecting it to be a major shake up, especially when it needed to be analogous to Sonic Generations like Bowser's Fury was to Mario 3D World. It makes me wonder what the next 3D Sonic will be like.

Shadow can go really fast in the open-zone and it makes me ask, what's even the point of the boost anymore? Frontiers Final Horizon showed that they're still willing to experiment at what they can do with Sonic in an open space, but idk if they'll ever completely ditch the boost. Mostly because

I can't even lie, when me press button that make blue hedgehog go fast, the neurons in my monkey brain go crazy

I 100% believe there are ways to get this feeling without the boost though. People combed through the files of Frontiers DLC and apparently at one point they were experimenting with bringing the mach state from Advance 2 into 3D, but they scrapped it. The cyberspace stages with the rocket boost are pretty fun and could work in a game without boost. It's all about how you present the feeling of speed to the player. I cobbled together this crappy comparison to show what I mean.

Spoiler

Modern Sonic is only slightly faster than Classic in Generations, but the visual effects go a long way into selling that idea of speed.

I hope the next game leans into momentum and keeping up your flow. I also hope they lean into score attack, that would be a fun addition to the open-zone. I know Sonic/Shadow Gens both have a score counter but you don't see it until the end of the stage so it seems kind of redundant.

Bring back the ability to pull off tricks, mix that with the scoring system from Adventure 2, put that into smaller scale open-zones which encourage player creativity and you've got Peak 3D Sonic.

Spoiler

 

this, to me, is the answer - if boost was a reward for not breaking your stride like advance 2, it would feel much more satisfying to plow through stages with it than the current paradigm where it's just a button press. it calls to mind how awesome the speed booster feels in metroid games - there's so many interesting things you can do with level design when part of the challenge is clearing out (and noticing) long straightaways where you can activate it.

honestly, the boost sort of feels like a vestigial limb in most of shadow gens. the character controller is still built around it, but the actual meat of the game is structured much more like adventure 2, with a higher emphasis on aerial movement and clever uses of level gimmicks. i doubt they will have the gumption to just toss the conventional boost out entirely in the next game (especially because they sort of went all-in on it visually with the movies and stuff), but i do hope that it's further de-emphasized. i think shadow gens proved that the levels are better overall when boost is less powerful and you're forced to engage with more of your moveset more often.

 

Now that I've had some time to settle into Shadow Generations, I've gotta say Mephiles' new voice has really grown on me. It's not Dan Green by any means, and I'll always prefer his performance. But I've moved past the idea that Robbie Daymond simply doesn't fit Mephiles, because he actually does.

 

Yeah I was shocked the first time I fought him in game at how good the voice acting was. Robbie Daymond really hit it out of the park with this role.

 

Off-topic-ish, but this section of Kingdom Valley in Shadow Generations goes so fucking hard. Thanks for this GIF - Pure work of art.

 

One thing they didn’t change from Generations that’s a bit baffling: red rings can’t be recollected. This is kind of a basic feature of collectible items in 3D platformers imo, even Shadow Gens does it.

 

https://x.com/jav_dotwav/status/1853502180998676728

Rail canyon using the frontiers procedural lighting and skybox disabled looks really interesting, figured I would share this here.

 

How does the original look?

 

Mulling over the story a bit more, I do think it's kinda funny how insanely different Sonic and Shadow (the characters, not the games in the dual-pack) are from a narrative perspective. Shadow has an elaborate, well-defined backstory and nearly every aspect of his character is defined by his past and his trauma specifically. Sonic is, uh, literally Just a Dude™ with not only basically no backstory, but a literal mandate to never ever have a backstory in the games. I get why they're like this, of course--Sonic's whole thing is being unburdened by the past at all, but it's still funny how he has like zero defined history whatsoever.

I do think a game that actually forced him to confront an aspect of his past in a way he can't ignore would be very interesting (even if it would ultimately reinforce how little he cares about it), but there's literally nothing to pull from by design so any such element would seem to come out of nowhere, frankly

(as I wrote this, I realized that basically every single character in this series besides MAYBE Knuckles is like Sonic, which only makes Shadow's incredibly detailed history even more incongruent with the rest of the series)

 

Tails and Gamma maybe.

 

Nah that’s easy

pulling stuff from any past game story to be his “past”, it’s all history for him now, maybe confronting when he was turning into werehog and lost chip? Or when he failed to save the world and even prisoned in space, leaving the world get destroyed, even if they beat eggman in the end you can’t fix the damage that has been done to the world? -comics kinda touch on that- , you can pull material from past games like that and build a new narrative around it

 

I think it's significance in comparison to the rest of the cast is the fact that there's essentially nothing to the titular character the franchise is based off of. It isn't 'Rouge the Bat' plastered on the cover, it's the character that's had the chance for 30+ years and onward. This is the fact that's only clicked for me within the past summer that's sort of been, I dunno, revelatory in a sense. It's thoroughly impressive to keep your main character locked away for that long without there being any obvious consequences in the stories themselves.

 

I like Sonic not having a backstory. It's because you would expect him to have one that makes it interesting that he doesn't. He really is a character who exists in the moment. At most, the games we've seen have an effect on him, but I don't want an explanation on why he's fast or what he was doing before he met everyone.

The idea that this random guy regularly fights God's and super scientists because he's Just Him is also funny

 

The one thing I did not enjoy about Shadow Generations was it's generic story that didn't force Shadow to actually make any tough decisions and I feel added nothing to the lore of Black Doom or the Robotnik's.

If this is the writing staff we'll be dealing with going forward i hope they never touch Sonic backstory with a ten inch pole.

 

"added nothing to the lore of Black Doom or the Robotnik's"? Really?

Spoiler

Expanding Eggman's family by actually showing us his father and uncle. And giving Maria a baby sister. Not to mention, that Eggman's father was a robotics doctorate too, and his uncle was one for archeology.

I'll give you Black Doom because they honestly don't really do anything with him that hasn't already been done, he's mostly just there to represent Shadow's history and serves an excuse to make the plot/game work at all.

I don't know what you were expecting, to be honest? The Sonic series is not well known for giving characters significant background details. Shadow and the Robotnik family are the exceptions, not the rule...

Also tbh it was never going to do anything super major in terms of story, it was always intended to be a game made to advertise/coincide with a movie for marketing purposes, and its development timeframe, scope and budget reflect that perfectly. Honestly, given those constraints, it's a project that actually achieved a lot MORE than I was expecting, in terms of content, quality, and scope.

 

I won't pretend the story was the second coming of cinema, but I thought the storytelling and its execution was very good, especially compared from what we have been getting from Sonic lately.

It's still not perfect, but to me, already felt a huge improvement over Sonic Frontiers' story, even tho' I kinda liked this one as well.

I genuily think it's best Shadow content we've got story-wise. Like, I get it some of it was already made in Shadow '05, but I thought the execution was really made better here in Shadow Generations; I feel like I can take it serious and actually care about Shadow's and Maria's story. It made really feel bad for Maria and Shadow.

Again, it's not perfect, the story has a bit of issues on pacing, but I still think it deserve a lot of credits and the whole work behind this felt genuine. This is best Ian's and lore team work for the games, so far.

 

There could've been more here, but what's here is fine.

I really hope Sonic Team learns how to intertwine story and gameplay in the future. They're so close to making something that works, but the scope really limited them here.

 

Well that's a hot take.

From my vantage point, all I could see was people on twitch and youtube talking exitedly about how Shadow Gens made them care about Maria as a character, and not just a one-note "girl gets shot lmao" joke she was before.

Between this game, the animated shorts and Gerald's diary, Shadow and the Robotnik family have received a massive amount of lore and characterization. We will see Shadow Gens being referenced for a long time, methinks.

 

I've beaten Shadow Gens and it is quite good. I do think its quality is a bit overblown though and especially its story. The story is significantly better than Frontiers but that's ot really hard. It does have significant problems. Like how Shadow doesn't react at all to the fact he's engaging with events from his past beyond Maria and Gerald. Quite jarring. I would consider Maria similarly not very interesting. She's probably better than she was in SA2. Although on SA2 she only really needed to serve as a plot device. In Shadow Gens she's a bit more of a real character but she still is nothing more than a fairly silly and ott perfect girl figure. Her characterisation is extremely one note. I'd say Gerald is just fairly boring in the main game - I haven't read the journal.