It scares me how good this game is. It scares how it just came out, was good, and everyone liked it. Like, since when, Sonic?
I'm not saying Shaderations doesn't have it's nay-sayers, no. There's discussion to be had on the dialogue re-rewrites in the Sonic Generations part of the bundle and the level choices for Shadow's part of the game
(And of course those who swear by the Classic trilogy that nothing good ever came out of Sonic after 1994). But those are minor compared to what you usually get with a Sonic game.
That even goes for me. It kind of takes a while for me to fully form an opinion on a Sonic game. At first I thought Sonic Superstars was pretty mediocre and now it's one of my all time favorites that I lose sleep every night for how little it's recognized. Sonic Frontiers looked fine to me on launch but nowadays I think it has to be my most disliked Sonic game for how I think it's genuinely harmful to the future of the franchise.
Which is to say, Sonic games are usually very,
very nuanced in their design that leads to a lot of back-and-forth about their quality. So at some point I just assumed there'd never be a Sonic game that was just a home run like that due to Sonic's inherent deceitfully complex design. We're still asking if Sonic Adventure 2 was actually good to this day, for crying out loud.
But out comes Shadow Generations meeting every expectation, with little to no whining from people and I'm just like WHAAAAAAAT???????
IT'S HAS AMAZING LEVEL DESIGN? NEW ABILITIES THAT LEAD TO A LOT OF COOL STUFF THAT THE LEVEL DESIGN ENCOURAGES? ACTUALLY ENGAGING BOSSES? NO JANK YOU HAVE TO PLAY AROUND?
SINCE WHEN DID YOU DO THAT, SONIC TEAM??? SINCE WHEN??????
Of course, it can be said it's only this good because it was built on top of what was already considered the best Sonic game, but it still adds so much I don't think you can discredit as being good
just because it's on top of OG Generations.
And there's also the concern of the boost formula getting kind of same-y. I don't know about anyone else but
the thing I like about Sonic is how experimental it likes to get with every new release, the next game in the franchise completely changing up what the previous one did. And of course, that kind of inconsistency is what gets Sonic to be so divisive, but at this point I feel it's part of the Sonic identity to go wild with it's ideas and never go for the same game style multiple times in a row, but that's kind of where were headed.
And I
know what will get Sonic more success is the boost formula since SEGA now knows that's the formula that works, but I'm kind of dreading that if it means we aren't getting crazy out-there styles of Sonic anymore. We'll have to way and see about that, but it's a concern I have.