#I don't know if this counts as 'analysis' per se but it's long and detailed enough that it might as well go in the tag

[descendant-of-truth]

Heads up, I'm gonna be discussing Sonic x Shadow Generations leaks below the cut, so if you don't want extra-early spoilers then just feel free to skip this one for now.

That being said: it's come to my attention that the Sonic Generations portion of the game is, in fact, being rewritten... but not reanimated. Meaning that it's just new dialogue on top of the pre-existing animations.

This is. quite possibly the worst route they could have taken. not to mention the weirdest??

I can see what the train of thought most likely was, to be fair. Shadow Generations is being written by Ian Flynn, while the original game was written by Ken Pontac and Warren Graff, and their versions of the characters are very different from Flynn's. Clearly, they wanted some sense of internal consistency between the writing of the re-release. That part is normal.

But then, I guess they just... didn't have the budget, or interest, or whatever it was they needed to reanimate everything from scratch. So they just added some lipsyncing when necessary and called it a day.

The problem is that doing it this way fundamentally kneecaps what you can actually do with a rewrite. The revised dialogue I saw in a video doesn't feel any less stilted or awkward, and the only thing it really changes is giving the characters slightly more reasonable priorities, or filling in gaps in their knowledge that were there before.

And those aren't bad things to do, but it's... kind of the ONLY thing they can do. It doesn't fix the game's story. It's barely putting a band-aid over it. All it does is read like an amateur fan project, especially with the addition of Modern Sonic responding to his friends after he saves them where he didn't before; I'm convinced I've seen videos of fans doing that exact thing in the past.

Yes, everyone knows that the few seconds of silence while he gestures felt unnatural, but so does trying to fit a relevant sentence over such a short animation. The official attempt isn't going much better, adding this really out-of-place and forced "alright!" when Sonic gives Knuckles a thumbs-up, and it doesn't flow naturally with the rest of what he was saying at all. It's there seemingly just to fill the space, so that there's no moment where Sonic is animating and not talking. It's bad.

Not to mention, I kind of assumed that the reason Modern Sonic was silent during those segments was because Classic Sonic was. You can play either Act of each stage in whatever order you want, so you could rescue the others as either Sonic. It would give people an unfair incentive to always play Act 2 second if it meant they would get more dialogue that way, and they would miss out on Classic's interactions as a result. Sure, neither of their interactions are anything to write home about, but... that's not really the point, here.

Trying to insert new personalities and character dynamics into animations that were meant for something different only works if you're doing a fanmade parody. Doing it in an official capacity feels... weirdly insulting to both the original writers and animators, honestly?

Like, no, that's not the script they spent hours animating for. That's not the tone they were trying to convey with those character movements. No, Sonic isn't face-palming in exasperation because Amy's too focused on "saving Sonic next time," he's doing that because she's joking about how scared she was that she'd never get to flirt with him again. Those are not comparable interactions.

I understand why they wanted to change the script, I really do, I don't even like the original version but for crying out loud, swapping out the dialogue does not make the game more interesting. There's a reason the story felt utterly bland and lifeless and an extremely large part of that was the animation and cinematography. The white space that most of the cutscenes took place in was literally just the side-scrolling hub world, they had maybe five square inches that each character could move around in and it was really, really boring.

A rewrite of Sonic Generations, especially with the goal of making it an equivalent experience to Shadow Generations, desperately needs more than this. Shadow's story is going all-out with the animations and camera angles and the severity of the situation and the deep-dive into Shadow's character and Sonic gets. this. a slap in the face to the original writers with no attempt to meaningfully improve upon their story.

It doesn't solve the problem of Sonic's story being jarringly lackluster in comparison to Shadow's. If anything, it's just going to stand out as being even weirder, because if this was all they were going to do, then... why did they even bother? What was the point? Does Tails recognizing the Chemical Plant from Sonic 2 mean anything when there's no new scenes that actually take place in it? Are we really making "Sonic References: the Game" into nothing more than a vehicle for Slightly More Accurate Sonic References and Nothing Else??

And what really gets me about this is that I would've gone nuts for an official Generations rewrite as a kid. My Sonic Generations Phase(TM) was both extremely long-lasting and filled to the brim with others' fan projects, because I couldn't get enough of this idea of Sonic and Tails meeting their past selves while trying to save the very fabric of reality. It's such an inherently cool and fun idea!

But what I was invested in as a kid was just that: an idea of a story. The reason I was obsessively reading and watching fanfic about it was because the actual game gave me nothing to work with. Now, it seems we're still getting nothing, just in a different flavor. Like, plain oats, but this time they're gluten free so that means they're totally what I wanted, right?

No. I didn't want a Sonic Generations fandub that happened to be paid for. I wanted a story. It should not be this difficult to give me one.

(To clarify, this is not a diss on Ian Flynn himself or his ability to write. I think he was given a task that was impossible to do well and I'm mad at whoever made this decision)