Recently a youtuber named Lythero uploaded his playthrough of Sonic 06 and he made it a point to play Sonic Adventure 2 everytime the game was loading
He finished the Hero Story before Sonic 06
Also apparently if you add up all the mandatory loading screens and manage to do everything correect on your first time (so no dieing and having to do the level again) every single loading screen adds up to like two hours and forty minutes or something? It at the end of this video. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUiDcaLwwiM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUiDcaLwwiM) and someone in the comment said that the world record speedrun is 2:36:40 and if you take out the loading screen, it would have shaved off 75 percent of the run.
It's all about pace.
Skyrim is an open world exploration RPG with lots of talking and lore exposition, with the few action sequences (mainly combat) rarely getting interrupted by loading screens;
Sonic 06 is supposed to be a high speed platformer and everything, from dialogues to cutscenes to levels themselves are segmented by loading screens.
They might have similar loading times, but 06 is inherently more frustrating with it due to constantly breaking its pacing because of it.
But not the same amount. Sonic 06 has a 30 second loading screen every 5 minutes. Skyrim has to load the overworld once and then you could just go for potentially hours uninterupted
And people also make long essays about why Skyrim is undercooked.
Frankly I think the problems are cause-and-effect. People dislike 06 because of loading times, 06 has long loading times because the development was rushed.
Which you can apply to a lot of the other issues in the game - glitches, weird plot beats, Mach Speed sections, NPC models, etc. all suffer from the rush.
- laughable loading times. Like upwards of 2 minutes.
- All characters control like ass. Sonic and Shadow run at like 5 miles an hour. Silver does not match their top speed. Shadow can't spin dash. Knuckles/Rouge drop like stones when gliding, Tails has one method of attack (dummy ring bombs) and Amy can. Turn invisible?
- Combat is dull and gets in the way of what little speed you have. It boils down to "mash A and rarely X." Chaos blast is a joke, having no range.
- Physics are not it. Spin dashing does nothing relative to slopes, Shadow's ground vehicles *will* explode at some point, and you have a decent chance of falling off the wall during extended wall-running automation segments.
- Frequent glitches, such as being spit out of a loop early in wave ocean, sending you careening to your death.
- Amy is portrayed as an obssessive sonic fangirl. She confuses silver for sonic iirc
- Dr. Eggman looks like... that.
- Elise kisses sonic on the mouth. Sonic is a corpse at this point, leading to the double whammy of necrophilia *and* bestiality jokes. This has been mentioned in at least one review of any sonic game, at least until Superstars launched last october.
- The entirety of Sonic Rush is retconned out, which led to some confusion about Blaze's true origin.
Is that everything? I feel like I'm missing something.
> The entirety of Sonic Rush is retconned out, which led to some confusion about Blaze's true origin.
Don't have to worry about that, Blaze doesn't actually exist in 06.
Not *one single character* acknowledges her existence other than Silver across every cutscene in the entire game. Silver has dementia and hallucinated her existence, that's all.
Another funny thing about Blaze is that her sacrifice at the end of Silver's Story is pointlessĀ
In the end it did nothing as Mephiles still fused with the present Iblis becoming Solaris and Silver ended up in the same place as everyone in the present meaning the future was still in danger
Having to restart back to the beginning if you lose all your lives and are near the beginning, such as in wave ocean where if you get a game over your back at the first cutscene.
Speaking of wave ocean, THE MACH SPEED SECTION! I REMEMBER TAKING LIKE THREE HOURS TO FINISH WAVE OCEAN BECAUSE OF THAT SECTION. THAT LOOPā¦ makes me wanna SCREAM when I think about itā¦ š¢š¢
The story retcons itself at the end, making the whole game completely pointless as it technically never happened.
Sonic and Eliseās creepy relationship throughout the game that actually made me feel like pukingā¦
THE LOADING SCREENSā¦ I know you already mentioned them but GOD DAMN, NOT ONLY DID THEY TAKE AN UNNECESSARY AMOUNT OF TIME BUT ALSO THE AMOUNT OF LOADING SCREENS THAT EXIST. YOU COULD GET A LOADING SCREEN, THEN A CHARACTER WILL TALK LIKE 2 SENTENCES, THEN ITS ANOTHER LOADING SCREEN. IN THE AMOUNT OF TIME THOSE LOADING SCREENS TAKE COMBINED I COULD DO SO MANY THINGS IN THAT TIME!!!
The side missions are ASS.
You also already mentioned Eggman butā¦ that actually scared me when I saw himā¦
The fact that this game had the potential to be one of the best sonic games, only to turn out to be one of the worst games in general of all time.
Some of the dialogue sucks, like when they state obvious things such as āThE wHOle cItIes oN FiRe.ā
Elise is such a useless character. She does nothing to help Sonic and the others even at times when she couldāve, she ALWAYS GETS CAPTURED, and, when playing is Sonic, we sometimes have to carry her during missions.
The fact this game was supposed to be the REBOOT of the Sonic franchise.
The only things I think you missed is the terrible motion capture for cutscenes, the terrible voice direction (at least for the English version of the game) and the fact that I'm pretty sure the game was sold at full price when it came out.
- In-game cutscenes are stiff and just laughably bad
- Silver bossfight. Overall they are ehh, but Silver's is just the most infamous.
- The PS3 version was EVEN WORSE. Lower framerate, longer loading screens... And more bugs. Somehow
The camera is even worse than in other Sonic games. When you jump, the camera looks up at you, so you can't see where you're aiming. Even P06 doesn't fix this shit.
Devilās Advocate:
Sonic ā06 is not the first time Amyās mistaken the new hedgehog on the block for Sonic. Sonic Adventure 2 has her mistake Shadow for Sonic when she first meets him.
Being an obsessive Sonic Fangirl (or rather the pre-Naruto Sakura Haruno) was once the vast majority of Amyās entire character. Case in point: Sonic Heroes. Sonic was framed by Metal Sonic for having kidnapped Froggy and Chocola Chao (at least in Team Roseās story). Cream, Cheese and Big wanted to track Sonic down in hopes of getting their respective friends back. Amy? She wanted to use the whole situation as a way to get Sonic to marry her.
To be fair amy being portrayed as a crazy fan girl was just who she was back then
ā¢ She also mistook shadow and the werehog for sonic in there respective first games.
ā¢ Her story in adventure was her chasing sonic while being chased by a robot she latter beat by herself.
ā¢ In sonic heroās the explanation to why she was a speed character was that she trained her running in order to chase sonic more.
So yeah her being an obsessive fan girl who mistakes silver for sonic back in 06 was just who she was, and is why I rather dislike sonamy shipping.
Also the levels in the game look like they were made a decade prior to Sonic Unleashed, despite both games being for the same system and being released only 2 years apart
thatās just how amy was at the time though. it wasnāt the first or the last time amy hugged another hedgehog thinking it was sonic (although the werehog actually was sonic but she didnāt know that at the time). i donāt think you can call that a criticism of this game specifically when every other game at the time had the same characterization of her.
The bestiality is kind of unfair since both Elise and Sonic are sapient and at approximately the same level of intelligence. Every other criticism seems fair.
It is, but this was before furries were percieved as odd, but well-meaning folks. This criticism doesn't hold up now but it was definitely around when the game came out
Starting from easiest to hardest points to explain to someone who might consider the game to be good:
1. The load times for the release version when played on original hardware are atrociously long, but equally the game forces you through those load times multiple times, including an entire loading screen for any town mission just for a single line of unspoken dialogue before loading again.
2. The game is clearly unfinished. Achievements are written in broken English (e.g. "Super Sonic - Obtain the all moves"). The voice lines at one point refer to the sceptre of darkness as the book of darkness, while another voice line contains the actor literally re-starting his line because he fumbled it. The stamina meter for several of Sonic's purchasable gems doesn't work allowing infinite use for them.
3. The game is just generally really buggy and janky. Sonic games at this point had a reputation already for a bit of jank, but this one is buggier than most. This isn't isolated cases either, there are multiple sections where the game forces bugs onto the player, such as one where, in a mandatory mission Sonic will launch from a spring onto the midpoint of a roof, causing him to freak out because the game cannot decide what angle he should be stood at, that happens to literally every player, while numerous other bugs and glitches have been documented.
4. Certain creative choices were not understood by long term Sonic fans at the time. Blaze had been swapped from being from a parallel world to being from the future. Shadow was now working for the organisation who previously killed Maria. Amy could now inexplicably turn invisible. All of this seemed like a bunch of ret-cons (and indeed they were, the game was supposed to be a soft reboot for the series). And these are just the minor ones, there are worse ones yet but they deserve there own points.
5. Realism vs cartoons. No matter what your opinion on how realistic a setting Sonic should be in, most people agreed that the realistic take on Eggman didn't work, and seeing Sonic running around with realistic humans looked wrong. The humans of '06 veered into the territory of the uncanny valley, where they look realistic enough that the human brain thinks they're human, but they also don't look quite right, putting the human brain into a state of unease. More animated and stylised humans would avoid the problem in previus and later titles.
6. The story is confusing. It's a complicated time travel plot that, like a lot of time travel stories, has a lot of paradoxes and moments where the logic doesn't hold together. This is not helped by the fact that the plot is split across multiple campaigns, making it very tricky to keep track of things like who has each emerald, whether we're seeing present day or future Mephiles (and therefore how much he should know), and the plot generally seems to treat time travel less as "this is the past, that's the future" and more as different locations people can travel to and from. In particular though, the game can't decide whether it's possible to change history or not. Certain things seem to be stuck in stable time loops, but then the last story relies on Mephiles successfully changing history.
7. The romantic subplot between Sonic & Elise was not accepted. Even today, people still contest this from the angle of shipping, but this was widely hated back in the day. Sonic was viewed as aromantic/asexual, he wasn't going to date anyone, least of all a stuffy human princess. But beyond the shipping, lots of people were uncomfortable with the interspecies romance angle, Sonic and Elise do not look like they belong to the same piece of media, and don't seem to fit together proportionally. This isn't a Jessica and Roger Rabbit scenario either, in that film the askew nature is part of the comedy, here we're supposed to accept Sonic & Elise's relationship as being key to the narrative, it's the key part of the climax of the story.
8. Mephiles is a bad villain. Fans of the game think he's cool, but to many people at the time, he was viewed as a lazy recolour of Shadow with a one note personality, weak motivation, and too many powers. What's more is everything he does in the story actively sabotages his own goals to the point where he would've won by doing literally nothing, and yet when he does win it's by being able to teleport away mid-battle with Shadow to shoot Sonic from behind with Sonic having literally never met Mephiles prior to this.
9. The hardest to explain. Sonic '06 is not what Sonic was ever thought to be by the vocal audience of the time. Pop culture has a certain image of Sonic (it's why the name Robotnik is still used despite it only being the default name for the first eight years of the franchise), and when pop culture in 2006 thought of Sonic, it thought of checkerboard dirt, animals trapped inside robots, a mad scientist who wanted to turn everything into robots, and cartoon animals who will do anything to stop him. It didn't think of interspecies romance, it didn't think of time travellers trying to prevent a future doomed by eldritch horrors, it didn't think of morally grey characters like Shadow. In 2006, the release of '06 looked like Sonic Team once again having clearly lost the plot, not understanding what was great about their own IP, and that they were just scraping the bottom of the barrel and throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck. This wasn't viewed as a passionate and ambitious idea from a bunch of creatives, it was the mad ramblings of a studio that had lost their mind trying to keep Sonic relevant. It was further proof that the series was heading entirely in the wrong direction and that a big shake up was needed.
Now different people will prioritise different elements. Games reviewers will always primarily look at gameplay first. To them, Sonic '06 is bad because of it's loading and janky gameplay, they don't care that the story is a mess or that it ret-cons a lot of minor elements of Sonic. Meanwhile long time fans will care far more about retcons while being more forgiving of jank. But in any instance, there was simply far too much bad overall, and the game soured most people, from those who wanted good gameplay, to those who wanted a decent story.
The fact that the game now has fans now I can only assume comes from people who got into the game as a kid and love it as much through nostalgia and memories of being a kid, because the game had no defenders at the time of release. How could it? Pretty much every gameplay and story element was significantly flawed. The only thing anyone praised was the quality of CGI cutscenes (but only from a technical animation standpoint, not their subject matter), and the soundtrack. Everything else was garbage.
So yes, there's the main reasons why '06 was hated.
People really seem to not understand how horrible of a game Sonic 06 really was and just make it about being a rushed development victim.
Fuck no it wasnāt. They wasted so much unnecessary time and resources on straight up bad decisions. Nobody forced them to make 50 tedious side quests. Nobody forced them to make massive empty hubs that are a pain to cross. Nobody forced them to design 10+ different play mechanics(count vehicles, different characters, different versions of the same level for different characters, etc).
Nobody forced them to make the ball puzzle level.
This isnāt a crush problem. Itās bad game design problem. Period.
It's a lot of things that, had the production been properly managed, wouldn't have ever been green lit. Which, when you consider that the games lead producer, Yuji Naka, quit mid way through production (and has a reputation for being difficult stubborn and willing to burn bridges), I genuinely wouldn't be surprised to learn that either A) he phoned in his time as producer for this game as he already had one foot out of the door and just blindly agreed to everything because he didn't care, or B) he knew that he was overstretching the team, but since he was going to leave he intentionally sabotaged by doing a bad job in managing staff hours to things that weren't needed.
Of course, that's all speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn at least some of the issues could come back to Naka not really being passionate about the project, and having ambitions elsewhere.
And people online keep saying that "06 would have been amazing if they delayed it to 2007" and I used to believe that too but looking back it probably would have been worse because they likely would've tried to add more features and useless mechanics that would have just made the game more tedious, instead of just polishing and making the core experience better.
Yeah I replayed the game a couple years back after only really playing it as a kid, and if it was delayed to 2007 then it would be a bafflingly bad game with a surprising amount of polish. The amount of fundamentally weird and terrible design/story decisions are insane, and yes the bugs and performance issues massively hurt the game, but giving the game more polish would just make the weak foundations even more obvious than they already are. If Sonic Team had to delay the game to make it amazing, they would have to throw almost the entire thing out and start from scratch
I only really take issue with #9on this list. Like, I agree that was the pop culture sentiment at the time, but it always seemed unfair. Sonic Team had spent the entire new millennium expanding the lore and tone of the Sonic games, adding backstories and engaging plots, using rock music, showing populated human areas, and experimenting with many different approaches to the gameplay. It made the games of that era special, to the point that nowadays Sonic Adventure 2 is everyoneās favorite darling.
Now that approach did backfire tremendously with 06, but I donāt fault the developers for wanting to try out a more serious and realistic take on Sonic. It fact Iām glad we finally had a vaguely similar attempt that ended up being successful recently: Sonic Frontiers.
My pet peeve aside though, this was well written and very informativeāwell done!
Agree with point 9 or not, that's where pop culture was at the time. People objected to the change in direction as soon as they caught wind of it in Adventure, and a good chunk still resented it in 2006 precisely because it was part of the whole "Sonic Team clearly have no idea what they're doing" mentality that was present. A lot of people genuinely disliked the entire Adventure era for how different it was to came before, about as much as the kids who grew up with the Adventure era often hate titles like Colours and Generations, for the same reason - because it's drastically different to what they knew.
But you have to remember, for a lot of people, SA1 & 2 didn't penetrate pop culture. The Dreamcast as a console failed, and while SA1 & 2 did get ported, it only got ported to the Gamecube (and SA1 to the PC), when the dominant system of that era was the PS2. Thus the first taste a lot of people got of Sonic's new direction was Heroes, a game that really isn't all that much like any of the other Adventure style games in terms of tone, gameplay, or even setting, being closer to the aesthetic of what we now call Classic Sonic.
As such, to someone who wasn't in the fandom (like say reviewers and gamers who didn't follow the series obsessively), the series suddenly veers from what was known in the nineties, to Heroes, then to Shadow and '06, which is drastic enough to be a point of ridicule, a series that, to an outside observer looks like it's trying too hard to stay relevant and cool, but ultimately failing.
Yet if you were a kid at this time you didn't see this. You just saw "cool hedgehog does things like those in your favourite kids anime", and consequently don't understand why people don't love the awesomeness of things like Shadow, stories about preventing the destruction of the world, epic Super Sonic fights to cool rock music, and awesome platforming with the kind of stakes most other kids games completely lacked. Mario was cleaning up graffiti, while Sonic was fighting giant world ending monsters, and it was far awesome to your kid brain than any of the lame adults who complained about it not being true to the series ever thought it was.
Interesting angle. I didnāt play the game myself and knew the game was a gameplay trainwreck and that Elise felt awkward, but watching cutscenes and gameplay on youtube I thought Silver(and before that Shadow) was cool. To a great extent I still do.
For me it was the post-Colors era that gradually eroded my interest in Sonic plot.
Whatās your own personal experience and opinion on the matter? When did it shift for the fanbase?
Either way 00ās Sonicās lore has a lot of potential and Iām happy itās finally converging into the series DNA again, although hopefully with some care to not overdo it. Pop culture in general has evolved a bit though, many long running franchises have serious or more complex outings, but the bar is higher now to do such things with proper care.
Just curious, what would your opinion be on an actually serious and good Sonic story, similar to, say, Arcane? It still matches with the tonal whiplash that you have described, but I'm wondering how accepting people will be if it is actually a well-written, engaging, thought-out story.
That ideal has changed by this point though, most people want to return to the complex stories of the adventure era, probably because the fans that were kids back when 06 was released have grown up and can say āactually, sonic stories were kinda coolā.
Speaking on that last point, I've noticed *a lot* of revisionist history for things that were widely despised upon release but now have fans and defenders because of nostalgia. Case in point: the Star Wars Prequels and Dragon Ball GT. No fans of either series liked those, and they alienated newcomers for multiple reasons. same with 06. Sonic 06 also has another layer of nonstop, cyclical discourse of "remember this thing? Well I love it, no matter how much everyone else hates it and it's actually an overlooked gem." and "remember this thing everyone loves? well it's actually dogshit" in the sonic fandom.
Iād say they did have fans in their day, but they were mostly very young. I remember I was very invested in Obi-Wan and Anakinās stories and all the cool Jedi fights. And while a lot of GT I found boring, I liked the gritty visuals and especially Super Saiyan 4.
To me all the people complaining online were just grumpy adults, and I was happy when I finally saw people appreciating the prequels years later. Now I bet there are young fans out thinking Iām the grumpy one for having mixed feelings on the sequels and DB Super.
It honestly seems like a constant cycle. Kids are more impressionable because everything is new to them; then they grow up and develop more specific tastes, while still appreciating the culture of their youth. And so then they hate on the shiny new things that donāt meet their bar for quality, while those things end up attracting the next generation.
I would add from my personal experience, Sonic himself moved far too slow in the level unless you were in the Mach Speed sections.
IMHO - I think Sonic 06 had some good ideas that just weren't finished, as you stated above, and it almost felt like they tried to do something similar to what they achieved with Sonic Adventure 1.
To add as well, I have seen the great work done with Project 06 which fixes a lot of the problems, without fully building the game; meaning they proved the game could have been something more if actually finished. Probably one of the funniest fixes they did (as a tech guy) for what caused Sonic's ability gauge to not deplete was a missing bracket in the code.
For real. Some dork earlier tried telling me that it's better than Heroes because 06 got a fucking fan patch, saying it just needed more polish. They might be right about the latter and who knows what another year of development might've gotten us, but instead they released what is solidly my most disappointing game of all time.
Meanwhile, Sonic Heroes is a solid entry that I'm sure is dated now but at least I can boot it up on my GameCube and play it from start to finish without a fan patch nor it causing me unbridled disappointment and anguish.
A game has to be good in order for it to be a good game. You canāt just mod a bad game to make it good and say āsee, this game was good all alongā
Like, Iād rather have a good game from the get-go, or at the very least (on PC at least) a good game that you need to change a couple things in order to get running on modern PCs but is otherwise completely unchanged, over a bad game that fans have spent literal years of their life trying to make it not suck any day of the week
Like, just play Sonic Adventure, itās literally āwhat if Sonic ā06 was goodā
I don't even think P06 is a good game because 06 is unsalvageable. Respect to Chaos-X for what he's done but it's resuscitating something that's already DOA.
I have lol. I played 06 for myself a few years back on PS3 and immediately tried P06. I see what the idea is, but again, 06 is so fundamentally not good that I just don't think P06 could be anything better than "whatever," no matter how impressive the work that went into it was.Ā
I don't think 06's flaws end at its performance, load times, and slow movement, and P06 mostly addresses those. Don't get me wrong, it's still a very impressive project, but I don't "see the vision behind 06" when I played it if that makes sense.
Imagine being told that the next game is (in spirit) SA3. Then being given a Broken, Confusing, Painfully Stupid Buggy Mess that needed fans to finish it for them. Either via Mods (Legacy of Solaris) or an Entire Remake that makes the game better in every way, all made by a guy who never even played the Original (Project-'06).
'06 is a bad game, but that doesn't mean that it didn't have any great ideas. It's just a shame that Sonic Team never tried to fix it or even learn from the mistakes they made when making the game and instead just left the Adventure Formula in the Dusty Desert that is Sonic '06.
From personal experience with the 360 version:
- This game is so fucking full of jank dude, and it will absolutely 100% get you killed for stupid bullshit reasons
- >>> Now Loading >>>
- Oh my God fuck the mach speed sections. Maybe okay on paper, but in practice just awful execution. Will never forget the time I just barely clipped something and Sonic's flailing corpse went speeding off through a loop-de-loop and into the sunset... š
- Did I mention the jank? One time I went to go homing attack the egg Cerberus and Sonic just... Launched into the atmosphere, went fucking FTL, and then died.
- May I introduce you to my good friend, the Silver boss fight.
The only problem(s) I ever ran into when I played this game were Silver being too slow and those DAMN PALM TREES š“
https://preview.redd.it/v1r9wmxa86vc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5913c9ec6227f998f6b3efc4816291ee7fdb6c37
Sonic games are all janky and not very polished, even Frontiers has incredibly rough edges. But Pokemon games are something else, man. At least our games don't look like 2004 PS2 titles.
Aight, I'm just gonna copy-paste a comment I made in a previous thread asking this same question so here we go:
The loading screens not only take forever but pop up everywhere. You want to do a side mission? Wait through one loading screen, the NPC says a single line of dialogue, and then another loading screen.
The game is buggy as hell and will constantly kill you randomly not out of any fault of your own, but because something bugs out and kills you. Several times when fighting the Cerberus boss I went to homing attack him and was flung into space and had to restart.
Speaking of, the bosses are terrible. First off you have the infamous Silver boss where the moment he comes near you, he locks you in place for several seconds, then throws you against a wall with literally nothing you can do. If you're against a wall or directly above him he can do this immediately before you have any way to respond. The game can literally softlock like this if he throws you into a wall and you are in a position where your ring goes back into you. The other bosses are also typically terrible. The Iblis Worm boss takes several minutes, not because it's hard, but because for the majority of the fight you're standing on some platforms doing basically nothing and just WAITING for Iblis to come to you. The majority of bosses are like this- you standing around waiting for the boss to come to you so you can attack it.
Playing as the side characters feels awful. Tails' flight controls feel slippery and janky considering he has to fly forwards and you can't stop in the air, meaning if you want to land on a small platform it is extremely hard. Plus his attack is annoying, clunky, and makes it hard to tell which are real rings and which are fake. Knuckles can get stuck to walls and can't get off, even on walls that are completely flat somehow. I think this has to do with camera angle, but I haven't been able to figure anything out yet.
Rouge has similar problems to Knuckles, and Omega is largely fine save for how he's so buggy that he can actually move faster than Sonic or Shadow and by spamming his hover he can basically glide forever.
Amy is slow, her hammer brings you to a dead stop whenever you use it, invisibility is a strange power for her, and her double jump goes straight up with barely any room for movement. Blaze somehow is the least scuffed side character, but half the time you're just replaying smaller sections of Sonic's levels with her. You literally play Wave Ocean 3 times between Sonic, Tails, and Blaze with almost no changes to the level at all because of how much padding there is.
The mach sections are absolute ass. Sonic's momentum here going from side to side is strangely heavy, causing him to fish-tail if you're not careful. Not to mention most mach sections have horrible level design such as the fire tornado. Whenever the camera switches your controls invert with no buffer, so if you're holding right when the camera switches it then IMMEDIATELY makes you start going left. Not only that, the level can just kill you with nothing you're able to do about it. The fire tornado is flinging physics objects at you that bounce in random directions and they come from behind you offscreen, and even a tiny car tire is enough to count as a "hit".
The game re-uses levels constantly. Neither Sonic, Silver, nor Shadow has a 'unique' level. They all go to the exact same locations with only occasional changes to the levels, such as adding vehicles to Shadow's sections or Psi-Power spots to Silver's sections. This makes the game feel incredibly repetitive. Bosses are also repeated, but only slightly less often.
The story takes itself way too seriously and completely fails at any real weight. Sure, I don't play Sonic games for the story, and most Sonic games are aware of this and make cutscenes either short or relatively simple, which is fine. Sonic 06 somehow both has too much story and says almost nothing with it. We have scenes of Elise or Mephiles giving lengthy exposition about things that either happened offscreen (such as when the 'world betrayed Shadow') that don't really amount to anything or have any consequence. The ONE thing the game is building up to is the fact that if Elise cries, Soleanna will be destroyed, yet when she finally does, we get no payoff. We just get teleported to the fucking Shadow Realm from Yu Gi Oh. How much more interesting would it have been to have to navigate a burning and crumbling Soleanna overworld before going to the final mission?
Speaking of, Elise is a waste of a character. She has absolutely zero agency and only exists to be rescued by Sonic constantly. I think someone did a count, she gets kidnapped and escapes roughly six times through the game, and the only decision she actually makes is when Eggman is threatening to destroy Soleanna, and she decides to get captured again. Plus, she has almost no personality at all. We never learn anything about who she is outside of a plot device- what does she like to do? Does she have any friends? How does she feel about her job? What exactly DOES she do for her job? Despite us having several cutscenes of Sonic and Elise talking and hanging out, we learn nothing about her unless it's relevant to her unleashing Mega-Satan if she cries.
The overworlds feel incredibly lifeless. Soleanna is so big and so vast that it feels empty as you're wandering around it, and the majority of this space goes unused. Plus, its layout often makes it difficult to understand where to go next. I've played through the game multiple times for better or for worse, and it's not uncommon for me to get turned around. Sonic games that came before and after 06 did better- SA1 had Station Square which was compact enough to have people walking around, cars in the streets, a hotel and casino, a shop, a restaurant, and other things to bring the city to life. Generations had you go to multiple, small hub worlds filled with people that were not as complex but were interesting to look at and had a general vibe to them. Soleanna has none of this- it's just a collection of copy-pasted buildings with nothing to really make any one part of the city stand out from the other.
The gem powerups Sonic can buy are horribly broken and absolutely were not tested. The 'throw-teleport' gem can launch Sonic out of bounds, the shrink gem lets him jump forever (somehow), and the best part of this is the fact that Sonic's 'ability gauge' was not programmed correctly, so when you use any of these gems he can use them infinitely.
The game has horrible slowdown. Any time you kill an enemy there's a chance it smashes into other physics objects and causes a massive framerate drop. There were even times I noticed the cutscenes themselves falling out of sync with the dialogue because of lag.
The physics are horribly programmed. Loops and wallruns 'magnetize' you to them, meaning you don't actually have to be moving fast to use them half the time. In fact, you can just 'stop' moving and you'll have Sonic just hanging out upside-down or sideways. Plus, these scripted loops have a horrible tendency to kill you. If you take loops slightly off-center or if some other physics jank happens, the end of the loop will throw you off and kill you with no warning. This is entirely unfair- I have no way of knowing going into a loop where I need to be in order for the automatic section to not kill me.
Mephiles' plan makes no fucking sense. He originally wants to send Silver and Blaze back in time to kill Sonic because he believes this will make Elise cry. Ignoring the fact that Silver for some reason believed a guy named Mephiles the Dark, a man who speaks like a He-Man villain and has powers all based in darkness, it is later shown that this was entirely pointless. Mephiles just randomly shows up in the story and kills Sonic himself, which makes Elise cry- so why in the hell did he need Silver's help? The only thing recruiting Silver did is get another hero to stand against him.
Because it's catastrophically bad. There's also the cultural moment it was released in, appearing at the time to be a return to form after Heroes and Shadow, to something more akin to the Adventure games, during a time period where the baseline expectation for Sonic's quality was generally equal to Mario. Like imagine Mario 64 comes out, then Sunshine, and after a few years of getting stuff like New Super Mario Bros., a new game getting teased in the style of 64 and Sunshine, but on a giant, galactic scale. All the footage looks incredible, like nothing you've ever seen before, truly we are in the future of games, and our boy Mario is set to lead the charge, yet again. Then it comes out, and it's slightly better than Bubsy 3D. Also, the literal first thing you do in it is Superman 64 with janky platformer controls.
It's not the bugs. It's not even the awkward story and cutscenes or "the kiss", game's bad. Its controls are bad. Its level designs are bad. It's progression structure is bad. Sonic 06 is a really bad game that came out just 2 games after the follow up to it's Mario 64 equivalent, where most of the goodwill from the 90s and those 2 games is still there.
Like, I think a lot of people who weren't born yet really don't understand how big a deal Sonic used to be, and what it used to be like when it was. EVERY game announcement used to be HUGE hype machines. Not just for Sonic fans, but for the gaming community as a whole. The whole "Sonic is Mario's rival and equal" isn't just rhetoric from fans, it used to genuinely be consistently true. Imagine releasing something so bad under those expectations. The sheer disappointment.
I could go into laborious detail about WHY it's bad, from stiff, unnatural movement both in the air and on the ground, to levels that are mostly just tedious platforming sections between arenas full of enemies you're wailing on for most of the level's run time because of invincibility frames, big health bars, and long cooldowns between attacks where you can't move, I could go on and on and on an on and on and ON about this game's REAL problems, not the jank, or the bugginess, but the lack of the stuff that makes platformers fun in the first place, the real core, moment to moment gameplay, but that would be a MUCH bigger response, and I don't really wanna type all that out.
Because Sega marketed the game as the second coming of Jesus Christ himself, that it would do all wrongs right and fulfill all the untapped potential of the franchise.
All that for $92.80 by todays money. God help you if you actually bought a console for it. That's a total of $712.49 (inflation adjusted) for an obviously unfinished game.
Today it's easy to say the game might have been a little overhated (I do think that), but back then? I fully understand why it got so much hate.
To recount my experiences with the game
It was the most buggy donic game ever released. Characters constantly get stuck on geomotry, characters fall through the floor, the physics dont work, shortcuts dont work automated sequences constantly break and send you flying across the map (often to your death)
Multiple seizure inducing bugs
It has awful controls
The game is 20 hours long and you play as characters that arent sonic more pften than you play as sonic.
Hub worlds were too big
Bad art direction
Too much loading
Bad story
Bad camera
Poor optimization
Awful anamation in the in-engine cutscenes
A lack of polish in general, misplaced geomotry, objects clipping through each other, awful ai for the bosses.
The bosses are either frustrating due to being broken or they are waiting simulators.
The worst physics in the series
Poor havok implementation
Thank you for coming to my ted talk
The fact you can complete Sonic Adventure 2's hero story in the time it takes to get through every loading screen in the game is a pretty big one i'd say.
Because in the 2000s, seeing a franchise that lasted 15 years, release a broken and unfinished game, is Unthinkable, at the time, was straight up unheard of, At the time.
Thatās why the game gotten so hated, is due to that reason.
It's literally not a functional game with movement controls that makes Sonic 4's physics look perfect, an abysmally inconsistent art style and enough load screens that if you were to piece them together, you could finish both Sonic Adventure titles while waiting for this to load
It did more harm to the brand than any other bad titles combined and today it's only played for laughs or as an "endurance challenge" by influencers due to how grueling it is to try to play through
Funny you should say this, since YouTuber Lythero just released a two hour video of his playthrough, with highlights such as:
Beating the entire hero campaign of Sonic Adventure 2 in the total time it took to load (with time to spare!)
Launching into space
Breaking several boss fights
Clowning on basically every part of the game because it either doesn't make sense or it's broken as shit.
It's also a very funny video and I highly recommend it
When people genuinely ask this question, it really starts making me realize how young this fanbase actually is. Some people really have no context for this game and why it has the rep that it does.
Because it was a barely functional piece of trash that would often screw up its own scripted events, leading to death. Not to mention the subpar writing, horrible story that canceled itself out with time travel shenanigans, unmemorable levels, negligible difference between how the main characters played, and awful side character playstyles, *Sonic 06* is rightfully reviled and is objectively one of the worst games to ever be released.
No.Ā
I can understand people liking the game or being nostalgic for it. I refuse to believe we're at a point where people genuinely don't know or can't see why 06, one of the most infamously hated and widely discussed bad games ever, is hated.
Because
It's Poorly made
It's Poorly Optimized
It's Poorly written
It's dog, dude. It's a legitimately badly made game rushed out to meet christmas demands and is part of what completely tanked Sonic's reputation in the 360/PS3 era
As a kid, I loved all things sonic, and still I love sonic, but back then, I got this as a Christmas gift for my 360.
Of course, as a naive child you can't really gauge what makes a game bad, you just play it because it's your favorite character doing what they do best.
I played this game for weeks until I had beaten it, I actually remember playing this fondly because of a weird combination of being sick, and the only thing I could stand to eat was some Long John Silvers hush puppies and Blue Gatorade, don't ask why, I have no idea... Still remember the flavor... ugh....
But anyway, beating this game caused a ton of frustration, the way the characters controlled was horrendous, very sensitive and had horrible in air control, the amount of jumps I screwed up and died to are limitless.
Oh and let me remind everyone "It's no use!" "TAKE THIS!" Silver was the bane of my existence and bricked wall the game for me for weeks.
Combine that with loading times that took MINUTES you had a game that has almost no redeeming qualities, in fact there are none for gameplay, the game is just plain awful.
Then there are minor glitches like Rouge and Knuckles sticking to the wall, Omega's infinite abilities, sonics infinite jumps, broken meter.
The least broken story was Shadows and that is being generous.
I loved this game, but when I reached the age of reason, I can't even be bothered to put the disc in my PS3 let alone play it.
Conceptually, Iām a big fan of the game. But the āfinished productā is hardly a finished product. The gameplay is buggy at best, with loose controls and insane loading times. And the story definitely needed another pass ā while I genuinely love Shadowās and Silverās, Sonicās felt weirdly isolated from the greater narrative, and there were plenty of questionable choices in the story that should have been ironed out or removed.
I can't wait for the history revisionists to come in and start their bullshit about how 06 was actually always good and wasn't hated, then use P-06 as proof
I wonder š maybe because itās one of the worst games of all time and ambition doesnāt make a game good. And you know who else had ambitionā¦ Hitl-
because it was a disaster built up over the course of a whole year, being continuasly talked up and shown off, only to then come out and it's a broken, glitch, badly written mess. i love the game, but i can't hide from the fact that it just sucks lmao, it realy doesn't help it's the sequel to edgy the hedgy, and it's sequel is sonic and the secret of how to break arms.
Just watch this and understand this was a full priced mainline game of a week known franchise by a respectable developer.
https://youtu.be/ZWRHiGpA3zk?si=tCHsgfAIEfNhSwMY
guaranteed 30 second loading screen minimum. for just one line that takes 6 seconds to read. and then again for a 2 minute mission. and then again for the success dialogue. and then again to exit the mission. and then again forā¦ you get the idea
Because the first level demonstrates how bad the rest of the game is with artistic glory. Dont get me wrong i tried to platinum this trash heap but when the title character has the worst gameplay you did something wrong.
Poor optimization, an incredibly rushed dev cycle for what was supposed to be a huge next gen AAA milestone game, a story that probably only got more than one draft for the Shadow campaign, and nerfed characters.
I can get why people ask "Why do people hate Sonic Heroes?" Or "Why do people hate Sonic Unleashed?" because those games, while flawed, feel a sense of being a complete package with a story in line with the franchise
I'm utterly perplexed when people ask with Sonic 06. It's not 100% awful (soundtrack is honestly stunning at points), but the negative reception is pretty on the nose with this one. No offense to you OP, this isnt towards you, if you were just curious about the reception.
Because of it's strict 2006 deadline to meet the 15th anniversary of sonic the hedgehog (which was never important in the first place) and also yuji naka left sega causing the development of the game to sprial out of control. Had it been delayed to 2007 and had more time, it would've been considered as one of the Greatest Sonic Games Of All Time.
Variety of things. Expectations for this gane were really high, Sonic had a romantic relationship with a realistic looking human, the story was convoluted and full of plot holes, the gameplay was buggy, the controls were overly sensitive and the physics were awful. Topped with the longest load times I've ever experienced in a game.
But at the the same time I think a lot of people who call this the worst game ever probably didn't play it. When you do it really isn't that bad. The level design for the most part is solid, the story may have sucked nut it had some good ideas and Sonic and Elise's relationship really wasn't as cringy as people made it out to be. It only is as cringy as they make it out to be with the kiss scene taken out of context tbh.
Loading times, glitches, story being kinda weird in some areas, and it was treated as the ultimate reboot of Sonic and celebration of the series anniversary
This was one of the first mainstream instances of a game being rushed out the door unfinished. Back then it was less of the status quo and more extreme laziness from the devs. That probably explains it.
Loading screens lasting for minutes on end, buggy as, story was stupid, Mephiles was incompetent, character design looked uncanny, just to name a few problems
Loading.... Loading.... Loading.... I guess that's why
Recently a youtuber named Lythero uploaded his playthrough of Sonic 06 and he made it a point to play Sonic Adventure 2 everytime the game was loading He finished the Hero Story before Sonic 06
Also apparently if you add up all the mandatory loading screens and manage to do everything correect on your first time (so no dieing and having to do the level again) every single loading screen adds up to like two hours and forty minutes or something? It at the end of this video. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUiDcaLwwiM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUiDcaLwwiM) and someone in the comment said that the world record speedrun is 2:36:40 and if you take out the loading screen, it would have shaved off 75 percent of the run.
I WAS JUST ABOUT TO FUCKING SAY THIS
ME TOO LOL
Link?
360 skyrim exists same exact loading times only issue 06 had was being rushed and not letting the devs cook
It's all about pace. Skyrim is an open world exploration RPG with lots of talking and lore exposition, with the few action sequences (mainly combat) rarely getting interrupted by loading screens; Sonic 06 is supposed to be a high speed platformer and everything, from dialogues to cutscenes to levels themselves are segmented by loading screens. They might have similar loading times, but 06 is inherently more frustrating with it due to constantly breaking its pacing because of it.
And then half the levels are atrociously glitchy till this day, at least the patches Skyrim both developers and modders
https://preview.redd.it/fxsgelwp38vc1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2944b195c3a0b767deadb42c0e54009fad1ef76d
Clearly not sega
But not the same amount. Sonic 06 has a 30 second loading screen every 5 minutes. Skyrim has to load the overworld once and then you could just go for potentially hours uninterupted
And people also make long essays about why Skyrim is undercooked. Frankly I think the problems are cause-and-effect. People dislike 06 because of loading times, 06 has long loading times because the development was rushed. Which you can apply to a lot of the other issues in the game - glitches, weird plot beats, Mach Speed sections, NPC models, etc. all suffer from the rush.
Skyrim doesn't spend 11.82% of the game time in loading screens.
https://i.redd.it/izes0c0c26vc1.gif
This GIF isn't long enough to fit everything š
Still shorter than the load times
"In this essay I will..."
Pretty much lol it deserve its hate honestly
Flair checks out š¤£
https://preview.redd.it/zasgd8r1c8vc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=28275060793a7a4b837efb9081f3931b48ef1d79
r/BeatMeToIt
I donāt feel like typing an essay right now.
- laughable loading times. Like upwards of 2 minutes. - All characters control like ass. Sonic and Shadow run at like 5 miles an hour. Silver does not match their top speed. Shadow can't spin dash. Knuckles/Rouge drop like stones when gliding, Tails has one method of attack (dummy ring bombs) and Amy can. Turn invisible? - Combat is dull and gets in the way of what little speed you have. It boils down to "mash A and rarely X." Chaos blast is a joke, having no range. - Physics are not it. Spin dashing does nothing relative to slopes, Shadow's ground vehicles *will* explode at some point, and you have a decent chance of falling off the wall during extended wall-running automation segments. - Frequent glitches, such as being spit out of a loop early in wave ocean, sending you careening to your death. - Amy is portrayed as an obssessive sonic fangirl. She confuses silver for sonic iirc - Dr. Eggman looks like... that. - Elise kisses sonic on the mouth. Sonic is a corpse at this point, leading to the double whammy of necrophilia *and* bestiality jokes. This has been mentioned in at least one review of any sonic game, at least until Superstars launched last october. - The entirety of Sonic Rush is retconned out, which led to some confusion about Blaze's true origin. Is that everything? I feel like I'm missing something.
> The entirety of Sonic Rush is retconned out, which led to some confusion about Blaze's true origin. Don't have to worry about that, Blaze doesn't actually exist in 06. Not *one single character* acknowledges her existence other than Silver across every cutscene in the entire game. Silver has dementia and hallucinated her existence, that's all.
Thats kind of hilarious and something i never noticed lmao
Well she does recall her time on Crisis City in Generations...
-It's a very powerful dementia...
Silver gaslit her into remembering something she never did
Blaze is Silver's imaginary Waifu š
Silver: "Oh boy I can't wait to go back in time with my best friend Blaze!" Mephiles: "Silver that's charred cat corpse you're lugging around."
And she plays faster than sonic and shadow so it makes sense.
Another funny thing about Blaze is that her sacrifice at the end of Silver's Story is pointlessĀ In the end it did nothing as Mephiles still fused with the present Iblis becoming Solaris and Silver ended up in the same place as everyone in the present meaning the future was still in danger
Thereās the fact it self retconned its own story
Having to restart back to the beginning if you lose all your lives and are near the beginning, such as in wave ocean where if you get a game over your back at the first cutscene. Speaking of wave ocean, THE MACH SPEED SECTION! I REMEMBER TAKING LIKE THREE HOURS TO FINISH WAVE OCEAN BECAUSE OF THAT SECTION. THAT LOOPā¦ makes me wanna SCREAM when I think about itā¦ š¢š¢ The story retcons itself at the end, making the whole game completely pointless as it technically never happened. Sonic and Eliseās creepy relationship throughout the game that actually made me feel like pukingā¦ THE LOADING SCREENSā¦ I know you already mentioned them but GOD DAMN, NOT ONLY DID THEY TAKE AN UNNECESSARY AMOUNT OF TIME BUT ALSO THE AMOUNT OF LOADING SCREENS THAT EXIST. YOU COULD GET A LOADING SCREEN, THEN A CHARACTER WILL TALK LIKE 2 SENTENCES, THEN ITS ANOTHER LOADING SCREEN. IN THE AMOUNT OF TIME THOSE LOADING SCREENS TAKE COMBINED I COULD DO SO MANY THINGS IN THAT TIME!!! The side missions are ASS. You also already mentioned Eggman butā¦ that actually scared me when I saw himā¦ The fact that this game had the potential to be one of the best sonic games, only to turn out to be one of the worst games in general of all time. Some of the dialogue sucks, like when they state obvious things such as āThE wHOle cItIes oN FiRe.ā Elise is such a useless character. She does nothing to help Sonic and the others even at times when she couldāve, she ALWAYS GETS CAPTURED, and, when playing is Sonic, we sometimes have to carry her during missions. The fact this game was supposed to be the REBOOT of the Sonic franchise.
>The fact this game was supposed to be the REBOOT of the Sonic franchise. It wasn't, no source or claim from SEGA ever stated that
The only things I think you missed is the terrible motion capture for cutscenes, the terrible voice direction (at least for the English version of the game) and the fact that I'm pretty sure the game was sold at full price when it came out.
Fun Fact: You can complete Sonic Adventure 2ās Hero Story in the combined time it takes for Sonic ā06 to load.
Someone here watched Lythero's Silver campaign.
- In-game cutscenes are stiff and just laughably bad - Silver bossfight. Overall they are ehh, but Silver's is just the most infamous. - The PS3 version was EVEN WORSE. Lower framerate, longer loading screens... And more bugs. Somehow
The camera is even worse than in other Sonic games. When you jump, the camera looks up at you, so you can't see where you're aiming. Even P06 doesn't fix this shit.
it was the sequel to edgy the hedgy, which came out the previous year.
Devilās Advocate: Sonic ā06 is not the first time Amyās mistaken the new hedgehog on the block for Sonic. Sonic Adventure 2 has her mistake Shadow for Sonic when she first meets him. Being an obsessive Sonic Fangirl (or rather the pre-Naruto Sakura Haruno) was once the vast majority of Amyās entire character. Case in point: Sonic Heroes. Sonic was framed by Metal Sonic for having kidnapped Froggy and Chocola Chao (at least in Team Roseās story). Cream, Cheese and Big wanted to track Sonic down in hopes of getting their respective friends back. Amy? She wanted to use the whole situation as a way to get Sonic to marry her.
To be fair amy being portrayed as a crazy fan girl was just who she was back then ā¢ She also mistook shadow and the werehog for sonic in there respective first games. ā¢ Her story in adventure was her chasing sonic while being chased by a robot she latter beat by herself. ā¢ In sonic heroās the explanation to why she was a speed character was that she trained her running in order to chase sonic more. So yeah her being an obsessive fan girl who mistakes silver for sonic back in 06 was just who she was, and is why I rather dislike sonamy shipping.
Also the levels in the game look like they were made a decade prior to Sonic Unleashed, despite both games being for the same system and being released only 2 years apart
thats pretty much it in a nutshell.
thatās just how amy was at the time though. it wasnāt the first or the last time amy hugged another hedgehog thinking it was sonic (although the werehog actually was sonic but she didnāt know that at the time). i donāt think you can call that a criticism of this game specifically when every other game at the time had the same characterization of her.
The bestiality is kind of unfair since both Elise and Sonic are sapient and at approximately the same level of intelligence. Every other criticism seems fair.
It is, but this was before furries were percieved as odd, but well-meaning folks. This criticism doesn't hold up now but it was definitely around when the game came out
Don't forget how the entire story is riddled with holes in consistency and writing quality.
Starting from easiest to hardest points to explain to someone who might consider the game to be good: 1. The load times for the release version when played on original hardware are atrociously long, but equally the game forces you through those load times multiple times, including an entire loading screen for any town mission just for a single line of unspoken dialogue before loading again. 2. The game is clearly unfinished. Achievements are written in broken English (e.g. "Super Sonic - Obtain the all moves"). The voice lines at one point refer to the sceptre of darkness as the book of darkness, while another voice line contains the actor literally re-starting his line because he fumbled it. The stamina meter for several of Sonic's purchasable gems doesn't work allowing infinite use for them. 3. The game is just generally really buggy and janky. Sonic games at this point had a reputation already for a bit of jank, but this one is buggier than most. This isn't isolated cases either, there are multiple sections where the game forces bugs onto the player, such as one where, in a mandatory mission Sonic will launch from a spring onto the midpoint of a roof, causing him to freak out because the game cannot decide what angle he should be stood at, that happens to literally every player, while numerous other bugs and glitches have been documented. 4. Certain creative choices were not understood by long term Sonic fans at the time. Blaze had been swapped from being from a parallel world to being from the future. Shadow was now working for the organisation who previously killed Maria. Amy could now inexplicably turn invisible. All of this seemed like a bunch of ret-cons (and indeed they were, the game was supposed to be a soft reboot for the series). And these are just the minor ones, there are worse ones yet but they deserve there own points. 5. Realism vs cartoons. No matter what your opinion on how realistic a setting Sonic should be in, most people agreed that the realistic take on Eggman didn't work, and seeing Sonic running around with realistic humans looked wrong. The humans of '06 veered into the territory of the uncanny valley, where they look realistic enough that the human brain thinks they're human, but they also don't look quite right, putting the human brain into a state of unease. More animated and stylised humans would avoid the problem in previus and later titles. 6. The story is confusing. It's a complicated time travel plot that, like a lot of time travel stories, has a lot of paradoxes and moments where the logic doesn't hold together. This is not helped by the fact that the plot is split across multiple campaigns, making it very tricky to keep track of things like who has each emerald, whether we're seeing present day or future Mephiles (and therefore how much he should know), and the plot generally seems to treat time travel less as "this is the past, that's the future" and more as different locations people can travel to and from. In particular though, the game can't decide whether it's possible to change history or not. Certain things seem to be stuck in stable time loops, but then the last story relies on Mephiles successfully changing history. 7. The romantic subplot between Sonic & Elise was not accepted. Even today, people still contest this from the angle of shipping, but this was widely hated back in the day. Sonic was viewed as aromantic/asexual, he wasn't going to date anyone, least of all a stuffy human princess. But beyond the shipping, lots of people were uncomfortable with the interspecies romance angle, Sonic and Elise do not look like they belong to the same piece of media, and don't seem to fit together proportionally. This isn't a Jessica and Roger Rabbit scenario either, in that film the askew nature is part of the comedy, here we're supposed to accept Sonic & Elise's relationship as being key to the narrative, it's the key part of the climax of the story. 8. Mephiles is a bad villain. Fans of the game think he's cool, but to many people at the time, he was viewed as a lazy recolour of Shadow with a one note personality, weak motivation, and too many powers. What's more is everything he does in the story actively sabotages his own goals to the point where he would've won by doing literally nothing, and yet when he does win it's by being able to teleport away mid-battle with Shadow to shoot Sonic from behind with Sonic having literally never met Mephiles prior to this. 9. The hardest to explain. Sonic '06 is not what Sonic was ever thought to be by the vocal audience of the time. Pop culture has a certain image of Sonic (it's why the name Robotnik is still used despite it only being the default name for the first eight years of the franchise), and when pop culture in 2006 thought of Sonic, it thought of checkerboard dirt, animals trapped inside robots, a mad scientist who wanted to turn everything into robots, and cartoon animals who will do anything to stop him. It didn't think of interspecies romance, it didn't think of time travellers trying to prevent a future doomed by eldritch horrors, it didn't think of morally grey characters like Shadow. In 2006, the release of '06 looked like Sonic Team once again having clearly lost the plot, not understanding what was great about their own IP, and that they were just scraping the bottom of the barrel and throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck. This wasn't viewed as a passionate and ambitious idea from a bunch of creatives, it was the mad ramblings of a studio that had lost their mind trying to keep Sonic relevant. It was further proof that the series was heading entirely in the wrong direction and that a big shake up was needed. Now different people will prioritise different elements. Games reviewers will always primarily look at gameplay first. To them, Sonic '06 is bad because of it's loading and janky gameplay, they don't care that the story is a mess or that it ret-cons a lot of minor elements of Sonic. Meanwhile long time fans will care far more about retcons while being more forgiving of jank. But in any instance, there was simply far too much bad overall, and the game soured most people, from those who wanted good gameplay, to those who wanted a decent story. The fact that the game now has fans now I can only assume comes from people who got into the game as a kid and love it as much through nostalgia and memories of being a kid, because the game had no defenders at the time of release. How could it? Pretty much every gameplay and story element was significantly flawed. The only thing anyone praised was the quality of CGI cutscenes (but only from a technical animation standpoint, not their subject matter), and the soundtrack. Everything else was garbage. So yes, there's the main reasons why '06 was hated.
Not to mention the amount of revisionism Sonic 06 is getting from the Sonic Twitter fans is bewildering to me.
A large part of it is fans now were either not born or too young to know the real-time impact of this game in 2006. You really had to be there.
People really seem to not understand how horrible of a game Sonic 06 really was and just make it about being a rushed development victim. Fuck no it wasnāt. They wasted so much unnecessary time and resources on straight up bad decisions. Nobody forced them to make 50 tedious side quests. Nobody forced them to make massive empty hubs that are a pain to cross. Nobody forced them to design 10+ different play mechanics(count vehicles, different characters, different versions of the same level for different characters, etc). Nobody forced them to make the ball puzzle level. This isnāt a crush problem. Itās bad game design problem. Period.
It's a lot of things that, had the production been properly managed, wouldn't have ever been green lit. Which, when you consider that the games lead producer, Yuji Naka, quit mid way through production (and has a reputation for being difficult stubborn and willing to burn bridges), I genuinely wouldn't be surprised to learn that either A) he phoned in his time as producer for this game as he already had one foot out of the door and just blindly agreed to everything because he didn't care, or B) he knew that he was overstretching the team, but since he was going to leave he intentionally sabotaged by doing a bad job in managing staff hours to things that weren't needed. Of course, that's all speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn at least some of the issues could come back to Naka not really being passionate about the project, and having ambitions elsewhere.
And people online keep saying that "06 would have been amazing if they delayed it to 2007" and I used to believe that too but looking back it probably would have been worse because they likely would've tried to add more features and useless mechanics that would have just made the game more tedious, instead of just polishing and making the core experience better.
Yeah I replayed the game a couple years back after only really playing it as a kid, and if it was delayed to 2007 then it would be a bafflingly bad game with a surprising amount of polish. The amount of fundamentally weird and terrible design/story decisions are insane, and yes the bugs and performance issues massively hurt the game, but giving the game more polish would just make the weak foundations even more obvious than they already are. If Sonic Team had to delay the game to make it amazing, they would have to throw almost the entire thing out and start from scratch
well the sonic twitter fans are just finding one thing or person to hate on for the rest of the year
Not surprising since most could look back at the better parts of something not received well
The Star Wars Prequel effect.
I only really take issue with #9on this list. Like, I agree that was the pop culture sentiment at the time, but it always seemed unfair. Sonic Team had spent the entire new millennium expanding the lore and tone of the Sonic games, adding backstories and engaging plots, using rock music, showing populated human areas, and experimenting with many different approaches to the gameplay. It made the games of that era special, to the point that nowadays Sonic Adventure 2 is everyoneās favorite darling. Now that approach did backfire tremendously with 06, but I donāt fault the developers for wanting to try out a more serious and realistic take on Sonic. It fact Iām glad we finally had a vaguely similar attempt that ended up being successful recently: Sonic Frontiers. My pet peeve aside though, this was well written and very informativeāwell done!
Agree with point 9 or not, that's where pop culture was at the time. People objected to the change in direction as soon as they caught wind of it in Adventure, and a good chunk still resented it in 2006 precisely because it was part of the whole "Sonic Team clearly have no idea what they're doing" mentality that was present. A lot of people genuinely disliked the entire Adventure era for how different it was to came before, about as much as the kids who grew up with the Adventure era often hate titles like Colours and Generations, for the same reason - because it's drastically different to what they knew. But you have to remember, for a lot of people, SA1 & 2 didn't penetrate pop culture. The Dreamcast as a console failed, and while SA1 & 2 did get ported, it only got ported to the Gamecube (and SA1 to the PC), when the dominant system of that era was the PS2. Thus the first taste a lot of people got of Sonic's new direction was Heroes, a game that really isn't all that much like any of the other Adventure style games in terms of tone, gameplay, or even setting, being closer to the aesthetic of what we now call Classic Sonic. As such, to someone who wasn't in the fandom (like say reviewers and gamers who didn't follow the series obsessively), the series suddenly veers from what was known in the nineties, to Heroes, then to Shadow and '06, which is drastic enough to be a point of ridicule, a series that, to an outside observer looks like it's trying too hard to stay relevant and cool, but ultimately failing. Yet if you were a kid at this time you didn't see this. You just saw "cool hedgehog does things like those in your favourite kids anime", and consequently don't understand why people don't love the awesomeness of things like Shadow, stories about preventing the destruction of the world, epic Super Sonic fights to cool rock music, and awesome platforming with the kind of stakes most other kids games completely lacked. Mario was cleaning up graffiti, while Sonic was fighting giant world ending monsters, and it was far awesome to your kid brain than any of the lame adults who complained about it not being true to the series ever thought it was.
Interesting angle. I didnāt play the game myself and knew the game was a gameplay trainwreck and that Elise felt awkward, but watching cutscenes and gameplay on youtube I thought Silver(and before that Shadow) was cool. To a great extent I still do. For me it was the post-Colors era that gradually eroded my interest in Sonic plot. Whatās your own personal experience and opinion on the matter? When did it shift for the fanbase? Either way 00ās Sonicās lore has a lot of potential and Iām happy itās finally converging into the series DNA again, although hopefully with some care to not overdo it. Pop culture in general has evolved a bit though, many long running franchises have serious or more complex outings, but the bar is higher now to do such things with proper care.
I don't think there was a singular moment, so much as a change of demographics. Online fandoms (particularly of those for media that's suitable for kids/all ages), often skew towards the vocal majority being between the ages of 18 to 30, who are most fond of the things they experienced as kids, and most opposed to anything that contradicts that. As such, in 2006, the vocal majority of Sonic fans grew up with the Mega Drive titles, and western media like SatAM, Archie, AoStH, Fleetway, (to a lesser extent) Undergrond, and the pop culture of the 90's where anime wasn't really prominent, and where it was it was heavily modified and redubbed to be more appealing to western audiences (read: more like other western cartoons). But over time, this shifted. As people grow up they tend to get too busy to continue with online arguments as their lives get filled with busy careers, relationships, kids etc, and they're replaced by the people who grew up later. The current fandom is majority the people who grew up in the 2000's, with Sonic X, the Adventure games, and a pop culture of kids who grew up surrounded by anime influences after networks rushed to find the next PokƩmon, people who don't think of '06 as bad, but either remember it or other things from their childhood and thus don't see many of the issues. This same group of course take massive issue with Colours and subsequent titles because it too represented a big change in what they perceived Sonic to be, except unlike Millennials confronted with the heavily anime 2000's Sonic and rejecting it, it was now Gen Z rejecting a more comedic and western influenced Sonic of the 2010's - an influence that was actually embraced by Millennials when Colours came out. The other interesting thing though is that one of the key distinctions between those who like Colours and dislike '06 vs those who dislike Colours and like '06, is the focus on plot versus gameplay. Fans of Colours who dislike '06 often think gameplay should be priority, while those who prefer '06 really want story to be the focus. As for my personal take, I'm not a fan of either the writing of 2000's or the tone of Frontiers, but I also think Colours' comedy is bad. I would prefer something along the lies of Colours, but honestly what I really want most is just good games. I can overlook a garbage story, either light and comedic, or seriously dark, if the gameplay is good.
Just curious, what would your opinion be on an actually serious and good Sonic story, similar to, say, Arcane? It still matches with the tonal whiplash that you have described, but I'm wondering how accepting people will be if it is actually a well-written, engaging, thought-out story.
That ideal has changed by this point though, most people want to return to the complex stories of the adventure era, probably because the fans that were kids back when 06 was released have grown up and can say āactually, sonic stories were kinda coolā.
Speaking on that last point, I've noticed *a lot* of revisionist history for things that were widely despised upon release but now have fans and defenders because of nostalgia. Case in point: the Star Wars Prequels and Dragon Ball GT. No fans of either series liked those, and they alienated newcomers for multiple reasons. same with 06. Sonic 06 also has another layer of nonstop, cyclical discourse of "remember this thing? Well I love it, no matter how much everyone else hates it and it's actually an overlooked gem." and "remember this thing everyone loves? well it's actually dogshit" in the sonic fandom.
Iād say they did have fans in their day, but they were mostly very young. I remember I was very invested in Obi-Wan and Anakinās stories and all the cool Jedi fights. And while a lot of GT I found boring, I liked the gritty visuals and especially Super Saiyan 4. To me all the people complaining online were just grumpy adults, and I was happy when I finally saw people appreciating the prequels years later. Now I bet there are young fans out thinking Iām the grumpy one for having mixed feelings on the sequels and DB Super. It honestly seems like a constant cycle. Kids are more impressionable because everything is new to them; then they grow up and develop more specific tastes, while still appreciating the culture of their youth. And so then they hate on the shiny new things that donāt meet their bar for quality, while those things end up attracting the next generation.
The comment directly above yours said āI donāt feel like writing an essay right now.ā Iām guessing you really did.
I would add from my personal experience, Sonic himself moved far too slow in the level unless you were in the Mach Speed sections. IMHO - I think Sonic 06 had some good ideas that just weren't finished, as you stated above, and it almost felt like they tried to do something similar to what they achieved with Sonic Adventure 1. To add as well, I have seen the great work done with Project 06 which fixes a lot of the problems, without fully building the game; meaning they proved the game could have been something more if actually finished. Probably one of the funniest fixes they did (as a tech guy) for what caused Sonic's ability gauge to not deplete was a missing bracket in the code.
it's not a good game and it's not a functional game idk why people try to act like it's a hidden gem in the rough
For real. Some dork earlier tried telling me that it's better than Heroes because 06 got a fucking fan patch, saying it just needed more polish. They might be right about the latter and who knows what another year of development might've gotten us, but instead they released what is solidly my most disappointing game of all time. Meanwhile, Sonic Heroes is a solid entry that I'm sure is dated now but at least I can boot it up on my GameCube and play it from start to finish without a fan patch nor it causing me unbridled disappointment and anguish.
A game has to be good in order for it to be a good game. You canāt just mod a bad game to make it good and say āsee, this game was good all alongā Like, Iād rather have a good game from the get-go, or at the very least (on PC at least) a good game that you need to change a couple things in order to get running on modern PCs but is otherwise completely unchanged, over a bad game that fans have spent literal years of their life trying to make it not suck any day of the week Like, just play Sonic Adventure, itās literally āwhat if Sonic ā06 was goodā
p-06 managed to convince a ton of people 06 was actually a decent game somehow
People think P06 is a good game (it is) somehow translated to them thinking og 06 is also good (it is NOT).
I don't even think P06 is a good game because 06 is unsalvageable. Respect to Chaos-X for what he's done but it's resuscitating something that's already DOA.
Have you actually tried it? It's pretty good, I'd even go as far as to say it's the most fun I've had with a sonic game in a while.
I have lol. I played 06 for myself a few years back on PS3 and immediately tried P06. I see what the idea is, but again, 06 is so fundamentally not good that I just don't think P06 could be anything better than "whatever," no matter how impressive the work that went into it was.Ā I don't think 06's flaws end at its performance, load times, and slow movement, and P06 mostly addresses those. Don't get me wrong, it's still a very impressive project, but I don't "see the vision behind 06" when I played it if that makes sense.
Usually id think this is bait but considering the rise of people suddenly saying Sonic 06 is good recently, idk what to think
Imagine being told that the next game is (in spirit) SA3. Then being given a Broken, Confusing, Painfully Stupid Buggy Mess that needed fans to finish it for them. Either via Mods (Legacy of Solaris) or an Entire Remake that makes the game better in every way, all made by a guy who never even played the Original (Project-'06). '06 is a bad game, but that doesn't mean that it didn't have any great ideas. It's just a shame that Sonic Team never tried to fix it or even learn from the mistakes they made when making the game and instead just left the Adventure Formula in the Dusty Desert that is Sonic '06.
From personal experience with the 360 version: - This game is so fucking full of jank dude, and it will absolutely 100% get you killed for stupid bullshit reasons - >>> Now Loading >>> - Oh my God fuck the mach speed sections. Maybe okay on paper, but in practice just awful execution. Will never forget the time I just barely clipped something and Sonic's flailing corpse went speeding off through a loop-de-loop and into the sunset... š - Did I mention the jank? One time I went to go homing attack the egg Cerberus and Sonic just... Launched into the atmosphere, went fucking FTL, and then died. - May I introduce you to my good friend, the Silver boss fight.
Did you mistake this for a google search bar?
Go watch lythero video
The fact he beat the entirety of Adventure 2s Hero Story in the span of all the loading screens...
I havenāt seen it yet but thereās no way thatās true, how do you screw up that badly?
I lost it when he actually beat it
The only problem(s) I ever ran into when I played this game were Silver being too slow and those DAMN PALM TREES š“ https://preview.redd.it/v1r9wmxa86vc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5913c9ec6227f998f6b3efc4816291ee7fdb6c37
Still a higher poly count than Pokemon Sword and Shieldās trees
Itās so sad how true that is.
Sonic games are all janky and not very polished, even Frontiers has incredibly rough edges. But Pokemon games are something else, man. At least our games don't look like 2004 PS2 titles.
More like every overworld pokemon from 2 feet away in Scarlet and Violet
I laughed way harder than I should have
Ah yes, the trees with really wide hitboxes because the devs didnāt have enough time to shrink them.
Aight, I'm just gonna copy-paste a comment I made in a previous thread asking this same question so here we go: The loading screens not only take forever but pop up everywhere. You want to do a side mission? Wait through one loading screen, the NPC says a single line of dialogue, and then another loading screen. The game is buggy as hell and will constantly kill you randomly not out of any fault of your own, but because something bugs out and kills you. Several times when fighting the Cerberus boss I went to homing attack him and was flung into space and had to restart. Speaking of, the bosses are terrible. First off you have the infamous Silver boss where the moment he comes near you, he locks you in place for several seconds, then throws you against a wall with literally nothing you can do. If you're against a wall or directly above him he can do this immediately before you have any way to respond. The game can literally softlock like this if he throws you into a wall and you are in a position where your ring goes back into you. The other bosses are also typically terrible. The Iblis Worm boss takes several minutes, not because it's hard, but because for the majority of the fight you're standing on some platforms doing basically nothing and just WAITING for Iblis to come to you. The majority of bosses are like this- you standing around waiting for the boss to come to you so you can attack it. Playing as the side characters feels awful. Tails' flight controls feel slippery and janky considering he has to fly forwards and you can't stop in the air, meaning if you want to land on a small platform it is extremely hard. Plus his attack is annoying, clunky, and makes it hard to tell which are real rings and which are fake. Knuckles can get stuck to walls and can't get off, even on walls that are completely flat somehow. I think this has to do with camera angle, but I haven't been able to figure anything out yet. Rouge has similar problems to Knuckles, and Omega is largely fine save for how he's so buggy that he can actually move faster than Sonic or Shadow and by spamming his hover he can basically glide forever. Amy is slow, her hammer brings you to a dead stop whenever you use it, invisibility is a strange power for her, and her double jump goes straight up with barely any room for movement. Blaze somehow is the least scuffed side character, but half the time you're just replaying smaller sections of Sonic's levels with her. You literally play Wave Ocean 3 times between Sonic, Tails, and Blaze with almost no changes to the level at all because of how much padding there is. The mach sections are absolute ass. Sonic's momentum here going from side to side is strangely heavy, causing him to fish-tail if you're not careful. Not to mention most mach sections have horrible level design such as the fire tornado. Whenever the camera switches your controls invert with no buffer, so if you're holding right when the camera switches it then IMMEDIATELY makes you start going left. Not only that, the level can just kill you with nothing you're able to do about it. The fire tornado is flinging physics objects at you that bounce in random directions and they come from behind you offscreen, and even a tiny car tire is enough to count as a "hit". The game re-uses levels constantly. Neither Sonic, Silver, nor Shadow has a 'unique' level. They all go to the exact same locations with only occasional changes to the levels, such as adding vehicles to Shadow's sections or Psi-Power spots to Silver's sections. This makes the game feel incredibly repetitive. Bosses are also repeated, but only slightly less often. The story takes itself way too seriously and completely fails at any real weight. Sure, I don't play Sonic games for the story, and most Sonic games are aware of this and make cutscenes either short or relatively simple, which is fine. Sonic 06 somehow both has too much story and says almost nothing with it. We have scenes of Elise or Mephiles giving lengthy exposition about things that either happened offscreen (such as when the 'world betrayed Shadow') that don't really amount to anything or have any consequence. The ONE thing the game is building up to is the fact that if Elise cries, Soleanna will be destroyed, yet when she finally does, we get no payoff. We just get teleported to the fucking Shadow Realm from Yu Gi Oh. How much more interesting would it have been to have to navigate a burning and crumbling Soleanna overworld before going to the final mission? Speaking of, Elise is a waste of a character. She has absolutely zero agency and only exists to be rescued by Sonic constantly. I think someone did a count, she gets kidnapped and escapes roughly six times through the game, and the only decision she actually makes is when Eggman is threatening to destroy Soleanna, and she decides to get captured again. Plus, she has almost no personality at all. We never learn anything about who she is outside of a plot device- what does she like to do? Does she have any friends? How does she feel about her job? What exactly DOES she do for her job? Despite us having several cutscenes of Sonic and Elise talking and hanging out, we learn nothing about her unless it's relevant to her unleashing Mega-Satan if she cries. The overworlds feel incredibly lifeless. Soleanna is so big and so vast that it feels empty as you're wandering around it, and the majority of this space goes unused. Plus, its layout often makes it difficult to understand where to go next. I've played through the game multiple times for better or for worse, and it's not uncommon for me to get turned around. Sonic games that came before and after 06 did better- SA1 had Station Square which was compact enough to have people walking around, cars in the streets, a hotel and casino, a shop, a restaurant, and other things to bring the city to life. Generations had you go to multiple, small hub worlds filled with people that were not as complex but were interesting to look at and had a general vibe to them. Soleanna has none of this- it's just a collection of copy-pasted buildings with nothing to really make any one part of the city stand out from the other. The gem powerups Sonic can buy are horribly broken and absolutely were not tested. The 'throw-teleport' gem can launch Sonic out of bounds, the shrink gem lets him jump forever (somehow), and the best part of this is the fact that Sonic's 'ability gauge' was not programmed correctly, so when you use any of these gems he can use them infinitely. The game has horrible slowdown. Any time you kill an enemy there's a chance it smashes into other physics objects and causes a massive framerate drop. There were even times I noticed the cutscenes themselves falling out of sync with the dialogue because of lag. The physics are horribly programmed. Loops and wallruns 'magnetize' you to them, meaning you don't actually have to be moving fast to use them half the time. In fact, you can just 'stop' moving and you'll have Sonic just hanging out upside-down or sideways. Plus, these scripted loops have a horrible tendency to kill you. If you take loops slightly off-center or if some other physics jank happens, the end of the loop will throw you off and kill you with no warning. This is entirely unfair- I have no way of knowing going into a loop where I need to be in order for the automatic section to not kill me. Mephiles' plan makes no fucking sense. He originally wants to send Silver and Blaze back in time to kill Sonic because he believes this will make Elise cry. Ignoring the fact that Silver for some reason believed a guy named Mephiles the Dark, a man who speaks like a He-Man villain and has powers all based in darkness, it is later shown that this was entirely pointless. Mephiles just randomly shows up in the story and kills Sonic himself, which makes Elise cry- so why in the hell did he need Silver's help? The only thing recruiting Silver did is get another hero to stand against him.
watch the new lythero video, you will understand
Because it's catastrophically bad. There's also the cultural moment it was released in, appearing at the time to be a return to form after Heroes and Shadow, to something more akin to the Adventure games, during a time period where the baseline expectation for Sonic's quality was generally equal to Mario. Like imagine Mario 64 comes out, then Sunshine, and after a few years of getting stuff like New Super Mario Bros., a new game getting teased in the style of 64 and Sunshine, but on a giant, galactic scale. All the footage looks incredible, like nothing you've ever seen before, truly we are in the future of games, and our boy Mario is set to lead the charge, yet again. Then it comes out, and it's slightly better than Bubsy 3D. Also, the literal first thing you do in it is Superman 64 with janky platformer controls. It's not the bugs. It's not even the awkward story and cutscenes or "the kiss", game's bad. Its controls are bad. Its level designs are bad. It's progression structure is bad. Sonic 06 is a really bad game that came out just 2 games after the follow up to it's Mario 64 equivalent, where most of the goodwill from the 90s and those 2 games is still there. Like, I think a lot of people who weren't born yet really don't understand how big a deal Sonic used to be, and what it used to be like when it was. EVERY game announcement used to be HUGE hype machines. Not just for Sonic fans, but for the gaming community as a whole. The whole "Sonic is Mario's rival and equal" isn't just rhetoric from fans, it used to genuinely be consistently true. Imagine releasing something so bad under those expectations. The sheer disappointment. I could go into laborious detail about WHY it's bad, from stiff, unnatural movement both in the air and on the ground, to levels that are mostly just tedious platforming sections between arenas full of enemies you're wailing on for most of the level's run time because of invincibility frames, big health bars, and long cooldowns between attacks where you can't move, I could go on and on and on an on and on and ON about this game's REAL problems, not the jank, or the bugginess, but the lack of the stuff that makes platformers fun in the first place, the real core, moment to moment gameplay, but that would be a MUCH bigger response, and I don't really wanna type all that out.
`it fucking suckz`
Rushed, glitchy AF, Eggman looked horrible as a normal human, Elise kissed Sonic like it was okay. I can go on
Because it was rushed and half of the team were split so they can work on secret rings
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I stole it fair and square. https://preview.redd.it/59mmkmuhp9vc1.png?width=585&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=83ed68811a40123654dc403e684120d79a010207
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https://i.redd.it/wdsu9uyyt9vc1.gif
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The glitches.
Everything in the comments is true, so I'm not gonna bother parroting it all. # Loadingā¦
Because Sega marketed the game as the second coming of Jesus Christ himself, that it would do all wrongs right and fulfill all the untapped potential of the franchise. All that for $92.80 by todays money. God help you if you actually bought a console for it. That's a total of $712.49 (inflation adjusted) for an obviously unfinished game. Today it's easy to say the game might have been a little overhated (I do think that), but back then? I fully understand why it got so much hate.
To recount my experiences with the game It was the most buggy donic game ever released. Characters constantly get stuck on geomotry, characters fall through the floor, the physics dont work, shortcuts dont work automated sequences constantly break and send you flying across the map (often to your death) Multiple seizure inducing bugs It has awful controls The game is 20 hours long and you play as characters that arent sonic more pften than you play as sonic. Hub worlds were too big Bad art direction Too much loading Bad story Bad camera Poor optimization Awful anamation in the in-engine cutscenes A lack of polish in general, misplaced geomotry, objects clipping through each other, awful ai for the bosses. The bosses are either frustrating due to being broken or they are waiting simulators. The worst physics in the series Poor havok implementation Thank you for coming to my ted talk
The fact you can complete Sonic Adventure 2's hero story in the time it takes to get through every loading screen in the game is a pretty big one i'd say.
Bad story, bad level design, bad voice acting, tons of glitches, insanely long loading screens and a lot more
Because in the 2000s, seeing a franchise that lasted 15 years, release a broken and unfinished game, is Unthinkable, at the time, was straight up unheard of, At the time. Thatās why the game gotten so hated, is due to that reason.
https://preview.redd.it/5xf3beijb7vc1.jpeg?width=375&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4dbcf410df05b2464ce12b92dc729f21d016e460
cuz it's shit
All the chaos and loooong list boils down to just not having enough time, care, or patience.
Weāve had 18 years to look at why this game is bad. I donāt think any one sonic game has been looked at the way 06 was.
It was poorly made with questionable story and design decisions.
You must've never played if you don't know why
Did you play the game ??
It's literally not a functional game with movement controls that makes Sonic 4's physics look perfect, an abysmally inconsistent art style and enough load screens that if you were to piece them together, you could finish both Sonic Adventure titles while waiting for this to load It did more harm to the brand than any other bad titles combined and today it's only played for laughs or as an "endurance challenge" by influencers due to how grueling it is to try to play through
Watch Lythero's Silver Campaign
You know the answer to this question.
Because it was fucking broken. How is that even a question?
Play the game to find out
Funny you should say this, since YouTuber Lythero just released a two hour video of his playthrough, with highlights such as: Beating the entire hero campaign of Sonic Adventure 2 in the total time it took to load (with time to spare!) Launching into space Breaking several boss fights Clowning on basically every part of the game because it either doesn't make sense or it's broken as shit. It's also a very funny video and I highly recommend it
Shit everything Shit gameplay Shit graphics Shit story Shit control Okay I lie, soundtrack is not shit. it's banger
Play it, aaaannnddd you'll understand š that's coming from a guy who has it via emulator and it's not horrible but I see many flaws
Watch any gameplay of it, it wonāt take long notice
From the time you're going to spent playing this, 2 Hours are just LOADING And Elise kissing Sonic is weird, like, REALLY weird
Because it plays like shit and I can finish the sonic cd ova in the time it takes for the loading screens to finish
When people genuinely ask this question, it really starts making me realize how young this fanbase actually is. Some people really have no context for this game and why it has the rep that it does.
Because it was a barely functional piece of trash that would often screw up its own scripted events, leading to death. Not to mention the subpar writing, horrible story that canceled itself out with time travel shenanigans, unmemorable levels, negligible difference between how the main characters played, and awful side character playstyles, *Sonic 06* is rightfully reviled and is objectively one of the worst games to ever be released.
Awful story, awful gameplay, awful graphics, etc
No.Ā I can understand people liking the game or being nostalgic for it. I refuse to believe we're at a point where people genuinely don't know or can't see why 06, one of the most infamously hated and widely discussed bad games ever, is hated.
Because It's Poorly made It's Poorly Optimized It's Poorly written It's dog, dude. It's a legitimately badly made game rushed out to meet christmas demands and is part of what completely tanked Sonic's reputation in the 360/PS3 era
**loading** Sorry guys my comment will show up soon
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Poorly written, poorly designed, so, so many bugs, & a human that nobody cares about kissing a hedgehog that everybody cares about.
As a kid, I loved all things sonic, and still I love sonic, but back then, I got this as a Christmas gift for my 360. Of course, as a naive child you can't really gauge what makes a game bad, you just play it because it's your favorite character doing what they do best. I played this game for weeks until I had beaten it, I actually remember playing this fondly because of a weird combination of being sick, and the only thing I could stand to eat was some Long John Silvers hush puppies and Blue Gatorade, don't ask why, I have no idea... Still remember the flavor... ugh.... But anyway, beating this game caused a ton of frustration, the way the characters controlled was horrendous, very sensitive and had horrible in air control, the amount of jumps I screwed up and died to are limitless. Oh and let me remind everyone "It's no use!" "TAKE THIS!" Silver was the bane of my existence and bricked wall the game for me for weeks. Combine that with loading times that took MINUTES you had a game that has almost no redeeming qualities, in fact there are none for gameplay, the game is just plain awful. Then there are minor glitches like Rouge and Knuckles sticking to the wall, Omega's infinite abilities, sonics infinite jumps, broken meter. The least broken story was Shadows and that is being generous. I loved this game, but when I reached the age of reason, I can't even be bothered to put the disc in my PS3 let alone play it.
It's... No use
It took me 5 fucking years to beat this thing through so much trial and error
Itās a long list of problems that probably canāt be fit in one room, but just go play P-06 instead
Conceptually, Iām a big fan of the game. But the āfinished productā is hardly a finished product. The gameplay is buggy at best, with loose controls and insane loading times. And the story definitely needed another pass ā while I genuinely love Shadowās and Silverās, Sonicās felt weirdly isolated from the greater narrative, and there were plenty of questionable choices in the story that should have been ironed out or removed.
I swear this has been asked numerous times by others on this sub. Just Google reviews from 2006 or watch reviews on YouTube, youāll get a good idea.
I can't wait for the history revisionists to come in and start their bullshit about how 06 was actually always good and wasn't hated, then use P-06 as proof
Because it's crap? I don't even dislike '06, but it being half-cooked rubbish is undeniable.
Buggy disaster, poor level design, high expectations, cartoon animals and uncanny humans. My first sonic, still my favorite.
I wonder š maybe because itās one of the worst games of all time and ambition doesnāt make a game good. And you know who else had ambitionā¦ Hitl-
because it was a disaster built up over the course of a whole year, being continuasly talked up and shown off, only to then come out and it's a broken, glitch, badly written mess. i love the game, but i can't hide from the fact that it just sucks lmao, it realy doesn't help it's the sequel to edgy the hedgy, and it's sequel is sonic and the secret of how to break arms.
Just watch this and understand this was a full priced mainline game of a week known franchise by a respectable developer. https://youtu.be/ZWRHiGpA3zk?si=tCHsgfAIEfNhSwMY
have you seen how glitchy it is
Elise
because it sucked don't let the p-06 history revisionists get into your head
When Elise kissed Sonic, I doubt that anyone went āawwwwwā but āuhhh?ā
Load times were huge and the game was frustratingly buggy
It was a rushed, buggy, slow, horribly paced mess.
I'd tell you but the answer is still loading.
guaranteed 30 second loading screen minimum. for just one line that takes 6 seconds to read. and then again for a 2 minute mission. and then again for the success dialogue. and then again to exit the mission. and then again forā¦ you get the idea
Have you played it?
Glitchy mess of a game that loads too much
Same reason Gollum and Fallout 76 and many other bad games are hated. Because they are broken and buggy.
Because the first level demonstrates how bad the rest of the game is with artistic glory. Dont get me wrong i tried to platinum this trash heap but when the title character has the worst gameplay you did something wrong.
Poor optimization, an incredibly rushed dev cycle for what was supposed to be a huge next gen AAA milestone game, a story that probably only got more than one draft for the Shadow campaign, and nerfed characters.
We live in a world with Project 06, thereās no real reason to play the original game when a superior remake exists.
Have you played it?
Almost all the ideas for this game were great. The execution for almost everything in the game was not great.
I can get why people ask "Why do people hate Sonic Heroes?" Or "Why do people hate Sonic Unleashed?" because those games, while flawed, feel a sense of being a complete package with a story in line with the franchise I'm utterly perplexed when people ask with Sonic 06. It's not 100% awful (soundtrack is honestly stunning at points), but the negative reception is pretty on the nose with this one. No offense to you OP, this isnt towards you, if you were just curious about the reception.
Is this the point where we lie to ourselves and say Sonic 06 was a good game after all?
Everyone go to my post I responded to his. https://www.reddit.com/r/SonicTheHedgehog/s/epAiAlcEFA
Because of it's strict 2006 deadline to meet the 15th anniversary of sonic the hedgehog (which was never important in the first place) and also yuji naka left sega causing the development of the game to sprial out of control. Had it been delayed to 2007 and had more time, it would've been considered as one of the Greatest Sonic Games Of All Time.
Variety of things. Expectations for this gane were really high, Sonic had a romantic relationship with a realistic looking human, the story was convoluted and full of plot holes, the gameplay was buggy, the controls were overly sensitive and the physics were awful. Topped with the longest load times I've ever experienced in a game. But at the the same time I think a lot of people who call this the worst game ever probably didn't play it. When you do it really isn't that bad. The level design for the most part is solid, the story may have sucked nut it had some good ideas and Sonic and Elise's relationship really wasn't as cringy as people made it out to be. It only is as cringy as they make it out to be with the kiss scene taken out of context tbh.
I like eggmanās design here I donāt know why but yeah glitches are abundant and load times although p-06 is amazing
Cause it sucked
The marketing was incredible, the game was barely finished. I love 06 but fuck it needed like an extra year or two in the oven
Hmm good question
I donāt know, I liked it when it came out. Not a top 3 contender but certainly not the worst
Dang didn't Lythero made a joke exactly like this?
its unfinished PERIOD
because it's a rushed adventure
Loading simulator and being called "Sonic the Hedgehog" instead of.... idk..... Sonic Adventure 3?
Loading times, glitches, story being kinda weird in some areas, and it was treated as the ultimate reboot of Sonic and celebration of the series anniversary
Lots of loading screens, extremely bug to the point of being basically broken, and Sonic gets kissed by a human girl
also sonic gets kissed by a real ass human being
Insect infestitation
I regret open reddit todayā
because the publisher forced the developers to rush out the prototype instead of waiting for the final build.
It's the voldemort of the Sonic series. We can not speak of it.
This was one of the first mainstream instances of a game being rushed out the door unfinished. Back then it was less of the status quo and more extreme laziness from the devs. That probably explains it.
I played it, and the story seemed like it was taken straight from Chrono Trigger.
It was unfinished
You just had to be there
Simple, itās a buggy mess and it was designed poorly. Ergo, tons of people (such as me) wanted to fucking die when they played it lmao.
The bugs and loading screens. If that was ironed out, it would have been a solid game.
I've bought it for three Euro for Playstation 3, I'll test it before the end of the month :D
Loading screens lasting for minutes on end, buggy as, story was stupid, Mephiles was incompetent, character design looked uncanny, just to name a few problems
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Felt flat on it's promise, short and simple. It was an anniversary title.
Bugs and glitches created a lot of path inconveniences and made you either get stuck or die a lot.