#bigredbutton

It’s more to do with expectations, really. Sonic 06 was the last time I bought in to the hype. And I bought in to it deep. Sega was out there talking about how this was a reboot, about how it was a celebration of Sonic’s 15th anniversary, and I told myself there was no way they were going to mess it up. It was too important to fail, and at least in the context of a post-Sonic Heroes, post-Shadow the Hedgehog world, Sega was saying all the right stuff:

This game was going to be a technical showpiece, showing us a bigger, more dramatic world for Sonic. Not necessarily dark and edgy like Shadow the Hedgehog, what with the blood and the swearing and the assault rifles, but just more... cinematic and grounded in reality, I guess? I mean, that reveal trailer was incredible! Is the game going to be THAT big and THAT detailed?

They were going back to the style of game we got in the original Sonic Adventure. Sonic Adventure was regarded as one of the only 3D Sonic games to really understand the mixture of speed and platforming from the Genesis games, even if was a buggy, janky mess. So a do-over on that concept sounded great!

Most early marketing, and most quotes from Sega were adamant that there were only three playable characters in Sonic 06: Sonic, Shadow, and Silver. This was, of course, a flat out, straight up lie – one they kept under their hats until about two weeks before release when they finally began talking about “Amigo” partners.

They were wiping the slate clean for a new generation. More powerful hardware meant a new style of Sonic the Hedgehog. They wanted people to forget their past sins and focus on this new modern-fantasy take on Sonic the Hedgehog. With the previous points, I was ready to believe.

Sonic 06 was the first game I had ever pre-ordered in my entire life. It was the first Xbox 360 game I bought. It was the last Sonic game I ever let myself get openly, unreservedly excited for.

And that’s because I fell very, very, very far, and I smashed in to reality. It crushed every blue bone in my body. Even now, as Sonic 06 is fully entrenched itself as sort of a Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room-type game, where people love to laugh at it, I find it difficult to forgive Sonic 06 when I really sit down and remember how I felt 11 years ago, cracking open that game as my first step in to the next generation of console gaming.

Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric, on the other hand, was awful looking a mile away. The character designs, that incredibly awkward first trailer, it was super obvious it was going to be another Sonic Heroes situation, plus also feature a lot of fighting. Sonic doesn’t beat robots up with his fists!

And once I finally got it, it was more sad than anything else. It was incredibly obvious that executive meddling had somehow changed the game; so much of it looked so different from that reveal trailer, and so much more of it just didn’t make any sense. I knew why Sonic 06 was the way it was – if Sonic 06 was a celebration of anything, it was a celebration of everything Sonic Team did wrong. They created a game out of the worst parts of all 3D Sonics.

Sonic Boom was just a PS2-era platformer. It was another Ratchet & Clank, or Jak & Daxter, and every now and then you could see a glimmer of it actually not being an awful one. It was never anything like a Sonic game of course, but BigRedButton had enough pedigree at their studio that you could see that in Rise of Lyric sometimes.

Sonic 06 was like being dropped from the rooftop of a skyscraper, whereas Sonic Boom was like finding an ugly teddy bear in a dumpster.

I’ve thought about this ask on and off since I got it almost a month ago and I just don’t know. It’s all so contextual, you know? Like, for the longest time people thought Naughty Dog would be great at making a Sonic game, because they were clearly staffed by a lot of Sonic fans at one point in the Crash Bandicoot era, and the sort of “cinematic scripting” stuff they do in Uncharted could line up really well with what Sonic Team already does with Sonic.

But then we got Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric out of Bigredbutton, a development team made up of former Naughty Dog team members (among a few other places).

I don’t know if you could, on the surface, easily make a judgement call as to who would or would not be a good fit to make a Sonic game. Even Nintendo, for how many home runs they’ve been hitting, will occasionally put out a dud.

Retro Studios, maybe? Retro’s got a very weird style to their games. I don’t like Metroid Prime 2 or 3, but it’s got this odd sort of “story where story doesn’t belong” tone to it that may actually end up working with Sonic? Because in some weird way, maybe that’s how you describe a 3D Sonic game, right? And Retro seems to enjoy making games that are more difficult than most, which I think is a quality Sega has failed at – Colors and Generations were noticeably easier than Unleashed, and while Lost World was difficult again, it was for the wrong reasons. Retro may be better at straddling that line. Games like Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze also had immaculate level design with lots of great flow and unique ideas. Those are elements that Sonic would benefit from.

But then there’s also a matter of budget. And time. Retro works under Nintendo, and Nintendo will let a game take as long as it needs in order to be good. Breath of the Wild was announced, what, three years before it came out? And how many years had it been in development before then? Two? Maybe three?

How would Retro function under Sega? How much of Rise of Lyric’s problem was that Sega pulled the rug out from under Bigredbutton and didn’t give them any extra resources to adjust to changes they didn’t make? Even if Retro does good work, would Sega provide them with an environment to do good work? Is Sonic Team actually the problem, or is it their working conditions?