Sonic X Shadow Generations thread, movie level out now

Meh, the use of words are fine, they're just mean to use something we really liked. I don't think using it alone should define someone's maturity.

I will say tho' I don't like how someone people use the world "mid" because usually someone use is on something they really don't like and it's a bad movie / series / something but they don't know they meaning of this word is to use something that is MEDIOCRE not necessarily bad.

Anyway, yeah, I think it have been a great decade to be a Sonic fan to me. I've been pretty happy with Sonic Frontiers, Sonic Superstars, Sonic Dream Team, Shadow Generations and the movies.

 

Numbers that back up the assumption that Frontiers had a smaller budget than Dream Team or Shadow. I know they don't release numbers. That's why it's quite a claim to be making. I'm aware they hired more staff, but that is not an indicator that their next project would have a ballooned budget exceeding the last one. Especially since they're bringing them on board for the purpose of developing multiple projects at the same time. The budget and staff would end up being split across at this point.

I'm not trying to knock Dream Team here or anything, but the world geometry isn't exactly something that would be breaking the bank in terms of asset creation. A lot of it is new, but none of it is crazy and they do a lot of smart recycling in the game to make most of it.

I don't believe either of these games demonstrate an increase in money affecting their quality. I think it's just the case of getting the right people behind them.

 

It's oficial, the game is officialy out everywhere!

 

Was Westopolis an unlockable music track in OG Generations? Because I just unlocked it in this version and I swear I don't remember it in the original game

 

It was not, the only Shadow game track that was in the game was I Am... All of Me.

 

Just a heads-up to anyone who was wondering - as predicted, a "Digital Deluxe Upgrade" option has appeared on launch, giving folks who bought the physical copy or just bought the base game digitally the option to access that content should they choose. = )

 

Finished Shadow Generations - it's probably the best Sonic game to come out in a decade. Which is pretty sad considering it's basically an add-on for a remaster, but I'm not gonna complain. The level design is great - I'll have to replay the levels more and explore, but it's up there with Generations and Unleashed. The Open World area is really fun to explore - I probably spent about an hour just wandering around and doing the side missions. I'm a tad disappointed with the level selection but that's probably a post for the Spoiler thread.

My only complaint is that I really, really hate how Frontiers is used as a base, because it feels so... cheap in some aspects, due to whatever they did back in Lost World/Forces. It's far better than how it was in Forces, but I did a quick run through some Generations stages prior to playing Shadow Generations just to get feel for the changes. There's some really minor things that just feel off.

Rail switching feels awful (the animation speed is super fast and it feels choppy to use) - it actually got me killed in some cases because I got flung off instead of cleanly swapping rails. Wall jumps feel weirdly clunky too - it's like Shadow "snaps" forward instead of jumping off like in Generations. It also seems oddly difficult to chain together wall-jumps - doing 2 in a row is easy, but it feels like you can't cleanly go into a third? It's bizarre, because none of this was an issue in the literal first game of this style, Unleashed. It might just be the default settings, but turning while jumping feels... weird? It was never good in Generations/Unleashed, but I feel like it's somewhat worse here.

It's a blessing it's overall really nice to play and the polish is high otherwise.

 

I do not envy Kishimoto and the Frontiers team one bit.
It's very easy to argue that he is not the most capable person to be in charge of mainline projects. And there have been eyes on him ever since the Forces/Mania releases, when Sonic team's reputation was at an all time low. To say this is stressful is an understatement.

But I'd like people to look at the aftermath of Frontiers. As flawed and messy that game is, it reignited an interest in the series and managed to capture public's attention.
I'm not trying to make a "Popular=Good" argument here, rather that even if it's not something you'd like, it is worth having different people with different ideas on handling this series around. Some of the ideas in Frontiers ended up in Shadow Gens and the results seem to be very good.

I personally am not really too concerned with the quality of the output of the Studio. Even a bad game can offer a worthwhile experience.


On a different note, Shadow gens' is not available for purchase for me.
EDIT: NEVERMIND, I double checked, I guess it was not available for preorders?

 

Even if you want to argue that Kishimoto puts good ideas on the table, he's consistently failed to deliver. The entire boost formula and 2D/3D hybrid gameplay as we know it was pioneered for Unleashed by Hashimoto (arguably adapted from Rush), but he left SEGA soon after that games release.

2 years later Kishimoto would go on to put it Colours, a massive dilution of the boost gameplay as established by Unleashed. It got a warm reception back then, but it focused on different aspects (more 2D, lots of basic platforming and very clunky controls). The Wisps were the big new offering for Colours and they were always divisive. Opinions on Colours have somewhat soured in the years since, even before the botched port that is Ultimate came out. The gameplay of Colours is rarely compared favourably to Unleashed's daytime levels and especially not Generations' Modern Sonic. Colours is still regarded as one of the better 3D games out there and to many one if the better games in the entire franchise. But one year later we got SoGenerations, this time directed by Miyamoto. And Generations has remained something of a gold standard for Sonic games since, despite Colours falling off. I'm as certain now as I was in 2010 that Colours' reputation came about largely because of what it wasn't, not what it was.

Kishimoto followed up with the derided Lost World, an experimental title that was swiftly swept under the rug as soon as it was out. For his next entry he attempted to reverse by creating Generations 2.0 in Forces. Now we know that Forces was subject to some development issues, and came about at a time when SEGA seemed to want Sonic games to be made on as small a budget as possible. But for fucks sake, that game had such a solid template to build on in regards to both the Classic and Modern Sonic gameplay styles and did an embarrassing job with both. The Modern Sonic gameplay is Colours but worse, Classic is a sloppy mess and the Avatar is boostless Colours with flaccid weapons.

Finally we get to Frontiers. Not to discount the troubles involved in production there, including those brought on by the pandemic, but by and large it's just Forces with a tech demo open world attached. Apparently the open zone was frequently regarded as boring or otherwise unfun during playtesting, and this criticism certainly wasn't done away with in the final release. He clearly tried hard, going so far as to significantly change gears for the big TFH DLC. But his entire approach (minus introduction of combat and cinematic boss fights) was handled better by a very different team come ShGens. And the end result is leagues apart. Everything that Frontiers did, Shadow Generations approached differently.

Kishimoto's work is a mixture of weaker emulations of other games, and potentially good ideas that never get to take off because they're poorly conceputalised and/or poorly implemented. He's never managed to improve or even match work of his predecessors, and his innovations have never landed right.

This post is written in a way that makes it sound like what I'm saying is objective. But my opinions on his games are subjective, and people can certainly like his games for the exact reasons that I dislike them. Ultimately I'm explaining why I feel his work is sub-par and he's a bad fit for the series. Shadow Generations might be based in Frontiers, but it's also just doing what a lot of games have been saying for decades. Kishimoto can't see the forest for the trees, and keeps doing everything that he tries to do wrong, frankly.

 

Okay so I decided to do some research into the team behind Shadow Generations vs Frontiers and they share way more of the same staff than you're implying.

Seiki Hayashi was a level designer on Frontiers, then got upgraded to head level designer for Shadow Generations. Masaki Shirakawa also was a Frontiers level designer. The only person who didn't work on Frontiers who was a designer was Takeki Kani (who worked on the house of the dead remake in 2022).

I don't think its a hot take or wrong to make an educated guess that with more staff and money the same people who produced those Frontiers levels were able to make something substantially better. Your argument that they just got better people on board doesn't make sense when they're the same exact level designers.

Katsuyuki Shigihara and Yuka Kobayashi were working mainly on the Mario and Sonic games before Shadow Generations. The latter did work on Unleashed as a level designer and the former was involved as game designer with the original generations but if Mario and Sonic was still a thing, they'd have probably still been involved with that. And I know this will get singled out so ,yes, this is just a theory but I do imagine if we were getting a Mario and Sonic game this year the guy who did 3 of them and the guy who codirected the last one would be involved in a 2024 entry.

Mr. Shigihara also directed Sonic Origins. I know it's just a series of ports, but considering how lackluster many people felt they did with porting the games I could use that as a merit against him but I won't.

I don't think they just suddenly got the "right people" involved when most of these guys have been on Sonic for years, and the directors have produced their share of mediocrity too. They just have the backing from SEGA now that they needed to soar.

 

Buckle up...

This borders on historical revisionism. "consistently failed to deliver" belies the fact that he's only directed four games and two of them are considered the point where Sonic Has A Good Game Now (Finally!) after years of Sonic Being Bad.

Nothing in this franchise is "consistent", and I don't agree with putting Shadow Generations, a single game that JUST came out, over Kishimoto's work on those grounds.

I don't understand the insistence that Kishimoto is an incompetent hack who made a fluke (multiple times, somehow...) when there are frankly far worse games in the franchise that don't have the directors treated like a pariah like he is.

I'm only reminded that figures in the Sonic creative team get hate and dismissal for little reason more than they are the most recognizable names. Takashi Iizuka, Ian Flynn, Morio Kishimoto; it's just easier to believe, I guess, that one guy is good/bad enough to decide the fate of the entire franchise.

Sonic Colors did not get a warm reception, it was considered the first good 3D Sonic game in years, if not ever. That was after being an underdog, because people thought of Unleashed as a bad game besides the the daytime stages, and Sonic 4 a return to form (pffft). It was a cynical time for Sonic, yet Colors succeeded.

Regardless of how fair that is to other games, people liked Colors a lot. People still like Colors. The remaster made by entirely different people fucked things up and reviewers still went "it's still as good as it was back then, it's just the remaster that's ass".

Even if Generations released first, I don't think the reception to Colors would change.

Both positive and negative reviews of Sonic x Shadow Generations explicitly say that Sonic Generations is the lesser game in the package, at worst dragging the whole thing down, and the specific reasons often given stem from innovations and changes explicitly created by Sonic Frontiers; the controls, the level design, the cinematography, etc. are all closer to how Frontiers did it than the original Generations, and they are praised as such. Some reviews say that outright.

Hell, I found only one review that averts this train of thought, believing that Shadow is the lesser product, and it's because they think the game isn't like Frontiers enough.

https://www.si.com/videogames/guides/monster-hunter-wilds-beta-times-pc-ps5-xbox

The idea that people like Shadow Generations because it follows the standard Generations set is not well-founded (and arguably hypocritical after people kept going "it's Forces again!" when the levels in Shadow Generations were first shown off).

If what you're saying is true, then Generations didn't even set a standard, since Lost World, Forces, and Frontiers followed it. It's Colors that set a standard. Generations is an outlier if anything.

Frankly, I prefer its new status quo, where Generations is simply just another good Sonic game rather than The Last Good 3D Sonic Game.

You cannot discount these issues so casually, especially when seemingly averting them entirely is largely why Shadow Generations is that good. It is an extremely polished and high-fidelity game; if it were not, it would not be looked to as favorably, even if none of the actual gameplay or creative decisions changed or suffered as a result (which itself would be hard to believe).

You say Kishimoto's failings are his fundamental skill as a game director and designer, but you dismiss the difficulties he went through making those specific games, as if Frontiers or even Forces would be treated the same if they weren't more polished and more time in the oven, and downplay his success, even though they are what birth the more inviting reception and even decisions of future games.

Meanwhile, you say that Shadow Generations is proof of better and implicitly "consistent" game design from a fundamentally better director, when it's a single game explicitly built on the innovations that Frontiers fought hard to establish and had the, for the lack of a better term, privilege of not having its development issues. It is the first game we can definitely say is the direct result of Frontiers' success, which means it absolutely had the privilege of knowing what works and what to improve, but you treat this as unique to the specific team that made it and not the nature of iteration.

Even if the idea that Kishimoto is simply a poor mimic is true, we are still talking about a speculative sequel to a game he made. A direct sequel that will likely benefit from not having a tighter budget or rushed development now that Sega realizes those hurt games and more importantly sales. A game that would know a lot more about what it's going to be than Frontiers because, like Shadow Generations, it is its iterative sequel. Do you believe Kishimoto can't make a good game, or do you think he doesn't even know why his own games are good? I think he can, and I think he does know.

Is Shadow Generations "what Kishimoto did but better" or is it entirely different? It can't be both.

You want to praise them for doing better than Frontiers, but you also don't want to acknowledge that Frontiers did something right to begin with? I don't get it.

 

Wait, so if I'm understanding right, for Shadow Generations they finally got an Unleashed guy and a Generations guy back on Boost games? They weren't there for Frontiers?

 

No they weren't. Mr. Shigihara dealt exclusively with the Mario and Sonic games 7 years (then he directed Origins in 2022). Kobayashi wasn't even a Sonic Team member, he worked on the Dimps Sonic titles, and worked for Dimps in general given his director credits on Dragon Ball Xenoverse 1/2, until being given a codirector credit for Mario and Sonic 2020 and now being codirector for this title.

The level designers for Frontiers and Shadow Generations are two of the same people from Frontiers, as well as someone else from in SEGA who worked on Non-Sonic titles until now. Those are the names I'd focus on personally.

 

Finally got the game for Switch, and wow the visuals are a huge step up from Frontiers. Framerate seems like a consistent 30 too.

I can see why reviewers were saying OG Gens is the worse part of the package, Shadow Gens isn't necessarily better imo but it benefits a lot of combining Frontiers' physics and controls with the standard boost gameplay, as well as the levels having way more going on just by Chaos Control and multiple collectibles existing.

Speaking of Chaos Control, I was fully expecting it to be a fairly context sensitive mechanic as is the usual for 3D Sonic, but its actually extremely flexible in how it can be used. You get plenty of meter for it through the levels and its really handy for making platforming easier and freezing moving hazards if I can't dodge them fast enough. Such a good mechanic and I hope it becomes a mainstay for Shadow's future playable appearances.

 

Day one and the game have superpassed 1 million units.

Holy shit.

 

Probably mostly early access boosted, but this likely doesn't have too many Switch sales in it so that number is very likely to balloon fast by next week, and even more after Sonic 3 comes out.

Might actually hit 3-4 million before the price cuts start happening

 

Ever since Sonic Origins, staff aren't wasted on Mario & Sonic games, and I think we can agree that this is a good thing lol.

 

Personally, I think getting some blood who worked on Unleashed and Generations means that (in addition to any other differences in staffing, budget, or dev time) they also got some talent that Frontiers did not.

Thank god for the death of those Olympics games. Rest in piss, you won't be missed.

 

I'll drop it after this but this just feels like goal post moving.

"Kishimoto should be replaced on Frontiers 2!"

"Well he's never gotten to make a sonic game that wasn't a budget title or had the proper support of SEGAs full resources before."

"How do you have proof this game wasn't a budget title?"

"Well there's completely new assets and a level of polish that isn't really common in Sonic games"

"No, they just got the right people involved!"

"These are the same exact level designers and programmers from Sonic Frontiers. What has changed in the time since Frontiers other than them getting more resources from SEGA?"

"The Unleashed and Generations directors are just objectively more talented!"

"Didn't they direct those mediocre Mario and Sonic titles for years?"

"Well Kishimoto still sucks!"

I know this hasn't been your argument by itself but it's a sum up of the responses I've gotten and it all just feels like doing everything they can to discredit Kishimoto or his staff while elevating two guys who I can find, from the same people praising this game, quotes talking about how bad Mario and Sonic had gotten or the problems with Origins.

I just think that's silly but I hope Kishimoto gets his chance to shine and makes something special that shows why he's been trusted with Sonic for so long.

 

Yea I think Shadow is here to stay.