Please be warned: the end of this video
contains aggressive, seizure-inducing footage, so if you are sensitive to that sort of thing, be extremely cautious jumping ahead
to the timestamp shown on screen.
Sonic Colors: Ultimate is one of Sonic's worst
releases ever, and I'm genuine when I say that. Not because Sonic Colors is a terrible title --
no, it's a solid time. I wish all the Acts in each Planet were fully unique -- there is quite
a bit of level design re-use throughout -- but the game is otherwise an approachable, fun
platformer for players of all ages, and acquiring collectibles and the highest ranks gives
those looking for more challenge and longevity something to sink their teeth into. That said,
this is not a review of the actual game; instead, I'll be focusing on the quality of the remaster,
which is shockingly poor, and that came as a surprise to me considering Sega has an infamous
history with releasing technical messes that, in some ways, haunt them to this day. Unfortunately,
they’ve proven once again they have not learned their lesson, and are still content pushing out
subpar products for their iconic blue blur.
Just for clarity, my review code was provided
by Sega, and I played on PlayStation 4 Pro. All footage shown in this video is based on updates
1.02 and 1.03, the latter of which came out on launch day, September 3rd, halfway through my
recording sessions. I was not able to discover meaningful differences between these two versions,
and the patch note "General bug fixes'' doesn't exactly help narrow anything down. Perhaps by the
time this video is out, or further down the line, more problems are ironed out, and I will leave
a pinned comment in the comments section if so, though Sega never mentioned any
patches to me to be aware of. Either way, future fixes or not, the state
Colors Ultimate released in is inexcusable.
To start on a positive note, however, the upgrade
in frame rate and resolution are very apparent. Ultimate runs at a smooth 60 frames per second
with only the occasional brief stutter in certain sections, and the game looks far clearer than
the original did on the Wii. While OG Colors was graphically impressive for its console, the
480p resolution makes for a crusty, dated visual presentation that can be difficult to go back to
when playing on anything else than a classic CRT, and 30fps caps certainly don’t do Sonic games any
favors. When the action got intense, Colors on the Wii could also exhibit slowdown -- the Frenzy
Wisp and its destruction was a big culprit for this -- but these same segments run perfectly and
at full speed in Ultimate. Many of the textures are significantly sharper than before, too --
not all of them, there are still textures here and there that look somewhat low res, like parts
of this giant burger in Sweet Mountain -- but combined with the immeasurable bump in resolution,
overall image fidelity has cleaned up a lot.
Despite that, ever since the first trailers came
out, the updated graphics themselves in Ultimate have been controversial amongst fans. Primarily,
the lighting and shaders are overhauled from scratch, and it gives each setting a decidedly
different look than they had on the Wii. The bloom is cranked up pretty hard in Ultimate. While
this can be striking at first, the more I looked at it the more overbearing it became. I certainly
think that could’ve been toned down somewhat; Sonic himself, especially, looks way too bright
and shiny, and the lighting doesn’t exactly work on him. His eyes, and the eyes of any character
for that matter, are dulled out and grey-ish, which is not good art direction for a cartoon
hedgehog. Areas like Tropical Resort are also far too saturated for my tastes, and the
stark contrast between light and dark parts of the scenery doesn’t do it for me; I much
prefer how Tropical Resort looks on the Wii, where the colors are balanced and everything is
more evenly lit, with shadows from objects and buildings creating the desired depth. To be fair,
I feel Tropical Resort made the worst transition; areas like Sweet Mountain come across more
naturally, and are subtly but elegantly enhanced with modern rendering techniques like these light
rays shining down from the sky. I don’t want to linger on this topic for long, though, since these
visual changes are pretty subjective by nature, and the best I can really tell you is that,
barring resolution and texture quality, neither version necessarily looks superior over
the other -- they’re just different. Personally, I feel the overall appearance in OG Colors is
more cohesive and blends the environment better with characters and objects, and running the game
on the Dolphin emulator, removing said resolution and frame rate discrepancies from the equation
for the sake of comparing the two aesthetics, solidifies my preference. I just wish
every Planet looked consistently great, and that the bloom slider wasn't pushed up so far
it broke the physical limit of the slider.
Whether you enjoy the updated look or not,
however, what's undeniably shoddy is that it is not consistent between gameplay and cutscenes.
You see, in the latter, the environments and Sonic himself appear identically to how they did on
the Wii -- not Ultimate -- reason being that the cutscenes in OG Colors were pre-rendered
video files, and Ultimate re-used these files. Not only does that create the awkward visual
differences between gameplay and cutscenes, it also means the cinematics look diabolical.
The source material is compressed 480p, and the AI upscaling they applied can not hide
this fact; jaggies are super obvious, and the inherent compression artifacts smear much of the
detail into a blurry mess, particularly when there is motion. Now, at first, I was feeling generous
enough to give them a pass on the cutscenes, until modders discovered that all the original animation
data is present in Ultimate's files; by extension, the team could have made the cutscenes run in real
time at 60fps with the updated visuals, but for whatever reason they went with the quick and dirty
approach instead -- and it definitely shows.
Thus far, then, we’re doing alright,
but regrettably, believe it or not, the above is the least of our concerns with
this remaster. What completely caught me off guard as I played through is the absurd amount of
graphical glitches that are in here. I don’t even know where to begin with this, but the issues
can broadly be divided into four categories: flickering, pop in, shadows, and then a
variety of straight weird, random shit.
In terms of flickering, there are so many
instances where things, be that particles, models or anything, flicker about. This starts as soon as
you reach the title screen, where the trail on the Wisps are rapidly flickering when they shouldn’t
be, and your eyes better get used to this because you’ll be seeing a lot of it: the smoke emitted
into the air from Eggman’s machinery in Planet Wisp flickers; the dust coming off of the Spike
Wisp when you’re charging a Spin Dash flickers; the fish that swim by throughout the backgrounds
in Aquatic Park always flicker and never stop; the particles from Sonic’s customizable
aura periodically flicker behind you; the whole backdrop in this scripted segment in Sweet
Mountain has a stroke and flickers like crazy; the roller coasters in Asteroid Coaster sometimes have
this flickering, orange speed effect around them; Eggman’s troll face in Game Land has constantly
flickering garbage around it as it follows you; and the list goes on. It’s distracting
whenever it occurs, which is frequently, and it reminds me of the sort of artifacts
you’d see if your graphics card is dying or you pushed your overclocking too far on it.
Pop in is the next category, and let’s put the following out there: OG Colors is not flawless in
this regard either. There were certainly moments on the Wii where I noticed pop in on distant
objects, but it was well within acceptable standards for the system, and the 480p resolution
also masked much of it pretty well. Sadly, not only are all these instances of pop in of
distant objects exposed in their full glory in Ultimate because of the increased resolution,
on top of that there is a bunch of new pop in that I’ve verified is not in the Wii original. The
giant-ass ferris wheel in Tropical Resort? Yeah, that just casually disappears before the camera
has even off screened it, and then comes back and goes away again if you move back and forth between
a certain point. The ships in the background in Starlight Carnival? Sometimes they gracefully
spawn in with the special effect they’re supposed to, but they also have a tendency to pop in and
out of existence without the effect. In Act 1, the giant ship here, in particular, is already
partially visible before the effect even happens, and then the rest of it shows up shortly after.
At the start of Aquatic Park - Act 1, there is a black void in the distance that only materializes
into what it should look like a certain distance in; the ceiling glaringly goes away here and can
easily be triggered to come in and out similarly to the ferris wheel; entire stage geometry in
Tropical Resort - Act 3 disappears right in front of your eyes in a secret section you are very
much intended to reach with the new Ghost Wisp; and that’s where I’ll cut it for the pop in.
Not because I don’t have more examples of it, but we gotta move on, and pop in is one
of those obvious things that a remaster of a Wii title should resolve basically
entirely -- it should never be worse.
As for the shadows, then, which is a
little more of a mixed bag. In OG Colors, enemies rocked simple circle shadows, and these
didn’t show until you were closer to said enemies; Ultimate gives everybody proper shadows,
but they still have to fade in and out depending on the camera's distance to the
enemies, and there’s also an issue with the animation for certain shadows refreshing like
they came out of a Mr. Game and Watch handheld. What was always projected correctly on
the Wii, though, is Sonic’s own shadow. In Ultimate, on the other hand, the visibility
of Sonic’s shadow on these bright pathways has a mind of its own; sometimes you can see it
reasonably well, other times it seems more faded, and then on Asteroid Coaster’s boss encounter it’s
absent altogether for the whole fight. Moreover, Super Sonic does not have a shadow… like,
at all. Never. Nowhere. It looks really off, especially coming off of OG Colors where Super
Sonic does have a shadow. This shouldn’t be a two steps forward, two steps back deal -- it should
only be steps forward with no steps back.
So, that just leaves us with the straight weird,
random shit that was introduced in Ultimate. There's no rhyme or reason to these, so let's
rattle off, shall we: Sonic not falling down like he should, and instead slowly floating
in at the start of Starlight Carnival - Act 3; Sonic’s eyes not moving in any of the stage
intros, when they do in the Wii original, why is such a basic facial detail for the
character missing; Sonic’s model not having a fade in effect as it jumps out into the Planet
maps; Sonic's walking animation on Planet maps is slowed down and awkward, even though the
footsteps sound effects are still fast; this blue filter that covers the whole screen
when you go underwater, but it also covers part of the screen that isn't submerged yet and
the lack of a transition or anything looks bad; these enemies that had disappeared becoming
visible again underneath the ground when I activated the Laser Wisp; the trail for the Laser
Wisp being really dim, making it harder to see and aim your shots, directly affecting gameplay;
the Laser Wisp can now shoot straight upwards, which it was never supposed to and can bring you
up so high that the developers seemingly didn’t account for it; the pipes underground in Tropical
Resort not displaying at all, only their outline; Rings being solid black circles in the same
section, what the heck; the camera being misplaced here in Starlight Carnival - Act 1, revealing
the out of bounds portion of the stage you are not supposed to see; sometimes confetti does not
come out of these rockets in Sweet Mountain as they impact the ground while other times it does;
the Wisp UI at the bottom left of the screen is messed up during the final boss with these white
rectangles as the bar is draining; the fire out of Metal Sonic's exhaust port is a misaligned,
flat texture -- and undoubtedly there's more I've seen that I've forgotten about, but I
think you get the picture by now, anyway.
Suffice it to say, the graphics in Ultimate are
thoroughly unpolished, which is a critical failure when one of the main selling points of a remaster
is nicer graphics. For crying out loud, the static backgrounds on the results screens are not even of
the appropriate resolution; they’re probably still 480p, which looks nasty blown up on a 1080p or 4K
display, and leads to a jarring mismatch between them and the foreground elements. You cannot tell
me they couldn’t have made new images for the result screens -- come on, man. Individually, many
of the oddities and shortcomings I've demonstrated can be brushed off as nitpicks, but there is such
an abundance of this crap that I think it's fair to say the visual appeal is severely diminished,
doubly so if you're familiar with OG Colors. Ultimate's fresh coat of paint is already
divisive, but any improvements it brings may as well be nullified in my eyes, and in the
future I'd much prefer to play the game on Wii, 480p/30fps and all. At least you get an infinitely
more refined presentation that way.
You also don't get broken audio with OG
Colors, which you do with Ultimate; actually, I might argue the audio is even more offensive.
The most immediately apparent issue is that sound effects are screwed up. They can fail to play
or cut off before they are finished properly… and the volume level for them is all over
the place; sometimes they are loud as balls, sometimes barely audible, and this can
even apply to the very same sound effect. In addition to that, the sound effects
constantly bounce back and forth between the left and right ears. Combined
with the volume irregularities, this makes for an unpleasant listening
experience to say the least. For the maximum effect, I encourage you to use
earbuds or headphones for this example. This is what the game sounded like for all of
my play time, and if that’s not awful enough, music can randomly refuse to play. I’ve had it
happen on the title screen… When activating Wisps... On the results screen… And even when transforming into Super Sonic, leaving me with only sound
effects for the rest of the level. And I must stress again, all of these
are regular occurrences -- not one-off bugs -- so I’m left utterly baffled.
I suppose while I’m on the topic of audio, I should credit the fact Ultimate did receive new
remixes for all the stage themes. In OG Colors, there were three variants of a Planet’s
music, using each twice since there are six Acts per Planet, but in Ultimate all
six now have their own unique variant. That’s certainly an appreciated effort, and I’m
glad that, if anything, Sega still takes pride in their banger soundtracks and are willing to
go the extra mile in that regard. I’m not a fan of all the new arrangements, I think Tropical
Resort - Act 1 sounds kinda cheap, for instance… but there is also some fire material in
there, such as Terminal Velocity - Act 1. All the same, I’ve even got some critiques here.
One of them is that there is no option to turn off the new music, or inversely to only have the
new music. This is not the end of the world, but there is no downside to having the option. Also,
I’m not sure if this is a bug or intentional, but only the three new remixes are used for all
six bosses; if they wanted to stay consistent, they should have at least still have the
old versions play for half of the bosses. That said, what I find most unacceptable is how
the new Planet Wisp arrangements are locked behind a paywall; they are not included in the standard
edition of UItimate, only the deluxe edition, which is five dollars extra. In my personal
opinion, 40 dollars is already a fairly high asking price for a re-release of what is not that
meaty of a game in terms of content, so for Sega to pull this stunt is rather greedy. Principally,
already, but factor in the rushed and unfinished wreck this remaster has turned out to be, and it
only further paints them in a negative light.
Well, that covers everything related
to graphics and audio, really, so are there any gameplay changes at all to mention?
Yes. Yes, there are, but -- I hate being so harsh and cynical here -- very few of them improve
the game in any substantial way. In my opinion, the best addition is the Park Tokens you can find
throughout stages, rewarding exploration more so than OG Colors, and the higher your rank upon
finishing a level, the more you receive as well. These Park Tokens can then be exchanged for
accessories and other custom cosmetics that alter Sonic’s appearance. I imagine this is
the sort of bonus kids would really enjoy, especially since the series has garnered a
bunch of new, younger fans with the 2020 movie, and I’m all for cute, harmless extras
that can bring joy to people.
The rest of the gameplay tweaks and additions,
though, are a waste of resources, as far as I’m concerned. One of Ultimate’s touted features is
the new Ghost Wisp; while I commend the attempt of adding another power-up for players to mess around
with, in practice it is unremarkable. The Ghost Wisp allows you to hover around and pull yourself
toward enemies and these designated green balls, which sounds cool on paper, but they don’t do
anything clever with it in the level design. Most usually when you find a Ghost Wisp capsule,
it means there is an area right by that you pull yourself toward to find some goodies or a Red
Ring, and that’s the extent of it -- creative puzzles or challenges are lacking. For the
most part, it’s inoffensive -- I don’t think it really hinders the gameplay -- except when
the developers are so adamant about having you use the Ghost Wisp that they placed an invisible
wall in this gap you can normally slide through in the Wii original. My first thought when I
ran into this was that I encountered a glitch, and I was almost going to restart the stage as a
result, but then I figured they wanted me to use the Ghost Wisp that was located further back in
the level. Why couldn’t they properly close the gap with actual geometry? An invisible wall is
just so sloppy and slapdash, and communicates the wrong thing to the player about what’s
going on, and what they’re meant to do.
Besides the Ghost Wisp, another
advertised mechanic is Tails Save, where, if you fall into a pit, the two tailed
fox will come to your rescue and put you back on what seems to be the nearest ground, without
being sent back to the last checkpoint. While I can see the value in this for very inexperienced
players, for myself I don’t want it, since Colors has plenty of checkpoints to boot, and Ultimate
removed lives from the equation on top of that, so there are no Game Overs. But of course, because
the game is allergic to options, it doesn’t allow you to turn off Tails Save. That's stupid, and
it doesn’t help that the implementation is also scuffed. There were parts where I fell into pits
and Tails never showed up to carry me out -- there doesn’t seem to be a clear reason for this,
and it’s just kinda confusing -- and worse yet, Tails Save can actively break stage components.
Side step sections don’t function anymore after it -- Sonic reverts to the usual free control you
have over him, which is not right -- and I ran into this reliably repeatable glitch in Starlight
Carnival where the game sets a 3D flag for a 2D segment, giving you full 3D control with all the
consequences you’d expect from that following. Beyond that, all objects in the stage reset after
a Tails Save -- this includes Rings, Red Rings, Wisp Capsules, etc. -- yet, all the while,
your own Ring count does not reset. As such, this can be abused to obtain S-Ranks much
more easily than you could in OG Colors; be this an oversight or not, it’s an obvious
exploit that shouldn’t be there.
And lastly, we’ve got the new Rival Rushes against
Metal Sonic that unlock in each Planet after collecting 15 Red Rings. I gotta be honest, this
feature strikes me as a marketing ploy to create the illusion of added value without actually
adding value. Metal Sonic is essentially a staff ghost you race against, which looks shoehorned
in, standing in mid-air when his platform cycles don’t line up with yours and shenanigans of that
nature, and if you’re halfway decent at the game, you probably won’t have to try too hard to outdo
him. The developers only set a single time as well, with no increase in challenge as you beat
it like, say, the Sapphire, Gold and Platinum relics do in Crash Bandicoot, and you only get one
measly Rival Rush per Planet -- not even for every Act in the game. This reeks of half-assed and
low effort: from the hilariously amateur image that pops up before you begin a Rival Rush
-- it reminds you of those scam ads about hot babes in your area who wanna bang you, or a
magic method to extend your penis by 500 inches; to the versus screen that looks like it was
put together in an hour in After Effects; the icons on the race tracker that have a face
portrait for Metal Sonic but a full body render for Sonic himself -- it’s just embarrassing. Hell,
in Tropical Resort, Sonic’s icon got stuck on the tracker and wouldn’t move up, even though I was
well ahead of Metal Sonic the entire race.
It’s a damn joke, and while gameplay bugs are
not nearly as common as visual and audio ones, there is still a share of it. Some of the speed
boosters and loops consistently break now, causing Sonic to be shot backwards or fall
down halfway through; the behavior of certain enemies and hazards has sped up by 200% due to the
doubling in framerate, which results in all these spike balls being shot out at an insane pace
in Planet Wisp, for instance; and in Tropical Resort - Act 1, this craziness happened and I
am very, very confident I have never ever seen that in the Wii original -- Jesus Christ. And
hey, this doesn’t fall under the umbrella of bugs, but the load times are longer than they have the
right to be. Playing on the Wii with an original disc, the first stage takes about five seconds to
load, whereas in Ultimate on the PS4 Pro it takes twelve seconds -- that’s over twice as long on
exponentially more powerful hardware, and with a storage medium that’s heaps and bounds faster than
DVDs. Yeah, the assets are of higher resolution, no shit, and I’ve heard from peers that the
PS5’s SSD reduces the loading quite a bit, but none of that is an excuse; everything is pointing
to the fact Ultimate is poorly optimized.
Furthermore, for a remaster, it’s a
shame there are barely any quality of life improvements to highlight. Really, I can
only think of one quality of life improvement: the ability to rebind buttons, which is always
good -- side stepping is still on the analog stick, though, and cannot be mapped to a button
-- but past that, I am drawing a blank. Like, I actually do have a few pet peeves with OG Colors,
the first one being that, if you accidentally hit the button to retry the stage on the results
screen and then exit out, the game does not register the stage as finished -- that’s really
flawed design. Ultimate had the opportunity to fix this, but the snafu is ever present. Similarly,
you must finish the current stage in order to make any new Red Rings you’ve collected count. I
mean, if I’ve already beaten the level before, I shouldn’t have to beat it all over again; finding
the Red Rings I was missing should be enough, and I don’t think anybody would argue against
that. This quirk makes the process of 100%’ing the game considerably more tedious and time
consuming than it needs to be, and as you’d expect by now Ultimate doesn’t address it. Eliminating
these complaints is one of those touches that can elevate a remaster over the original, and make
it stand out as the definitive version.
Unfortunately, though, if it wasn’t evident
at this point yet, I think Sonic Colors: Ultimate is anything but the definitive version.
Now, initially, this review wasn’t going to be as scathing as it ended up being, but when I saw more
and more people coming out with their experiences, I couldn't help but be immensely disappointed.
I’ve seen tons of reports of the game outright crashing multiple times for others, even on the
latest patch -- this only happened once to me, admittedly, so I guess I was lucky in that
sense -- and in the worst case scenarios, these crashes ended up corrupting save files. They
aren’t isolated incidents either -- I’ve seen a handful of Tweets about wiped saves -- and when
the PC version has noticeable input delay and can cause blue screens for users because they have
their controller plugged in before opening the application, something’s gone awry. The icing on
the cake was when word came out about the Switch port. As that went public, my Twitter timeline was
flooded with clips of exclusive Switch problems, and I am giving you a massive warning again --
I repeat: massive warning -- that aggressive, seizure-inducing footage is coming up shortly. If
you are sensitive to that sort of thing, proceed with caution or skip to the timestamp shown on
screen. It’s been discovered that by hopping between Planet maps a few times, a memory leak
occurs and causes serious graphical anomalies, the severity of which cannot be adequately
described with words. How something this rancid started happening on the day of release, and
was nailed down by the community shortly after, is a disgrace. This is legitimately dangerous, and
a legal liability for Sega; it is mind boggling this was ignored or otherwise never caught during
the QA and verification processes. Seeing other people’s input on the remaster, in conjunction
with my own, destroyed any benefit of the doubt I was willing to give Sega with this one.
Let me be abundantly clear that I mean no disrespect toward individuals at Sega or the
developer Blind Squirrel; I am sure many of the people there worked hard on the game, and didn’t
want to deliver this disaster as much as we didn’t want to receive it. Nevertheless, I cannot mince
words: Sega as a company should be ashamed they put Colors Ultimate out in the state they did, on
any platform. If upcoming patches end up solving all the issues with all the releases of this game,
which is basically up in the air as of the writing of this script, then that’s a noble cause and
worth acknowledging, but the damage has been done. This is a problem with the industry at large, but
patches are meant to further improve and solve issues and bugs that crop up after a game has gone
gold; they are not meant to be a comfy safety net you rely on to fix what was never ready in the
first place. Back in my day, triggering creepy pastas out of games required you to purposefully
and carefully tilt cartridges and whatnot, but it seems nowadays that’s something we get
out of the box from publishers once in a while, and that’s kind of disheartening, isn’t it? You
know what else is upsetting? The original Sonic Colors on the Wii was a polished title, and that
without any patches whatsoever. We can debate all day about how much we like or dislike the
game itself, but from a technical perspective it was solid and stable. That’s the standard we
should expect from products we spend our hard earned money on, and the ‘’Ultimate’’ label on the
remaster is frankly an insult, when in reality the ultimate version of Sonic Colors between the
two is the one we’ve had for 11 years now.
All these dudes rushing to make videos on this are despicable