windyvalleyzone replied to your post : Given that a lot of Sonic games tend to be half...
Sonic 06 would’ve been a masterpiece if it wasn’t rushed
I don’t normally do this, but I’ll bite.
How can you classify that knowledge? Of what understanding is this based off of?
Sonic 2006 was a game of vast and many problems. What we know suggests maybe it was cut off at the knees pretty early in development, and then continued to suffer the death of a thousand cuts all the way up until its release.
We don’t know what the original pitch for Sonic 2006 was. We have snippets of what could be -- there’s leftover code to suggest there could have been co-op, online multiplayer was apparently announced, mission objective text exists for racing time trial ghosts, etc.
But all of that’s focused only on multiplayer, which may have seen the most last-second cuts out of the entire game. The split-screen multiplayer we have in the game as released is barely functional as I understand.
So what do we have to go on?
Sonic 2006 is a game in which Literal, Actual Satan kills Sonic the Hedgehog. It is structured to celebrate all of the stuff that everyone would not stop complaining about as a teenager -- too many characters stealing Sonic’s spotlight, a lot of which simply aren’t fun to play as. Nobody wants to hunt keys as Rouge the Bat, nobody wants nonsensical stealth sections as Amy Rose, nobody with any sense asked for Shadow the Hedgehog to drive trucks, etc.
We don’t know how they may have fit in to the original, unfettered design document, but this is how they lived on in the final game, so we must take them at face value. Which is to say: they are bad, and you can polish that turd all you want, but nobody ACTUALLY wants a platformer with nine playable characters. They might SAY they want that, but they’re saying they want the CONCEPT, not the execution, which has always been bad (even in non-Sonic games).
People like buffets. Nobody eats everything at a buffet. But game development can’t just make food nobody is going to eat.
Similarly, concepts like Realistic Humans are not a symptom of the game being rushed. They are a symptom of bad design. A rotten core. From the very first press conference announcing the game, Sonic 2006 was meant to be a “realistic” Sonic game, with realistic physics, realistic humans, and a realistic setting. That’s the point. That’s the goal. Sonic’s weird proportions, the weird mannequin look NPCs have, they did that on purpose.
The best you may get out of a properly-finished Sonic 2006 is a game that doesn’t fight you for control constantly. But it will still have “Amigo” sections, it will still have arbitrary “Mach Speed” zones, it will still have weird looking people, it will still have an edgelord storyline, it will still have clashing art direction.
Don’t let your “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” dreams of what could have been create a version of the game that would have never existed.