And Generations 3DS. And Lost World 3DS. Even if you think Dimps's games were good, they haven't made a Sonic game in over 10 years. I'd be surprised if they have any of the same developers working there anymore, and their more recent Dragon Ball titles haven't exactly been hits either. This is ultimately a rumor. We don't actually know why Chronicles turned out the way it did. Matt McMuscles's video doesn't cite any sources, and AFAIK no developers have come forth stating what happened. It is true that the merger might've taken resources away from the game, but the EA merge couldn't be the cause of the game's abysmal sound design. That's just not how game development works. I won't deny that Sega's mandates fucked the game's development, but BRB's ambitions for Sonic were awfully lofty and radical to begin with. Looking at the game's original pitch, it doesn't even look like they actually cared for Sonic as an IP and were looking to reinvent it into something it wasn't, which goes back to my original point that I don't think many established developers actually like Sonic. If you wanted someone other than Sonic Team to take the reigns, you'd have to give it to fans, but the issue there is that fans are just as guilty of the "wouldn't it be cool if Sonic did X" approach as Sega is. Fans tend to make content for other fans and are less likely to find problems that need to be addressed for a more mainstream audience. Case in point: Mania has that Puyo Puyo boss fight. The only reason that boss fight works is because we, as hardcore fans, have played a bit of Mean Bean Machine or Puyo Puyo itself in our lives. But objectively speaking, it's an extremely weird design decision that has alienated more than one less-seasoned player, one that a non-fan would never make.
This is a pretty disingenuous paragraph given you portrayed the actual developer intentions for the nintendo games and for sonic you just did the writing equivalent of portraying the devs as a soyjak. Believe it or not, even games you dont like have complex reasoning behind their design philosophies and thought put behind them. Its not as black and white as you seem to think. You would know this if you actually put time into researching these games and thinking about their design, there are lots of interviews and articles online, Windii's translation blog is a good place to start.
The issue 3D Sonic has faced from the getgo is that because the games are so speed-focused, the level models tend to be extremely large and are absurdly time-consuming and expensive to develop. If you've ever wondered why Sonic games so often have completely unrelated gameplay styles like Big's fishing in SA1 or the Werehog, it's typically because Sonic Team simultaneously didn't have the time and money to keep making levels in the main style and didn't want to release a game that people would rake over the coals for taking an hour to beat. I would imagine that's the same reason they also frequently reuse assets/level design chunks, as in the Tails/Shadow levels in SA2 and the Cyber Space stages in Frontiers. It's less "Sonic Team is trend chasing and/or doesn't want to make Sonic games" and more "Sega doesn't give Sonic Team the necessary time and budget so they have to improvise"
Generations was in development for 3 years and the result was 18 high-quality, lengthy, speedy platforming stages, 7 bosses with unique assets and two difficulty settings, 90 side missions, and a pinball minigame. With no glitches or obvious cut content to speak of. Obviously there's more to it than that (reused level tropes/gimmicks, reused soundtrack, minimal storyline, etc) but if they can make that amount of content in 3 years, then Frontiers should've theoretically had far more, since it was in development for twice the time. Instead, what we got was a bunch of chunks of 12-year-old levels we've played before, wrapped up in an empty, boring, open environment. Sonic Team doesn't need more time or money, they need to figure out how to work within the limits they have. They don't need a ballooned budget for them trying to be Zelda in order to make a great Sonic game.
I feel like I remember reading that the "genre roulette" in Adventure 1 at least was meant to show off all the different things the Dreamcast could do, but that could just have been hearsay/speculation, and I could be misremembering. The wiki (without a source) says there were other reasons for the Werehog's existence: The truth is probably a combination of a lot of things. Between technical demonstrations, unending attempts to widen the brand's appeal, trend chasing (which they are 100% guilty of, let's not fool ourselves), apathy, too small budgets, and too short dev times, we've got a healthy list of suspects for why 3D Sonic games just don't have the juice. I think there's also something to be said about quality of ideas, and the skill/talent in implementing those ideas. Maybe they do want to make good shit, but they're just bad at it. Personally, I like my baseless theory that Sonic Team is a money laundering front.
I really don't like the budget/time excuse (WRT the levels) considering the whole point of the boost formula was to make it so you could blow through all that oh-so-expensive level design as fast as possible in the first place. They willingly chose the most expensive option and easily could've just done something else if it was such an issue. I think Frontiers' lack of original levels just represents Sega's lack of confidence in the games post-Forces pre-movie but at least that tide seems to be turning.
Yeah Sonic's speed has always been a major limiting factor for the series, and Frontiers' design is just the latest attempt at trying to figure out designing around that limitation. Generations and Forces are probably the only 3D games that didn't try any kind of padding and were made as straight Sonic experiences, and they still had to come up short in some regard (Gens with good level length but only had 18, Forces with 30 levels but most are barely a minute)
Even if they did put effort into trying to figure out the gameplay afterward, my point is that the "how to expand the gameplay" idea didn't come first in the Sonic titles listed in my examples. The idea they kickstart from is how to enrich Sonic the character. That is not a knock on the idea of trying to suit to what would be cool for your character to do, but I do consider it a bad place to start if the priority should be to make games. Like, let's be real here. If they were thinking with Sonic's gameplay first, they might've landed on the Werehog's concepts by thinking of how to give Sonic a stretchy grapple move in his high-speed platforming instead of making a separate brawler game to showcase it. If they were fully interested in the "open zone" promise in Frontiers enhancing Sonic's gameplay, they would've probably thought of a better way than rails/springs floating over an empty field, and probably altogether avoided the combat / skill tree system. Now Black Knight was trying to figure out how to expand on the Secret Rings engine's gameplay, I'll give you that much, but I think it's hurt by there being no real gameplay advantage to Sonic having a sword that he didn't already have with the homing attack, the spin dash, the boost, etc; it's a cosmetic choice at best and a waggle fest at worst. But I feel like my point stands. Much of these ideas sound more like things people would think is cool for Sonic to do. Sonic swinging a sword fighting knights sounds cool to people. So does Sonic turning into a werewolf. So does Super Sonic DBZ battling a mech to screamo music. I'm sure there was a lot of thought put into some of these concepts (I for one don't hate the Werehog because I can see the vision a little bit), but I know a lot of these concepts either blatantly contrast or are redundant to Sonic's gameplay. None of the execution here feels like it was additive to the Sonic experience. I don't have to read developer diaries to assess that.
It's a case by case scenario. Middle mouth is kind of hard to make it look right, but it can be done, assuming Sonic's mostly facing towards the camera. Side mouth's obviously the iconic look for Sonic, but Sonic Team really needs to stop forcing it so hard in recent games. And then I do really like no mouth, it's a great way to express when Sonic's focussing or serious.
For the Sonic Chronicles soundtrack, I remember there was always mention of the originally composed soundtrack being nixed when someone on the music team quit during develooment, but trying to look back at old archived versions of the Sega and Bioware forums where most of talk was for any leads now tends to be much harder since the originals are gone. Quick glance and I didn't find related topics off hand, but I'll keep that in mind. As for the merger with EA, their handheld divison did shift to the DS Mass Effect game next immediately and a cost analysis for DS projected sales vs profit margins did end up with the project cancelled and the department being partly axed then retooled towards mobile stuff. So even without more corroboration it is at least plausible the budget took a hit or Chronicles was rushed out the door for a more popular internal peojects to get started. Even if it's all Speculative right now. Definitely something to be dug more into. Also for the DIMPS dbz stuff, Xenoverse 2 is still seeing support all these years later, and the CARDDASS games tend to top charts in Japan. They definitely found a niche and have sat comfortably there. On the Sonic front it does seem like after Big Red Button they have shied away from outsourcing as much. I do miss Dimps games for nostalgic reasons, but I will admit there were definitely a lot of flaws but I wouldn't mind seeing a return of 2D modern Sonic in the near future by someone. Also to DefinitiveDubs point about Frontiers, I think it also goes to show other internal issues at Sega. With Forces they had stated that a lot of new hires and younger developers came on. They had a couple returning veterans with subsequent games. The issue is it seems like they don't have that cohesive a staff, unified of a vision, or the general level of experience they might have once had. It almost feels like they are trying to reinvent the wheel but maybe it's still an actual learning period for some. Not good for what is supposed to be Sega's flagship franchise, but hopefully does lead to a better course moving forwards.
All of these have their purpose. Middle mouth is good for silly or shocked expressions. Hidden mouth is good for stern or intense expressions. For everything else, there's the side mouth. Sega was right to consider it the default, but maybe a bit lazy for never parting from it lol.
This is the first I've heard of someone actually quiting in the middle of the project. The dodgy factoid that's always regurgitated is that they lost the files for the original version of the soundtrack before release and had to throw it out, but I don't know how that makes any sense when they have like 7 streamed audio tracks + the cutscene music that sounds pretty finished to me. Also Matt Mcmuscles' Chronicles video is a big fat stack of nothing and he should be ashamed of himself for putting it out. "Game bad, models resource.png, okay it's time to talk about Ken Penders who had nothing to do with this game's development"
Yeah, and a lot of online Discourse of the Chronicles ost recursively links back to unsourced stuff on the Retro Wiki. So that's always a thing.
The development of Chronicles I'd be fascinated to learn more about. I had the game when I was younger and got bored of it extremely quickly, abandoning the title after Green Hill. I was surprised to learn the game ends on a bit of a bleak cliffhanger before awkwardly having Tails and Sonic break the 4th Wall listing a bunch of credits. It's such a fascinatingly strange choice to end the title on given the weird mood whip-lash that gives. Yeah, I'm not sure I quite buy that story either. Surely they must have had an earlier build of the game floating around somewhere they could've swiped the music from? The story of the original composer leaving the project sounds a bit more logical. From my understanding, the reason a majority of the in-game music we got sounds 'off' is because the sequenced music doesn't properly call the right instruments in a lot of cases, which isn't actually documented on the Wiki either and lacks a more in-depth explanation. I dunno if it means anything, but the primary composer for the game was someone named Steven Sim. According to MobyGames, Chronicles seems to be the only DS title he did any musical work on. Maybe it was a mistake on their end due to inexperience of some kind?
about frontiers not having a unified vision... why did so much of the promo art have a japanese painting style? Did that have anything to do with the actual game? It seemed so out of place to me.
