Tarnish

If you ask me, we never even left the first dark era..the games after Sonic 2006 just sucked in other aspects that appaprently most people were willing to ignore or forgive.

At first it is, but for me that cheap thrill wore off really fast. After that I was like "Okay, that was neat, now can we go back to what made the franchise unique?". But sadly you can't just not use the boost when basically the entire game is built around it. Maybe not as much with Rush specifically, but with the 3D games, definitely. I think the boost would be better handled if it was handled like nitro in racing games (tho it has been ages since I played a racing game with nitro, so I dunno how they handle it these days compared to the early days) where you REALLY have to use it sparingly. That would make boosting stand out a lot more and feel more unique. When you can just use it through the entire level, it's not exactly unique, is it? Or there was a consequence to using boost. Instead of just having a bar for it, boosting would use up Sonic's rings. Not just a bar filled by rings, the ACTUAL rings. Gives more incentive for the player to collect as many rings as possible, and also would make boost stand out more as now there's a price to pay for it. And the player can decide if that price is worth it in the given situation or not. Of course this would require that the stages are not designed around the boost. Plus, the boost shouldn't have an instantaneous effect of taking Sonic to max speed in a blink of an eye. It should be more of a gradual thing where it simply increases Sonic's acceleration, but he still has to speed up graducally to reach top speed. It would just take a lot less time to do so.

I never looked into the actual numbers but I'll take your word for it. I'll just say that making money doesn't always go hand in hand with being a quality or well made products. Taking a look at the Transformers movies, the reception of them always seem mediocre at best, terrible at worst on both critic and audience side, and yet somehow they still make a crapload of money. And yeah, theoretically game devs can change trajectory whenever they want..if the parent company/publisher lets it of course. Who knows how the relationship between SEGA and Sonic Team works. And like Roger pointed it out, using the boost so much and for so long kinda trained people by now on what to expect from a Sonic game. I think they kinda backed themselves into a corner by relying on it for so long.

To each their own, but in my book it definitely was a mistake, and a big one at that, as it introduced the whole "boost to win" mentality to the franchise..something that they're still holding onto like dear life itself. The "rhythm" of those games I found was just hold down the boost when on ground, and keep mashing the trick button when in midair. It got way too tiresome way too quickly and the boost took away the feeling of you're actually in control of the character and that the environment and stage design actually mattered, has a meaning and impact on the gameplay. The game just became a whole lot less engaging in my opinion. It didn't feel like Sonic was traversing through the stage and obstacles and more like he was just a train going on a rail. I think sacrificing the identity and uniqueness of a franchise just to "keep things fresh and new" is not exactly worth it. Because once that "newness" wears off, you're left with something that's now old hat, and also without any real identity. Which is where we are now, actually..the boost is by now boring, extremely formulaic and rigid, yet the franchise itself lacks any real identity because it jumps all over the place in every other aspect.

Reading that I can't help but help think of this little comicstrip, but now it's applied to the entire franchise.

Pretty much my thoughts exactly.

Unleashed and Colors have a completely different approach than the Adventure games, so I think it's completely apples to oranges.

Funny how they only remember the bad examples, but not the good ones. Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, for all their faults, had potential to become even better in the right hands.

Yeah, when was the last proper 3D entry in the main franchise? The storybook series was a spinoff, Unleashed was a hybrid, Colors was a hybrid, Generations was a hybrid, Lost World was a hybrid, Boom was a spin-off, Forces was a hybrid..so does that make Sonic 2006 the last time they actually attempted Sonic in purely 3D?

Strange as I find those are 2 of their better covers. A really dark version of His World just sounds epic and appealing to me. Un-Gravitify just has a totally different mood/feel to their usual songs which for me is a welcome addition. That, and those guitar solos are just still epic IMO. For me, their worst cover definitely has to be 'Free' from Sonic Free Riders. That I was disappointed by even when it came out.

It's mind boggling to me how easily they could have solved all this, yet they couldn't muster the intelligence, effort or whatever they're in clear lack of. Just show Amy and Knuckles in a place everyone could clearly, without a doubt recognise it's on Sonic's planet. At Tails' workshop (if that's even a thing they remember at all), or hell, in that very same park with the picnic table from Generations for all I care, and say only the Lost Hex has that cartoony artstyle. That way they're not screwing with the entire world of Sonic (AGAIN) and they can still have their cartoony looking game. But alas, leave it to Sonic Team to ruin absolutely everything they touch.

I guess my taste in music just never changed, because the songs I liked when they were new I still like, the songs I hated back then I still hate. Or you know..just accept it's not their cup of tea. That soundtrack just bores me to death. On a bit different note, I think the older songs were better simply because they were simpler. I feel some of the newer stuff suffers from overengineering. Back then say the Mega Drive could only do so much in regards to music, but they still made some of the most memorable tunes. Now, they have full orchestras, autotune and what have you, but can still end up making the most bland and forgettable stuff.

No, that's not what you said at all. You said that Lost World park is "clearly based" on the Generations one. To say one thing is "clearly based" on something means (for me anyway) the creator deliberately looked at something and took inspiration from it. You could ask 2 separate people to draw a plain with a few trees on it and guess what? They would probably look very similar, without them ever seeing the other's work to take inspiration from. Without anything in either park scenes to make them unique or identifiable, you can't claim one is "clearly based" on the other. Did you not read anything I just wrote? It does not make it clear in any way shape or form where Amy and Knuckles are. In the previous games (Unleashed, Colors, Generations) they established that Sonic's world has a somewhat realistic artstyle (the designs of the locations and scenary might be wacky, but the artstyle is still more based on a realistic artstyle). With Lost World, they introduced a very different, more simplictic and cartoony artstyle. I guess excuse me for trying to think rationally and assume that new artstyle applies ONLY to the Lost Hex and not suddenly Sonic's entire world. Because you know, when they just show a bland park area with nothing in it to clearly identify it without a doubt and has a totally different artstyle than they established in the the previous few games, my first thought is definitely "Oh, the artstyle on Sonic's planet just changed, SO obvious" and not "Well, if this scene has this new artsytle, it has to be on this newly introduced planet that has the same artstyle". But to make all this related to the actual topic of the thread: THIS is exactly why I have no faith in any new Sonic game Sonic Team will make, 3D or 2D. They can't settle on ANYTHING, they have no vision for the franchise. Whatever the hell is on their mind at the given day is what they'll go with, doesn't matter if it makes no sense at all or if it goes against something they did in a previous entry, and if it backfires, they'll just steer in a totally different direction and you're just expected to forget and pretend it never happened in the franchise.

That's my point, they are filler puppets to make Sonic the hero. Having a few lines of text and speech does not make them an active participant in a story. You could remove every single one of them and the story would still work perfectly: Sonic gets sucked up by the Time Eater, has to run through old stages and collect the Emeralds, face the Time Eater, turn super and defeat it. None of the other characters contribute ANYTHING to the story. Also, if we really want to get critical, let's not forget that the whole plot falls apart in the VERY FIRST cutscene. All of Sonic's useless friends get sucked up (Honestly, what else can you call them? A fox that's able to fly and an echidna with super strength still gets sucked up within seconds), then Sonic gets knocked unconscious, the PERFECT opportunity for Eggman to defeat him once and for all..! And then he wakes up..totally unharmed..not even tied up, yet alone turned into a statue like all of his other "friends"..not surrounded by enemies or the Time Eater itself..just conviniently left unguarded so he can then go collect the Chaos Emeralds...if you're not gonna put in the slightest of effort to make an engaging story, just don't even bother with it. Generations would have been fine had it been just a list of stages you can select from a menu..at least then it wouldn't force you through pointless cutscenes that amount to nothing with garbage writing and mediocre to terrible voice acting. Regarding that scene in Lost Word, I think a lot closer guess would be: it's just some random scenery they haphazardly and thoughtlessly threw together for that cutscene. To say it's "clearly based on" the one one from Generations is saying that one super generic park/forest scene is clearly based on another super generic park/forest scene. There's nothing special or unique about any of these scenes, nothing to distinguish them, so you can't claim it's "clearly" based on it. The ONLY thing setting them apart is different artstyles: the Generations park had more realistic looking trees with more realistic leaves. HAD they used those same style of trees in that scene in Lost World, you would have a better chance convincing me it's not a park/forest set on Hex. BUT, since they wen't out of their way to establish "Sonic's planet has these style of trees" JUST IN THE PREVIOUS GAME (Generations), then in Lost World introduce this floating planet (how original, like we hadn't seen that before) with a very different cartoony artstyle, and USE THAT SAME ARTSTYLE in that scene with Amy and Knuckles, then I'm sorry, but the only logical conclusion is that Amy and Knuckles are also on Hex..OR, suddenly Sonic's entire planet just changed artstyle from one game to the other..I'll let you decide which makes Sonic Team look less amateur.