yo
We both obviously love sonic so I feel bad if I came off patronising. Apologies.
However, I have to disagree with pretty much everything you said :lol
Your notion that SA's level themes follow naturally from the Megadrive games is probably what I have least problem with. Maybe given better technology, Sonic Team could've pulled off what they were going for and it would have fit with the classics better. As it stands, Adventure looks like trash. Maybe the first three were also going for a semblance of realism but the abstraction required to make them on megadrive clearly worked wonders.
I really don't think you can argue that the boost games lack the exploration aspect of the originals. In 1 through 3 you had your high, mid and low routes and in Generations especially that is translated to 3D perfectly. You can just boost (aka hold right, fam), but take the time and you can spend hours finding all the routes, getting your red stars and finding the critical path for a speed run. I honestly doubt I can change your mind, but trust me when I say we both have an equal working knowledge of the blue dude ta very much.
Anyway it's 1am in England and we've derailed this thread enough. If you want to post a new thread bout this I'd gladly post in it in the morning.
Fuck sonic adventure with rusty razors
No problem dude.
Also, I don't think the first three games were going for realism, at least in a comparable sense to one another. However, the longer the series was developed for, the more materials (trees, flowers, rocks, metals, water/ice, etc.) began to trend towards more realistic depictions. Most plants weren't flat planes of color anymore; they started to be more comparable to real leaves in terms of shape and number of instances. The only real outlier to this is in terms of a linear timeline is Sonic CD, but then again I consider that game a fucking abomination until Taxman finally fixed it.
The different paths in the boost games don't amount to much except for diversions from the main path. A rail here or a path here to perhaps find something like an extra life, but in quick time you're diverted back on the main path. On top of that, because the game's goal is speedrunning there's only one real optimal way to go anyway; couple that with the self-admitted nightmare of making up to 10 real-world kilometers of geometry for Sonic to travel along per level, then it's clear the style gives Sonic Team far less leeway to make levels that have the kind of vertical nature of something like
Marble Garden from Sonic 3. Indeed, the classics on average had more vertical space, lending themselves to an actual possibility of dropping deep down in the annals of the stages and taking completely different paths all the way to the end without ever really seeing the "main path," if there was a "main path." This type of exploration just isn't physically possible in the boost games because the land space doesn't exist. Boost gameplay (and by proxy the appearance of Classic Sonic in Gens) is not classic gameplay in any meaningful sense, no more than the godawful Sonic 4 was classic gameplay.
But you know what?
That's fine. I don't inherently think 3D Sonic games need to ape classic games to be good. If anything, that's what the boost gameplay proved! But I find that it's an objective falsehood to say that there's greater parity between even just the physics systems of the boost and classic games versus the physics of the first two Adventures and the classic games, whether you're comparing them in terms of what the math was doing or just their spiritual feel: the idea of Sonic being a ball that gradually traveled in arcs versus a bullet that immediately blasted straight forward. And I think it's these kinds of inaccuracies and simplifications taken as fact over the years that have both completely ruined online discourse surrounding Sonic and actual direct communication to Sonic Team.
As a result, the 3D Sonic games still don't have much of an identity worth being excited about to me, and they have proceeded to leave really good ideas by the wayside because these ideas- the simple idea that Sonic should act like a pinball similar to how he did in Adventure- are easily conflated with "Sonic 06" and thus people shut down; they don't even want to hear it because visceral reactions overtake reasoned discourse. I feel the games are now a shell of their former selves even as quality control standards have undoubtedly risen. Each level is completely interchangeable with one another in design, and taken as a whole these games have a nonexistent difficulty curve which makes them, well, boring! You're doing the same thing against the same obstacles with the same skill threshold from beginning to end for six hours, if
that; it's the definition of tedium! Reskin these boost levels with different textures and you lose absolutely nothing in terms of identity, because the designs are not at all informed by a creative context of their setting or their place in the story, but by the maintenance of a rigid and limiting design threshold that prevents Sonic Team from implementing a creative idea like, say, actually having the casino stage function like a working pinball machine (
versus a boost stage with casino textures), and dropping you in the sewer system- the real Sonic level- if you lose! Don't even get me started on all of the wasted design potential by not even including Tails anymore as a playable partner.
I get it. Sonic 06 came out and was a disaster. Sonic Team had to do something real fast to recover whatever semblance of dignity they and the franchise had left, and I'm grateful they did if only because Sonic Unleashed was an absolute riot for me personally. But the systematic removal of everything that made Sonic unique, fun, and worth buying over other platformers because these ideas were also used during Sonic's early 3D days should have been a stop-gap measure to regain trust and focus, not their modus operandi going forward for his entire foreseeable future. Sonic Team doesn't need a New Sonic The Hedgehog U.
It needs a fucking Sonic The Hedgehog Odyssey since yesterday. It needs the depth back. It needs the unique ball physics back. It needs the reliance on narrative and spacial context back. And these things were present in the Adventure games and classic games. Reskinned boost games with empty narratives and locations that are checked off a "Generic Platformer List" aren't cutting it for me anymore.
.......................
So how about dat dere Odyssey?