#sonic forces is. a game that exists certainly. but shadow is shown to care about sonic there too

[eventhoughthestarisgone]

every time someone assumes that sonic and shadow hate each other a faerie dies

[bltngames]

Gut Check: Sonic Central 2021

When Sega announced Sonic Mania, there was an undeniable electricity. A moment of, "wait, WHAT?!" upon seeing who was working on that game and what it looked like. With the way it builds up and then unveils itself, it was the perfect reveal. I'll admit, as a Sonic fan, it even made me a little misty-eyed. We did it. They did it. I may have my complaints about Sonic Mania now that it's out, but those are weird, personal complaints that I still haven't entirely, accurately unpacked. If someone told me Sonic Mania was their favorite Sonic game ever, I would smile and nod, and think, "yeah, it was kind of amazing they pulled that off." And then I'd think of that reveal again, and the impact it had, and how the music swells at just the right points. The hearts of many Sonic fans soared that day.

I cannot say the same for the Sonic Central 2021 announcement stream. And to tell the truth, this isn’t an article I really wanted to write (though some of that is because I had immediate knee-jerk reactions over on my personal blog).

Look, I get it. There was a pandemic last year. It's still a pandemic right now, actually. Things were weird and will continue to be weird for at least another year, possibly even two or three, as the effects of covid on the work place environment continue to ripple outwards. But the thing is, this isn't my first rodeo, and it's not Sega's first time botching something like this. Five years ago, it was Sonic's 25th anniversary (the fun number everyone treats as a real serious milestone) and while that live event was where the magical Sonic Mania reveal took place, there’s plenty of clips of how awkward and bizarre the rest of that event was. Some of the misplaced hype for this 30th Anniversary can be blamed on a hungry fandom who was getting punchy without any news, but this is also the company that gave us Sonic 2006 as part of Sonic’s 15th anniversary celebration, you know? There’s almost a precedent being set here, where Sega talks a big game only to trip and spill their chili all over the carpet.

So what do we have, then? Beyond the brilliantly deranged idea of putting Mascot Suit Sonic in to several games and hiding a port of Sonic the Fighters inside of a different, $70 game, Sonic Central really revolved around three major announcements: Sonic Colors Ultimate Edition, Sonic Origins Collection, and a mysterious teaser that almost instantly stopped being mysterious once it was discovered how little Sega did to protect its secret.

Sonic Colors Ultimate Edition was definitely one of Sega’s worse kept secrets. It had leaked from multiple sources weeks ahead of the announcement, and managed to make a pretty underwhelming display on stream. The issue was something common with remasters of this type -- it’s something I guess we could call “The George Lucas Effect,” where needlessly twiddling with an already-finished product slowly makes it worse. We’ve seen this before -- the lighting in “Batman: Return to Arkham” looks noticeably worse than the original Arkham Asylum trilogy, and “Mass Effect Legendary Edition” boasts improved skin rendering and higher resolution textures that just make those games look more inhuman.

For a big release like this from a major publisher, deadlines must be met, which means there’s little time to delicately repaint textures or make sure lighting looks totally correct. Still, more often than not, preserving the original visual identity of a game is more important than whatever clumsy touch-ups most publishers put these games through. For Colors Ultimate, this manifested in significantly darker lighting and lower quality lightbloom, dramatically impacting the mood of some levels.

In the days since the Sonic Central stream, evidence has mounted that the trailer shown during the stream featured an older build than anticipated. Better looking screenshots of a more recent build surfaced from Famitsu, and a technical artist working on the game revealed short video clips through an ArtStation account that made the game look a bit more accurate to how it originally appeared in 2010 (that Artstation post has now been removed). Though, if we’re being honest, whatever style of lightbloom they’re using still makes the game look pretty washed out. Hopefully that’s still being tweaked.

What’s most curious is how much they’re actually changing about Sonic Colors. The more we learn the less it sounds like a port and more like a complete recoding of the game using Godot, an open source game engine similar to Unity. Promised features include not only enhanced framerates and “improved controls” (whatever that means), but even a rudimentary cosmetics system, with Sonic being able to wear different shoes and gloves. Other additions include the ability to race against Metal Sonic, and a restructured lives system, where Tails rescues you from bottomless pits. It’s a far cry from the days of Taxman and Stealth’s Retro Engine remakes of Sonic 1 and 2 for mobile phones, where it was said that Sega rejected simple bonus features like a boss rush mode because they’d rather “preserve the original experience.” For Sonic Colors Ultimate Edition, it appears they’re going hog wild changing and adding new things.

On the subject of Retro Engine remakes of classic Sonic games, we have the Sonic Origins Collection. It’s not really known if these are the same "Retro Engine" versions made popular on phones and tablets, but they have confirmed that all five games will be in 16:9 wide screen and have additional bonus features. That certainly sounds like Retro Engine to me, but we’ll need to wait and see. The Retro Engine versions had a lot of little nips and tucks that made those games even better than they originally were, so it would be great to have those specific versions on a proper console at long last.

The big shocker here is the inclusion of Sonic the Hedgehog 3. In recent years, Sega has avoided even referencing Sonic 3 in anything -- it was missing in action from the console versions of the Genesis Classics Collection, Sega rejected a Taxman and Stealth Retro Engine remake, it was missing from the Genesis Mini, and Sega even seemed adverse to referencing Sonic 3 in casual conversation. The example I always use is the “Sega Tower Mini”, a fake accessory for the Genesis Mini that included a miniaturized Sega CD, 32X, and a fake cartridge of Sonic & Knuckles. But, instead of locking on to a Sonic 3 cart, the Sega Tower Mini came with a Sonic 1 cartridge instead. There almost seemed to be an agenda to bury its existence.

That has changed over the last few months, as Sega’s social media accounts have begun hinting at Sonic 3 in things like wallpapers and character profiles. Now that we know the game is finally coming back for real, we’re faced with a question: what of the music? Depending on who at Sega you ask and when, there have been opposing claims that Michael Jackson both was and was not involved in composing some of the game’s soundtrack. As I mentioned in my video a couple years ago, it sounded like there was some legal trouble, as Jackson collaborators Scirocco Jones and Bobby Brooks were claiming Sega owed them unpaid royalties for their very real, credited work on Sonic 3. Has Sega finally made peace with those two? Or have the offending music tracks been replaced, now that an alternate, prototype version of the Sonic 3 soundtrack has been recovered? Only time will tell, I suppose.

It’s exciting to think that this may mean the Retro Engine versions could finally be seeing a home console release, but it’s hard to ignore what a mess this will look like on the consumer end, given just how often some of these games have been re-released in the last few years. For Nintendo Switch owners, it’ll be possible to buy Sonic 1 and 2 as part of the Sega Ages collection, as part of the Genesis Classics Collection, and now as part of this new Sonic Origins collection. And each of those versions will have been produced independently of each other, with different features and extras. Sega Ages Sonic 2 features the drop dash from Sonic Mania and a special ring challenge mode, whereas the Genesis Classics version of Sonic 2 has emulator rewinds and a mirror mode. Sega has always leaned on re-releases of old Sonic games, but never has the market been this over-saturated.

Which lastly brings us to the stream's "One More Thing" reveal -- a cryptic video of Sonic running through a forest followed by some glyphs. Sega's always been a fan of mysterious promotions for Sonic games, dating all the way back to 2000's reveal of Sonic Adventure 2, where they spent months teasing the identity of Shadow the Hedgehog and his role in the game. The teaser shown during Sonic Central was so lacking in context and content that I honestly found it difficult to care. In order to set up a mystery, you should probably actually, like... tease something mysterious, right? There wasn’t enough here to grab on to.

You also have to consider the fact that, after the poor reception to games like Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces, Sega doesn't have much goodwill to cash in on cryptic hints these days. It's not a good time to be shy about what the next Sonic game is going to be.

Graciously, the mystery didn't last long. The community ended up getting their hands on the source-quality version of the teaser given to the press, and noticed the file's embedded project header mentioned it was for something called "Rangers." That same day, Sega accidentally referred to a "Sonic Rangers" in a press release that was later scrubbed of that detail. This name was quickly cross-referenced with imageboard posts made last year from people who were apparently in a focus group test for a game called "Sonic Rangers." When the posts were originally made there was no reason to believe they were legitimate, but combined with the newfound context of Sega confirming the name, it began to paint a picture of the game that just might be true.

Going by the alleged focus group posts -- one in August of last year, and another in January of this year -- Sonic Rangers is an open world game where players run around a semi-realistic fantasy setting, completing puzzles and doing rudimentary quests. A new ability was talked about named "SpinCycle," where Sonic runs loops around enemies, sounding similar to the "paraloop" ability from Sonic Team’s NiGHTS: Into Dreams for the Sega Saturn. After completing puzzles in the open world, players can enter portals to "cyberspace" levels, which were described as being the most similar to levels from Sonic Generations. Completing a cyberspace level earned you a Chaos Emerald, and after collecting all seven, a boss could be faced: a massive titan the player had to fight as Super Sonic. Both focus group posts implied they understood this was only a small piece to demonstrate the mechanics.

For many years, I was against the idea of an open world Sonic game. There was definitely a fad during the PS2 and Xbox 360 eras where developers were trying to make all games open world. Racing games, platformers, sports games like Tony Hawk, it didn't matter. Everyone was trying to copy Grand Theft Auto's success, whether it made sense or not. This led to a lot of boring, forgettable open world games -- like Total Overdose, or State of Emergency. Whenever the community would bring up the possibility of an open world Sonic game, it felt more like cashing in on that fad rather than a desire to have a good game.

But as the dust settled on the open world gold rush and developers figured out what worked and what didn't, I began to have a change of heart. Sonic games generally have problems with repetition. Usually, there's a resource or some other collectable that must be gathered before you can unlock the next level, and that means replaying levels you've already finished multiple times. I've been developing a theory about this: in addition to padding the clock out in order to make the games longer, I think they're also trying to coax the player to replay levels for faster times or perfecting scores, because I'd argue that’s where most of the real fun is in Modern Sonic games. But not everybody is always into that, and depending on how it's presented, it can feel like tedious busy work.

Racing games eventually figured this out. Whereas before, racing games had discrete time trial modes that let you learn the layout of a track and practice to get faster times, the advent of an open world did away with that. By repeatedly traveling between locations on the map, players learn the layout of streets and roads naturally without it feeling so much like work. This could also be theoretically applied to Sonic games, where the grind of replaying stages over and over could be mitigated by incorporating it into the natural traversal of an open world.

The problem is, that's not exactly what the Sonic Rangers leak claims. It's an open world game, sure, but from the way it sounds, it also includes traditional linear Sonic levels in their own separate little sub-world. The problem is still there, just buried under another layer of abstraction.

But it's important to remember that Sonic Rangers is probably a year and a half away. For a professional game development studio with hundreds of employees, even a few months can lead to dramatic, sweeping changes. The people who were part of the focus test also say as much -- if Sega was getting feedback on Sonic Rangers all the way back in August (or as some posts claim, even March) of last year, there is plenty of time for them to course-correct and get things right before its release next year.

Now, I'm not dumb. This is Sonic the Hedgehog we're talking about. Statistically speaking, there are more bad Sonic games than good ones, and I say that as someone who was around and can remember the kind of impact Sonic had back when he first debuted. I know some of you out there will say things like, "Sonic Heroes was a good game!" -- but consider that by 1990's standards, Sonic the Hedgehog was as big as today's Call of Duty, or Fortnite. Sonic wasn't just a big deal, he was one of the biggest deals in all of gaming, and his games were golden. That was 30 years ago, and games like Sonic Heroes are a big step down in quality. Heck, even Sonic Heroes is going on 20 years ago. Getting something like Sonic Mania nowadays feels more like a happy accident than setting up any kind of precedent or return to form. There is a bare minimum skepticism that must be maintained with these games, otherwise you're setting yourself up for more heartbreak.

And I've always maintained that a lot of the bad Sonic games at least started with a good core idea. You can always see the potential in what they were attempting, but because of either time constraints, budget limitations, or some other weak link in their development pipeline, they never reach that potential once they end up on store shelves. Which, really, makes things even more heartbreaking. There are only so many times you can watch someone drop the ball before it starts to affect you.

There's still a long road ahead of Sonic Rangers. Let's see what E3 brings.