It looks like Sega might be beavering away on a Sonic Adventure remaster ahead of the beloved Dreamcast game's 25th anniversary in 2023, and the hints might be staring Sonic Frontiers players straight in the face. Be still, Ewan's beating heart.
My first Sonic game was Sonic Rush, so for me, Sonic has always been two dimensional. However, Sonic Adventure was the first to prove that the series could work wonderfully in 3D and four years on from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, this game shattered expectations of what the medium could achieve and painted an exciting future into the 21st century.
Check out the trailer to Sonic Frontiers here - which was praised for its combat and variety of islands, while still suffering from the same issues that 3D Sonic games have always had:
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So, imagine fans' surprise when the Sonic Frontiers flashback that Tails has about the events of Adventure appears to have brand new textures slapped onto the scene. This news comes courtesy of modder SPEEPSHighway who got their hands on the full flashback image and then deleted the painterly filter on top of the original. Poring over it, there are evident differences between the textures in this image and the ones in the Dreamcast and Gamecube versions. Take a look for yourself:
Strange, and stranger still when you remember that Sonic Adventure's 25th anniversary is on the horizon. It's important that we don't leap before we look with this - while it would be lovely to see the Dreamcast game remade, it's possible that Sega upgraded just this scene for this section of Frontiers and nothing more. We'll hold out hope, though.