Were Sonic Adventure-Sonic 06 too serious?

[Yoko/葉子]

Not sure if this is a good topic to discuss, but I noticed that besides Heroes to some degrees, that all the main 3D games on consoles until Unleashed had some really intense storylines from Chaos watching the chao get trampled, the murder of a 12 year old girl then lying about what happened nearly destroyed the world, and a time-space bird mutant/god etc.

I'm not trying to make a "Sonic MUST be light-hearted" thread, I just feel conflicted about the tone changes at times in some cases. What are your thoughts?

[Urban Flow]

Um no? At least I think so.

[sonfan1984]

Neither were really that serious. Sonic 06 tries to be but I couldn't take it seriously.

Oh, if you're talking about the games between Sonic Adventure and Sonic 06 then my point still stands. Sonic Adventure 1 didn't feel serious till the end when Station Square got destroyed. Sonic Adventure 2 didn't get serious till Last Story but the game did have some mild dark elements to it. Sonic Heroes is pretty light-hearted and cheerful till the end.The only game(s) that actually took itselfs too seriously is Shadow and Sonic 2006 for reasons that everybody else in this topic already stated..

Edited April 7, 2012 by sonfan1984

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

I'll put it in simple terms:

SA1? No.

SA2? No, but it practically made the upper glass ceiling on how serious it can be.

ShTH? Hell yes, to the point it parodies itself on accident.

Sonic 06? To be honest, no, but it's bad writing seems to magnify how bad everything else was.

[JezMM]

I was fine with their seriousness personally. My ideal Sonic game would see the lighthearted tone of Colours and Generations eventually approach Adventure 2 and 2006 in terms of stakes for the finale.

Sonic Adventure 2 was pretty close to this. The little inbetweeny cut-scenes before heading to the desert seemed to show the heroes taking their fugitive status totally in their stride, keeping the story upbeat. That's how seriousness should work in Sonic. As long as Sonic has time to stop and think, he'll crack jokes and lounge around on the job, but when things get tense, we can go ahead into full-on badass or even panic mode.

Edited April 7, 2012 by JezMM

[Shoot em up Capbusta]

Well SA1 and 2 were fine to me the dialogue could have been better but the overall tone of the two weren't too serious. While Shadow and 06 was the only times I felt things got plain ridiculous.

[-Mark-]

For a start, I don't think it's too fair to lump every single game from Adventure through to 06 in the same boat, really. I mean, Heroes' plot was almost nonexistant and Shadow was comically dark-for-the-sake-of-dark. Everything else was somewhere in between.

Personally I wouldn't say Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 were, at all. Sure, SA2 danced a little closer to the edge, but remember, a serious story =/= 'dark'. I'd say SA2 was more serious than dark. Sure there were dark elements, but it was never gratuitously so. Unlike say, Shadow the Hedgehog, it still felt perfectly in-universe and acceptable for Sonic. Hell, I'll even stand by Sonic 06 and say that wasn't overly 'dark', save for the fugly realistic style they were trying. Plot-wise, it wasn't really much darker than anything SA2 threw at us.

If anything, I'd say the games since then have been too fluffy and light. Unleashed was something of a middle ground, but there's still something outright ridiculous about the world being shattered to pieces and most of the populace happily going about their daily lives like nothing was wrong. Had Sonic's previous heroics got them so complacent that they basically had an attitude of "Oh, don't worry, the planet's been smashed but Sonic will save us"? And in terms of a general lack of seriousness, Colours and Generations just outright take not just the cake, but the entire bakery to boot.

I'd still say that the Adventure games (and to a rather lesser extent, 06) had just the right tone for Sonic. Meaty enough to be taken seriously (save for 06's terrible writing), but never quite dark enough that it felt comically out of place (Shadow).

[Johnny Boy]

Well I kinda felt that the story of the first adventure was balanced in terms of tone. Sure we had some dark moments such as the chao getting trampled or Gamma's death but overall pretty balanced.

Sa2's story was much more dark, but unlike the games that would come after it, this game did a dark storyline right. I mean come on, a 12 year old girl gets murdered, we have a bunch of government conspiracy, we see a video of a man vowing revenge just mere moments before he is executed, hell Eggman even threatens to blow Amy's head off in crazy gadget! But the execution was done very well and the game neve tried to shove the darkness of the plot down your throat (unlike Shth, but we'll get to that stinker later).

And now we have Heroes. To me, heroes storyline was pretty lighthearted. But then it tried to get dark towards the end and it just ended up being stupid.

Now we have Shadow the Hedgehog. Hoo boy, was this one a mess. As Scar said in another thread, this games storyline was just the freaking pinnacle in terms of immaturity. I mean seriously, Guns? Motorcycles? Swearing? Alien Invasions? I'm sure all the things I just listed would be pretty damn epic, if it weren't for the fact that the main character is a 3 foot tall cartoon hedgehog. Honestly, am I the only person who bursts out laughing when I see that opening cinematic of Shadow loading that gun? As I said before Sa2 had a pretty dark storyline but at least it didn't try to shove it down your throat. But the "shoving down your throat" part is what Shadow does the most, and it backfires pretty damn badly. I guess seeing the types of games that were coming out at the time, Sega was trying to jump on the bandwagon and fit in. But Sega, this is a series about cartoon blue hedgehog running around fighting an obese mad scientist. Did you really think we were going to take any of the shit seen in Shadow seriously?

And finally we have Sonic 06 the disaster. Where do I begin? We have the implied romance between a cartoon blue hedgehog and a princess that looks like a final fantasy reject, silvers story which is totally not a ripoff of Trunks' story from DBZ, and plotholes that rear their ugly head at every turn. Honestly we've already discussed how 06's story falls flat on it's face so I think we all get the picture on this piece of shit.

In general, when Sega was first trying dark storylines with sonic they weren't so bad. But they got progressively worse as they kept trying and it definitely shows with Shadow and 06.

[Solly]

Sonic Adventure 1 wasn't too serious. The biggest thing that happened in that game was Station Square getting destroyed, but ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, RIGHT? It had serious stuff happen, but it didn't dwell on it.

Sonic Adventure 2 crossed the line for me though. There's a lot I'm willing to accept in Sonic, but the ARK backstory is a bit much, like when the evil facist military came in to kill the scientists and the little girl, leaving the giant cartoon hedgehog to mourn her loss. It also has Shadow becoming introspective, pondering his purpose in life and the reason for his creation- which to me is a bad thing, because the more you think about an anthropomorphic animal with giant gloved hands being created as the ultimate life form, the stupider it becomes. You know what else that game needed? A Maria counter. I'm curious as to how many times that name was spoken.

Shadow the Hedgehog made a lot of the same mistakes, although ironically I remember it having more comic relief than SA2. I'm not even going to touch Sonic 06 though.

[Gregzilla]

Well, I personally think SA1 has the best story in the series, as it expands on the characters and mythos while creating its own unique tale. Compared to now, the tone is definitely less cartoony, and it definitely has its dark moments. I don't want Sonic to be a very dark series, but without the serious moments, the player wouldn't be as invested in the story. Good story elements, okay atmosphere.

SA2 is where the script slightly improved, but the story tried a bit too hard to be grounded in the real world. The government, secret agents, science experiments, infiltration missions... well, not necessarily realistic, but you know what I mean. It kinda ditched most of the fantasy elements in favor of a more science/government type story, which I think is unfitting for a series about a blue hedgehog that runs fast and fights robots. The atmosphere was pretty good, though, as the characters had a bit more personality and there were a few more wise-cracks and light-hearted scenes thrown in along with the heavier stuff. Bad story elements, but pretty good atmosphere.

Heroes.....doesn't belong in this conversation.

Shadow the Hedgehog - well, I think it's fairly common knowledge that this game went overboard, but I'll still give my opinion. The swearing, guns, and evil aliens were just an awful attempt to make the series "grow up," when in reality it just made it seem immature. Shadow wasn't very likable, the government characters were horribly unfitting, the Black Arms were even MORE horribly unfitting, and the settings were, with a couple exceptions, gritty and uninteresting rehashes of cities and previous tropes. The story was ridiculous, the characters sucked, and it just tried waaay too hard to be edgy. Bad story elements, horrible atmosphere.

Sonic '06 wasn't as "dark," as much as it tried to be "epic." I'm all for Sonic having an epic storyline, but not if it means it's gonna be a plothole-ridden, boring Final Fantasy reject. It took itself way too seriously, it tried to have way too many complicated plot elements, the characters were absolute shit, and it, once again, tried to be too realistic - only this time turned up to 11. The "save the human princess" storyline was just stupid, stupid, stupid. Elise is one of the worst characters in any medium I have ever had the misfortune of viewing - maybe THE worst. Mephiles, while slightly enjoyable in my opinion, was still way too dark and brooding for the series, and this game is where the Monster of the Week formula really went overboard. It was like the Chaos story, only 10 times more complicated. And not good. It doesn't help that pretty much all the characters we've come to know over the years had been stripped down to one-dimensional puppets with little to no personality. The adding of the ever-annoying Silver didn't help much either. Repulsive story elements, horrible atmosphere, all-around SHIT.

Overall, I don't think there should be a set plot structure for the series. As long as it's interesting, I don't care how big it is (maybe not as miniscule as Generations, but still). What SHOULD stay constant, however, is the atmosphere and character traits. Unleashed has probably the best tone in the series, as it had its share of fun, cartoony moments while balancing it out with an interesting story, and it wasn't afraid to take things seriously when it was called for. Hell, if they took the general plot to 06, tweaked a few things, and applied Unleashed's tone to it, maybe it would have been tolerable, or - dare I say - good! But in the end, the tone shouldn't be just dark or just silly, it should be adventurous, which combines the best aspects of action, mystery, and comedy.

[LoseR]

Only Shadow the Hedgehog. Sonic Adventure 2's amount of seriousness is probably the limit in my opinion. Anything more is just trying too hard...

[Nepenthe]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say none of them were too serious. Not even the likes of ShtH and Sonic 06 approach any meaningful level of maturity that you will see in more established and successful works of fiction elsewhere. At most, merely a bunch of shit was going on that the heroes had to respond to immediately, and the execution of that serious shit was, at best, Saturday Morning cartoon levels of inappropriate, which is to say not at all if you're above the age of 5. Disney canon films have outdone practically everything that the 3D games have done either directly (here's some on-screen fratricide for you) or through implication (let's hang a man today, shall we?). With that in mind, I don't get offended at aliens or kisses anymore, although honestly I never got offended at them at all anyway.

Edited April 7, 2012 by Nepenthe

[Vic Boss]

To be fair they've always had plots involving big things going down. Adventure 1 and 2 were fine, because despite being convoluted and having too much story, they were fairly mild and light hearted fun. Shadow was a story of "who-the-fuck-cares, buy me future CoD bandwagoners" and just stupid but we know that. 06 had ZERO fun, ZERO sass, and all SERIOUS CARTOON HEDGEHOG business. It was like a bad anime. Hell they should have just made it live action, because they wanted it as realistic as they could push it.

While we're at it, Unleashed was too serious too. The final portion of the game was stupid and the world breaking was kind of presented a bit... meh and OH GOD NOOOO. Whatever.

AND THEN Colours comes along and is all silly and self referencing. Good show. AND GUESS WHAT GUYS, IT'S LIKE A CARTOON. Y'know, actually good! Ignoring the Gurren Lagann stylee final battle that is.

Yes it seemed the Japanese devs wanted Sonic to be very anime / typical Shounen stuff. And it showed. It was bad. They had crap story writers. We were that close to Sega just calling him Sonikku-kun across the west with him going tsundere over honorifics.

Edited April 7, 2012 by Detective Conan

[Scar]

SA1 - No, hardly serious at all. It had some things that I suppose were "serious", but nothing extensively so. Big's story kills any seriousness the plot tried to have anyway. Most of it is just really terribly written and terribly acted dialogue. Overarching plots were OK, if a little formulaic. Gamma had by far the best story.

SA2 - No. most serious it gets is towards the end of the game. Everything before it is just mediocre-poorly written. Dialogue is iffy and there are only a few moments where the story actually gels. Most of what's happening is pointless and nonsensical. Dark side gets interesting in parts but it rarely goes anywhere interesting. Shadow's motivations are sketchily written. Not properly explained really.

Heroes - Heroes suffers from schizophrenia. Its trying to be super child-friendly, with all the "TEEMWURK" bullshit, yet simulatenously coughs out a plot trying to take itself serious. Dialogue is pretty poor and all the characters are off-character for whatever reason. Laughable because it tries to take itself seriously, but its so badly done that it isn't at all.

Shadow - Attempts to be serious and fails in every single capacity. Terribly written dialogue that makes no sense and localisation is total fucking garbage. Story itself is total fucking garbage. Shadow didn't need to have his already good backstory to be butchered expanded upon. Far too vulgar; a ridiculous attempt to be mature, and as a result is by far and away the single most immature story in the franchise. Yes, even more immature than Colours. Being mature doesn't mean senseless cursing and guns. Just terrible., equivalent of a 12 year-old thinking he or she is mature and adult by swearing randomly.

06 - Generally terribly written. Sonic himself serves no real function other than to get killed and then brought back to life. He goes around trying to save Elise, another pointless and terribly written character, and ultimately acheives nothing. Sonic and Elise's relationship is sickeningly badly written. They barely interact at all, in fact they don't even have a full length conversation without her getting kidnapped by Dr. Eggman, so Elise's feelings for Sonic are baffling.

The rest of the characters are dull and lifeless and interactions are rubbish. Dialogue throughout is awful.

So none of them are really serious at all. At worst terribly written or immature. Shadow and 06 try too hard to be mature and serious, and as a result come of immature in the formers case, and just plain terrible in 06. They don't let the mature themes come through naturally, just try and shove it in your face constantly and it doesn't work.

End result, none of them are written well enough to actually be serious in a meaningful way.

EDIT:

What Nepenthe said.

Edited April 7, 2012 by Scar

[Yoko/葉子]

For a start, I don't think it's too fair to lump every single game from Adventure through to 06 in the same boat, really. I mean, Heroes' plot was almost nonexistant and Shadow was comically dark-for-the-sake-of-dark. Everything else was somewhere in between.

Personally I wouldn't say Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 were, at all. Sure, SA2 danced a little closer to the edge, but remember, a serious story =/= 'dark'. I'd say SA2 was more serious than dark. Sure there were dark elements, but it was never gratuitously so. Unlike say, Shadow the Hedgehog, it still felt perfectly in-universe and acceptable for Sonic. Hell, I'll even stand by Sonic 06 and say that wasn't overly 'dark', save for the fugly realistic style they were trying. Plot-wise, it wasn't really much darker than anything SA2 threw at us.

If anything, I'd say the games since then have been too fluffy and light. Unleashed was something of a middle ground, but there's still something outright ridiculous about the world being shattered to pieces and most of the populace happily going about their daily lives like nothing was wrong. Had Sonic's previous heroics got them so complacent that they basically had an attitude of "Oh, don't worry, the planet's been smashed but Sonic will save us"? And in terms of a general lack of seriousness, Colours and Generations just outright take not just the cake, but the entire bakery to boot.

I'd still say that the Adventure games (and to a rather lesser extent, 06) had just the right tone for Sonic. Meaty enough to be taken seriously (save for 06's terrible writing), but never quite dark enough that it felt comically out of place (Shadow).

I typed at the beginning that Heroes wasn't as intense as the others. Like I said, I have a very mixed reaction with some of them.

Perhaps I look at the term serious a bit differently than most. I don't mind a tone change as long as it doesn't go overboard, though this may sound contradicting to the first post, those bits about Chaos and Maria really struck me growing up, thus my thoughts on the entire stories had those in mind. Heroes, was balanced to me. Shadow and Sonic 06... the events conflicted with my earliest memories of the series too much. Don't get me wrong, I like 06 more than Shadow, 06 made a good point in the ending about sacrificing one's desires for a generally good outcome, as for Shadow, it didn't make enough sense with all the different ways it can play out.

Edited April 7, 2012 by ChaosカオスZero

[Wittymations]

There's nothing wrong with making Sonic games a bit serious in story. I mean, really, we're older now-a-days -- we're the main audience. Most of the fanbase were probably kids playing some of the classic games on gensis.

Now, there's nothing wrong with a darker story. No, don't throw the darkness through the roof like Shadow's game. It's a horrible execution. But find a happy meduim.

Let's look at something that is a family movie, but has many dark elements. It's a classic, it was made in the 90s, it's watched with the children. That's right, The Lion King. Come on, that story was damn dark! Murder, betrayl, power, military, totalitarian-monarchy. Something like that would be considered too dark today. Disney's Aladin isn't too sweet either. However, these cartoon movies were done in a way that it gave off a lot of light-heartedness along with dark elements. Sonic should do the same.

Now, gimmickjs like guns and swords, werewolfhogs aren't needed. You can play the classic power seeker -- politcally. You can do full scale militarism, slaver ownership, ect. But, like Disney, you also want to throw comedy in the mix. You also don't want to be dark for the sake of being dark -- you make yourself look horrible.

What Sonic should do, for more serious games, is take a 90s-Disney approach to their story. But that's me.

[Chili Dawg]

For the most part I'd say no. Adventure wasn't all that dark up until you get towards the end game, and I'm fine with some real intense moments to shake things up around the climax. Adventure 2, eh, kinda pushing it since it's a bit darker throughout, but for the most part it's not too bad. Heroes was brighter and cheerier than pretty much anything before or after it, and the storybook games were pretty much on the same level as Adventure.

Shadow and 06 are the only ones I can say I had a real problem with, especially Shadow. It's just way too in your face about everything. Some darkness when the story calls for it is all well and good, but Shadow basically built the story around being as edgy as possible while still maintaining a below T rating so Sonic Team could show how much they understood their Western twelve year old audience.

06 was fairly dark too, but it wasn't all in your face about it like Shadow. The story had a lot of things wrong with it, but I'd say the tone wasn't really one of them.

[Wentos]

I think of the 3D games, the most light hearted ones are Sonic Adventure, Sonic Heroes, and Sonic Colors.

[Cyberguy]

Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow the Hedgehog were the more serious, in my view.

I mean, in the Sonic X version of SA2, it showed a scene of all the GUN troops evacuating the set-to-blow Prison Island, yet it didn't in the game. I know that's off topic, but this shows how serious SA2 was, and how Sonic X wasn't. Not to mention all the darker tones to the story, such as Eggman nearly killing Sonic.

But wow, Shadow the Hedgehog went way overboard, showing Shadow kill Eggman in two of the endings. We all know ShTH is the dark game, I don't need to explain any further.

Oh yes, and I also found the death of the little Chao in Sonic Adventure...rather emotional.

[LessHD]

I dunno , i found SA1 very comical. The only serious one i found was shadow the hedgehog.

because

Killing

[John F. Kennedy]

No, and none of them were.

[Kiah]

To answer the question, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes were serious on occasion, notably at the end of each game as was already mentioned in this thread. Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic '06 just tried way too hard on the serious tip, with the result of each game being a hot story-telling mess. From guns to having Sonic murdered, in the end these stories looked stupid in the midst of trying to be serious. Or whatever it was that Sega was trying to do.

Not that there is anything wrong with a serious tone. There just need to be a balance between serious and the light-hearted aspects in the storylines in the Sonic series. I feel the stories in the past few games have been too light-hearted, as well as shallow. I know gameplay is the most important thing in a video game, but having a story with little development, too many jokes and more (plot)holes than a slice of Swiss cheese (yeah bad joke, I know ) doesn't help matters. Don't get me wrong, I liked Sonic Colors and Sonic Generations, but the story in Colors was too plagued with all the jokes and corny dialogue (which I enjoyed, it was just too much) and Generations had me wondering "Did I miss something?! That's it?!" It left me with quite a few unanswered questions.

What Sonic should do, for more serious games, is take a 90s-Disney approach to their story. But that's me.

I like this idea, I like this idea a lot. Disney has that balance between serious and comedy in their films, and it has proved to be very successful for them. I'm sure it would work wonders for Sonic if the series followed suit having that balance.

[batson]

Well, i wouldn't say any of those games were to serious in terms of how "mature" their content were, but ShtH went way to far in trying to give the whole game a sort of depressing feel, which doesn't fit at all in a Sonic game. I do however think that all those games except Heroes went way to far with how realistic the universe they took place in looked.