i sorta wonder if the whole sonic x shadow generations thing is part of the New Sonic Team Training Arc. like. when forces came out the team had basically been theseus’d by that point. and they very clearly struggled a lot with trying to recreate the boost gameplay from the old codebases. besides the technical level, everything about it screams to me that they were really just struggling creatively on every other level too.
eventually, with considerable time and effort, they made a completely original and new game with frontiers, which is largely pretty good and generally well-liked. but it (from what i’ve played) very much feels like the team is still trying to find their footing, and it generally fails to convey the aesthetic vision it has and let it shine the way it very well could.
so like, what better learning exercise than to look at one of the most renowned works of your predecessors in the style you’re going for, which in itself is a celebration of the best of everything that came before it, study it by porting the code, refining the art and graphics, adding some of your own stuff in a way that fits with what was there, and generally polishing the whole thing up for modern platforms, then using what you’ve learned to make a new game with the same premise for a new character, to pair the old one with?