I totally agree that the American approach to Sonic was corporate, cynical and driven by the desire to acheive optimal profit margins above all else. I just don't agree with this narrative that Glorious Superior Nippon's approach to Sonic was a beautiful bastion of unrestrained creative liberty until it was brutally ravaged and mutilated beyond recognition by the evil, greedy Westoids. Palas put it well; Why are you people acting like Sega of Japan was run by middle aged men in suits any less than SoA was?
Yeah it's weird to resent SOA's changes when SOJ intentionally left them to their own devices to begin with. And I just don't buy that SOA's changes didn't contribute to Sonic's increased sales compared to Japan. Americans kids liked stuff with a bit of grit in those days. If they just copied over the SOJ art it could've been seen as lame and 'too much like Mario' by that fickle early 90s demographic. You can think it's all ugly and horrible if you want but it was a smart choice, at least at the time.
My post was not a morality judgement on SOJ vs SOA. It was about the fact that SOA literally did not make Sonic the Hedgehog the Video Game. The video game is what I care about. It's what I spent my time playing and thinking about. It's what I've bought again and again on different platforms just to have it on hand. It has elements captured again in future titles in the video game series developed by the talented folks at SOJ. The boxart, marketing and the cartoons by and large do not embody these elements and are entirely superfluous to that experience. They could have been an extension of that experience, but instead they have nothing to do with it and this creates tangible friction. That's what I'm discussing. This is not hard to grasp.
Mario had lots of superfluous cartoon shows in the 80s/90s and it didn't and doesn't matter. The 'friction' the SOA art potentially causes online doesn't matter anymore than the 'friction' any other Sonic-related subject the internet causes. It's cool that you really don't like the SOA art but you're never going to get people who do like the SOA art to see it this dramatically. Sega hiding away the Genesis boxart would just be a bad idea. Those games as they were sold were paramount in Sonic's early success and overall legacy.
As a Portuguese who was 10 years old when the first Sonic game was released and in a country where Atari 2600 clones and Famiclones were plentiful and quite affordable (that's how I first played Super Mario Bros.) I can tell you that we kids at the time didn't give a damn about the art ... what really stood out was the game and its graphics ... truly incredible for the time ...
Unleashed's level design is horrible. And I'm not just talking about the DLC stuff, like Cool Edge Act 3. This goes for the main acts as well. I recently played through Unleashed Recompiled. I had the works installed as mods. Tighter controls, better physics, better progression, foreign input system, infinite lives, yadda yadda. And it goes a long way towards fixing the game. But my god, playing this after Generations shows how awful the daytime levels are in comparison. Maybe that's hyperbole, but after my 300th attempt at S-ranking Arid Sands, I had to rant about it because I think people see videos of Unleashed daytime levels, assume they're the same quality as Generations, and wonder why there's no PC port. It'd be because of how cluttered the levels are where you're constantly running into walls and random objects when you're not boosting, or how many bottomless pits there are when, heaven forbid, you miss a jump you had a fraction of a fraction of a second to react to in time. Or for bouncing into people and running backwards for no apparent reason. Or for how buggy it is where randomly, those QTE ramps will fail to register your success and send you to a lower path anyway, or you're going so fast that you phase through objects like springs. But I could forgive all of it if the S ranks weren't so unfair. It's one thing to ask me to beat these stages without dying, it's another to ask me to not get hit even once. There is simply way too much shit to keep track of for the entirety of these stages, coming at you too fast to react to without memorizing every aspect of the stage, to expect 100% pure perfection from the player for the entire duration of it. SA2 had really hard A-ranks too, but the difference there is you had far more control over Sonic. There are times where I've been locked out of my controls for reasons I can't even fathom, like not being allowed to boost, or not being allowed to jump until the game says so. Generations isn't like that, at least not often. SA2's stages were relatively short in comparison, too, and they don't ask you to take blind leaps of faith in order to find the "correct" path. This is why when you get an E-rank in SA2, you feel the need to improve, whereas when you get one in Unleashed, you feel insulted and cheated. People harp on Generations onward for having S-ranks so easy a baby could get them, but this is the opposite end of the spectrum where getting S-ranks is unreasonable and unfun. Why does the challenge have to be all or nothing? Why can't there be a middle ground? Is it weird that, at least with mods, I find the Werehog stages more enjoyable? Even with the shitty camera and lack of a drop shadow, they still don't make me want to break my controller in half.
I do agree that the Unleashed daytime level design could've used more time in the kitchen, and that Generations (and SxS) leaves it in the dust. The way he twitches when you push the gameplay also ruins the experience compared to the later boost games. About the S ranks though, I think they’re easy once you realize it's more about score than time. You still have to hit a certain time, but it's not actually hard to get to. As long as you grab as many rings and take out enemies as you can, and hit checkpoints with high speed, you'll get that S rank even if you mess up or slow down. For example, the first time I played Eggmanland, it took me over 38 minutes to beat it and I still got an S rank. Here's me doing a practice run for the hot dog missions. Despite shaving off 28 minutes, I got an A rank because I skipped most of the werehog fights. I remembered that when I couldn’t get an S rank on the first stage, even with a decent time. But I was avoiding enemies as much as I could to get there faster. Once I destroyed a few, it finally bumped me up a rank.
I understand score is what ultimately matters, but you still can't hit the lower paths. That not only eats up your time, it prevents you from hitting trick rings. And some of those alternate paths require clairvoyance to get to. And if you get hit? Forget about it. There goes your ring bonus.
This might be an unpopular opinion nowadays but I think Unleashed has atrocious writing with the worst Sonic character of all time (Chip).
Its so wild that the people who are actually freaking out about the fact the world has actually been blown up are only doing so because they've been possessed. The writing in Unleashed is... I dunno. It's not awful. I think it's fine? It was the first time Sonic Team tried for comedy, although it wasn't until the next game, Colours, that they changed writing staff and had the American script written first. For something that's obviously meant to be light-hearted and easy-going, it works well enough. The jokes don't usually feel as juvenile as those that would come in subsequent games but they still fall flat. And any attempts any emotional writing, be that Sonic and Chips friendships, sadness when Chip gets hits memory back etc, all feel very unearned. None of it's offensive though. However, Unleashed did give us the only in-game incarnation of Orbot (or SA-55 as he was then known) that was any good. Dude was a sassy douche winding up Eggman on purpose. But ever since then he's been portrayed as bumbling, lazy and incompetent, which I can't stand. And Cubot... Christ. Kill off Cubot.
On my last run I realized the storyline just kinda feels unfinished before you get to the tone and dialogue. The game stops giving the different villages, bosses and gaia enemies cutscenes like halfway through and just shuts up until its over. Combine that with the generic western animated film tone and it both doesn't feel very "sonic" and doesn't feel very strong in it's own right. There's some stuff I like about it though. I never grew fond of chip but I think him and Sonic's character acting during cutscenes get off a sort of "brotherhood" vibe I never got from Sonic and Tails with how clean their relationship usually is.
Ain't this doubly so with the idea that the Hedgehog Engine was devised to mimic Pixar's rendering capabilities, but in a live game-engine format? I vaguely recall a presentation on HE and it's goals including something along those lines... Or maybe it was just hearsay spread around over the years / I'm remembering some completely other thing wrong and just attributed it to Sonic.
Tonally, I think Unleashed hits just right. It's not too edgy like 06 was, but it's not too "we're trying way too hard to be a Cartoon Network show" like Colors. Yeah it is kinda silly that nobody in the world seems to care about the world splitting apart, but it's more about the globalist "We Are The World" metaphor anyway. And I personally like Chip, and I think 99% of people's problems with him, much like Silver, can be boiled down to the English voice. Comparing it to the Japanese voice is (as usual for this series) like night and day (no pun intended). He's much cuter, and his dialogue isn't as cringey.
This motivated me to look up the Japanese cutscenes, and while I don't really find Chip any more tolerable in Nihongo, I'm now absolutely in love with the deeper voice Junichi uses for the Werehog. He sounds like such a classic 70s - 80s anime hero, it's wonderful.
That's cause it's not actually Junichi Kanemaru. They had another VA, Tomokazu Seki, voice Sonic in his Werehog form in Japanese instead.
