Sonic Unleashed: The Post-PC Port Discussion Thread

I've said my piece in the other thread so I'll paraphrase here after having played through the whole game and all the DLC with my preferred QOL mods.

I really, really want to like Sonic Unleashed. But I can't. There are elements of this game that are truly great. I think Jungle Joyride is one of the best Sonic levels ever. The game is beautiful, has a top-notch OST and the writing...well, it's fine. Nothing special honestly, but not hurting any of its characters (frankly I wish Chip just had a different voice so I could take it a little more seriously). If the game was just these things, I'd have no qualms putting it in the upper tiers of 3D Sonic (not the highest tier, Day Sonic is still slippery, full of QTEs and puts the damn homing attack on the boost button).

But it is not just those things. In fact, it is so padded and bloated that I cannot in good conscience call it a good game at all, let alone better than...any Sonic game I've played since 2010. This is not just because of the werehog, constantly trapping you in rooms full of samey enemies to fight though it may be, but it's also:

* the repetition of moving through the hubs, especially when interacting with the NPCs is necessary

* walking back to talk to the professor (did you know recomp added a menu option for this by pausing on the world map? I didn't, until after I finished the game) so he can tell you to go to the stage you already know you're trying to go to

* hunting around the gaia gates (I had no idea where Rooftop Run 3 was until recomp despite playing the game multiple times before now)

* the slow-ass transitions between menus

* the fact that you can't go back to the world map from a stage or gaia gate but have to return to the village first (why?)

* the level order forcing you to at-times do multiple werehog levels before a daytime stage

* two separate tornado levels that are nothing but repetitive QTEs

* getting upgrades for moves Sonic probably should have from the start

* Unleashed having longer and more numerous cutscenes than the games since, despite not being much more complex narratively

...and of course, the all-important medal hunting. I know where to go to get all the ones I need now, but that's still a drain. None of these are that bad on their own, but mixed together they make the game into an utter chore to play. The six or seven fun day stages (I do not care for Cool Edge) are nice, but they simply aren't worth the gigantic pile of styrofoam crowding out the rest of the product. It's been said time and time again that Sonic Team is terrified of their games being too short, but this is the worst way they ever chose to handle it. The pacing is just unbearable for me.

I know the meme right now is "Huge Sonic Unleashed fan excited to finally play it", but I really do think that the Unleashed Project, or even Xenia not being able to complete the full campaign and people using modded 100% saves to play the day stages kind of skewed the perception of this game in the fandom. It's become this measuring stick for how Sonic games are apparently "supposed" to be, but the most I can say is that individually comparing one of the good day stages to, say, Colors or Forces, makes Unleashed look better. In terms of full campaign experiences, every damn game since Unleashed has done more with less. Yes, including Forces, because Forces, for better or worse, does not distract from its own core gameplay. That gameplay being weaker in some ways (note that I say some, people act like Unleashed jank is less-intrusive than Forces jank and I disagree in many ways) doesn't equate to what is one of the most exhausting Sonic games out there, Unleashed rivaling Shadow and 06 for the title.

Other than that, I guess the set-dressing is fine. I don't like the hot dog challenges or any of the town missions, but they're thankfully completely optional, so they're there for people who care about them. Frankly, I just wish that the NPCs were less-ugly and more interesting, especially since they're also a measuring stick for how people think humans are "supposed" to look in the series (stop saying "Pixar", god damnit). I wish the game made me want to interact with it more, and it could've taken on that alone, due to my personal preference. That's the tragedy in all this, if you suck out the padding from Unleashed, it's still probably longer than Colors and Generations and Lost World.

This post is probably still too long, but this game gets inside my head, man. It's never the straightforwardly good or bad games that do it, it's always the "love and hate" games. If you want more ideas on how I'd try to see this game salvaged, especially with the new mossing possibilities recomp brings, take a look at my discussion with Wraith here.

 

That's completely fair and something I had in the back of my mind when writing the post. I guess the asterisk I'd put there is, "if you've played action games before". I was primarily thinking about the criticism grown adults lob at Unleashed in an industry where some of the most popular games of the era are third-person beat-em-ups, since "the werehog stages take forever" isn't exactly an uncommon complaint

I also think it's not a werehog-exclusive thing - Unleashed is hard and the later stages can go on for a while. I remember Shamar Night taking me around 40 minutes. I also remember Adabat Day taking me around 15 minutes. My first Eggmanland run took me something like an hour. I personally like the difficulty: the sense of achievement when it all clicks activates my dopamine, but it's not for everyone.

 

fwiw the menu shortcut to go to the lab was already in the original game, but I agree it's kinda dumb they make you constantly visit him though when the world map already does a good enough job of telling you where you need to go next lol

personally I have a real soft spot for the humans in this game and I like Gurihiru's illustration style in general but I feel like maybe there was just poor communication between artists when translating them to 3D because their in-game look doesn't really do them justice. idk if I'd call em ugly though.


(I agree people should stop using the misnomer of "Pixar-style" but I guess "Gurihiru-style" doesn't roll off the tongue as well lol)

human characters in Sonic have always been a bit all over the place, though I think Maria and Gerald looked pretty good in Shadow Gens.

 

Wow, really? I can't believe I somehow missed that on all my Xenia playthroughs AND this on top of that. Makes me feel a little stupid, but clearly they should have telegraphed that.

2D Concept art almost always looks better than fully-realized 3D interpretations, though. The 2D art is certainly more pleasant (and the 3D models themselves have aged poorly as well), but I wouldn't say it's more befitting of Sonic's style than, y'know, having the original character designers take a crack at it. Ohshima and Uekawa are the only ones I've ever seen to illustrate humans that fit in perfectly well with not only Sonic, but also Eggman, and ironically, they're all in games that aren't Sonic (Balan Wonderworld for Ohshima, and Billy Hatcher for Uekawa).

I mean, as someone who was one of those people, kiiiiiiinda? Because as much as Stricker and I would bicker over Unleashed PC versus Colors PC (before Ultimate) over on SSMB, one thing I always failed to refute is that Unleashed is cohesive. It is a curated experience designed to take you from area to area in a diegetic, narrative fashion.

And to its credit, I do still think that some of the extra/DLC levels have their merits. One of the threads in the topic I linked was me and Wraith talking about the possibility of modders stitching together extra and DLC acts into something resembling proper followup stages to the main campaign (and, in my case, adding in the Wii stages), since it does the Sonic Colors thing and a lot of them are split off the main acts with different object layouts or just in inaccessible sections, especially for the werehog. Through this lens Jungle Joyride remains the gold standard, as it has four of them that, if combined, would make about as great a full act 2 as that stage is going to get, albeit less environmentally-varied than the first. Savannah Citadel and Skyscraper Scamper both have decent-length Final Horizon-style "stapled together cardboard box" levels, and a lot of people seem to like Windmill Isle 4 even though I don't (could go with 1-2 okay maybe).

Also, everyone! Look! A mod that removes the enemy walls for the werehog!

I haven't tried it yet since I'm just getting home from work, but this could be a big improvement already.

 

While I agree with you completely here -- OG Sonic Unleashed is exhausting and people may have their perception skewed by improvements and amenities made over the years -- I think it's worth to consider what the game is today, 18 years later, after Unleashed Project (and even the port and the mods) as direct interventions on the original game. Kinda like up until very recently, the best way of playing some Japanese-only games like Fate/Stay Night was through installing a series of patches on the original game that made a patchwork quilt out of the numerous, different releases. It might be easier to go through a community-curated experience today than actually going through the original full campaign with all of its woes.

So nowadays Sonic Unleashed is a gold standard for boost gameplay, I guess. It doesn't do anything for me though, and never did. I don't even mind the Werehog stages all that much -- the day stages already aggravate me more than enough. I can respect it, from a distance.

 

I haven't played the port yet, as I'm waiting for mods to fix my main grievance to the game, and my backlog is too long anyway. So I'll just post my opinion on Unleashed from when I first played it:

Daytime levels, Werehog levels bad. Peace out

What's that, you want me to elaborate and be less cliche? Okay then, let's see... I loved how intense the daytime levels were. They were a bit cheap at times, when you couldn't see hazards ahead, but for the most part they kicked ass. Their length was also perfect. Coupled with the realistic environments based on real life locations, it actually makes it feel as though I'm covering large distances, like you would expect when you're a superfast character. As I said before: "When I play Dragon Road daytime I feel like I'm running half the length of the Great Wall and tearing through China's countryside." Later games' boost levels felt too short and lacked that large-scale feel IMO.

The Werehog levels might have been okay if they had been shorter, controlled better, and the Werehog maybe more speed-oriented. Why couldn't the Werehog be as fast as in that cutscene near the end? Unfortunately, what we got was a total chore to play.

I didn't really mind the mandatory medal collecting, QTEs, XP grinding, or the town sections. Well, I could live without some of those, but I rather enjoyed the town missions that involved playing unique mini-acts. Although the Pixar-esque humans never did it for me; I found them too annoying and over the top. That's right Devin, I said the word, as Unleashed was clearly going for a Pixar look like many other cartoony games of the time, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise

I would have preferred the humans to be designed in the style of either Maria, Merlina, or Billy Hatcher.

I agree with this. Those games showed what Sonic-style humans would look like, while Unleashed's humans always looked ugly and out of place to me.

 

I'm actually really struggling to understand what distinction you're making here. Are you saying that the tinkering and configuration required to run these games up to this point was massaging the original's reputation, or that the simplicity of the port made the effort required before feel like a weight being lifted off softening the flaws that are already there, or that people are just playing with mods from the start, or what?

 

I'm saying "who even plays OG Unleashed from start to finish anymore instead of just slapping all the mods and changes that make it less annoying than it used to be at first", yes

 

yeah that's fair enough I guess, the character designs in Balan look pretty great and would definitely feel at home in a Sonic game. I think they translated pretty well into 3D too


in general the visual design of Balan was great (only redeeming quality of the game lmao) so it would be cool if they got Ohshima to do art for a new Sonic game. The concepts he did for Superstars were pretty great too (another example of stuff that wasn't translated to 3D very well lol)

Sage and that magenta-haired lady both look like they were designed by Uekawa so I guess that's the style they'll be using going forwards

 

I'm gonna be honest and say I don't get why this kept coming up as a "fix". I have never, ever in all of my years of gaming played a game with any sort of combat at in it where getting locked into an area until you've killed all of the enemies is considered a flaw. It only ever comes up with Sonic games, and the reason you want to just run past them instead of fighting them is because they're not actually fun to fight. You have to fix that fact first before you fix anything. If the community accepted take becomes "Actually the dozens of moves the werehog has aren't as fun as running past the enemies and doing the ledge flip tech over and over" then that might be the biggest sign that the levels actually are unsalvagable.

 

yeah, I've been playing Okami again recently and all combat is within a locked area (albeit, eventually ones you can break out of at a cost to your shields). Bayonetta and other character action games do that too, where you can't proceed until you kill all enemies in a specific encounter. (Okami having some significant character action roots of course, being directed by Kamiya)

 

the link is broken

 

Okay so we're basically on the same page, I think my responses would just be that
1. Obviously the game shouldn't be judged on the basis of what it's like modded, at least not if we're talking about anything the devs deserve credit for
and
2. I play every Sonic game I can with mods to improve the experience anyway, and I think that's the case for most fans, at least ones that are gonna be running Unleashed mods, so it's hardly something that should be affecting Unleashed in specific.

Her name is Victoria!

While I agree that the combat being mediocre is down to more than just the pacing of the stages, can we honestly say that replacing any Sonic game's combat system with the best combat system you can think of makes it not a pace-breaker? Especially in games like the Heroes-Secret Rings period. It doesn't ring as big an issue in other games because other games aren't trying to be Sonic. They're usually combat-centric to begin with. I took a quick glance through my steam library and the only games I could find that even did this to begin with were shooters and action-roguelites. Good combat or bad, Sonic stages benefit from the player not being forced to interact with these kinds of roadblocks any more than they have to. The design ethos between gameplay styles would ideally be as similar as possible, and even though there's nothing simpler than "jump into robot to destroy them", I don't love when, say, Sonic Rush makes you fight enemies this way either, but it being much more brief helps a lot. The player will still be engaging with them, because they're obstacles and it's not like this removes doors or any sequence that requires you to use enemies as tools, there's just not a completely overt non-diegetic barrier acting as a drain on progression. And conversely, whether or not your combat system is good, there's absolutely a such thing as too much of it for a given stage to feel briskly-paced.

Moreover, I don't really care about what does or doesn't count as "salvageable". If you can make a level that isn't fun into one that is, whether it meaningfully resembles the thing it was to begin with is none of my concern, so long as we don't start misattributing design choices to the wrong people, like I was saying to Palas. Being able to climb ledges completely transforms Deus Ex, for example, and arguably ruins the unique purpose of the high-jump augmentation canister, but I use the climbing anyway because it's really fun to approach the open-ended stages with that extra hit of mobility, especially if I'm doing a stealth build or a pacifist run.

fixed.

 

what the... she better be the greatest character ever if she actually shows up in a game someday

 

In the Werehog's case, yes? Because the werehog isn't a fast paced platformer. It's a mode of play where you're frequently reduced to pushing boxes around, walking on tight ropes, escorting colored shapes into colored holes to activate doors. It's a slow paced platformer beat em up hybrid akin to the average PS2 platformer with Sonic-isms applied to the top. You can learn to do things in it faster in the same way you can learn to play Ocarina of Time or Death Stranding faster, but that wouldn't discredit the intentionally slow pace of both.

Speaking more broadly you have more of a point but honestly, there are platformers and action platformers that pull that type of dynamic off, from Rayman Origins scattering the enemies and making the whole thing more of a movement based challenge to this usually being a pretty enjoyable process in, say, ratchet and clank. There are some things you can try here before you just throw your hands up, imo.

But I digress. It's fair if people really do find the levels more fun this way but I personally find myself scratching my head because so much of these levels is the combat. Slow paced puzzle solving comes second and the undercooked platforming mechanics are dead last. I think there's a nice sense of escalation, just like there is in the day stages, but there really isn't enough to chew on in, say, to clock tower section in spagonia or the icicle climbing in holoska for me to want to hit fast forward and just do those part.

 

Well I'm not exactly advocating for removing the combat entirely, the problem in my view is that the levels are unbalanced. I can take some enemy fighting, I just think the normal game goes overboard on it, hence, big purple barriers that are a lot less natural as a blockade to progress than, say, a door opened by a switch that you need to clear out the enemies to get to. In my view, that's a little more justifiable, or at least you can tell it was built as part of the stage rather than the result of someone saying "THEY'RE STILL BEATING THE STAGES IN UNDER TEN MINUTES BLOCK IT OFF". Like I said before, I think the game should have been spreading its encounters out more (and certainly not had enemies respawn in second waves in the exact same places they were before, that actually does piss me off in every game where it happens).

I think most people would still fight most of the enemies anyway, especially newbies who don't know what's up ahead. But there's a psychological element to it, a necessary distinction between fighting enemies because they're in front of you, and fighting enemies because the game deliberately doesn't let you do anything else. I can, if I want, sprint past almost every regular enemy in Dark Souls. And I often do, because I'm dying to something further up ahead and don't need to bother with the small fries. But I don't consider this a failure of game design, or like I'm cheating myself out of experiencing the game, because I already know what I'm doing. I'm relatively certain that anyone who just uses this mod to skip past all the enemies is either someone who already knows the game and just wants to get a move on, or else is so dedicated to not doing the combat on purpose that nothing was ever gonna convince them otherwise.

 

I’m glad more people are getting the chance to play unleashed. I finally decided to give it a go after it was added to the Xbox back compat a few years ago now and I was floored at how decent the game was. For so many years I’d been led to believe the game was awful and beyond saving that I’d just never bothered giving it a shot at the time it was newish. Instead I had opted to get the SD version which at the time people held on a pedestal, and had a great time with it back then.
In hindsight I shouldn’t have let such negativity influence my decision on these things but considering the time I started reading fan circles, unleashed was so hated it just rubbed off on me.
I really hope Sega & Sonic Team see the outpouring of love for this game in the modern era, and push to out-do what was here.

 

Oh I can think of many, most obvious being those who don't like arena FPS design vs linear FPS design. It became a focal point of discussion with Doom (the reboot) because it put the emphasis on the two styles front and center. BBut it happens in other genres as well, I just saw someone cite this very reason as why they liked MGS5 over MGS: Peace Walker. I've seen people complain about this happening "too much" in DMC2 compared to the rest. But perhaps the most relevant example is Mirror's Edge, that is THE primary complaint about the game which is conceptually very sonic-like. Turns out people don't like being prevented from progressing.

As someone who actually likes the werehog gameplay, I think the arguments that "it's good gameplay, so people should like it" remind of when people say X console doesn't have game droughts, because "sony or nintendo or microsoft put out like 10 games last year," as though "sony" or "nintendo" was a genre. Just because someone likes Sonic, doesn't mean they'll like a beat 'em up, even a well designed one. The quality of a game doesn't matter if people don't like it, I saw people call the Puyo Puyo boss in Mania "garbage" even though it was a faithful recreation of an extremely popular and enduring puzzle game.

Sure if you like *SEGA* games specifically, and thus anything that comes from Sega is going to thrill you if it's competently made, then people complaining about the werehog combat seems silly since it's just a rote beat 'em up. And perhaps if there were, at the time, a glut of 3D sonic clones (IN GAMEPLAY!) out there, people would be way more forgiving. But as it was, people who just wanted to play this racing platformer game, couldn't do so without being forced to play multiple other genres over the years in between levels and it got very annoying. I think that's a big reason you're seeing a critical reevaluation of the Werehog -- there's other avenues for you to go and play straight up lots and lots of boost-era 3D sonic levels without the fuss anymore. So the people who were hyper-allergic to any other style of gameplay probably aren't playing this port and thus the werehog at the moment.

I'd also say when Unleashed released, there was a significant amount of "hate watching" on the internet in General. That's when stuff like the AVGN was blowing up, when people were looking for stuff to "MST3K." You know the era I'm talking about, I'd see it in all sorts of things, not just Sonic. People being giddy that something is going to release and "be bad" before they even see it, and jump in specifically to try their tight-5 comedy routines online about how "THIS GAME IS MONKEY POOP" as flamboyantly as possible. Where "they just put out a *4 HOUR VIDEO* on how much this movie sucks, it must be SOOOO bad" sort of mentality came about, as though the length someone rambles about something is the mark of comprehensive coverage. "The video is long, so they MUST know what they're talking about." The sort of breathless "I am the most objective because I hate everything about this" mentality has subsided in recent years in general, in the late 2000's it felt very much like anything but relentless negativity was construed as in-genuine, like being jaded was an objective truth. You still see it when people call others who like what they don't like, "blinded by nostalgia" or "fanboys" or whatever.

I can remember getting the game an entire week early, and posting my comments online about how I enjoyed it, and getting completely SLAMMED in response. Not like "OMG you have bad taste," but the sort of disingenous bullshit amplification the internet says. The deal where people start clowning, and then someone makes an exaggerated joke like "he thinks Sonic Unleashed is better than Mario Galaxy" and then other people start chiming in and being like "unleashed fans claim it's the game of the generation" and such, despite nobody ever saying that kind of stuff. That's not a random example out of a hat, that literally happened to me. Fuck internet discourse was so damn shitty and annoying when this game released.