The Animation of Sonic Games

Oh boy... I think I may have bit off too much this time. [music] So, okay. As an animator, I always find it fascinating to look at the entire span of a franchise’s history and watch how the character animation evolves from game to game. It’s a fun exercise, I recommend it! You get to study a bunch of animation, you learn a little game animation history along the way AND you enjoy a nostalgia trip in the process. Why do I bring this up? Well, because Sonic the Hedgehog is going to turn thirty this year. YEAH. Our little speed boy is about to start experiencing the joys of back pain. And actually feeling hangovers in the morning. “So hey”, I thought to myself, “this ridiculous hedgehog has one of the wildest histories in all of gaming. Why don’t I play ALL of the Sonic games and see which ones have the best animation? That could be fun!” Turns out I was wrong about that last thing, but the point is: I DID IT. Now, if you ask five different fans which of the Sonic games are “good” or “bad”, you are likely to get five different answers, but most of us can at least agree that the Sonic franchise is a quality roller-coaster, yeah? Well here’s the fun thing: the animation quality in those games is ALSO kind of a roller-coaster, but it turns out these roller-coasters are very much not in sync. But which Sonic games have the best animation? Which have the worst? And what is it that makes for good animation in a Sonic game? Let’s find out together! Because I’ll be darned if I’m going through this alone. Welcome to New Frame Plus. Now before we set off on this journey, let me establish some ground rules. One: we are only sticking to the main line Sonic platformer and action games here. So no racing spinoffs, no Olympics, no Smash Bros, no weird arcade games where Sonic is a cop (which is real, by the way). No, this is already going to be my longest episode ever BY FAR, let’s try to keep this under control. Two: to simplify things just a little further, I’m also limiting this list to the games which were released on a home console at some point. So no hand-held exclusives. FASCINATING THOUGH IT WOULD BE to dig into that one time BioWare made a Sonic RPG, I’ve been working on this for like five months now and I’d love for it to be done someday. And three: as always, remember that just because a game is old doesn’t mean it can’t have good animation. Nor is bad animation in an older game simply bad BECAUSE the game is old. Don’t make me tap the sign. But okay, I think that’s it. We have 25 Sonic games to look at, so... take my lead, I’ll set you free. Follow me! [music] See now, this right here is a heck of a start. Yes, it is primitive by today’s standards, but the animation in this game is still GREAT. For one thing, despite being like 40 pixels tall, 16-bit Sonic is expressive! Look at that confident idle stance! Or the surprise on his face when he’s swept down a hill by water. Or - and I know everybody brings this up, but - the way he will get impatient with YOU if you leave him standing around for too long. Even the basic "meat and potatoes" animations like running, skidding to a stop, pushing blocks… every frame of these animations is taking full advantage of the inherent appeal of Sonic’s character design, emphasizing his current emotional state, and reinforcing the depiction of this character as cool, and confident and just adorable. And that expressiveness is kind of a big deal. This is Sonic’s first game, and I would argue he is already demonstrating more animated personality than Mario had in any of his games to this point! For this brief window of time, Sega HAS indeed done what Nintendidn’t. But all this characterization isn’t the only reason Sonic 1’s animation is so good. In addition to all that, Sonic’s animation is also incredibly functional. You see, character animation is an enormous contributor when it comes to how a game feels. It provides visual feedback for our inputs and it helps us to intuit how things in the game work. And Sonic’s character animation is great at conveying the mechanics of his locomotion. For example: the thing that makes Sonic platforming unique is the way it’s built around momentum, right? It takes time for Sonic to accelerate to full speed. And his animation reflects that by being broken up into distinct phases. When you first start Sonic moving, he’ll kick off with this jog, which is a 6-frame cycle. And as you start picking up speed, that jog cycle loops faster. Then, once you finally reach Sonic’s full running speed, he switches to a completely new 4-frame cycle where his feet become a spinning blur. And notice how the initial jog cycle feels like it’s taking some effort. Sonic is pumping his arms and you can see some vertical movement on his body with each step, very much like actual jogging. But then, once he hits top speed, his arms tuck into his sides, that vertical motion disappears and his run becomes smooth and seemingly effortless to maintain, like he’s coasting. The animation is helping to reinforce the fact that THIS speed is where you want to be, but it’s going to take a little time and effort to get there. And if you try to stop or turn around, this skidding animation emphasizes the effort it takes just to Sonic slow down, again, visually reinforcing the momentum thing. One of the other unique properties of Sonic platforming is the way you have to factor in the angle of the ground beneath you. You can use slopes to gain speed or verticality, and the angle of the slope you’re standing on can significantly affect the arc of your jumps. So, in order to make this functionality clearer, all of Sonic's run cycles have these rotated variants, visually demonstrating that YES, Sonic is absolutely built to traverse the environment this way and you do NEED to take the slope of the ground into account when maneuvering. Sonic’s handling may have a bit of a learning curve, but the character animation helps a great deal with that learning process, telegraphing all of the functional information you need to know about how Sonic’s movement works. The animation helps to make this momentum-based navigation feel intuitive. And I know a lot of this stuff might seem self-explanatory, but the fact that it all does feel so obvious when you just look at Sonic in motion is a testament to how WELL Sonic Team designed this move set. In terms of animation quality, this is a fantastic start for the series. And Sonic Team would build on that success in the sequel, but... before we jump to that, we need to take a little detour. Because you see, in addition to the Genesis games, Sega did develop a handful of Sonic titles for the Game Gear. And several of those games also happened to release on Sega’s previous home console, the Master System. Which means - according to my arbitrary (but infallible) rules - that I have to include them. But that’s alright, because the animation in these is also pretty good! [music] First of them, less than a year after the release of Sonic the Hedgehog: it’s Sonic the Hedgehog! But 8-bit this time. Now obviously we are looking at a downgrade in hardware power. The Master System had access to a much smaller color palette than the Genesis, so we’ve lost some character sprite detail. They've also had to cut those rotated variant run cycles for sloped surfaces, although the slopes do still impact your movement. And there have been some other small omissions like ledge teetering and block pushing, but otherwise, this 8-bit Sonic can do almost all the same stuff as he could on the Genesis! The acceleration and skidding to a stop, the rolling, the spring jumping and running in midair… these animations may be simplified, but they’re all still in there. And what’s more: so is the personality! Despite all the downgrades, Sonics character appeal and attitude are still coming through loud and clear. Almost everything that worked about the animation in the 16-bit original still works here, and - considering the limitations - that’s kind of amazing. And the sequel to this does even better! [music] Still on the Master System, still 8-bit, and the lot of the animations from the previous game are basically unchanged aside from color tweaks, BUT there are some noteworthy additions. For one: Sonic has a brand new version of the Bored animation when you leave him idle too long, and I don't think we would see this particular fidget come back later in the series, at least not on Sonic, but I kind of love it. It’s like “....? Are we gonna go? I can’t do it by myself. Like, I can't... I can’t do it.” And now 8-bit Sonic can teeter on ledges just like the Genesis version! And they’ve SORT OF made the rotated run cycles work, if only in these loops. Like, it’s not a great game as 2D Sonics go, but in terms of animation, this does quite a bit to close the gap between Sonic’s 8- and 16-bit incarnations. Plus, hey, first sighting of Tails! That’s fun. I mean, he’s not playable yet, but he will be! Speaking of which... [music] Everything about Sonic 1’s animation was already working, so rather than reinventing the wheel, the Genesis sequels are all about building on that foundation and expanding scope. So in addition to some subtle adjustments to his design, this iteration of Sonic also gets a bunch of new moves. And my favorite of these is EASILY the Spindash. This looks awesome. You’ve got that tilt emphasizing Sonic’s direction like a cartoon tire peeling out. You've got the dust billowing behind… it’s just fantastic. And Sonic can also now run through these corkscrew things. They use this same animation when Sonic hits these springboards and it looks so good! It’s the first of these new animations to start suggesting more three dimensional shape on this 2D character, which they’re going to be doing more and more the further we go. Plus, Sonic’s Bored fidget has been extended, with new stages where he checks his watch and eventually flops down on the ground to chill while you finish whatever is so darned important. Also, and I love this: Sonic has not one, not two, but THREE ledge teetering animations! One for if you’re facing the ledge. One for if you’re facing away from the ledge. And a third for if you’re REALLY about to fall off that edge. Superfluous? Yeah, probably. But come on. Three animations for that! But perhaps even more noteworthy than ALL the new things Sonic can do is the fact that Sonic 2 introduces a second playable character. Now Tails’s animation set might be a bit less robust than Sonic’s. This poor kid only gets one teeter animation to call his own. But give him a break, it’s his first day and he’s very small. But the important thing is that - even though his moveset and handling are mostly the same as Sonic’s - the aesthetic look of his locomotion is very different! Tails has this tottering, kid-like quality to his run that feels completely unlike Sonic’s more confident stride. And when he gets bored standing there too long, he does a little yawn! Cause he’s little and he’s sweepy. It really drives home just how much personality Sonic Team is infusing these animations with; that these two characters can handle mostly the same and still look so different doing it. Sonic 2’s animation is just a straight up improvement in pretty much every single way. So how do you improve on that? [music] Now this one’s an interesting case, because it’s sort of a side-grade developed by a different team than the folks behind Sonic 2. There are tons of neat little additions in here, animation-wise, but also a few notable losses. Lemme show you what I mean. First off, Sonic’s character sprite is back to the design he had in Sonic 1. Which is fine, because the differences between the two are nearly imperceptible. But it's not just the design change, we’ve also lost MOST of the great new animations that Sonic 2 added. And that part’s a bummer. The corkscrew run is gone. Those new Bored fidgets where he checks his watch and lays down are gone. Though I guess Sonic does straight up bail on you if you make him wait for three minutes, which... alright that's kinda funny. I’ll call that one an even trade. And they DID bring back the Spindash, but instead of that awesome tire spin animation, now he just does a spin in place. BOOOOOO. And one of the biggest losses is actually one of the most subtle. For some reason, this time Sonic’s jog as he starts building speed no longer has any vertical movement. There’s no bounce to it at all. The difference is, admittedly, pretty hard to notice if you don’t have them side-by-side, but I would argue it’s actually a pretty big downgrade to the multi-phase progression of his run. That vertical “jogging” bounce really helped to sell the effort of building momentum before settling into the smoother glide of your top speed sprint, and the overall run just kinda feels slightly worse for the change. Fortunately, all of those losses are balanced out by a bunch of neat new additions. The most prominent of which (and EASILY my favorite) is the Super Peel Out. How do you take Sonic’s already exaggerated, feet-blurring run and crank it up to look even faster? Well, you lean him even further forward, throw those arms back behind him Naruto-style and get those feet moving SO fast that the blur turns into an abstract shape. I love this. It doesn’t quite make up for the tragic loss of Good Spindash, but boy, it does come close! And there are a bunch of other great additions too, like these little twirly jumps! And the overhead ramp! And this thing! And TINY SONIC. Look at Tiny Sonic! I want a Tiny Sonic game. Plus now we've got Metal Sonic! And also Amy, displaying literally the only character trait she’s going to be given for the next 25 years. So yeah. Not what I’d call an upgrade to Sonic 2’s animation, but it’s got some cool additions going for it. Also, it's worth noting, Christian Whitehead’s excellent 2011 port of this game, which is probably the version most of you have played, gives you the option to bring back Good Spindash! And for that, every one of you is now obligated to give him an enthusiastic high five if you happen to meet in person. Now let’s jump back to the Master System one last time real quick... [music] I don’t want to spend too long on this because there’s not much more to be said, but it astounds me that they keep finding new ways to squeeze a LITTLE BIT MORE out of this 8-bit hardware. Sonic is looking closer to his 16-bit counterpart than ever. And they've got the loop rotations working better! And the corkscrew thing is in there (sort of)! And they added Good Spindash! Plus Tails is playable, and looking astonishingly faithful to how he looked in Sonic 2. Hats off to all the folks behind these Master System and Game Gear titles, because this can’t have been easy. Anyway! [music] Like Sonic 2, this sequel is all about taking a successful foundation and just piling on MORE. Sonic’s got all kinds of fancy new ways to navigate obstacles. Tails can even carry Sonic around when he flies now, which is adorable. Look how cute this boss fight is! And I’m impressed at how frequently these new additions show Sonic off from unusual angles. Like, look at this full turntable rotation! They’re still doing such a good job of giving a sense of three dimensional shape to this 2D character sprite. Not every change is a 100% win, though. Like, Sonic has a new bored fidget in Sonic 3, and I usually LOVE these because they are just pure character expression, but I would call this replacement a noticeable downgrade. The posing on this foot tap is perfectly FINE, but it’s also a bit neutral, the way he’s standing stiffly upright. That forward lean from the previous games really helped to sell the irritation of that look toward camera. And now, instead of that great one-two combo of Sonic glancing at his invisible watch and eventually giving up and laying down in annoyance, we have… this? I honestly cannot tell what these hand gestures are. Like, obviously he’s pointing at the end to say “Hey, we’re supposed to be going THAT way”, but what is his right hand doing? Is this pointing to camera? Or is he snapping his fingers at us? I’ve watched this like fifty times, I still can’t decide. But, tiny little nitpicks like those aside, the animation in this - as with all of these Genesis-era Sonic titles - is still firing on all cylinders. It’s expressive, it’s functional, and it’s got style. But one of the most important new additions in Sonic 3 is the introduction of the Story Cutscene. They aren’t long, and they’re mostly assembled using existing game-play animations, but these quick little scenes provide a bit of connective tissue between levels. And they are pretty great little additions! Let's all take a moment to really appreciate this brief window of time where Sonic cutscenes are just... good. We’re not gonna get to enjoy this often, okay? So... Relish it. And hey, now Knuckles is here! The trinity is now assembled, which means we might as well proceed to... [music] Boy, the increasingly clunky CG renders of Sonic in these title screen animations really feel like ominous foreshadowing in hindsight, huh? So Sonic’s animation in this… expansion? Sequel?... Sonic’s animation in this expansionequel is basically identical to his animation set in Sonic 3. But now Knuckles is also playable! Both in this, and retroactively in Sonic 2 and 3 also. Because that's just a thing you could do, I guess! Like Tails before him, Knuckles is yet another new personality flavor being layered over Sonic movement. Just like Tails, Knuckles has some unique moves and tricks of his own, like gliding and wall climbing. But for me, the best thing about Knuckles’ animation is that, like Tails, even the moves he shares with Sonic, he does in his own character-appropriate way. Like, his crouch pose. It's less about taking cover and more of a “fists up, protect your head” maneuver. His Bored fidget has him air boxing. And his teetering animation, while there is only one of them, is the longest, most detailed one in the series yet. He’s like “WHOOP whoa hey I GOT IT. I got it... ohhh no don't got it OH NO” I so LOVE seeing this emphasis on characterization prioritized so early and so consistently in this series! But boy, if you REALLY want to talk characterization, let’s just move on to the next one. [music] Now yes, this game for the Sega 32x is arguably a spinoff. Sonic isn’t even IN it. But technically it IS the Sonic IP, it is a platformer, and it WAS released on a home console. IN FOR A RING, IN FOR AN EMERALD, BABY Besides, there’s no way we can leave this one out, the animation in this game is great. If you haven’t played it (and you probably haven’t), the central mechanic of Knuckles’ Chaotix is cooperative movement. You play with two characters tethered together by the rings they hold, and they can each use each other's momentum to traverse the level. That is some complex platforming mobility to have to visually convey in pixel animation, so - in addition to his sprite redesign - Knuckles has a completely overhauled animation set. His core movement verbs of running, jumping, spindash, glide and climb are still there, but his animation can’t just be about how he moves around now. It also has to convey the influence of his tether partner’s movement. Notice how a lot of his animations are designed in such a way that allows his ring arm to exist as a separate sprite. This allows the angle of that arm to change to reflect his partner’s position at any time, whether they’re lagging behind or running ahead, hovering above or dangling below. And he’s got poses for digging in his heels to hold steady so his partner can stretch out the tether for a slingshot move. And all of this really works! And the best part is that every one of the five playable characters in this game feels unique. Just like the Sonic/Tails/Knuckles trinity before them, each of these characters has unique animated movement and personality. Knuckles is a familiar face here, so his animations mostly stick to the posing and attitude we already know. Mighty, meanwhile, is sort of your budget Sonic. Similar attitude, similar posing. Espio has this intensely serious energy about him, but I love that they’ve also infused him with a hint of cockiness. Like, everybody else looks all nervous when they teeter over a ledge, but Espio? Pffft. Doesn’t even care. Look at this smug dork. Charmie is… well, small. But Vector. Look at him! He dances! He gives this happy look toward camera when he runs! He’s having such a good time! I love Vector. Knuckles’ Chaotix might be a real mixed bag of a game, but it is a great demonstration of exactly what it is that makes for good animation in a Sonic title. As I see it, good Sonic animation comes down to four things. First, Appeal. Good Sonic animation is appealing to look at. Appeal can be a somewhat difficult animation principle to explain (I'll make a video about it someday) but, for now, think of it as “the charisma level of a character’s design, motion and performance”. It's the difference between THIS… and THIS. Appealing… Not Appealing. Good Sonic animation has appealing poses, appealing expressions, appealing movement. Sonic characters tend to have some pretty great-looking designs (most of the time), but those designs are only effective when posed and animated well. Some of these games might lean into the cuteness of these characters, others might be more about, uh... “coolness”, but whatever look a game is going for, the animation of the characters has to support that aesthetic. Second thing: Characterization. Good Sonic animation is loaded with personality. It is expressive. Every animation should help to show you what this character is about. What’s more, the animation should help to emphasize what makes each of these characters distinct. If two very different characters are moving and behaving exactly the same way in one of these games, then something has gone wrong. Third thing: Game Feel. The animation in these Sonic games cannot just look good, it has to functionally serve gameplay. It should add clarity to the mechanics. It should help Sonic to feel better to control. It should make going fast feel GREAT. Lots of these games play a little differently from each other, but whatever any given game demands from the player, the character animation should be helping to make that play feel solid. And the fourth thing: Polish. Arguably the least important of these four, but still, you can’t ignore technical implementation. Because if the animation is breaking all the time, well, then it doesn’t really matter how good it was SUPPOSED to look, does it? Sonic game animation is only going to get more complicated from here as we move into the 3D era, but even so, the quality of that animation will ALWAYS come down to those four factors. And with THAT… well, here we go! [music] Sonic 3D Blast (or Sonic 3D: Flickies’ Island, for my European viewers) was the last Sonic game released on the Genesis and it was eventually ported to the ill-fated Sega Saturn. You see, the game industry at large was beginning its shift toward 3D graphics at this point. And although the aging Genesis hardware was not capable of 3D graphics, Sega did want to start pushing Sonic in that exciting new direction. So they enlisted the help of Britain-based studio Traveller's Tales and tasked them with developing the closest equivalent to 3D that the Genesis WAS capable of: a 2D Sonic game with an isometric perspective. And this more three dimensional feeling camera angle necessitated a new approach to animating Sonic. Just the shift to an isometric presentation creates a greater sense of depth in the level, which not only means that Sonic himself needs to feel more three dimensional to visually belong in that space, but it also means that all of his animation needs to support movement in any direction. Now, in addition to a side-to-side run cycle, you also need a version for running away from camera, running toward camera, running diagonally toward camera, running diagonally awa- ...you get the idea. Now, today, the simplest solution for that problem would probably be to just go full 3D and have Sonic be a 3D character you can easily rotate any direction you want. But, again, proper 3D graphics were not something the Genesis was equipped to handle, so they instead decided to adopt the Donkey Kong Country approach. Build Sonic as a 3D model first, animate that 3D character, then render those animations out to all the different camera angles you need, compress those rendered frames into sprites and BAM, 3D Sonic! ...Kind of. It’s a reasonable solution to the problem. But although this approach does reap some of 3D’s benefits, it also comes with the inherent limitations and downsides of 3D game animation. And in 1996, those limitations were MANY. Now, don’t get me wrong; 3D animation had been a thing for a WHILE at this point, but the tools for creating 3D animation were still relatively primitive and most of the people in the game industry didn’t have much experience with them yet. So what you get is THIS. The opening movie kinda says it all; Sonic’s legitimately great pixel animation run has here devolved into a stiff, awkward waddle. And just look at some of the stills from this game’s opening cutscene. The vacant stare. This pose that isn’t ANYTHING. It almost looks like somebody's dropping unlicensed Sonic toys in the shot. Now, to their credit: once we get into game-play, Sonic DOES feel like a 3D shape with consistent form and volume, so that aspect is working! But unfortunately, animating that 3D shape to the standard of clarity and visual appeal that we saw in the previous games is REALLY difficult in 1996. And this game does NOT succeed. Sure you can see Sonic from 8 different angles now, but the cost is so high. He can still run and jump and spindash, but all of the personality and the appeal that this series used to have in its character sprite art has just been DRAINED. What IS this idle pose? What are his hands doing? Are they supposed to be resting on his hips? And this Bored fidget is in rough shape too. As much as Sonic is meant to look like a 3D character here, he’s not moving like one. There’s no shift in weight or anything; only his arms and foot move at all. And why are his arms repeatedly crossing and uncrossing so quickly? I've not sped this up! I will give them the dimension ring-grabbing animation, though. This looks pretty nice. Look, I’ve met a guy who worked on this. He’s an Animation Director on MASSIVE AAA projects now. He's got a level of experience and skill I can only HOPE to reach one day. The fact is, this game was a big technical challenge, it was really early days for 3D animation in the game industry and everybody was still figuring stuff out. But even so, regardless of the limitations of the time, the results here are such a considerable downgrade on every front. And thus begins Sonic’s troubled expedition into the realm of 3D. This was the first little trip-up, but now he’s just gonna kinda fall down the stairs for a little while. I’m starting to get actually motion sick looking at this one, so let’s move on! [music] For some context on this one: at the time of Sonic Adventure's release in 1998, the industry-wide shift to 3D gaming was already well underway. Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil 2, Final Fantasy VII and Banjo-Kazooie were all on store shelves. Crash Bandicoot already had like three games out somehow. And Mario 64 had been out for two years, showcasing some pretty impressive early 3D character animation. I've got a video on that one already if you would like to check it sometime. But even so, the game industry was still very much in that learning process with 3D. So it is entirely understandable that Sonic Team would experience their share of those growing pains. And BOY DID THEY. I feel like we need to talk about gameplay and cutscene animation separately, so let’s start with gameplay, because there is genuinely some good stuff in here. For one thing, Sonic’s run? Not bad! Just like in the 16-bit originals, Sonic's run still has those multiple phases as he builds speed. First a walk, then a slow jog, then a faster jog with longer strides, then he throws those arms behind him for a full tilt run. And if you hit a booster, he’s got a fifth EVEN FASTER sprint. And notice they’re still doing that thing where early phases of the walk and the jog feel bouncier and more strenuous as Sonic tries to build speed, while the full tilt running is more of a smoother glide. Granted, I don’t really love any of these cycles as isolated animations. Like, I don’t think any individual one of them QUITE matches the appeal of, say, Mario’s run. Or even Sonic’s own 16-bit run. But the progression that these cycles combine to create is still really effective. Easily better than the sum of their parts. And Sonic has some other great details in his locomotion too, especially considering how early this is in the 3D era. Like this skid-stop-turn transition here? That’s a nice touch! And check out how Sonic looks into his turns. Like, if you steer Sonic right or left, he’ll turn his head in that direction as he goes. Now that these characters are in 3D, tiny details like that go such a long way toward making basic navigation look and feel better. They’ve also implemented some neat procedural systems, like Look-At targets which allow Sonic to automatically look in the direction of nearby points of interest. The head rotation can be a little clunky in action but it still helps to make him feel more aware of his environment, which makes him feel more like a living, thinking character! And Sonic does still have some of those expressive touches in his animation too, like the increasingly fancy acrobatics he does when springing on trampolines. And somebody went to the trouble of making an animation JUST for if the player walks into the casino’s showers after exiting the sewers! They did NOT have to do that, but I love that they did. And Tails’ idle tail-flicking loop looks really nice. Like, right? Look at that. That looks good. Actually, speaking of Tails, one of my favorite things about the animation in this game is that - even though they’re still coming to grips with this 3D technology - they’re CLEARLY making an effort to make all of these playable characters’ animation distinct. Even when their animation isn’t GOOD (and there are plenty of places where it's not), everyone does still feel unique, and that has real value. But despite all of those good qualities, the gameplay animation is still kind of a mixed bag. For one thing, everyone’s idle animation is pretty bad. They are all just linearly oscillating between two poses. One, two. One, two. One, two. One, two. One two. It’s just very robotic. Even for the actual robot. And what is going on with Amy’s grabby hands? What IS this? What is she doing? And for every gameplay animation in here that IS working, there are at least two that aren’t. Knuckles’ punches are… somewhat lackluster. Amy’s run cycles are upsetting. Froggie’s animation is… honestly I’m just kinda mad I had to play this part. In general, NONE of these gameplay animations have the expressiveness or the appeal of the pixel animation we were seeing on the Genesis. But then, to be fair: that is hardly unique to Sonic in 1998, right? It’s early 3D gaming, every character is a potato. But then there’s the cinematic and narrative animation, which is comically SUPREMELY BAD. [SONIC: "Watch out, you're gonna crash! Ahh!"] Where to even start. Just that first cutscene when you boot the game up is a BRUTAL first impression. Those awkward, sliding human walks... And then seeing Sonic spawn in, float gently to the ground, starts to hit an action stance, but then cut to a new camera angle in a completely different pose and… [SONIC: “Oh yeah! This is happening!”]... oof. The acting and dialog animation in these scenes is just a disaster. The lip sync animation appears to be constructed of generic mouth flapping “talk” cycles, with the occasional custom expression for big exclamations. Which is not an inherently bad approach actually, especially for a 1998 game, but the execution here just looks awful. Both in English AND in the original Japanese. Those bigger custom expressions aren’t animated well and don't match any of the line reads. The hand gestures rarely feel synced to what any given character is saying. And I cannot FATHOM the logic behind randomly wiggling features on Sonic’s head as a “talking” animation. The eyelids are bad enough, but why are his ears also flapping? Why are his back spikes waggling?! It would genuinely have been better if they had not even attempted to animate the characters’ faces in these scenes. Like, real talk: the less any given character’s face moves, the less absurd they look. Tails’s face doesn’t move nearly as much when he talks, and it looks better! And Eggman doesn’t have ANY face animation that I can tell. His head just bobs around when he talks, and that looks FINE. Way more appealing than… GAH. Look, it was 1998, 3D in games was still very hard, and I’m willing to bet at least a few of the people who animated some of these scenes have gone on to make INCREDIBLE animation in their careers. Even so, the animation in these cutscenes is still a mess. Worse even than the animation in games coming out at the same time on weaker hardware. Sonic Adventure’s animation is a pretty huge downgrade across the board, honestly, even when factoring in the stuff that works. Appeal is down. Characterization is... there, technically. functional Game Feel has definitely taken a hit and, thanks to all the new complexities of 3D, Polish is WAY down. Again, completely understandable given all of the challenges of finally making that jump to full 3D, but a downgrade is a downgrade. But HEY. What are sequels for, right? [music] I’m... torn on this one. On the one hand, there are legit improvements over Sonic Adventure here. Most notably: the cinematic animation is considerably better. Gone is that ridiculous full face waggle. Now every character is demonstrating specific acting choices, with ACTUAL face expressions! Characters are visibly reacting to each other. Their performances convey some basic dramatic information! Granted, it’s not INCREDIBLE cartoon acting, and a lot of the animation is still clunky, but it’s a HECK of a lot better than the cutscene animation we saw in Sonic Adventure 1. Gameplay animation has seen a few improvements too! Right out the gate, this snowboarding… street-boarding, whatever... the animation of this looks and feels quite nice! And everyone’s idle loops are toned way down, which is a welcome change. Also, Shadow the Hedgehog is here now, and SOMEONE on Sonic Team decided that he should have “Air Shoes” and run like he’s wearing skates? And this is objectively a perfect creative decision. OF COURSE the world’s self-described ultimate life form comes standard with heelys. Are you kidding me? *Chef kiss* YES. 10 out of 10. But despite that stroke of comedic genius, there are still a LOT of problems. And the weird thing is that some of them are things that the previous game did better. Like basic character gameplay locomotion has taken some hits. And the downgrades aren’t super noticeable. Honestly, I couldn’t quite put my finger on exactly what was feeling worse for a while there. But once you start to dig in, the problems pop up everywhere. Like, okay. Sonic’s walk cycle in Sonic Adventure 1 wasn’t great. But his walk cycle in Sonic Adventure 2 is WORSE. Even ignoring the absolutely ABSURD amount of foot sliding happening right now, the body mechanics of this walk are a mess. There’s almost zero motion or rotation happening in the body. No vertical bounce with each step, no side to side sway or rotation in the hips, nothing. His torso is just like a ball drifting smoothly forward while all the other parts of his body flail around it. That’s not how walks works! And that would be bad enough, but once you start speeding Sonic up, even his jog has barely any motion in his hips. There’s no weight at all to this. No vertical motion. He’s just flailing his limbs even more wildly now! No, for some reason, they’ve saved all of the vertical motion for Sonic’s full tilt run, which is exactly where you DON’T need it! Now, if you play this run cycle back at a slower speed, I actually like a lot about it! There’s some great detail in here. That light overlapping bob on the hands with each step as they drag behind the body is nice. That bend and extension in the leg with each step looks good. And look at that subtle side to side rotation in the body and the head. I like that! Unfortunately, you're not gonna see, or even FEEL, ANY of that at the speed this animation plays in game. You see, there is a reason why past games smoothed Sonic’s vertical motion at high speed: because, at this rapid stride frequency, that vertical movement turns into strobe-y noise. He’s just a rapidly vibrating blue shape now. Real quick, let’s jump back to Sonic Adventure 1 and look at that fastest sprint again. Notice there’s a lot less detailed motion in here. The feet are moving too fast to track, the arms are shaking a bit and the whole body is vibrating lightly as he runs, but at speed that smoothness actually looks pretty nice! It’s smooth enough that, if his expression were to change or if he were to turn his head to look at something, you could easily see that. Not the case in Sonic Adventure 2. And this problem applies to every playable character in the game. These runs are a MESS. I mean look at Knuckles! Or Rouge. Or, JEEZ, Eggman, are you okay? I know I’m really dwelling on this point, but running is the most important gameplay verb in almost ANY Sonic game. It’s kinda the thing our boy is known for. And if your Sonic game botches THAT animation? That’s no good. Now, I will give Sonic Team some leeway here, though, because the reality is that making a super high speed run animation look good can actually be quite tricky. The 2D Sonic games cracked this problem early, but the 3D games aren’t going to nail it for a while yet, and this is definitely one of the lowest points on that progression. But Sonic Adventure 2's animation issues don’t stop at locomotion. These human characters are still an off-putting mess. Tails’s tail flick looks jankier, and actually stops completely during the early phases of his run for some reason. And the application of some very primitive real-time physics on certain characters is a neat technical advance, but pretty shabby in execution. Like, yes, the wobble on Rouge’s ears is pretty cool. Maybe a bit much though? Consider dialing that knob down a bit. They're.... they're still going. And… hang on. Boob jiggle physics? Are you serious? Sonic Team. Come on. See, this is why I’m torn. Because nothing in Sonic Adventure 2 feels quite as JARRINGLY BAD as some of the animation in Sonic Adventure 1. But at the same time, there are still loads of issues. And, if we’re being blunt, the 3D gaming scene in 2001 looks a LOT different than it did in 1998. Sonic Adventure 1 came out at a time when its biggest competitors were all on weaker hardware. And if you’re a Dreamcast title standing next to a bunch of PS1 and N64 games, even if your animation isn’t any better than theirs, you at least look pretty cutting edge by comparison. But Sonic Adventure 2 doesn’t have that luxury. The same year Sonic Adventure 2 hit shelves, we also saw: Dead or Alive 3 Super Smash Bros Melee Devil May Cry Final Fantasy X Luigi’s Mansion Metal Gear Solid 2 Jak & Daxter, for crying out loud. Sonic Adventure 1 came out at a time when everybody was still figuring 3D out, so it gets a bit more of a pass. But Sonic Adventure 2 - despite improving on the first game in many respects - in the context of its time, it actually comes off looking WORSE. And I know I complimented the cutscene animation earlier, but the thing that bothers me the absolute most about the animation in Sonic Adventure 2 is that - for SOME REASON - they decided to use motion capture to animate some of these sequences. Watch this scene. [music] [SONIC: "Huh, Amy?"] [AMY: "Shhh! Keep your voice down!"] [AMY: "Have no fear..."] [AMY: "Amy Rose is here!"] This sequence (and many others in the game) are performed by human actors in motion capture suits. And look: motion capture is an INCREDIBLE animation tool. If you want to capture realistic human movement in all of its nuance and detail, and especially if you want to capture that movement in enormous quantities efficiently, there is literally no better tool for the job. Motion capture is great at producing large quantities of naturalistic human performance. What it is generally NOT good for is animating cartoon characters. Sonic characters have extremely stylized designs. And, as a general rule, exaggerated cartoony characters require exaggerated cartoony movement. Because if you take a cartoony character and animate them like a realistic human being, you get an effect that I like to call The Mascot Suit Problem. Actually, let’s stop and talk about this, because it’s going to come up again and again with Sonic games. If you’ve ever been to a Disney theme park, then you’ve almost definitely seen a classic animated character performed by a human actor inside a suit like this one. It’s fun! I love these things, and I have immense respect for the people performing these characters in these awkward suits. But no matter how skilled the performer inside, you will never see a mascot suit character move in the same way as the animated source material. Because humans are bound by the limitations of physics and realistic human motion. An animated character is not bound by these limitations. Animation IS exaggeration. An animated character can move however the animator wants them to. So why would you intentionally take a heavily-stylized animated character (a character who owes a LOT of their design to animation icons of the 1920s and 30s), and have their animated performance be copy-pasted from a real live human being’s movements on a stage? Why would you intentionally constrain their movement to the limits of human motion? My guess is that they saw an opportunity for efficiency. Hand-crafted animation is a slow process, and if you happen to have access to motion capture tools, you could theoretically just spend an afternoon having two people perform scenes and then edit that motion data to fit your characters’ proportions. But the work required to manually edit realistic human movement so it looks like exaggerated cartoony performance is quite extensive, and that is clearly not what happened here. I watch scenes like this and I don’t see Sonic and Amy. I see two people on a motion capture stage (badly) miming to a voice track. And the results look like… well, two humans acting out a scene while wearing Sonic and Amy mascot suits. The Sonic series is going to wrestle with this a lot. These characters have big eyes and exaggerated facial features. They have absurdly large hands. Their designs are specifically engineered to exaggerate the proportions of the human features which are most expressive: the eyes and the hands. But just HAVING large eyes and hands doesn’t instantly make a character expressive. You have to ANIMATE those features. If you don’t actually animate those eyes or take advantage of those large hands to deliver expressive gestures, then those resources aren't just being completely wasted, they're actively working AGAINST you. And what you end up with feels like a regular ol’ human wearing an expressionless Sonic costume. And it doesn’t work. Wait, how long has this video been going? WOAH okay, we have to move on. [music] Ahh the end of Sonic’s Sega console exclusivity. RIP Dreamcast. Unlike its predecessors, Sonic Heroes gameplay is structured around character trios who can swap formation on the fly to navigate levels, which is a neat idea, especially for a franchise that has been acquiring new side characters as fast as this one has. And although the overall quality of animation hasn’t changed much since the Adventure games, because the focus is now on cooperative group movement, the quality of animation on any individual character matters slightly less. Like, sure, the walk and the run cycles ARE slightly better here than in Sonic Adventure 2, but honestly, for this game it matters more that the movement of your trio as a unit feels good. And it does! The formation running can be a little janky here and there, but swapping formations on the fly feels pretty nice. And what’s more, even though all four trios play basically the same, they each have some of their own unique animated variations of that cooperative move set. Like, where Team Sonic will grab hands and do a sort of skydive formation to float over these fans, Team Rose will grab onto Big the Cat as he opens an umbrella, Mary Poppins style. It’s a characterization reskin over shared functionality, and that’s great. But despite those characterization wins, despite the fact that the animation’s contributions to game feel are slowly improving, and despite the fact that almost nothing looks outright BROKEN anymore, the animated appeal of these characters' 3D incarnations is still so low, and it’s dragging the feeling of animation quality down every time. These characters just still don’t look appealing in 3D, even in the pre-rendered cinematics. Heck, ESPECIALLY in the pre-rendered cinematics. For me, this shows most starkly in the return of Vector and Espio. You remember these two? Last time we saw them was at the very end of the 2D era, and they looked great. Distinct personalities loaded with appeal and animated pretty delightfully. But NOW? Jeez fellas, what did they do to you? With Sonic and the rest of the core crew, we’ve at least had some time to mentally adjust to the wonky 3D incarnations, but going straight from this to THIS really highlights that the 3D versions of these characters still have a long way to go to getting that appeal back. And part of the problem I think is that Sonic Team has been making this a lot harder on themselves than they need to. For one thing, their insistence on featuring TONS of playable characters in every 3D game to date has clearly not been helping. I know that increasing the count of playable characters has been a thing for this franchise, but getting just ONE playable character to look and feel good in 3D is already a challenge, and splitting your focus across six characters or more sure doesn’t help. Heck, by this game, we’re up to TWELVE of them. I can’t help but think that if they’d poured all of that effort into refining just one playable character’s handling and animation, this transition to 3D might not have been quite so bumpy. But in addition to that, the other thing making life hard for their animators is just their approach to character design. These characters have some increasingly WILD proportions. Big heads, tiny bodies, ENORMOUS hands and feet. And like I said earlier, yes, exaggerating the size of the most expressive parts of our body is a great idea TO A POINT. But there is a threshold past which increased size just makes those features cumbersome and difficult to animate. It creates PROBLEMS. Like, for example: It makes your arms clip through your head if you look any direction other than straight forward while running. It makes crossing your arms look like THIS. This pose barely reads! You can’t even see arms, it’s just two gargantuan HANDS floating in front of her body. If your humanoid characters’ proportions are making it awkward for them to perform basic human gestures and poses, that’s a sign that something may have gone too far. Now, if you were drawing these same poses by hand, you could at least cheat things to make these poses more appealing, but those kinds of cheats are a lot harder to pull off in 3D, and they were ESPECIALLY hard to do back in 2003. It’s going to be a while yet before we really see that appeal factor start to come together for these characters in 3D. But, surprisingly, we’re about to see a promising step forward in the right direction! Just… hear me out. [music] Man, what must it be like to work on Sonic Team? Imagine having the head of your studio walk into a company meeting and announce: “Good news, everyone! We’ve chosen a direction for our new Sonic title. This time, we’re going to give the grouchy hedgehog a gun. This is going to be the next 2-3 years of our professional lives together. Let’s get started!” How do they feel about that? Confused? Disappointed? Maybe they’re hyped about it, I don’t know! I wonder about that sometimes. Anyway, in this one, the grouchy hedgehog has a gun. Now, look... I know. Shadow the Hordgeheg has a machine gun now and everything about that is supremely dumb. HOWEVER. I hold to my previous statement that this is actually a big step forward for the animation in 3D Sonic games, and let me tell you why. For one thing, this is the first game in the series to give us a glimpse at what appealing 3D Sonic character animation looks like. And that glimpse comes in the pre-rendered cinematics. Previous 3D Sonic games have featured pre-rendered cinematics, but the character animation in them wasn’t much more appealing than anything you saw in-engine. Sometimes it was actually worse. But this time, Sega outsourced the production of these cinematics to Blur Studio, who know what they’re doing and did us all the courtesy of showing what a 3D version of a Sonic character can look like when animated WELL. Shadow’s animation in these shots looks SO much better than anything we’ve seen before this. Look at these dynamic poses! The facial expression are clear, the eyes are expressive. You can actually read the character’s thought process happening in real time as you watch expressions cross his face, which is what good face animation is supposed to do. There is nothing mascot suit-looking about Shadow in these shots. Yes, everything HAPPENING in these scenes is comically stupid, but Shadow’s animation in these comically stupid scenes is pretty great! (No buddy, no... that’s not how that kind of gun works, you don’t charge those like a shotgu-- you know what, it doesn’t matter.) Granted, once we switch to in-game cutscenes, things do start looking a little bit more familiar. All of that expressiveness and the appealing motion are gone, and we’re pretty much back to what we saw in Adventure 2 and Heroes. But HEY, at least the pre-rendered sequences have given future games a target to aim for. But that’s not the only win here! Because Shadow’s gameplay animation has seen some small but EXTREMELY IMPORTANT improvements. Sure, there are still problems. Shadow’s locomotion doesn’t seem to adapt whatsoever to carrying a weapon, no matter how absurdly large or heavy-looking that weapon should be, which leads to absolutely ridiculous- looking situations like these. (I don’t understand why none of you are taking this game seriously.) But look at this walk cycle. This looks pretty nice! In fact, this is the first time one of these characters has had a decent-looking walk cycle in a 3D game, and with this many characters it REALLY shouldn’t have taken four games for that to happen. And, far more importantly than that, they’re finally using squash and stretch in a noticeable way during 3D gameplay! Look at this jump. You see that stretch on the legs? And the bouncy settle when he lands? That looks really good on this character! And they’re showing more willingness to stretch proportions for attacks and such. And the reason this matters is because the animators on Sonic Team are finally pushing the animation on these characters into a slightly more cartoony realm. As I have already said: these are highly-stylized character designs. And that naturally lends them to a kind of stylized animation which previous 3D games haven’t really taken much advantage of, partly because "cartoony" is just hard to do in 3D. But Squash & Stretch and Exaggeration are staples of stylized animation, and it’s great seeing this team finally start to deploy more of the two principles they stand to benefit most from. These improvements, they may not seem super noticeable yet, but between the appeal breakthroughs in the cinematics and the cartoony experimentation in Shadow’s move set, things are starting to look really promising. And we’re about to jump to the next generation of console hardware here. If the next game can start building on these successes, we might just pull out of this 3D slump! What IS the next game anyway? Oh for heck sake... [music] So... Sonic 2006 is a particularly notorious title that had a heck of a troubled development and was clearly rushed to market before the devs could finish it, which sucks for them, sucks for everybody. The game is a mess, and it breaks often. Fortunately, most of the stuff that breaks isn’t animation-related... Mostly. Unfortunately, the animation is still kind of a mess anyway. First let’s talk about the good things. A-… ...(sigh) hang on… ... ...ok. A handful of the pre-rendered cinematics are still being delivered by Blur Studio, and they are still delivering. There’s only so much that Blur can do to fix the art direction nightmare that is this game’s bafflingly realistic setting. But even so, this is easily the most appealing 3D Sonic’s animation has been to this point, and saying that just made me sad. But Sonic’s gameplay animation has a few high points too. His Bored fidg-... (sigh)... ...His Bored fidgets certainly look a heck of a lot better than they have in any 3D game to this point. His skid and turn transition looks pretty nice. This low sweep kick looks really good, actually, and it somehow looks just as good when performed at high speed, even though the physicality of it is a bit wonky. It’s like he’s doing a leg sweep / baseball slide without losing any speed and… I don’t know, it feels good! Also, the more powerful hardware and Havoc’s physics engine are allowing them to do stuff like put some simple physics on Sonic’s spines, which helps to loosen up the shape of that bulbous head a little bit. And hey, Rouge has a half decent looking walk and run cycle for the first time, so that’s nice- STOP IT. So yes, there are some good bits here for sure, but the rest of this is kind of a mess, and in many of the same ways we’ve been seeing over the last decade of Sonic games. All of that promising Squash & Stretch and most of the Exaggeration we saw beginning to emerge in Shadow’s game is just gone. Heck, just look at Shadow now. His walk sucks again. And look at how stiff and drab his skating cycle is. Compared to what it looked like just one game ago! Oh... it hurts. But fine, even if we ignore the abandoned potential of those cartoony touches, so many of these gameplay animations are subpar. This might be the worst version of Sonic’s run cycle I’ve seen yet. The jog leading into it is fine, that part is solid, but then he starts the run and he splays those giant hands out stiffly to either side and it just looks awful. Like, either ball those hands into fists and tuck them in at his sides or drag them further behind. Don’t fan them out unnaturally like you forgot to animate them and just left our boy T-posing. Sonic carrying Elise around looks awkward as heck, although I think that was just a bad idea to begin with. I have no idea how you’d make this look good. And come on, y’all, you KNOW that’s not how snowboarding works. Even ignoring the clearly-broken uphill riding, the body mechanics of this aren’t even close. A snowboard doesn’t stay perfectly flat against the ground all the time. The rider’s gotta use the edges of the board and its angle relative to the slope to control their direction and speed. And I wouldn’t get on your case for this one detail in this one level if it weren’t for the fact that you already got this right three games ago! On ASPHALT. Also, if your character can wall climb in any direction, you do have to actually animate them climbing in multiple directions. You can’t just animate a Climb Up cycle and call it a day, or THIS happens. And the human animation in this is… a LOT to deal with. I don’t even know how exactly to go about critiquing it. Some of it just looks comically bad, like any time you talk to a human on the street. Their animation loops just look ridiculous across the board. But even when the human animation is technically BETTER (relatively speaking), the gross mismatch in art direction still makes it feel unpleasant to look at. These character designs just do not belong side by side, and forcing these characters to inhabit the same space kinda creates a no-win situation in terms of animation style. Because relatively realistic humans like these? They are going to look pretty uncanny if you animate them in a cartoony way. But cartoon characters this stylized are going to look weird if you animate them naturalistically. You can’t win. It’s no USE. Speaking of which, can you PLEASE STOP USING MOTION CAPTURE TO ANIMATE SONIC CHARACTERS? IT LOOKS BIZARRE. Especially if you’re not going to heavily modify that motion data or actually animate the characters’ faces! Sonic 06 is PEAK Mascot Suit Problem. At least half of the Sonic character animation in cutscenes was made using motion capture, so they’re already moving around with uncannily realistic physicality. But it’s made 10 times worse by the fact that they are barely animating the faces. Look, if you’re going to have your character eyes this big, you have to animate them. Okay? You HAVE to. If you don’t, all you’ve got is a plastic mascot head. Same goes for the hands and fingers. If you give your character hands this absurdly large, you have to USE them. You've got to create appealing shapes and hand poses. Otherwise, all you’ve done is attach clumsy, awkward shapes to your characters in every scene. Look at poor Knuckles! It’s like he’s wearing those giant novelty boxing glove toys. No wonder the poor guy can’t catch anything. You have to actually animate these exaggerated features, or they become a liability. It’s been true in ALL of these 3D games, but it’s ESPECIALLY true now that we’re seeing everyone in HD. I didn’t want to be mean to the animation in this one because Sonic 2006 is already such a punching bag of a game. And the animation IS less busted than a lot of the other elements. But... I just can’t find a positive spin to put on this. Like, okay, yes. If we are strictly comparing this to previous 3D Sonic titles, is the animation in this an improvement over Shadow the Hedgehog? ...Well, no. But is it better than Adventure and Heroes? ...a LITTLE? I guess? But in 2006, that is such a LOW bar to clear. This game came out alongside stuff like Okami and Final Fantasy XII and Gears of War and Kingdom Hearts II! The Sonic franchise has fallen SO far behind the curve on animation quality at this point. And hey, side note: pour one out for all the people involved in this scene. It took dozens of people working many hours to make this sequence a reality, and you KNOW that 90% of them felt exactly the same way working on it as you and I do watching it. But hey, nowhere to go but up, right? Well no, but let’s see what happens! [music] Sonic & the Secret Rings is a considerably scaled-down affair, and better for it. The first immediately noticeable difference is the swap from animated 3D story scenes to these much simpler hand-drawn “storybook” animatics. And I know these might seem like a downgrade at first. They’re definitely less ambitious from a production standpoint. But I would argue that “less ambitious” is exactly what Sonic Team’s productions needed at this point in time. Plus, the Sonic in these 2D scenes is way more expressive and appealing than he has been in ANY of the fully-animated disasters we’ve been bombarded with for the last five games. Sure, these animatics may be cheaper than fully animated cutscenes, but they sure ain’t worse than THIS. But it’s not just the story scenes! Gameplay animation has been scoped way down too. Exchanging those wide open branching levels of the past 3D games for these narrower, obstacle-littered lanes and a more infinite-runner style of platforming design means that Sonic’s animation set for traversing those spaces can be relatively simpler and more focused. By not allowing the player to have free reign over where Sonic goes and how, they considerably reduce the scenarios that Sonic’s animation might have to account for. And by not committing themselves to a giant playable cast of characters, they can finally focus all of their attention on just making Sonic look as good as possible. And Sonic’s animation does look somewhat better here! It’s hardly a night and day difference, but any boost in polish is VERY welcome at this point. That said, BECAUSE the devs had this prime opportunity to add more polish to Sonic’s gameplay animation, I’m going to get a little more nitpicky... Given there aren’t nearly as many variables that they have to account for with Sonic’s run this time, it still feels like there’s a lot of room for improvement here. Make no mistake, this is WAY better than the T-pose run he just had, but even so. Sonic’s run is the foundation for EVERYTHING in this particular game. If there’s one animation that should look fantastic at all costs, I feel like it’s this one. Part of the problem, I think, is the legs. Sonic doesn’t bend his knees much during this run, and it kinda results in each foot following an almost identical arc moving forward and back with each step. It’s like they’re a pair of clock pendulums stiffly swinging back and forth. Speaking of his feet, this noticeable clipping on the shoes on every step isn't great, especially considering how close the camera is to him now. Like, I know the absurd proportions are half of the problem here, and I DO feel bad for the animators. These feet look awkward as heck to animate. But given we’re almost exclusively seeing the run from this one camera angle now, there’s gotta be SOME way to hide that clipping better, right? I think the thing that’s bothering me most is that the animation doesn’t really account for side-to-side movement. If you steer Sonic to the left or to the right, his run animation doesn’t change. His entire body just kinda shifts to the side, like one of those figures on a Foosball table. And that’s not much of a problem when you’re going at high speed, but if you’re just getting moving, it makes Sonic’s run feel all the more floaty and weird. I’d love to see a bit more lean or maybe some twist on the head and shoulders or SOMETHING. Also, the instant you hit a boost pad, Sonic’s sprint is turning into strobe-y noise again. Which is harder to avoid with a Sonic game stuck at a frame rate of 30fps, granted. But, Sonic Adventure pulled it off. But enough nitpicking. Like I said, even with all these minor complaints (and despite the fact that I NEVER want to actually play this game again) this is all still looking better than Sonic '06. And I will take ANY win I can get at this point, people. Sigh…. alright, what’s next. [music] Oh! Hey, this is pretty good… wait, this is REALLY good! I don’t believe it. What… what happened? Sorry, after all of these 3D messes, I don’t know how to mentally process this feeling. For starters, THIS is the new pinnacle of 3D Sonic as depicted in a pre-rendered cinematic. I don’t know what studio did this (I THINK it was Marza Animation Planet, not a 100% sure), but the animation on Sonic here is REALLY good! Look! Squash & Stretch! Exaggerated poses and expressions! Someone finally cranked the cartoonyness back up on Sonic and it looks amazing on him. And it’s not just the pre-rendered cut-scenes. Sonic’s animation in the real-time scenes has a bit of cartoony exaggeration too, and it looks really solid! It’s obviously not to the same extreme you see in the opening movie, but still, I can’t believe they finally started doing it! And the faces are finally starting to look expressive! And look at this snappier timing! I mean, obviously the story and the dialog and all of that is still kind of awful, but the animation is SO much better. And the gameplay animation is also really solid! WHAT’S HAPPENING. This run looks great! He’s coasting smoothly enough to avoid all that strobing noise you can sometimes get with rapid movement at 30fps, but the light vertical bobbing motion to each step keeps it feeling like an actual run. Having his fists dragging behind his body works really well. These leans into the turns look VERY good. And even when you swing the camera around to a side angle, the run still looks solid! Better than Secret Rings managed to do to ONE camera angle! The rail grinding looks better than ever. Look how natural-feeling Sonic's weight shifts are. And look how cleanly Sonic switches from mode of locomotion to another! 3D Sonic traversal has never flowed this organically. And ok, yes. Granted, the werehog play is dull. I completely agree. And it is also like 2/3rds of the Sonic Unleashed experience, I know. HOWEVER, despite all that, the animation on him is still quite good! A lot of it is doofy-looking, but in a way that is kinda perfect for these doofy proportions, I think. I love these wacky stretchy arm attacks! And these finishers! WE may not be having fun with the werehog, but boy these animators sure did. And I love that they are finding ways to implement some of Sonic’s particular appeal characteristics even during regular play. Like the side mouth! If you’re unfamiliar, most of Sonic’s design iterations tend to cheat the position of his mouth toward camera. It’s a very common technique in animation, especially in 2D and ESPECIALLY on cartoonier characters like Sonic. And they’ve done this pretty often in Sonic cutscenes in past games where they had full control of where the camera was relative to his face. But here in Unleashed, they’ve actually implemented a side mouth system on in-game Sonic so that the mouth is cheated to whichever side of his face is currently facing camera. Watch his mouth as his head turns… THERE. See the switch? It’s a tiny detail, but it’s exactly those sorts of little details that make all the difference for how appealing a 3D incarnation of a 2D character looks. Though it IS worth mentioning that it would probably look even better if the mouth drifted back toward the center of his face when he’s looking at camera more dead-on? Like, you don’t have to keep it pushed unnaturally over to one side when he’s looking right at us. But I'm guessing that was just a technical limitation. And look, it’s not that there isn’t still room for improvement. The Mascot Suit Problem is significantly reduced, but it is still here. Human character animation isn’t anything to write home about. And all of their designs look very “Animation School Character Rig Starter Pack”, maybe that's just me. But hey, at least the humans are STYLIZED this time! At least these characters and Sonic look like they could belong in the same world. And they are still using motion capture for a lot of these cutscene performances. DEFINITELY on the humans, and I’m pretty sure for the Sonic characters as well, which is not the most ideal scenario, but you know what? This time they’ve done such a good job of manipulating that motion data to feel appropriate on these characters that you need a pretty well-trained eye to even TELL that motion capture was involved. And I say if they’re actually going to put in that work, then by all means: use it if you gotta. Ever since we made the jump to 3D, I’ve been saying over and over that the appeal we saw in Sonic’s original incarnation just isn’t here yet. It’s happened over and over and over and over. But now? I think this might be the first 3D Sonic game to pull it off. At last, 3D Sonic’s animation is an even match for the animated appeal of classic Sonic. Or at least it comes within swinging distance. He even does the Bored animation dozing off again! I did not realize how much I was missing those little personality touches. I keep saying it: Sonic characters are cartoony-looking as heck, and they look at their best when they move that way. Loosen these guys up with a bit of Squash & Stretch, and their designs SING. I’m not saying they have to move with that off-the-wall cartoony-ness that you see in something like Crash 4. ...Unless? Actually, can you imagine? No, but this is good, I’m fine with this amount of cartoony-ness, but I don’t know, if you WANTED to… maybe…? ...OR we could just go back to the way it was before, I guess! That’s... that's fine. [music] I don’t know why I get my hopes up. So we’re back on the Wii for another storybook installment, and things are... okay. Pre-rendered Sonic still looks decent. Certainly not quite as top tier as Unleashed pre-rendered Sonic, but this is hardly a major backslide. And it is nice seeing them still playing the cartoon comedy angle, even if the animation itself is a bit more restrained. LISTEN, we could be doing a lot worse. And, to be fair, this is clearly another small scope production. It’s essentially a follow-up to Secret Rings, from the general approach to the animation style to the level design to the 2D animatic cutscenes. And these are still working fine too. Sonic is looking expressive and reasonably appealing in these scenes and we should never take that for granted, Because AGAIN, WE COULD BE DOING SO MUCH WORSE. But boy, after seeing what Sonic CAN look like, it sure is hard going back. The look of the gameplay animation, meanwhile, has regressed back to the look we saw in Secret Rings. Actually, I’m 99% sure a lot of these animations are just slightly altered versions of the animations in Secret Rings. Ignore the sword in his hand and that run looks nearly identical. Actually, let’s talk about the sword. Because the addition of a SWORD obviously shakes things up a little, but in terms of animation, it doesn’t bring much value. I’m actually having a hard time finding an animation involving the sword that I LIKE. Like, okay, when I picture integrating sword combat into the way Sonic moves or the way Sonic games play, I imagine a sword attack being something that Sonic can do while running at high speed. A smooth motion that doesn’t even break stride or lose his momentum. Or heck, it’s Sonic. Maybe attacking with the sword could even help him BUILD speed. Kinda like in Rayman Legends, right? You do that running spin attack and even if an enemy is in the way, you zip right through them and enjoy a quick speed burst and it feels awesome. It wouldn’t even be that unlike how spin- rolling worked in the Genesis games. You see an enemy in your path, you drop down into a spin, you take 'em out, you get back up on your feet and (if you're good at the game) you keep moving with little to no speed loss. But nothing about this mashup of speed and hack-and-slash looks or feels organic in motion. The sword slash animations aren’t really integrated into the run. Instead, they feel like a sudden interruption, with Sonic snapping out of his run animation to attack and then instantly snapping back into his run cycle with no time allowed for a recovery on the sword swing, which leaves the weapon feeling kinda weightless. And what’s more, attacking with the sword almost always causes this sudden halt in forward momentum that feels terrible. When people speedrun this game, they seem to avoid using the sword as often as possible for this reason, which feels to me like an indication of failure on an animation design front. And come on, y’all, if you’re going to do little Quick Time Events, you’ve got to at least make the animation look exciting. That is LITERALLY the point. You should know this. I know for a FACT somebody over there played God of War. Also, we need to talk about these boars. When wild boars charge you, you can block and send them flying like this. It looks ridiculous and it’s my favorite. That’s all. Look, when you’ve been studying Sonic games nonstop for months, sometimes you need to take delight where you can find it. You know, the longer I look at this one, the less impressed with it I am. It’s FINE, we’ve seen so much worse than this. But now we’ve also seen significantly better, and this just isn't cutting it anymore. Especially given the fact that it’s fumbling on the one new gimmick the entire experience is built around. But it’s in the past now. New game, new chance to push the envelope. So let’s take that success that was the animation in Sonic Unleashed and BUILD upon it to- ...(sigh) okay... [music] What HAPPENED here? I’m kinda just dumbfounded looking at it. THIS is your Sonic the Hedgehog 4? Like, I’m not even a big fan of those original games, and looking at this makes ME kinda mad. So obviously one of the big differences between the animation in the originals and the animation here is that - despite the nostalgic 2D sidescroller presentation and gameplay - Sonic here is a 3D character model. And that is not inherently a problem! You can absolutely make a 3D character look awesome in a classic 2D side-scroller. Just look at the Ori games. And, to the animators’ credit, certain aspects of Sonic’s animation DO work okay here, especially when he’s just idling and being expressive. I particularly like these exaggerated anticipations on these Bored fidgets. Look at that arm extension before checking his watch. Or the way he kicks up the leg before flopping down on the ground. Or this big anticipation to just looking upward. The exaggeration here is a nice addition! In terms of personality, this incarnation of Sonic is doing alright. But in terms of functional game feel, these animations are failing MISERABLY. If there’s one singular failing that breaks the entire thing, it’s that almost none of Sonic’s basic traversal animations actually convey a proper sense of speed. You remember Sonic’s original run? The one we talked about like......oh no. An HOUR ago? Remember how he started with a high-effort jog animation over those initial seconds of acceleration before he hit full speed? It created this sensation that Sonic is a rapidly spinning tire, like the only reason it takes ANY time for him to accelerate is just because his feet need a second or two to find traction. And that’s also why his top speed feels so smooth: once he gets that momentum built, maintaining it is as easy as breathing for him. It just takes a little effort to get there. Now look at this start to Sonic 4’s run. They knew that it was important for Sonic to have a multi-phase run as he accelerated, but the first stage of acceleration kinda breaks the whole thing. Rather than an energetic jog that takes some time to ramp up, this Sonic starts with a leisurely stroll. And that’s not a great start, but even worse: not only does he stay in that walk cycle for a LONG time before shifting to the next phase, he slides unnaturally forward with those steps while doing so. So rather than exerting himself and trying to find traction, it feels like he’s already accelerating before he’s even started making the effort to. From the very first step, Sonic’s movement feels COMPLETELY wrong. The speed at which he’s physically moving across the level does not match the speed suggested by his animation. And so many of Sonic 4’s animations have that exact same problem. His jog? Still sliding across the terrain faster than the footfalls in his animation. Now, to be fair, that is a nitpick you could make with a lot of the 3D Sonic games, but here it’s only reinforcing that uncanny “off”-ness of the slidey walk that came before, further amplifying the problem. And the artificial blur effect they’re adding here does nothing to fix it. And his run? Sure, there is a pinwheel of blurred feet spinning beneath him, as is customary, but it doesn’t really feel like that happened because his footsteps accelerated to the point of blurring. His feet weren’t even moving that fast in the previous phase. It felt like that jog was just getting warmed up when BAM, now he’s full speed running apparently. The progression of the multiple-phase run is all wrong here. None of these cycles feel like they quite match the speed Sonic is moving, and no one phase flows naturally into the next one. Even the spindash falls flat. That does not feel like a spinning ball of kinetic energy waiting to blast forward at top speed. It’s too smooth and gentle. It looks more like your computer’s letting you know it’s about to crash. And I know that the jump is actually the 3D Sonic character model flipping in middair, but how did you manage to make that look like a gently rotating jpeg? Look, despite what this episode has reasonably led you to believe I don’t enjoy dragging other peoples’ animation work. In my experience, 90% of bad animation in games is the result of either technical problems or the animator just not having the time or the resources they need to deliver the work they’re capable of. I have made plenty of lackluster animations in my day. It just baffles me seeing how drab this run animation is in a 2D SONIC GAME. That they shipped this and called it "Sonic the Hedgehog 4". Like, animating a 2D Sonic platformer is a SOLVED PROBLEM. We have a blueprint for how to make 2D Sonic animation look good! We have MULTIPLE BLUEPRINTS. Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic CD, Sonic and Knuckles, Knuckles' Chaotix even. I think I'm actually more frustrated about this one than I am ANY of the lackluster 3D games. Sure, almost all of those have been falling short, and the animation in many of them looks at least this bad, if not worse. But figuring out how to make Sonic animation work in 3D is a much more complex problem to solve. And having now seen Sonic Unleashed finally manage to crack that much more challenging case, watching this game fail to live up to the standard of animation that came twenty years before just feels dire. To this game’s credit, though, the animation does occasionally succeed in capturing that personality that all good Sonic animation needs, and it should be noted that things definitely improved somewhat in the animation for Episode II. But by this point, those improvements are just too little too late to save this one. Moving on! [music] Ok, see THIS is more like it. Aesthetically speaking, the animation in Sonic Colors isn’t breaking any new ground. It pretty much just replicates everything that worked about Sonic Unleashed, and at this point that’s just FINE. And the fact that all of these traversal animations still look just as good in Colors despite the Wii not being able to take advantage of the motion blur that might have smoothed over the rougher edges in Unleashed, it really highlights how well-crafted these animations were to begin with. Even at top speed without the blur (and at 30 frames per second!) Sonic never turns into strobe-y noise. I think I might very slightly prefer the run animation in Unleashed with the closed fists as opposed to Colors’ open hands, but that call is getting pretty subjective at this point. And, in the interest of fairness to Sonic 4, I will call out that Sonic’s multi-stage run DOES start with a chill walk here in Colors, and that still does not look great. However, he only spends a few brief steps in that walk before shifting to a jog, and all the cycles from there DO look great. The in-game cutscene animation is looking solid too. The eyes still aren’t QUITE active enough to escape the Mascot Suit Problem, they’re still keeping the cartoony-ness REALLY constrained and, in general, there’s still a lot of room to improve from here, but as a starting point from which to build, this totally works. I’LL TAKE IT. What’s more, best I can tell, it looks like they’ve finally stopped using motion capture for anyone. And that change does result in a little bit less weight and subtle physicality to the characters’ movement, BUT I think it’s going to be a positive change in the long run, especially as the crew keeps refining this hand-animated approach to these characters. Speaking of cutscenes, I just want to give a shoutout to the animation on Eggman. Because ever since Sonic Unleashed, they have really honed in on what makes him appealing in 3D. Between the overblown physical acting and the overblown voice performance, he is becoming GREAT fun. If I had to rank the two, I would say the animation in Sonic Unleashed just barely comes out on top, just BARELY. But the animation in Sonic Colors is rock solid, especially considering this came out on the Wii, the same hardware that scaled down experiences like the The Secret Rings and The Black Knight were built for. Also, this game is pretty dang fun? Sega really should port this one to more things. Colors is worth keeping around. I bet it would look pretty gorgeous in HD too. Ahhh, boy it feels good to be back on track again. Now if only if we can manage to sustain that quality for two games in a row for once... Oh my gosh, THEY DID IT. [music] This Greatest Hits album of a Sonic game features both classic and modern incarnations of Sonic, which affords us an opportunity to see a side-by-side comparison of How It Started vs How It’s Going. Now Modern Sonic’s animation is essentially unchanged from what we been seeing in Sonic Unleashed and Colors, which is good, because those are definitely the best incarnations of his 3D animation set to date. Classic Sonic is an interesting case, though, because he is ALSO presented here as a 3D character, but one that stays truer to the aesthetic of Sonic’s early look and animation. And I would say it’s a reasonably successful representation! They’ve done a pretty great job at capturing both the feel of Sonic’s 16-bit animations AND that cuter image he had back in the day. This little guy is adorable. Look at him! Not to keep beating up on Sonic 4, but… well, THIS is how you do it. And it’s fun getting to see how the approach to animating Sonic locomotion has evolved using this side-by-side comparison. Modern Sonic’s attitude is almost entirely about cool confidence, while Classic Sonic leans more into the adorableness of his original design. Classic Sonic relies on momentum and Good Spindash to navigate levels, while Modern Sonic is more about effective use of Boost and Homing Attacks. For their locomotion, both versions of the character have multiple phases to their runs, but their approach to the structure of those phases is different. Classic Sonic’s is more or less exactly how it worked on the Genesis: first a high-energy jog that cycles a little more rapidly as he builds speed, then a smoother full tilt run with his arms tucked in and his feet becoming a blur. It works just as well as it did 20 years before. Meanwhile, Modern Sonic’s run actually has quite a few MORE phases. First a couple walking steps that quickly build into a bouncy jog. Then things smooth out a bit as he takes longer strides. Then, as he hits full speed, the arms drop back behind him for the run. So that’s already, what, four stages? But he’s not done! Keep him going for a few seconds, and he’ll hit a fifth stage where he leans a LITTLE further forward, his fingers splayed and the motion on his body and head smoothed out even further. And even after THAT, you can hit the boost to make that cycle go slightly faster and curl his hands into fists. The increased number of more granular stages makes for a much smoother progression as Sonic accelerates from 0 to top speed, and it looks great. As for the story scene animation, it’s… eh, it’s okay. It’s more or less on par with what we saw in Sonic Unleashed and Colors, so we haven’t really seen any sort of downgrade, but it’s not shown much improvement either. They are still brushing up against the Mascot Suit Problem most of the time. Honestly, I suspect that the awkwardness of these character proportions is still one of the biggest culprits here. The animators are doing what they can, but those big clumsy hands aren’t getting any easier to animate. The scenes look FINE, but there’s still so much room for improvement, and I really want to start seeing that improvement happen now. But this game is, above all, a celebration of Sonic history. Of everything the franchise has achieved to date. And given how bumpy a road it’s been for these games and the animation in them for the 15 years leading up to Generations, I suppose it’s worth just celebrating the fact that Sonic seems to have found his feet again. But let’s see where things go from here. [music] Sonic Lost World introduces a pretty radical overhaul to level design and a cleaner visual aesthetic. But despite those changes, some gameplay tweaks and a handful of new moves, Sonic’s animation isn’t all that different from what we’ve already seen. Some of the additions are noteworthy, though. For one, they’ve added a little bit of Squash & Stretch to Sonic’s spin jump and I LOVE it. It’s a subtle change, but that little bit of added squishyness makes such a big difference to how the jump feels. I want this to be carried forward to EVERY Sonic game from now on. Also, and I did NOT expect to see this: the Sonic CD Super Peel Out is back! And they’ve actually managed to make it look cool in 3D, which is very impressive. But for me, the biggest improvement Sonic Lost World brings is something that you FEEL more than you see: a very slight boost in polish across the board. It’s not something that jumps out and catches your attention. It’s the little things that make everything flow a little smoother. It’s the way Sonic will do a little roll to absorb the impact of a long fall before continuing his run. Or the way Sonic’s skid to a stop before reversing direction actually feels like a physically accurate skid for maybe the first time in 3D. It’s those nice leans into his turns. It’s that little squetch on the jump. It’s all these little bits of refinement, that extra 5% of tuning on top of all the gains that Sonic Unleashed and Colors and Generations made. It has been a long time since I’ve seen a Sonic game with nearly all of the rough edges sanded away from its gameplay animation. And it seems somehow appropriate that THIS is the modern Sonic game to deliver animation with the kind of polish we so often see in Mario games. Because… well, you know. This little boost in polish shows in the cutscenes as well. Again, there’s nothing radically new and improved about the animation in these scenes, just a tiny incremental boost in quality. That shift to hand-animated cutscene performances is starting to pay off now. The posing on the characters is a pinch more appealing, the timing of the movements just feels a bit sharper. Maybe the animators had a little more time for this one. Maybe the character animation rigs saw some quality of life improvements, or maybe the animators have just gotten more comfortable with animating this iteration of these characters, I don’t know. They have certainly had a little time to settle into the style now, which can’t hurt. Whatever the reason, things are looking just slightly better across the board. And it's great. The quality of Sonic games may still be all over the map, but the quality of their animation has really started to stabilize for the first time in a LONG time. Case in point... [music] If you are not familiar, this game is something of a spinoff developed not by Sonic Team, but by Big Red Button. Like Sonic 2006, it was forced out the door well before it was ready and - from what few insights I can find into its development - it sounds like the team faced a lot of miserable production woes. This game bums me out. Not because it’s dull (which it kinda is), and not because it runs badly (which it DEFINITELY does), but because despite all of that, the animation in it is GOOD. REALLY good. Now, I understand that not everybody is on board with the character redesign or the shift in characterization on these four characters. And that’s okay. It IS a very different flavor. But I will say this: you know how I’ve been commenting over and over about how animator- unfriendly the proportions of pretty much every 3D iteration of Sonic’s characters are? This incarnation of them looks WAY easier to work with. These faces are able to express a full range of emotions! These hand and feet sizes are manageable! I know I’ve been saying the 3D characters have been getting more expressive in these games, and they really have! There’s been real growth. But these versions are on a whole different level. There is so much more life in the eyes! You can see the thought processes happening in their head more clearly and more frequently than in just about any other Sonic game. But it’s not just cutscene acting. The animation for gameplay is pretty great too! The way this game plays is quite different from your average Sonic title, more of a Ratchet & Clank type affair, but the animation serves that play well. Like, Sonic’s high speed run: It has a very different style, but it looks nice! Look at the way the quick jostling movement in his torso from all the rapid steps ripples down the arms to his fingers. That looks really cool. Check out the extensive use of Squash & Stretch on Sonic whenever he’s spindashing or rolled into a ball. This is what I’ve been WANTING to see in these games! And the way he actually transitions into and out of spindashing, starting with a dive roll and finishing with either a hero pose or a transition back to running? Almost none of the previous games even TRIED that, and those that have didn’t make it look near this good. The attack combos look solid. Swinging around on these rails looks good. Knuckles’ wall-climbing has NEVER looked this great before. I so wish I could see this game running at a decent frame rate, because everything I CAN see of these animations looks awesome. And, like, Amy gets to be something OTHER than an obsessive Sonic fangirl for once! And that’s so nice. Can we keep that going forward at least, maybe? Please? It’s such a shame that all of this great animation work is attached to a game that's only ever going to be remembered as a mess. But that’s how it goes in this industry sometimes. Boy, this is a downer. Um... Can we get a pick-me-up or something? AHHH that's better.... [music] This unlikely little miracle of a game was noteworthy for being spearheaded by prominent creators in the Sonic fan community. And it is a delight. I don’t even LIKE Sonic that much, why does this intro make me so happy?! The animation in Sonic Mania is great. Not because it’s back to being a 2D game and not because it’s a return to the pixel animation we haven’t seen since 1995. No, as a long-awaited successor to the original trilogy, the animation in this game is good for the exact same reason the animation in Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic CD and Knuckles' Chaotix is good. The animation in Sonic Mania is great because it takes a rock solid foundation and builds upon it. In the same way that Sonic Generations was a "Greatest Hits" celebration of Sonic’s larger history, Mania is a "Greatest Hits" of Sonic’s 16-bit era specifically. This is that classic Sonic animation you remember, but with even more appeal packed in than before. Just about every one of these moves has been fleshed out with additional frames of animation. That Good Spindash from Sonic 2 used to be a 6 frame cycle. Now it has 16. The corkscrew jump used to have 12 unique frames. Now it has 24. And a lot of the added appeal comes from subtle tweaks to those familiar animations. Like, look at the way Sonic’s Bored fidget now has this overshoot and settle on the transition. It’s the tiniest change, but it looks so nice! It reinforces the original idea and turns it into something even better. Sonic Mania is littered with little touches like these. But even though every animation has been given a bit more fidelity, that glow-up never breaks the familiar retro aesthetic. Don’t get me wrong: this is NOT how 16-bit Sonic animation looked, nor is it trying to look that way. But it is trying to look exactly how you REMEMBER 16-bit Sonic feeling back in the 90s, and it is VERY good at being that. My favorite thing in the entire game is how Mania takes all of these familiar characters and emphasizes their personalities even more than the originals did. There's this bit at the start of Chemical Plant Zone where a drip of... whatever that chemical is drops on Sonic’s head at the start and he gets annoyed and shakes it off. It’s cute, right? But EVERY playable character has their own reaction to that drip! I love the shock on Knuckles’ face. He's so MAD. And Tails has a different reaction if he’s player 2 and standing behind Sonic when the drip happens! So much expressive custom animation for one goof! The animators have just poured so much love and care into the characterizing details in these animations, both the new additions and the updated originals. The pixel art versions of these characters have never looked so good. It’s wild that this game exists at all, and I’m really happy it does. Even to someone like me living on the outside of this fandom, the affection for the source material is impossible to miss. But one Sonic game remains! WE’RE IN THE HOME STRETCH, LETS GOOO [music] Ok, so we’re back to those familiar 3D designs and a tried and true animation style. As you've probably noiticed ever since around Sonic Colors, 3D Sonic has pretty much settled into a consistent animation aesthetic: hand-animated, stylized but with frustratingly minimal cartoony-ness. It’s a bit of a bummer losing the more exaggerated quality of movement that Sonic Boom had, but hey, they’re at least getting consistently decent results at this point, and that has not been true for Sonic since the 90s so I can’t get too mad about it. The most noteworthy thing about Sonic Forces, aside from the comically bleak story... [KNUCKLES: "Sonic is alive!"] ["My spy there says he's in a solitary confinement cell,"] ["and they've been torturing him for months."] WHAT? [AMY: "That's horrible!"] Knuckles? WHAT?? So, right, that aside... The most noteworthy thing is that you can now make your own self-insert Sonic OC to co-star as the hero. Never let it be said that Sonic Team doesn’t get their audience. And the animation on the OC characters is... fine? They’re fine. Traversal is a bit less refined than Sonic’s, but then they haven’t been tuning my OC’s traversal system for a decade, have they? Give me time, I just got here. I do love the way they use the grappling hook to drift around those sharp turns, though. That looks great, and I love how they sometimes use it as a team-up move to assist another character who can’t take corners that fast. And hey, now me and Sonic (noted best friends), are stunting as we drop down the laser shaft. If you ever want some Cool Guy lessons, let me know. My prices are reasonable. I honestly don’t know what more to say about the animation in Forces. It just doesn’t move the needle in either direction. Gameplay animation is still solid and mostly unchanged from Generations. Although, I don’t know why Sonic only does the one stunt on repeat after homing attacks now. That’s a tiny loss. But hey, they did keep the Squash & Stretch on Sonic’s jump from Lost World! I was SO CERTAIN they were going to drop that immediately just to spite me! And on the narrative animation side, cinematics are… also looking about the same! Definitely a downgrade in character expressiveness and style from what we saw in Sonic Boom, but easily a match for the animation we saw in Generations, maybe even a slight improvement. Still just can’t quite escape that Mascot Suit Problem, unfortunately. And at this point, I’m starting to think it’s just not going to happen? At least not without SOME sort of character redesign. These faces are just not built with expressive range in mind, certainly not in 3D anyway. For the time being, it looks like 3D Sonic is in a bit of a stylistic holding pattern, for better or worse. But who knows what the future will bring! If there is one thing Sonic has trained us to expect, it's a rollercoaster ride. So, in conclusion, which Sonic games have good animation? Well, having now spent months of my life exhaustively studying the lot of them, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the answer is: Some of them. [EGGMAN: “You’ve wasted so much of my time.”] I’m kidding. Let’s do a top and bottom five. Lists are fun! In order of release, I would say that the five Sonic games with the weakest animation are: Sonic 3D Blast. Points for attempting the new technical approach, but unfortunately it did drain the appeal right out of them characters. Sonic Adventure 2. I was torn between picking this or Sonic Adventure 1, especially given 2 did improve on some of its predecessor’s more glaring problems, but then it did also backslide on so much else, and at a time when the rest of the industry was already pretty settled in and comfy with 3D animation tech. Sonic 2006. I know Sega didn’t give y’all the time you needed to finish it, but I’m not convinced that more time was gonna save the animation in this one. Sonic and the Black Knight. I was a little torn on this one too since the animation's really just underwhelming for the most part, but the thing that tips it over the edge for me is that the animation of the sword, the game’s entire gimmick, actively detracts from the polish and functional feel of the game. Plus by that point, Sonic Unleashed had already shown us how it’s done and Sonic Colors would bring that level of quality to this same console the very next year, so this just feels even worse in hindsight. And finally, Sonic 4. Because it had every blueprint it needed to make 2D Sonic animation work, and it still failed on nearly every front. And as for the five Sonic games with the best animation of the lot? The first is Sonic 2. Because it took everything that Sonic 1 did right and made it even better, basically setting the bar for every Sonic game to follow it. Now I’m tempted to give Knuckles’ Chaotix the next slot because it’s such a showcase of the function and personality that made those early pixel animation games sing, but no, I think I’m going to give it to Sonic Unleashed. Because 3D animation is the monster this series has had to fight the hardest to wrangle, and Unleashed was the game to finally pull it off. Sonic Lost World. If Sonic Unleashed was the first game in the series to make 3D Sonic look decent, Sonic Lost World is the entry that, to this day, has squeezed the most polish and appeal yet out of this design incarnation of these characters. Sonic Boom. Because, for all the game’s problems, this is some of the best animation these characters have ever had, and the fact that this series probably won’t revisit this sort of stylish animation for a long time (if ever) makes me sad. And finally, Sonic Mania. Because it found ways to improve upon the animation this entire series was founded upon without sacrificing ANY of the appeal that was already there. But what about the future? Like I said three weeks ago when you first clicked play on this video, Sonic’s 30th birthday is coming up (OR has already happened, because this video is taking forever to finish). And I would wager we’re going to see (or have already seen) some new game announcements pop up to celebrate that anniversary. It could be we’ll see another retro title. Heck, maybe they’ll finally try making a traditionally animated Sonic game! Imagine Sonic Mania Adventures: The Game. I would play the heck out of that. But odds are good that the series is going to stick to its current trajectory of 3D titles. And if the last decade of 3D games are anything to go by, it seems to me that Sonic Team has maybe hit a bit of a wall on how to push the animation of their 3D games to the next level? Well, not that they have any reason at all to listen to me, but I do animate for a living and - having now explored the ups and downs of this franchise in its ENTIRELY - I do have some suggestions. First: give the developers the time they need to ship a finished product. That one seems obvious. Second: keep leaning into that cartoony energy. Every time the animation on these characters has dared to dip its toe into more exaggerated, squash & stretchy territory, it ALWAYS looks good on them. The original 16-bit games were ALL ABOUT that cartoony animation. That more exaggerated movement on Shadow in his solo game looked good too. The squash and stretch y’all started adding to Sonic’s jumps in Lost World feels great! And seriously, Sonic’s movement in the opening to Sonic Unleashed still looks AMAZING. You could have this all the time! I’m not saying you have to go full Crash 4 (unless you want to), but try letting a little bit of that animated energy seep in. Just a little! Third: And I’m sure this one's gonna get a bit more pushback, but consider making some adjustments to the character designs. I’m not saying you have to go back to the Sonic Boom look. You don’t. BUT one thing those redesigns did achieve was significantly increasing the expressive range of these characters, and that aspect at least was a straight-up improvement. They were able to hit a lot of poses more easily and they could do a much wider array of facial expressions. As they exist now, Sonic’s main cast of characters are extremely limited by the design of their facial features. It’s just hard to get many expressions out of this eyebrow/eyelid area. Like, THIS is the closest they can manage to get Sonic to an expression of "devastated sadness". That's pretty rough. Even now, in the most recent game, this is the closest approximation I’ve seen of a "terrified" expression. Not great. And thanks to the design of their eyes, most of these characters can’t move their pupils very far to either side without something feeling broken. Which means the pupils are mostly stuck floating in the center of the eye looking straight forward and the characters have to turn their entire heads to look in a different direction. Kinda like a mascot suit head, right? WEIRD. If I might make a suggestion, maybe consider taking some inspiration from Sonic’s feature film design? I’m not saying you should make THIS what Sonic looks like from now on, I’m just saying they made some smart adjustments to the structure of Sonic’s face which gave him WAY more expressive range. And even with those changes, he still feels like Sonic! Just a thought. Listen, there’s a lot of directions you could take Sonic’s animation. History has proven that he’s pretty malleable as a character. And I know he’s been pretty locked into this current look in his games for a while now and it does usually look FINE, but I’m just saying: I think there is a lot of untapped potential in these characters. Make just a few slight adjustments to their face structure and exaggerate their movement a bit more? I think they have the potential to look amazing. But yeah, that’s it! That’s all. Finally! That is Sonic’s game animation history in pretty much its entirety. I hope you’ve enjoyed this retrospective examination! I certainly have, and believe me when I say I don’t want to lay eyes on another Sonic game for at LEAST 6 months. I am all hedgehogged out. But hey, a BIG Thank You to JoCat for that wonderful animated bit back there. If you haven’t already, go watch all of JoCat’s stuff. He’s SO good. Also I want to give another MEGA THANK YOU to my patrons, not just for supporting this thing I make, but also for being cool with me disappearing into the Sonic mines for months to work on THIS, the longest video I have ever made by far. I’ve got plenty more videos in the works, though, so if you HAVE enjoyed this, hit the Subscribe button so you don’t miss future episodes. Or consider supporting the show like all of these beacons of patience over here. Take care everybody. I’ll see you next time! [music]

Channel: New Frame Plus

Views: 2,463,236

Rating: 4.9421468 out of 5

Keywords: Sonic, Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog, retrospective, series, good, bad, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Boom, Sonic Mania, Sonic Generations, Sonic Unleashed, Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic 2006, Sonic 06, Knuckles' Chaotix, Mascot Suit, 30th, cartoony, animation, explain, explained, compare, breakdown, gameplay, New Frame Plus, New Frame +, New Frame+, Animation, Game Animation, Animator, Video Games, Daniel Floyd, Dan, Extra Frames, Extra Credits, Extra History, PlayFrame, animate

Id: GxCcHOvSVJQ

Length: 105min 4sec (6304 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Grand_Galvantula]

Watched this the other day. Adventure 2's cutscenes being mocapped makes total sense now. Now I know why Amy looks like a marionette with how she awkwardly stands around at times.

[u/ThatGuy5880]

It always irks me when people go over every "mainline Sonic game" and include Boom but not the Advance games. It's to save time on not covering every portable game which is understandable but I'm curious to see what his thoughts on how the Advance sprites stack up compared to everything else. And Boom is like, the definition of a spin-off. What he had to say about Boom is probably far more interesting than anything he could muster up for Advance and the other portable games but still, it would've been nice to see.

Also, something funny about SA2's run cycles for Sonic and Shadow is that they have different ones in the final cutscene before their fight atop The ARK, ones that actually look more clear than the gameplay run cycles (I think at least).

[u/jabberwockxeno]

There's a comment on what I explain below already on the video) but I really think they mishandled the SA2 section, the whole thing was basically spent talking about Sonic's Walk/Run cycle and the issue of Mocap, when there's so many other animations to break down that have large impacts on how the game is played/felt when playing.

As an example, Sonic and Shadow have a large variety of flourish/trick animations: There's some when they do jumps off ramps, or do jumps off the end of specific rails. They have them when you vault off of poles, as well as when they hang in the air after a homing attack hits, or if you do a jump out of a somersault. There's additional variations for some of these based on the speed at which you're moving or other factors.

A lot of those are really well animated, and they fit both Sonic and Shadow as characters really well, but most importantly they synergize with the gameplay's emphasis on landing tricks and score bonuses as part of the ranking system SA2 introduced (and that was mishandled in every game after SA2 since they didn't flesh it out synergistically like SA2 did): They're both an easy visual indicator of you landing a trick, but perhaps more importantly, they make you feel stylish, making the player feel and expressing the thematic concept behind the mechanic/system, and it makes doing cool stuff as Sonic and Shadow in the game extremely satisfying.

To tie this into what criticisms he does bring up:

I would argue Sonic's low speed walk animation losing some of the dynamic elements he mentions is not that big of a problem, precisely because SA2's thematic and conceptual core to his playstyle isn't based on building moneumtum and using speed as a reward for mastery like the classics: In those games, the fact that the player is forced to build momentum up and learn the physics systems means the player will be spending time with sonic moving slowly and gradually building speed up, so having those animations look as good as possible is important*. In SA2 though, Sonic accelerates from a stop to full speed almost instantly, so you basically never see Sonic walking at low speeds anyways, though admittedly the issues he brings up with the animation still having awkward elements at full speed stands.... Regardless, SA2's focus in speed stages rather then momentum/physics, is the "flow state" of chaining different actions together and landing tricks and shortcuts: Going from a somersault into a jump into a homing attack chain against a group of enemies, then onto a rail and grinding the rail into a pole which you vault off of, etc. And all the different animations Sonic and Shadow have for those actions expresses that.

This is going on a tangent, but if I were making my dream Sonic game, it'd double down on this idea: It'd be all speed stages like SA2's, though with more branching paths in the stages a la Final Rush (just not all grinding), and with a more fleshed out trick and scoring system: For as much as I praise it, not all animation variations correlate to different score bonuses, some things don't have variants, and with a few exceptions chaining different tricks or cool stuff together doesn't result in combos or unique bonuses. I'd fix and expand on that, making it as fleshed out as something like the scoring system in a Skateboarding game or the DMC games. The game's visual style could also be stylized to match the graffeti inspired Sonic Adventure artwork, which I think thematically fits a la Jet Set Radio, etc

Anyways, back to the video: I also don't think the Mocap is a big issue in SA2. Yeah, there's a few scenes where there's a visual mismatch of realistic looking movement on noodley armed cartoon characters, but I think most cutscenes look fine to outright good.

I really think his time would have been better spent in the video cutting back on covering the SA2 walk cycle and the Mocap stuff and spending more of the runtime on what I mentioned regarding the flourish animations, or like... the dozens of other animations for other characters across the game: Knuckles, Rouge, the Mechs, the Chao, the GUN enemies, etc didn't come up basically at all. Hell Chaos and Metal Sonic in the vs Mode have some of of the coolest animations in the game.

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• I actually dislike the classic games because I feel like controlling sonic at low speeds in them feels gross, but I don't think that's an animation issue