Summer of Sonic (7): Sonic Generations

If you're going to launch a title that hopes to cash in on legacy and nostalgia, Sega has essentially built a road map to do it, and how not to do it. But we've yelled about Sonic 4 Episode 1 enough, at least until Sonic 4 Episode 2 comes up and it is coming up fast. No, bae, it's Generations time.

And it's about time. Also, it's about time.

Sonic Generations has a lot of unique elements for me, first and foremost I don't think I played a non-early era Sonic game for the entire period between the release of S3&K and Generations. I watched someone play Sonic Adventure and thought that isn't for me and wrote the entire franchise off. Took it outside and buried it in the sidelot. I might have played Rush, but that's not a main console release.

Except I played Sonic 4, Episode 1, back then. And I thought - I'm not kidding here - that I'd downloaded some sort of knock off game.

I had no experience with Sonic in 3D up until I fired up Sonic Generations, and I glumly fired it up, resigning myself to being forced to play Sonic in 3D, which I'd heard so many horror stories about. I mean, I've seen the Sonic R video Jontron did. I'd read about Sonic 2006, a game so bad it still stands the test of time as bad. Sonic in 3D was a place I didn't want to go, but the promise of Sonic in 2D made to the old timey standard instead of whatever nightmare alternate reality had...

Look, I promise, no more Sonic 4. That's back here, and after this review, we have a bonus review here and the next review will be here. The next review is more Sonic 4.


So you're going to assume, like me, like I did, that I hate Sonic in 3d. You've even got the foreknowledge of having read my pained whining about sonic adventure 2, or you don't, because that's a terrible review I should just delete. But yes, that's a safe assumption, I mean, look at me gosh over Sonic 3 and Knuckles. I must hate Sonic in 3D. I must hate Generations.

Plot-twist: This game is fantastic.

Biggest plot-twist: I actually prefer the 3d sections.

Anyway, for those who know Generations not, the game is a celebration of Sonic's adventures over at the time the last twenty years. It collects full levels from nine games, for better or worse, and offers you a version in 2d and in 'Modern'. The game is visually incredible, and the screen shots can't do the game justice.

I mean, this is ... Seriously one of the best looking games, ever, in motion. When you're hitting breakneck speeds and everything is coming together the game is actual bliss to look at. Unfortunately, it's not astounding when you're moving slow, and levels can have a weird sense of flow.  Generally, it's nice looking, but the engine is built for speed you won't see elsewhere. When you get to stop and hop sections, it can be kinda jarring even.

The music in Sonic Generations is a collection of remixes of music from the nine games it is built from, so there's 18 tracks, plus you can jukebox up any tune from elsewhere in the game. And there's a lot of elsewhere, as many of the challenges award songs - I think about 20+. Audio direction here is a return to form, collecting the best tracks from years of Sonic and bringing them to their apex. Nostalgia aside, Chemical Plant, Crisis City and City Escape all sound fantastic. I might be biased in my love of Rooftop Run's tracks.

2d Sonic is generally very close to the original Sonic; the physics aren't perfect but are better than Sonic 4 or Sonic ATS. Classic Sonic is pretty 'eh' in his own levels but many of the other six, which are modern levels,  really bring up his best. The reason they're so great, and while this is shared with the classic levels but less noticeable, is the camera pans back or zooms in to improve viewing quality. The levels are in fact in 3D, and often alternate paths can be seen in the background, or twist off from the foreground.  It basically takes everything good about classic Sonic and gives the developers more options for making the levels impressive both in gameplay and visuals.

Modern Sonic is a bit hard to precisely describe since his gameplay is conceptually built from a larger pool of more diverse games. Expressed simply, Modern Sonic does have some speed platforming in both 2d and 3d, as well as what I can best describe as "rollercoastering". The rollercoastering stuff is just absurd, when you get moving it feels fantastic, and it flips between the three as well as stuff that feels like mutations of those styles, pretty much constantly.

I would compare these levels to what I'd seen in Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes, but refined to the point of being the difference between wheat in the field and a delicious italian roll. Well, maybe not that far, but the frustrations of SA2 are reduced to one tenth.The 3D sections can still get frustrating in that way, but you are going really, really fast.

The game has 9 zones, each with a singular act - or course, essentially - for either Classic or Modern Sonic. Once both acts of a zone are completed, there are various challenge courses, which can take a variety of forms and re-use elements of their attached zone without necessarily fully repeating the course. There's also a couple references to other games or zones not used in the main game. These unlock additional songs to use as well as artwork and, rarely, a couple of extra skills you can "buy" and equip. You have a limited number of skill slots, and they're essentially to either make the game easier or to do personal scoreboard only time records.

As such, the game is relatively short - the levels, once you've got them down, range from a minute long to seven or eight - but has an abundance of content to fool around with that isn't necessarily "a level to pass". You need to do one challenge level per zone to move forward in the game, or maybe more, I never felt forced and usually did a couple of them as they unlocked. Some of them are really satisfying or just goofy silliness. A couple are a bit annoying or weird, but they're probably the best way to include the characters people dislike sort of in the background. Don't like Rouge? Don't do her stage. Easy.

S-Ranking levels, which is an A-rank (best speed) plus a perfect run, is just about right difficulty-wise. Sonic Generations understands if you want to do super awesome, there's leaderboards and incredibly hard to reach scores to aim for, but for most people, just doing the S-ranks and challenges is enough to feel satisfied when it comes to completing the game.

One of the nicest elements of this game is just the raw variety of zones and themes expressed. A ruin floating in the sky, massive pipes to run across, a city built in a valley, a european sprawl... There's lots and lots to enjoy. I may not like all of the levels, but I like looking at all of the levels, which is the most nostalgia driven thing about this game.

That's not to say Generations is flawless or doesn't have more than a few oddities. The game's skill / upgrade system is strange, and while I appreciate the additional depth, it often ends up feeling really weird. One of the upgrades, for example, is the ability to "have a lightning shield". You have one in your inventory. It ends up feeling odd un-Sonic, and dividing the upgrades between Classic and Modern feels like a bit of a cop out.

One of my biggest complaints about SG is, simply put, the levels chosen. Part of this simply my own personal nostalgia; Sky Sanctuary isn't nearly as memorable to me as several other S3&K levels - I think it's not even in my top ten out of 14 levels - but also there's a bit of a predication for going for the level "people remember". Three of them are "first levels", which is lame, and Chemical Plant - which mind you is an awesome level - is one that was in television ads.

But, but, but, I'm going to link a video here about something Sonic Generations is trying to do that is very difficult to  handily articulate: Sonic is a game of Generations. (I disagree, for what it is worth, that Mario is "effortlessly" anything. The revisionism of nintendo fans never ceases to bemuse me; Nintendo didn't exactly do great in sales with three of their last six consoles and yet we're to believe Nintendo has been dominating for years, with people claiming a console outsold three to one by its competitor was a "hit"... Nintendo has fought long and hard for where they are) Yeah, I think Sonic 3&K is the "best" game, but my subjective opinion does not account for something it can't account for - I played the first Sonic game near release - that being that other people have had other introductions, other experiences and other considerations. I am not the entire audience, and no one is.

So complaining about the level selection for a game that I hadn't played the other entries in the series up until now? It's pretty damn dumb. The only real complaint I think is legitimate is there really should be a Sonic CD level in here somewhere, other than the rivals battle whatever thing, but I guess there's only so much space. I sort of feel like they should have gone with ten levels and less challenges, with Green Hills more used as an introductory level and then have nine levels grouped together.

On the other hand, there is a lot of legitimate issue to be taken with the game's stability. Generations is pretty ambitious in what it does; it's a 360 era game pushing that hardware to the max and moving at speed in scopes way above other action titles. 90s era Sega made a big deal about the loops in Chemical Plant; here, Chemical Plant is kilometres across and long. And it floods. Then it explodes. But this comes at a price, and the game is frankly not all there.

I've had all sorts of weird bugs in Generations. The game has the 3d Sonic issue where repeating the same actions but with a slightly different starting point or maybe identically can result in Sonic being hurled off cliffs or in scripts not firing, at which point, you're hurled off a cliff. Basically any time anything bugs out or goes wrong, Sonic is hurled off a cliff.

It also inherits the difficulties with the control scheme that plagued 3d Sonics. It is better, it tries very hard to be great, but I would call it merely good. The homing attack chains are exciting and feel good, but they love to flip out, and sometimes ... Sonic is hurled off a cliff. Or just generally bongos somewhere he shouldn't, or the camera breaks, or stuff just doesn't feel as obvious as it should. I hit a bounce pad at slightly the wrong time during a doppelganger challenge and ended up with a broken camera that remained fixed and couldn't finish the level. That was some good bug.

Also, if there's an irony to this game, it's that years ago I went into it thinking a 2D Sonic redux was the bee's knees. Truth of the matter is, the 2D Sonic levels range from good to pretty meh, whereas the 3D Sonic levels are usually great, except Planet Wisp, which is bad on both ends of the game. I'm not really sure what happened with Planet Wisp in development, but it feels overcomplicated and way too busy. An S-Rank run of Planet Wisp can be as long as like, three other S-ranks put together!

I think a lot of that has to do with the choices made regarding which levels to go with, which often seems to come back to "the popular ones". I just end up feeling like they should build something out of the levels people don't know alongside the ones they do.

So here's the thing about this game: There's nothing quite like this game. In a space of a minute, once you get good, you can be juggling between four distinct style of play - 3d platforming, 2d platforming, 3d rollercoastering and this weird mix between all three where you're arranging a set of homing attacks on a 2d plane in what appears to be a 3d environment. The end result is a game that I recommend and highly, but also with the caveat there simply isn't a lot of gaming like this. You might get some of those elements, but you won't get all of them, maybe not even in any other Sonic game.

Basically, it's a great game, and not just for the nostalgia factor. It's a roadmap to using nostalgia effectively, taking elements you know and mixing them with others, taking things you thought were classic and making them modern, and making modern masterpieces out of the classics.

I don't know if Sonic Generations is my favorite Sonic game, but the fact it even enters the conversation is enough.