Tornado

Sega and Microsoft were so closely wound immediately following the Dreamcast being discontinued that Sega was actively campaigning to have Dreamcast games straight up being playable on the original XBox; and it was an open secret even at the time that Microsoft was highly considering just buying Sega outright to get their foot into the door in the Japanese market. There was almost certainly money funneled into the creation of JSRF (and Orta, and ToeJam and Earl III, and Sega GT 2002, and Crazy Taxi 3, and etc.) from Microsoft that made it so they (largely) never made it to anything else. It wasn't until it was clear that the PS2 was going to walk away from the original XBox in sales no matter how much effort/money Microsoft threw at it that Sega started supporting the PS2 more heavily.

Future was on XBox.

If it's specifically named as AAA then there's only a handful of existing franchises that it could realistically be. JSR is about ten years too late to put AAA money behind it and expect to not take a bath on it; Crazy Taxi never was, etc. If it's not Sonic, Phantasy Star is a legitimate option, as is a Yakuza title.

You didn't seem to get my point enough to agree with it.

It's not even really dark. Even by the standard of the series of gave Shadow guns and made him belt out PG level curse words like a 12 year old, having Cream become a brainwashed edgelord villain is hopelessly trying too hard to take serious for it to actually carry the emotion weight to consider it dark.

It was actually "Genesis does what Nintendon't," which is good because otherwise Sonic Drift, Drift 2, Blast, R, Shuffle, 4 and all of these pieces of shit would all seem pretty hypocritical.

"I wonder if there has ever been a character in the series who is, get this, a rabbit and a robot. then ehs can fight eggman and doesn't afraid of anything"

Knuckles was always an idiot. It was established that the intent was more than just him being gullible and trusting by the second time they did the same plot as Sonic 3 and Knuckles completely fell for it again, which was done within a year of Sonic 3 coming out. And then it happened multiple times after that. Now whether him functionally being Patrick Star is an acceptable level of development from that point is another matter; but on the other hand it's also probably been longer where he has been that stupid (or at least been treated as such in-universe) than it has with him just being an idiot who is easy to trick.

Just because the games were middling to complete disasters doesn't mean they didn't have big budgets, large marketing pushes and long development times. It wasn't until the Nintendo exclusivity agreement was done that Sega consistently pulled things back so it became the norm.

Yes you are. Learn about the topic before commenting on it, because "it's my opinion" is not a defense of being wrong. There's plenty of information freely available to do so, to the extent that publishers themselves have held seminars showing how to better design microtransactions and games and even user interfaces to prey on people who are not protected from such practices like they are in the gaming industry. Some are even on YouTube. Video game companies are not designing their entire business models (as mobile gaming has been almost exclusively for nearly a decade now) around parents who don't pay enough attention to what their kids are doing with their credit cards. It is wrong to claim that that is where the money comes from that keeps the practice afloat.