Unofficial Sonic Unleashed Port

I wish Unleashed's Tornado levels weren't QTE sections, honestly.

I don't hate it - but they're kinda boring and considering the amount of visual effort put into it (while the gameplay is something you could put together in a day), I have to wonder if they were intending for more of a Sky Chase sequence.

I mean, there's even the energy recharge mechanic that's barely relevant until the end of the game iirc.

Edit: Whoops - wrote and posted this before viewing the other posts above

To make it a bit more relevant to the Recompiled project, I'm kinda surprised nobody's decided to try and improve them. The Werehog has a few mods to help smooth it over, so I would've figured the tornado sections would have something similar.

 

Made it to Egg Dragoon before calling it quits, I'm not gonna bother with Dark Gaia since I've seen enough of how the battle goes on YouTube and I'm not interested in putting myself through that just to say I beat Sonic Unleashed HD.

Did finally play Eggmanland for the first time ever, also my first time seeing most of the stage as I've never really watched it in videos either. Took about 50 minutes and at least 20 deaths but I did it and got a B rank for my troubles.

Did my best to keep the game as vanilla as possible, didn't use any medal progression mods until I got gated at Arid Sands Night, and ended up removing them all together when I still had to collect 20 for Jungle Joyride Day. The medals can go fuck themselves, people defending them are just overly defensive Sonic fans who don't know what criticism is. Also waiting for mods that remove QTEs outright (maybe even replace them with the Gens trick system, that'd be a perfect fit for Unleashed), such a garbage mechanic that should've died in the sixth generation. So many great day stage runs ruined by something that isnt remotely a test of skill.

Anyways, yeah the game is still pretty bad. The day stages are fantastic, though if I'm being honest I can see why later boost games don't try to replicate this design. Its very draining to play and the levels also feel somewhat samey as well. Different visuals and music sure but in general what I'm doing in Jungle Joyride is just doing what I did in Rooftop Run but much faster. Still a ton of fun but imagine 3+ games designed like this. The fact that the most distinct parts of each level were the 2D sections doesn't surprise me.

Werehog sucked (shocker) but what really annoyed me was that I actually enjoyed some of the platforming. Even despite his slow mobility, chaining together a bunch of swings and pole grabs and whatnot had a good pace and flow to it. Ditch the bad combat and focus on the platforming and this could've been a good game. Unfortunate the hub worlds suck too, very obvious padding without any of the sauce that SA1's hub world had

Btw anyone got some mod recommendations? I've S ranked most of the main day stages (Cool Edge never getting played again unless it's the Unleashed Project) and a few of the DLC ones, so I don't care about gameplay alterations anymore.

 

Refined controls with the Generations drift in the settings switched on. I'd also turn the homing attack on jump code in Hedgemod on. These tweaks make the S Rank hunt a lot more bearable.

I don't think anything can really salvage the Night stages, but the Foreign Input System sure tries. Gives access to a wealth of new moves, strings and animation cancels, along with a lot of damage value adjustments, improved progression and a training arena. For me it just showed that the problem with these stages was more fundamental than what any mod could fix, but it was worth a shot.

 

Gonna have to give that "foreign input system" mod a go myself. Thanks.

And regarding remapping the homing attack to double jump, that's definitely worth doing. I'll always vouch for homing attack not being on the same button as jump, but Unleashed had to go and mess that all up by putting homing attack and air boost on the same button combo. I'd still take a Frontiers/Shadow Generations control scheme mod if one existed though.

The alternative is slightly neutering yourself skipping the air boost upgrade. It's supposed to be mandatory to access Dragon Road 1, but it's actually not too hard to difficult to do a grounded boost plus a jump and last minute sure dash to reach the gate.

 

I was a 'homing attack on an off button' truther for a long time. The only reason Unleashed made me switch back is because there are moments, especially when you're speed running, where you'll want to choose the homing attack or the air boost and with the hair brained default button mapping you just...can't actually make this call for yourself? You'll want to boost forward but it'll turn out Sonic locked onto something below you off-screen instead. It singlehandedly makes this game's controls way worse than the follow-up games let alone something like Frontiers where all your air actions are freely available.

 

Many Unleashed fans excited to play Unleashed for the first time it seems.

 

It's just a matter of the button mapping not making full and sensible use of the available controls until Frontiers. At the risk of going off-topic yet again, literally every 3D Sonic game until Frontiers has had the issue of mapping multiple actions to the same inputs and relying on context to differentiate between which action should be performed. That's just the fault of the idiots that mapped the commands.

Word. It's hilarious how many people have have held Unleashed on this pedestal despite never actually playing it. It's actually not entirely different to CD and Chaotix back in the day.

 

While I definitely prefer it to the "accidental air boost" layout, the trouble with homing attack on A is that you're inevitably going to be in a situation where you need to jump as soon as possible when you hit the ground, and that means you may press the button too early or even be mashing it, which does nothing on the original but will absolutely send you air dashing off the edge in this game. It's worse here too, since Unleashed has some of the most "too precise for this loose a control scheme" levels in the game (especially in the DLC), and it ALSO has the fastest, longest-range air dash in the damn series.

Frankly, Frontiers has the right idea, merging air boost and air dash into a single action, and paired with Forces' "sorta kinda almost a third jump" physics, it becomes a really useful and viable tool for both propulsion and saving yourself from falls. I don't miss collecting boost energy from enemies and rings at all, either. The regen ensures that you can always air boost!

 

Was just thinking about this today too; its really the modern day CD/Chaotix for the current generation.

True, but Unleashed is over 16 years old now and hasn't had any official re-releases, so unless you go out of your way to get an old 360/PS3, or play a modded version of Generations, a younger person would have no context for it. For context, Sonic CD was 18 years before it got an official re-release, and the only way to play it before that were emulators, which were still a relatively niche thing in the 2000s.

 

Development of the Unleashed Project mod for Generations is how I stumbled into this community in the first place, so yeah, I'm definitely guilty of the pedestal. Still, it really has been both cool and surreal getting to experience the game's ups and downs firsthand instead of seeing them through footage and others' analyses. As funny as it might be that it got a following of people who couldn't actually play it, it's not hard to see why when it carries itself differently than just about any entry we've gotten since. I'm glad we've all finally been invited inside instead of having to peek in through the window. And for better or for worse, I can't wait to try my own hand at Eggmanland.

 

Completed the game. I bought a USB-C to HDMI converter and basically turned my steam deck into a Switch 2 (or Switch 1.5?) It ran perfectly except for the final fight, the steam deck did not like that at all lol

Still, an amazing port though. Hats off to the team behind it. If SEGA are ever going to re-release the game they'll have to do something major to win me over (make Knuckles Unleashed official!) I'm sure they're aware the port exists because the JP Sonic twitter account randomly put out a tweet celebrating the game's Japanese anniversary... one month after the actual anniversary lol

As for the game itself I still really enjoyed it, werehog and pacing issues be damned. Muscle memory is crazy because despite the fact I hadn't played this game since 2011 I still immediately remembered every shortcut and route I used to take lol. I stand by what I said about Unleashed having a lot of soul and charm, most of which comes from interacting with the NPCs and doing their sidequests, which I know sounds silly because people don't usually play Sonic for sidequests. If the rumours/speculation of next the Sonic game taking place in a city are true I hope the NPCs are as involved and fleshed out as they were in this game. Chip is still a very endearing character to me, at least his Japanese voice is. I don't know why the hell they made him sound like pee-wee herman in the English dub lmao

I know I said it before but I'm still blown away by how great the game looks.



The lighting is so sophisticated and the art direction is brilliant. Unleashed had the perfect tone for a Sonic story, it has heart but still has a comedic tinge.

I have to catch myself when I praise Unleashed's production values though because do I actually like the game itself or do I just think it's a cool tech demo? I'm definitely not blind to the flaws this game had but I still think it's quite special.

Being nostalgic for Unleashed is quite strange for me because its design philosophy is probably the most enduring of any 3D Sonic. Most 3D Sonics since 2008 have been some variation of Unleashed. Frontiers is basically Unleashed's Entrance Stage on a larger scale. Just swap out action stages for cyberspace and sun/moon medals for portal gears lol.

 

IMO Unleashed basically set the standard for 3D Sonic games coming forward, kind of like Street Fighter 2 did to formalize what a fighting games was, but the foundations were there from much longer. The boost gameplay itself debuted in proto-form in Sonic & The Secret Rings, and that game was essentially an early fork of an attempted Sonic 06 port to the Wii, being a much better take on the mach-speed sections. I very honestly believe they landed on what boost gameplay is today because they were given such a large budget and 3 games to basically iterate on it. The budget is very much tied to what I praise, because the very similar systems done a just little different feel drastically poorer.

And after 16 years of tweaking, experimenting, and refining the shit out of it, we got Shadow Generations, basically the apex of all this. Really cool stuff IMO. Playing unleashed is like going back to Sonic 1 after playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles (That's a compliment, I love Sonic 1).

 

Just a question out of curiosity for all. Did you guys keep motion blur on or turn it off? For me? I turn off motion blur in every game, and turning it off in Unleashed, I didn't notice a decrease in how the game looks when going fast. I think it looks great. Furthering my opinion that motion blur in games is useless.

Have it set to 144FPS at 1440p max settings for me and I keep that framerate on mine. I'm on a 4080 with a 5700X and 32GB of DDR4 RAM at 3200 MHz. What exactly are you running the game with in terms for hardware?

 

I play with high framerate displays to avoid blur in general, so I definitely always disable that stuff in-game unless it seriously compromises some visual effect. I don't have fresh young eyes watching a CRT anymore.

 

Minor quibble but Sonic CD had a widely available PC port come out in 1995/96 and was included in Gems Collection in 2005, which is about equivalent to the fact that you can still readily play Unleashed on current official Xbox hardware and have been able to since 2018.

But yes, the fact that this seems to be getting the CD/Chaotix treatment where half the internet acted like it was this secret masterpiece and people who never played the game took it at face-value is pretty hilarious. I love Unleashed but there are absolutely sects of the fanbase who have only presented the rosiest possible image of it and ignored its brutal list of flaws in the interest of complaining about Ian Flynn making Sonic woke or whatever.

 

Everyone keeps saying this like the Xbox One digital re-release in 2018 doesn't exist.

 

Tbf Xbox isn't what it used to be in the 360 days, not shocking most people aren't going to buy an Xbox console to play a game released on 2008, let alone even know there was a digital rerelease (first time I've ever heard of this myself). Hell, most people don't even buy them to play Xbox games.

 

In the context of like, Sonic YouTubers though? I'm not so sure. Unleashed is constantly held up as the gold standard of boost gameplay, presentation, storytelling in the franchise and is the thing Colors, Generations, Forces, Frontiers etc. are often compared to. In that conversation, you often don't even get a token "oh yeah but the Werehog parts suck and that brings down the whole experience," I think it's just taken for granted that when Unleashed's place in the franchise is being talked about, it's exclusively the daytime stages because that's the part of it that's actually relevant to later Sonic games.

This is totally subjective analysis on my end so maybe I'm completely off-base here. I just wouldn't be surprised to find that the people who are really excited about Unleashed based on what they've heard or seen on YouTube and other social media don't really have the context that the stuff you want to play (the day levels) will maybe make up 25% of your first playthrough. It's especially ironic because often those same people will pick apart say, how much of Colors is actually 3D versus 2D when trying to "prove" it's a bad game, but then don't seem to engage with the full package of Unleashed beyond replaying its best levels on a completed save file.