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Sonic the Hedgehog in 3D. A tumultuous run with great ideas scattered and buried throughout a minefield of lost potential. In this video, I take a look at every 3D Sonic game Sonic Team developed in an attempt to understand where we are today.
Thumbnail art by Sammy Tighe https://twitter.com/TigheSammy
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
4:28 Ups, Downs and All-Arounds
10:21 Sonic Adventure
42:54 Sonic Adventure 2
59:11 The Dark Age Approaches
1:10:56 Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)
1:24:03 The Boost Era
1:40:38 New Frontiers
A huge thank you to my patrons and YouTube members for cleaning up my script, including:
Pyrrickong https://www.youtube.com/c/DesigningFor
ThePaintHuffer https://thepainthuffer.newgrounds.com/
T Pig
Special thanks to https://info.sonicretro.org, which was an invaluable resource during my research.
Sources
Retro Gamer – “The Making of: Sonic Adventure”
Polygon – How Sega moved Sonic from 2D to 3D https://www.polygon.com/features/2017/4/17/15099400/how-sega-moved-sonic-from-2d-to-3d
GameInformer – Where Sonic Went Wrong https://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2016/11/14/where-sonic-went-wrong.aspx
Sonic Boom Game Grumps Footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJyiWoe3bUg
Electronic Gaming Monthly, September 1997.
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26 Comments
Head to https://keeps.com/liamtriforce to get 50% off your first order of hair loss treatment!
You’re BRILLIANT Liam. Thank you!!
0:40 why are you dissing Shadow the Hedgehog like a normie?
Whining about edgy is played out
Post-hardcore is an amazing and underrated genre
most fans call it the "meta era" instead of "boost era" as the offputting writing puts these games together more than the act of boosting does (esp because lost world doesnt have a boost)
"Amy is not very fun to play as. Why was she included?"
You see, you're missing an important piece of information about her inclusion in SA1.
I like her
Nights Into Dreams also inspired the bonus stages of Sonic Robo Blast 2, which is a fangame DOOM TC.
Hey Liam. Just wanna say I love your retrospectives. I've watched the sonic music one in the past a few times actually. Or rewatched specific parts as well. I've kept up with your retrospectives and your videos to me are always a must-watch! Keep up the good work man.
And I wanted to go and say I 100 percent agree with alot of what you said here. Especially involving the split in the community as to what they want from a Sonic game. Now I may be on team boost here, but that's not to say I don't miss momentum as well. I've played Sonic games since I was a kid, mainly focusing on the 3d games. So I've experienced the Sonic Adventure style as much as the rest. I'm personally of the mind that if they ever did get rid of the boost formula, there would be a hole in the series. There would be people that would be like, "Man, remember when sonic was fast? Like, this is pretty fast, but like Really Really Fast? Where he would just tear through enemies from pure speed? Where everything around you became a blur?". What I mean to say is, at this point, I think Sonic games need boost. He is capable of moving at the speed of sound right? But I also think they could get that old momentum back as well. Maybe someday?
As for me. I found the Generations boost movement and formula to be the best it's been in a Sonic game ever. I was honestly hoping we had that same movement in Sonic Frontiers, but it was a bit more tight and controlled, which is fine. I personally would like to see mods for the cyberspace levels in generations. Or even a mod for frontiers that makes the boost physics and movement more like generations, cause frankly, that's all I ever wanted. An open world sonic game where I could run faster than the speed of sound like how generations allowed you to! Thats why doing the unleashed stages on generations was frankly the best a Sonic game has ever felt to me. Doing rooftop run with the generations drifting and speed boost, SHEESH. What a rush.
55:18 Liam Pratt
While I haven't played every 3d entry or version. I still enjoy most of em.
Heck Shadow the Hedgehog is honestly one of my favorites.
Especially Expert mode when you get A rank for every level. (Pathetically easy to get btw)
Cause the Expert mode is legitimately great. Like the traditional get to the end levels? Well yer wish is granted. Not only that but changes the levels a lot. Making them pretty good.
I think saying that Big has "no right to exist" is pretty harsh. I really don't mind Big as a character. I can see why people aren't fond of him, but I can't hate the guy. He's not an outright idiot, he's just a little slow and cares a lot about his friends. I feel he gets a lot of flack for all the wrong reasons…
Congratulations on putting together a 2 hour speech, but as u can see, Frontiers was nowhere to be seen at the game awards, and that’s how it’ll always play out no matter what they choose to do with this has-been franchise
I still can't believe Shadow: The Hedgehog exists and is a game.
I don't understand half the things he complains about in the video,like from unleashed onwards I don't know what he's complaing about
And I'm not saying this like "he complains too much" because it's not like that and (as a masochist sonic fan) I've seen worse,but I don't understand why the things he is talking about are bad (nor good)
Haha. He said toodie 😄 🤣 😂
18:08
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the fan Sonic games, and indies attempting to improve upon Sonic's numerous formulas (mainly thinking Spark the Electric Jester, or so I've heard). You asked if Sonic Team were even capable of making the next game to fix the issues. Mine is, do we even need to wait for Sonic Team?
People mistaking Shadow for Sonic actually makes perfect sense. You just have to empathise with the people in Sonic Adventure 2 more to understand why.
Of course the people see that Sonic is normally blue and that Shadow is black. But they also saw Sonic turn yellow back in Sonic Adventure. And they do not know Sonic, so why would they not think that Sonic can also turn black? That would seem much more likely than a third hedgehog who happens to almost be a carbon copy of Sonic suddenly appearing. In addition to that, Sonic can paint himself black.
Imagine you saw Trump but his hair were orange instead of it's usual colour. Would you assume that it has to be another person? Or would you assume it was Trump with painted hair? Or would you assume that it was an artificial lifeform made by the army to resemble Trump?
Let's be honest, even if the latter case was true, you would assume that it were Trump with his hair painted. You would make the exact same "unrealistic" mistake.
People often critique the story of Shadow in Sonic Heroes by saying that it makes no sense that Rogue or someone else does not tell Shadow about his past. But this critique is misguided. What Shadow wants to know in Sonic Heroes is how he got in that base and whether he is the real Shadow. Rogue has no idea how Shadow got into that base, she did not even know Shadow was alive.
As for what Rogue does know, she actually probably did tell Shadow that off-screen. Shadow recognises Sonic even though he lost his memory, making it a possibility that he recognises Sonic from what Rouge told him about the events from Sonic Adventure 2.
I like how Liam always manages to conclude each video with a motivational speech related to the rest of the video. Really shows the understated impact of video games on people's lives
I would like to say in the heroes special stages you can swap to the power character and it makes it easier
Somehow, just now seeing this even after being subbed to you, I guess you caught the algorithm, lol.
All I want to say is that intro statement very, very much echos damn near how the Halo community feels about Halo and the team behind it right now. It's astonishing how similar the stories between Halo and Sonic are. About their respective "golden era's" and how they're icons of their times. Now, the communities just want anything for it to recapture that magic, that lighting in a bottle, once more.
Can't wait to hear what you think and have to say for the rest of the video!
Thanks for the video. I always thought of the birds being the same as the robots rather than separate entities. So by destroying the other robots, he was destroying the shell or “cage” their real “selves” were trapped in.
I hope that the updates give more of the tight S Rank times of 1-2…finding the best route to get under 55 secs when the level takes just over a minute going the standard route was just some of the best fun I had with one of the Cyberspace levels. Imagine if Sky Rail gave you a minute to get to the goal with all the different routes it allows for
You are the first person I've ever heard actually describe the specifics of Big's gameplay.