Spoiler Thread - SONIC X SHADOW GENERATIONS (SPOILERS!... Obviously.)

That can help with the normal challenges (though having to go get it first is annoying, yeah), but turning on the hub's hard mode locks Chaos Control. So it feels like I'm either missing some very good shortcuts or don't understand how to make Shadow go fast enough.

EDIT: Alright, I may have jumped the gun a smidge. I did manage to figure out a path and it wasn't too bad. Though I do still wish there was a quick restart button.

 

Yup, chaos control + doom wings, makes short work of everything.

 

Gerald states in the last cutscene before the Doom Zone activates in White Space: "He has grown a new body, and used the nebulous nature of time in White Space to accelerate his plans for revenge." Which does support the Doom Leech theory.

 

love the concept art in this game

 

I personally see it as two ways of explaining the same thing: The Towers wife was (probably unknowingly) pregnant, so their son was 'brought' aboard the ARK, she safely gave birth on the ship thanks to the abundance of scientists, and whose existence was an incentive to send up Maria - The latter point sounds like a case of parents trying to comfort and convince another set of parents to go through with something, feels like that's what my folks would've done.

 

I love how this game really feels like a 3D game, a lot less so than previous boost games which felt like hallways. The game gives you quite a bit of freedom of movement at all times, and it always feels good. The game never is fighting you or snapping you back to rigid lanes. It's really hard to explain or even notice how it's doing it, but the game really guides you where you need to go gently and naturally so you don't even notice. A good example is in one of the later doom fractal moments when you are running through spirals and eventually come to a spring. In previous sonic 3d titles, it would have either been possible to overshoot and miss the spring easily, or you would have felt the game take away your control and snap you to the spring even if it was at an awkward angle. In Shadow the hedgehog you just... hit the spring. You don't even feel like the game is guiding you to it, you feel totally in control, but you somehow never miss the spring. It's so smooth you don't even know it's doing anything, unless you'd played previous games and seen how they would get it wrong.

This higher degree of manual control leads to a lot of moments of alternate paths where the way you access them is to manually aim for them. Sonic Generation toyed with this at moments, like the beginning alternate paths in Chemical Plant Zone, but that really highlighted how the game wasn't built to have you go outside the forward scrolling lanes. By contrast, nearly every alternate path in Kingdom Valley Zone is like that, but they all feel so smooth and easy to hit.

A moment where I really noticed how much 3D movement the game had was in one of those final sections of Radical Highway, where those big walls of black energy are coming at you. You're on platforms moving forward, and I couldn't think of any way to avoid the walls other than to jump off the platform, then double jump back on, to go completely around them. And it worked, and I was able to do it consistently without any problem. It was a spur of the moment thing, like I felt like that's not quite how the game wanted me to solve that situation but it still controlled well enough for me to do it.

All this above everything else is why Shadow Generations feels so correct where previous boost games felt janky. I don't even know what all the mechanisms it's employing to make all their gimmicks and tricks suddenly work, but they've finally nailed it. I never felt like the game was held together with duct tape or that if I did anything slightly off from how they intended I'd fall through the geometry or shoot off into space. It felt very solid and cohesive, like everything obeyed the rules and never wigged out or got funky. I haven't seen this level of polish in Sonic games since... Sonic & Knuckles? like the original trilogy when they were Sega's biggest budget games.

 

@Cooljerk Excellently put, it’s profound just how much of a difference it makes to have a smooth and fluid character controller and I think that really carries this game more than the level design (which I think is to an extent less interesting than Sonic Generations’ highlights, such as Sky Sanctuary, Seaside Hill and Rooftop Run). I’m reticent to the follow the conga line of “this is the best 3D Sonic of all time” since we’re still firmly in the honeymoon period, but I wouldn’t rule it out either and I can certainly see it becoming my favourite.

 

I don't know, I had absolutely no honeymoon period after Sonic Forces, and while I liked Frontiers I didn't feel the need to rave about it like Shadow Gens. A sonic game hasn't satisfied me this much top to bottom in a very long time, this is definitely one of the high points for the series. I've recommended the game to people that I never mention sonic to otherwise. It feels like a top tier platformer, not just for a Sonic game.

I even think the return to the cheesy melodrama of the story was cool and done well. It was shonen without being cringey. Sonic hasn't been legitimately cool in a long time. Dragon Ball in general is back and popular again, it's cool to watch Sonic embrace what it always was.

 

Speaking of Sonic being cool again:

I fucking adore this shot, I really wish they’d been able to fit Sonic in as a boss and gone deep into how much of a menace he is here.

 

>gets into your game
>beats you ass
>refuses to elaborate
>leaves

 

With all due respect, where? Just about every alternate path I can find in Kingdom Valley is accessed through a homing attackable object. There's no precision required aside from drifting within the generous range to lock on. The only time the game begins to loosen up in this regard outside of Radical Highway is the volcano section in Chaos Island.

 

I like this game.

 

I think they didn't just because they would have to limit the player, Shadow, since Shadow didn't display Doom Powers in the boss fight of Sonic Generations, and people don't like being limited beyond a taste of power at the start of a game.

 

I admit not being able to Chaos Control in Doom Zone areas is a little peeving, but I honestly think it was more that they didn’t want to do something we’d already be playing in the other half of the collection, which I think is fair. Regardless, I think Sonic was absolutely a scene stealer here and ultimately done justice. I think I’d just love to see more moments that focus on Sonic but without him being the PoV, so that they can play with perceptions like this. Imagine a short following an Egg Pawn as Sonic busts through an Eggman base but somehow misses this one bit, who now has to survive everything falling down around them.

 

the one in kingdom valley i was actually thinking of was this, but upon re-evaluation (1) i forgot it was in a challenge act and (2) it seems like you actually can homing attack the enemies to get up there, but i didn't think of it at the time because i was focused on the collectable that's adjacent to them.

however, there's also this rainbow ring (there's another one later on but it's right in the middle of the path, so it's not all that exciting) and this combat skip (you obviously need to initiate the skip with a homing attack, but that's not actually what gets you the shortcut). there's quite a few more you can get with the chaos spear momentum glitch but those don't count for the purposes of this conversation.

 

My honeymoon period ended once I finished the campaign. Time attacking against the leader board really shows off just how free the game is compared to the other boost games. I'm sure at first glance this is what the game looks like to folks.

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But really digging into the game opens up these paths a lot more. This game reminds me a lot of Sonic Advance 2, where the high level play has you intersecting between paths and constantly using all your techniques to do minor adjustments and repositioning. Dispatching enemies and managing Chaos Control meter adds a lot of depth and variety to runs. I'm more obsessed in running this game than any of the other boost games just because of how much more the core systems offer than a typical boost game. Easily the best in the formula for me.

 

Beat the main story yesterday. Gotta say, I really enjoyed it. I really like how Shadow controls and the level design is solid. I also really liked how they handled the open zone thing this time around and I really want them to keep building on it. Imagine something like White Space but in a full and detailed environment with NPCs and stuff. Overall I really think they're heading in a good direction.

Also very much appreciated Gerald's Journal, very nicely fleshed out the details of Shadow's origins from the fragments we got in SA2 and Battle. Curious - is "-T" a nod to Topaz?

 

i think this is key - shadow generations is really good at looking shallow and straightforward, and that works to the game's benefit because its primary audience is children and casuals. speaking for myself, this is why i was so unimpressed by the trailers but blown away by the actual levels - it's not until you actually try to push the game that you realize how much it actually has to offer. the actual "expert paths" don't even appear to exist at first glance.

like, even in ark act 1, the very first level, there's the rail skip that shows up in the first five seconds that then leads to the hidden springs behind the boxes. when i was watching pre-release gameplay footage, i arrogantly went "oh, that's the shortcut in this section." but after getting the level in my own two hands i realized that's yet another red herring - the actual shortcut is just boost-jumping straight from the rail to the springs like so.

there's a ton of things like that - i didn't notice the immediate shortcut in radical highway act 2 until i saw it in some random 10 view playthrough video, i didn't realize i could do that kingdom valley combat skip until i saw katie4 do a much more impressive version in her run, i didn't consider that i could just straight up leap across half the obstacles in the second phase of the final boss with a well-placed morph boost, etc.

honestly, the game that shadow gens has felt most similar to for me is neon white - like that game, half the fun is just coming up with fun and novel routes using a versatile toolkit and trying to push the limits of what's possible within a narrow set of parameters. while playing that game i even remember thinking "man, this is how boost sonic should feel," and lo and behold it actually feels that way now.

 

Between the Doom Zones not letting you to use Chaos Control and both Acts of Radical Highway being fully 3D (while not letting you Chaos Control either), what are the chances that they were the first areas conceptualized and created for the whole game?

 

My guess is that you can't use Chaos Control for technical and practical reasons. The environments and backgrounds all very active in Radical Highway and the Doom Zone. Stopping time just looks like it would cause everything to break.

And thematically it works too, since Black Doom is supposed to be in total control there.