Sunday, February 4, 2024

Sega's Unhealthy Obsession With Classic Sonic

 


 It's not hard to see that Sega have a strange obsession with Classic Sonic. One a lot of Sonic fans are sick of. This week during Playstation's State Of Play, they revealed the strange new compilation/remaster/remake/port of Sonic Generations called Sonic X Shadow Generations. While it's great to have Shadow back in a game, re-releasing Sonic Generations once again makes no sense. It's main base game is a port of a game that was made over a decade ago. Out of all the Sonic games they could have chosen to port to modern consoles , they choose Sonic Generations. While the new Shadow content does look good, strangely that is the only part of the game that looks upgraded graphically while the main game remains unchanged. 

This makes me feel like at one point they would have been planning to remake 2005's Shadow The Hedgehog, which would be great, but half way through during development somebody said 'This is too much content let's just re-release Sonic Generations instead. Apparently this also happened to a potential remake of Sonic Adventure a couple of years ago after Iizuka expressed interest in making one, but the remake was scrapped eventually for unknown reasons and changed over to what would become Sonic Frontiers.

However Sega are wise to not use third party developers for the new Generations expansion, as previously developed remasters such as Sonic Colours Ultimate, Sonic Origins & Sonic Origins Plus drew criticism from players for being buggy, rushed, incomplete and broken. Those remasters were overseen by third party developers, especially when some of them had no previous experience with developing a Sonic game at all.

Generations has already been ported a couple of times to different consoles, from Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PC. A while ago Sega promised to "move away" from using levels like Green Hill, Chemical Plant and Sky Sanctuary because they had been using these levels in the games for the past decade. Fans are getting bored and wanting a change. While 2023's Sonic Superstars featured all new and original levels, looks like they are back at using Green Hill again with Sonic X Shadow Generations. 

2022's Sonic Frontiers was supposed to be an Anniversary game that also included Green Hill Zone, Chemical Plant Zone and Sky Sanctuary Zone. Both 2017's Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces also included Green Hill & Chemical Plant.

While Sonic X Shadow Generations does use new levels from Shadow's past, it's a shame he has to be included in a game that features Classic Sonic & Green Hill Zone again. If Sega would not stop rushing everything they make, Shadow Generations could have most certainly been its own game.

It makes no sense to me to re-release an Anniversary Game from over a decade ago and releasing it in Autumn 2024 at a time when it isn't even Sonic's anniversary for 2024.

Sega just can't resist to have an excuse to use Classic Sonic again.

Once again the Sonic timeline will be messed up because of this release and I can't wait to see how they try to get around this one.

 

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