I've always been one to roll my eyes and groan over this recent narrative change in regards to Sonic 06. It's near exclusively given quarter few other games that failed as hard as it did are, under the blanket of "having potential", or in rare cases, the fact that it was all to do with the big, mean Sonic hating E-celebs. P-06 eventually being used as the smoking gun of the argument in the last few years is what really got under my skin.
I don't think a fan remake like this should excuse or invalidate any of the numerous issues the original game had, because that's stupid, and I say that as somebody who, as a young child and early teen, was in the same camp as a lot of those people. I was always of the opinion that there were interesting concepts at the core of what was essentially Sonic Adventure 3, buried under a game thats greatest issues came from a rushed development cycle brought on by a publisher who stretched a dev team too thin, to the point of making them work on an entirely different game to capitalise on the launch of the Wii, on top of one of the series' head honchos leaving and cribbing even more of the team on top of that. Issues regarding story, visuals and the sort aside, there were, as with so many other Sonic games, good or at least interesting ideas buried in there, but alas. Regardless of my own viewpoint on the matter, Sonic 06 happened, and no amount of history revisionism is going to make it anything less of a failure; a horse that's been beaten to vapor, yes, but one that we still need to acknowledge, lest the series fall to even lower lows in future.
But with my cards laid on that issue, having finally sat down to binge what we've got so far, I can't lie. Sonic P-06 is real fuckin' solid!
The few inherent positives of Sonic 06's baseline mechanics for Sonic and decent chunks of level design here and there are enhanced to an insane degree, by now being in a game you'd actually want to play! Sonic and co all control so much smoother, to the point it actually threw my inherent muscle memory off from years of childhood playthroughs of the original game, because the game doesn't feel stiff as all shit now. Even solely focusing on Sonic, there's a metric ton of changes, including the spindash actually being fun, the basic jump having the ability to damage enemies (which was criminally lacking from the vanilla game), the Gems being spread around levels as collectibles that have their intended upgrade and MP limit mechanics actually working, reworking the bounce to carry momentum for more speedrunning fun, total changes to impacting objects and the do-or-die jump in the mach speed sections, including the ability to play as Super Sonic, the whole shabang. It's only made me appreciate the mostly solid level design in stages like Wave Ocean, Crisis City and the two Elise escort stages even more, because now the most fun character in the game isn't only the most fun character relative to almost everybody else being dogshit.
Speaking of, everyone else! Yeah, they're all pretty damn fun! Silver actually has speed to go around and way more options to fight enemies, Shadow has a spindash and his combat combines with the game's reworked scoring system to make an incredibly satisfying system when chasing S ranks, and even the amigo characters are fun. Blaze was the second best of a bad situation in base 06, so she's still plenty fun for the few sections she has, Tails and Rouge actually have melee attacks to make for way more fun combat, and Omega's got the same with his Sonic Heroes moveset, in addition to his projectiles offering a multi-lock for added ease of use. Even Knuckles and Amy, who always made me groan when a section as them would rear in the original version, manage to be really enjoyable thanks to the wonders of these really weird things, like working hitboxes and impact on attacks. Funny how that works.
Aside from that, the game looks stellar, owing itself to being backed by modern hardware, rather than the early days of the PS360, and the music... I mean, come on, that was always the nugget of gold in the pile of bloodied diarrhea, you can bet your ass it's untouched and still as solid as ever. Ohtani's first OST as sound director still hits real good.
All this to say, yeah, Sonic P-06 is something real special, and it's not even finished yet! Things like the hub world, town missions, boss fights, last story, and cutscenes still aren't properly implimented at all, so Chaos-X still has work to do. While I'm not sure what exactly he'll do to pull off the acts of making things like the Silver or Iblis 2 fights anything approaching serviceable, or if he could potentially reanimate or otherwise at least pace the cutscenes better than their boring original iterations, I've been proven wrong before. I mean, this fucker made Silver's ball puzzle actually playable, so I'm ready to eat my whole foot!
And that's the insane thing about P-06 to me. This shit's been in development for years now, mostly by a single guy who never even played Sonic 06, instead studying the thing via YouTube and recreating the game based on that. Combined with the obviously massive changelog of gameplay, stage and visual additions, there's things like the rewards for S ranking each campaign, the small additional cutscenes in specific levels, even dozens of unused voice lines found in the game's files that finally get heard in full throughout. It's something to be admired, respected, and praised, because goddamn it, as shit as a lot of the Sonic fandom can be, that's commitment. Good shit, and I can't wait to see more, because we could totally be looking at a 10/10 in future!
I don't think a fan remake like this should excuse or invalidate any of the numerous issues the original game had, because that's stupid, and I say that as somebody who, as a young child and early teen, was in the same camp as a lot of those people. I was always of the opinion that there were interesting concepts at the core of what was essentially Sonic Adventure 3, buried under a game thats greatest issues came from a rushed development cycle brought on by a publisher who stretched a dev team too thin, to the point of making them work on an entirely different game to capitalise on the launch of the Wii, on top of one of the series' head honchos leaving and cribbing even more of the team on top of that. Issues regarding story, visuals and the sort aside, there were, as with so many other Sonic games, good or at least interesting ideas buried in there, but alas. Regardless of my own viewpoint on the matter, Sonic 06 happened, and no amount of history revisionism is going to make it anything less of a failure; a horse that's been beaten to vapor, yes, but one that we still need to acknowledge, lest the series fall to even lower lows in future.
But with my cards laid on that issue, having finally sat down to binge what we've got so far, I can't lie. Sonic P-06 is real fuckin' solid!
The few inherent positives of Sonic 06's baseline mechanics for Sonic and decent chunks of level design here and there are enhanced to an insane degree, by now being in a game you'd actually want to play! Sonic and co all control so much smoother, to the point it actually threw my inherent muscle memory off from years of childhood playthroughs of the original game, because the game doesn't feel stiff as all shit now. Even solely focusing on Sonic, there's a metric ton of changes, including the spindash actually being fun, the basic jump having the ability to damage enemies (which was criminally lacking from the vanilla game), the Gems being spread around levels as collectibles that have their intended upgrade and MP limit mechanics actually working, reworking the bounce to carry momentum for more speedrunning fun, total changes to impacting objects and the do-or-die jump in the mach speed sections, including the ability to play as Super Sonic, the whole shabang. It's only made me appreciate the mostly solid level design in stages like Wave Ocean, Crisis City and the two Elise escort stages even more, because now the most fun character in the game isn't only the most fun character relative to almost everybody else being dogshit.
Speaking of, everyone else! Yeah, they're all pretty damn fun! Silver actually has speed to go around and way more options to fight enemies, Shadow has a spindash and his combat combines with the game's reworked scoring system to make an incredibly satisfying system when chasing S ranks, and even the amigo characters are fun. Blaze was the second best of a bad situation in base 06, so she's still plenty fun for the few sections she has, Tails and Rouge actually have melee attacks to make for way more fun combat, and Omega's got the same with his Sonic Heroes moveset, in addition to his projectiles offering a multi-lock for added ease of use. Even Knuckles and Amy, who always made me groan when a section as them would rear in the original version, manage to be really enjoyable thanks to the wonders of these really weird things, like working hitboxes and impact on attacks. Funny how that works.
Aside from that, the game looks stellar, owing itself to being backed by modern hardware, rather than the early days of the PS360, and the music... I mean, come on, that was always the nugget of gold in the pile of bloodied diarrhea, you can bet your ass it's untouched and still as solid as ever. Ohtani's first OST as sound director still hits real good.
All this to say, yeah, Sonic P-06 is something real special, and it's not even finished yet! Things like the hub world, town missions, boss fights, last story, and cutscenes still aren't properly implimented at all, so Chaos-X still has work to do. While I'm not sure what exactly he'll do to pull off the acts of making things like the Silver or Iblis 2 fights anything approaching serviceable, or if he could potentially reanimate or otherwise at least pace the cutscenes better than their boring original iterations, I've been proven wrong before. I mean, this fucker made Silver's ball puzzle actually playable, so I'm ready to eat my whole foot!
And that's the insane thing about P-06 to me. This shit's been in development for years now, mostly by a single guy who never even played Sonic 06, instead studying the thing via YouTube and recreating the game based on that. Combined with the obviously massive changelog of gameplay, stage and visual additions, there's things like the rewards for S ranking each campaign, the small additional cutscenes in specific levels, even dozens of unused voice lines found in the game's files that finally get heard in full throughout. It's something to be admired, respected, and praised, because goddamn it, as shit as a lot of the Sonic fandom can be, that's commitment. Good shit, and I can't wait to see more, because we could totally be looking at a 10/10 in future!
SunlitSonata
4 months ago
This is basically the Sonic equivalent of the Recobbled Cut, if you've ever heard of The Thief and the Cobbler's development and the patchwork products brought into theaters. An incredible fan effort to bring out the best that can be brought in that good idea highly flawed release with a tumultuous development cycle, but regardless of how good this is, the original game was still brought into market when it was nowhere near ready for $60 and is no way redeemed by this, in the same way those original film cuts aren't suddenly great on their own.
That being said, yeah good on ChaosX for making this all for free and continuing to build from such where the only barrier is highly demanding PC specs and also just 06's levels like a lot of the post Adventure 2 2000s games sans Unleashed Day, being overly long.