Should we be happy a game like Sonic Dream Team exists, or sad that it took them so long?

[Scritch the Cat]

This reflects themes found in some other recent threads, but I think it's just unique enough a topic of its own to warrant its own thread, especially since between then and now, I've seen and heard more than a few positive reviews of Sonic Dream Team saying something like "What's odd is this isn't doing anything new or impressive; it's just by-the-numbers Sonic platforming in 3D, but that's okay." 

That sort of statement got me to thinking: As dead a horse as it is to beat that "Sonic has had a rough transition to 3D", with some people even going as far as to say "Sonic just doesn't work in 3D", in retrospect it's odd that nobody at SEGA tried just making a transition of 2D Sonic gameplay to 3D gameplay.  For many people, the first Sonic Adventure was the closest they ever came to this, in that it brought in Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles playing pretty close to how they did in 2D, albeit with some additional objectives for Knuckles, but it also had three additional gameplay styles added, divisive to varying degrees and almost unanimously hated in the worst of those styles.  There were also technical issues with making a one-to-one transition to 3D, but those could have been cleared with time and scientific progress.  Either way, though, from then on Sonic Team just wandered around, experimenting with taking some things out and adding some other things in, but one thing they never tried doing was just making a game that just transferred the abilities of the SEGA Genesis Sonic games into 3D, no more and no less. However loudly people screamed at them that this was what they wanted, every new 3D Sonic game was either more than what they wanted, less than what they wanted, or in a depressing amount of times, both.  For example, Sonic Heroes has most of the abilities from the SEGA Genesis games transferred into 3D in some form, but also constant halting to do slow combat and puzzle vignettes.  Sonic Unleashed has flight and gliding torn out due to Tails and Knuckles being torn out of playable roles, while even slower and more in-depth combat became the majority of its gameplay.  Meanwhile, Sonic Generations was a highlights reel, in many people's opinion, "just the good bits" of past Sonic games, but still only nine of them, without the ability to play those good bits as anyone but Sonic(s), and even Sonic(s) often not playing in quite the same way as in those older games, and most of the levels being underwhelmingly short and easy.  In many franchises, an attempt like that would be regarded as pretty half-assed, but in this franchise, a game merely having none of the bad of past Sonic games was enough for many to forgive it having only a sliver of the good of past Sonic games, which is understandable, but depressing.  And then, just when people thought that at least Sonic Team had a solid enough foundation built again that they could starting building all new games atop of, they abandoned that foundation to fool around again with Sonic Lost World, as well as commissioning others to make the Sonic Boom games.

And so it went, and has continued to go, until Sonic Dream Team, when for the first time, somebody working for SEGA finally decided to make a 3D Sonic game that basically just took the abilities that had repeatedly been shown to be well-received in Sonic's heyday, namely running, jumping, flying, gliding, and climbing, put them in a 3D game, put virtually nothing else in that same 3D game, and it worked.  Not everyone is absolutely blown away by it, but I can't remember any other 3D Sonic game that virtually nobody thinks is overall bad.  Which hits something important home: Almost this whole time that people have been beating the dead horse about 3D Sonic, it has been within easy enough ability to demonstrate that Sonic, as defined by the mechanics it had when it was most well-received, really does work in 3D.  It has merely been the asterisks always bundled with those Sonic mechanics in 3D, whether in the form of additional mechanics, technical flubs, or both, that gave the games their bad reputations.  Sure, there are asterisks in Sonic Dream Team too, if you dig enough; the characters boost instead of spindashing, speed-type characters should probably be a bit better than other types at going fast,  and more problematically, many of the standard Sonic movement types have been nerfed a bit, but I think those are comparatively minor issues and easy enough to improve on in a future game.  So really, SEGA and especially Sonic Team, was it that hard?!

Now all this does not mean I'm totally prepared to eat crow on the positions I argued in my thread about Sonic's friends.  I don't think stripping game design down to the absolute basics in order to maximize accessibility is generally a good idea, for a variety of reasons, one of which being that it would lead to rather homogeneous designs.  Lots of other game series have been able to innovate gracefully, and I would ultimately like to see Sonic do that too.  But it's still pretty pathetic that Sonic Team never took the time to nail what had been Sonic's basics in 3D before they tried doing anything else atop them.  Instead, they just swung around blindly to find something new that would bring as much success as the old things brought.  And all of their risky experimentation in the 3D Sonic games might have been justified if it was actually true that Sonic, as it had been in 2D, didn't work in 3D, but One, if it didn't then maybe they should have just stopped trying to make 3D Sonic games, and Two, we've established that the old Sonic mechanics do work in 3D.  In fact, many would argue this was already sufficiently proven by the first Sonic Adventure, and that all they needed to do from there was focus in more on improving those mechanics technically and designing good levels to utilize them.  Yes, some of them, like flight, certainly do require some extra steps to make them not feel game-breaking in 3D, but I think all of this is a comparatively trivial concern; the important question is "Are these abilities still fun in 3D?" and the important answer is "Yes, very!" Okay, I should probably go into a bit more detail because "fun" is a matter of opinion, and if you ask a lot of people their opinions, you can collect data suggesting that all manner of gameplay mechancis are fun in 3D.  But the abilities in Sonic Dream Team all gel with that franchise's specific stipulation that you can do them while going fast, and you can.

And as I reflect on that past bit, I think I feel a bit of epiphany regarding what has really been wrong with Sonic all of these years.  The series was created to do several different things, one of which was indeed to be a platformer based on speed, but also, Sonic was created to be a mascot to a console SEGA was launching and promoting initially based on how much more powerful it was than the competition.  That mostly ceased to be true when the SNES came out, but SEGA had gone hard enough on that high-tech boasting that they created a precedent of "bigger is better" that continued to rule almost all console race discourse until Nintendo managed to wiggle out of that precedent with the Wii.  And because Sonic was built for that sort of competition, the Sonic series would become SEGA's dumping ground for all manner of "look what I can do" flexes that they wanted to make, as well as be infected by the notion that each Sonic game had to be shiny and new to avoid the series becoming stale and forgotten. 

So even though I once again stand by the opinions I expressed in that other thread, with a rapidly rising hatred for the mobile games industry and an attitude towards autorunners that is at best indifferent, in this case, I'm going to have to concur with whichever critics argue that SEGA Hardlight's background in autorunners helped them to make a conventional 3D Sonic platformer that has none of the stigmatizing features that 3D Sonic games usually have.  Because perhaps a mobile game developer was just what this series needed to break it out of the "bigger is better" mindset that had been weighing it down for so long.  Now to be fair, that doesn't necessarily equate to anything more than a broken clock being right twice a day, and fangame developers had already mostly figured out how Sonic should play in 3D, but still, credit where it's due.

So, what now?  I guess we'll see.  I hope Sonic Team comes to a similar epiphany, to at least some degree.

Edited December 28, 2023 by Scritch the Cat

[Lorekitten]

On the subject of 'should we be happy or sad?' my answer is 'it's perfectly valid to have mixed feelings about a complex subject like this, so you can be both.'

[MGA_Gamer]

Better late than never IMO!

[Wraith]

I don't see why you have to pick one. It's alright for your feelings on the series to be complicated. I personally don't expect Sonic Team to be able to create something like Dream Team. With their aversion to stuff they didn't make I'd be surprised if they ever even check it out to begin with. That's sad.

It's probably better to just play the game and enjoy it instead of getting too caught up on the future though. Whenever a new Sonic game that's just a bunch of cool movement challenges without any BS comes out, just appreciate it. Lord knows when you'll get another one.

[televoxica]

Of COURSE we shouldn’t be sad about a good game releasing.  For heavens sake, people want good games, we get one, and people still aren’t satisfied. 

[The Famous Sonic]

17 hours ago, televoxica said:

Of COURSE we shouldn’t be sad about a good game releasing.  For heavens sake, people want good games, we get one, and people still aren’t satisfied. 

Lots of people aren't satisfied with Sonic Dream Team due to it being an Apple exclusive. 

[castell-neath]

Happy it exists.

Sad its locked to apple. At the moment

 

[MetalSkulkBane]

Emotions are emotions, it's hard to "decide them".

But moping about the past is rarely productive, especially if thinks got better. I prefer to focus on now, especially if it's good.

[televoxica]

2 hours ago, The Famous Sonic said:

Lots of people aren't satisfied with Sonic Dream Team due to it being an Apple exclusive. 

True but that doesn’t necessarily pertain to the gameplay itself, more so the exclusivity thing.  If the dissatisfaction comes mainly from that rather than any gameplay issue, I don’t think that’s worth getting sad about.

[Lorekitten]

5 minutes ago, televoxica said:

If the dissatisfaction comes mainly from that rather than any gameplay issue, I don’t think that’s worth getting sad about.

If a cool Sonic game comes out and you're unable to play it because you don't have any Apple products to play it on, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be sad about that.

[Scritch the Cat]

On 12/16/2023 at 2:04 PM, Wraith said:

I don't see why you have to pick one. It's alright for your feelings on the series to be complicated. I personally don't expect Sonic Team to be able to create something like Dream Team. With their aversion to stuff they didn't make I'd be surprised if they ever even check it out to begin with. That's sad.

It's probably better to just play the game and enjoy it instead of getting too caught up on the future though. Whenever a new Sonic game that's just a bunch of cool movement challenges without any BS comes out, just appreciate it. Lord knows when you'll get another one.

Well, let's be fair.  Dimps invented the boost and that made its way into Sonic Team-developed games, Headcannon invented the drop dash and that made its way into Sonic Team-developed games, so clearly Sonic Team is at least occasionally aware of other people's Sonic games.  Morio Kishimoto has been in touch with fans and has at least tried to give them what they wanted.  Also, even if Sonic Team overall does have a bit too big of an ego, ultimately their job is to make money for SEGA, and if SEGA demands that Sonic Team show some more humility and own up to past errors, then Sonic Team had better do it.

Am I saying that, exactly, will happen?  No.  And I am certainly not saying the top brass at SEGA have the moral high ground; their mandates are why Sonic 06 is...Sonic 06, among other notable instances of rushing things out recklessly.  Their underlying goal is to make Sonic profitable, with Sonic being actually good being only one potential way to make it so.  But even from that strictly selfish perspective, the revelation that there now seems to be a "safe bet" mold to make Sonic games in should matter to them.  I think I recall more than a few critics saying that future 3D Sonic games should take inspiration from this one, and these companies do pay attention to reviews.  I don't think sticking with a formula and only that forever is a good idea, but it seems like they should wait for a game that does that not to do well before they decide they need to get experimental again, since getting experimental has often not worked for them.

As to how soon we can expect this sort of thing again, it's hard to say.  It could be a long time, but when I reflect back on Dimps' time with the Sonic series I wonder why they couldn't be more frequent.  Even at a time when critics were losing their patience with Sonic Team's games, they still tended to like Dimps' handheld games as a preservation of what people used to like about Sonic and not a whole lot more.

One thing that seems pretty clear is that Sonic Team does not want to make Sonic games--at least not as their highest priority.  They want to make the games that Sonic stars in good, of that I have no doubt, but their conception of what they ought to prioritize to make Sonic games good always seems to be more about the icing than the cake, they never consider the cake to be enough, often seem more concerned with how interesting the icing seems in itself than how well it goes with the cake, and sometimes in the process they half-ass the cake even though they should know how to make it good.  And look, if the people in Sonic Team want to be doing something else, I say fine, let them, but then why are they calling themselves Sonic Team?  Why should SEGA keep around this name when they can give the orders to others that seem to care a lot more and know a lot more?

Edited March 14 by Scritch the Cat

[Miles Storzillo]

Maybe The Final Horizon just spoiled me greatly with how Amy, Knuckles, and Tails played (Combat with the guardians and Knuckles pre patch aside), but I can't really say I'm THAT amazed by Dream Team from what I've seen on Youtube.  Perhaps it's because I've never liked the Classic Sonic games, so transferring that kind of gameplay doesn't really do anything for me, I don't really know.  Doesn't help that compared to other games like Frontiers and ESPECIALLY HD Unleashed it doesn't seem nearly as ambitious, not to mention that, from what I've seen of the bosses, besides maybe the final one

Spoiler

which isn't even really a fight, it's an obstacle course

, they look even more dull than the ones in the Classic games.  But I suppose I'll let that and the lack of ambition compared to the console games slide since it is a mobile game.

[PublicEnemy1]

If anything, I'm a little mad that a goddamn mobile game subsidiary is getting closer to what many fans want than Sonic Team, for the most part.

[StaticMania]

Sonic Dream Team isn't inspired by the classic games...so that doesn't seem relevant.

[Miles Storzillo]

I'm just waiting for a game that will top HD Unleashed at this point.  But that bar is so high I have to question if it will ever even happen.