The Supreme Topic of 'Other' Knowledge.

What do you mean?

 

The Frontiers thread. It's been locked twice because we've had so little to talk about that the "discussion" therein became meandering nonsense. If we actually get a substantial preview, it'll be reopened.

 

We'll have actual things to discuss regarding Rangers/Frontiers/2022, so said topic can reopen.

 

Edit: NVM, someone made a thread for it already.

 

The original Saturn version is finally getting datamined, too.

https://twitter.com/andreasscholl09/status/1470016570932047875

https://twitter.com/GremmarWarden/status/1463398684306001925

 

An unused animated intro for Sonic Chronicles was posted on Twitter

The very next post puts this far more informatively than my quick phone update while cooking did, as well as linking to more interesting stuff too - go read that instead

 

Remember that Sonic animation that was in Joel MacMillian's demo reel that was said to be an unused intro for Sonic Chronicles and he said wasn't meant for the game?
Well, the full version of the animation has been posted by Jonathon Cooper, alongside linework for it and a less compressed version of one of the battle themes overlaying footage from the dev diaries of the developers working on assets for the game, including the intro. Supposedly SEGA cut it themselves.

I can see why they would if it was indeed intended for the game. it doesn't represent the game or its story and it's weirdly off-model from the rest of the used assets.

 

https://twitter.com/GameAnim/status/1473329631189078016?t=0037o8RjykSYI6mTqSYIog&s=19

Sonic Chronicles.

Dunno if anyone's shared this yet.

 

Previous post has that and more.

 

I can see why that opening didn't pass Sega's QA, that's some bad animation. I initially thought I was looking at an AOSTH episode

 

The animation is good, but it doesn't really fit the tone of the rest of the game so I can see why they axed it. It's cool though, I like it.

 

A little additional detail I only just now caught. The touch screen and main menu's bottom screen is lifted directly from the animation's bottom screen at the end - in fact, parts of it with the sky background are still used in the final intro. So it's like a little part of it is still there.

I wonder if this version of the intro made it into any of the preview builds people got to play back then.

 

It's really cool to see something like this surface. I do find it a bit funny though that Cooper says it was "inexplicably" cut. Like c'mon man... despite the smooth animation it is absolutely butt-ugly. This thing would have been memed to hell and back.

Kinda wild that sequence got so far into production without, presumably, any oversight from Sega.

 

It's kind of a shame the art is so bad, since like you said, the actual animation is really smooth. They should have reached out to Sega or gotten an animation director who could have kept the art on-model.

 

Huh. Those weren't there for me when I posted. I double checked. Ah well. Retro's been buggy lately anyway.

 

Watching that scrapped animation I had the same thought as some commenters in the twitter thread, which is that the weird style makes it look like an old fan-made parody animation on newgrounds.

 

The animation is good, but the artstyle is ugly. To be honest, all of Sonic Chronicles art looks weird to me. The characters appearance is somewhat traced from Sonic X, the cover looks like it was designed by entirely different artist and it doesn't match the rest. Then, we have the character models that are plain ugly, even for DS standards.

 

Ya like everyone else said, amazing animation, really unfitting crusty art style.

Like those Eggman teeth... wat? But let's be real that entire game was ugly from start to finish. Gross models, mediocre art, gross music. And it sucks because we've never seen another attempt at a Sonic RPG and there's potential there.