Nuggets

When it comes to content, we’re in a far worse place than Star Wars. When it comes to the actual fandom though? Please. Content-wise, Sonic’s first dark age is probably akin to the prequel trilogy, but even then, at the least, a film like Phantom Menace was still competently made, not fundamentally broken, like 06 or Boom. 06 is akin to a movie like The Room or some shit - flawed and bad in almost every way, almost to a charming extent. And regardless of your opinions on the sequel trilogy (PSA: it’s really not as bad as some of you ppl are making it out to be), those are at worst, competent movies with effort and care behind them. The prequels have even been retroactively improved through Clone Wars - and you can’t say the same for something like ShtH. The content in Star Wars is far more consistent and quality than that of Sonic’s, especially as of late. Last Jedi might not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but a lot of people (myself and the majority of critics included) thought it was stellar. I don’t think Sonic has had a product in the last couple years that even a pocket of people have genuinely enjoyed. Fandom-wise: since the release of Force Awakens (and really ever since the prequels), the Star Wars fandom has cannibalized itself and become an intensely toxic community to be a part of. The Sonic fanbase has a stigma online for being whiny and delusional, and that’s not 100% untrue, but at the very least we’ve never ran someone affiliated with the series off of social media with racist and sexist comments. Star Wars fans did though! And it was super fucked up. As evidenced by even some replies in this thread, Star Wars just ... does something to people that inspires hostility for whatever reason, and it results in shit like the Kelly Marie Tran incident. Being a Sonic fan isn’t always fun, but that’s because of the dearth of actual quality content for the last 6 years or so, not because the fandom itself is a terrible place to be.* Similar boat. Definitely not the same. *for the most part. Being an Archie fan around the time #225 dropped was p fuckin scary lol

Lack of alternate gameplay is one way to put it, I guess. After years of bullshit (Sonic in Arabian Nights with shit motion controls! Sonic turns into a werewolf with design philosophies that literally reject the core ideals the series was built on! Sonic with a sword! And MORE shitty motion controls!) Colors used a “gimmick” that was non-intrusive and meshed with the gameplay and was fun. I’d argue this is the first time that the terms “back to basics” or “finding our roots” that Sega’s marketing had run into the ground talking about Sonic games in the past actually applied after Heroes. The story was simple. Looking at it as a blueprint for the future of this series’ stories is depressing, but in a vacuum, it’s a simple and silly story that as a one-off, is funny and works despite a few wonks. The gameplay is mostly 2D - that’s a little disappointing, but again, I think that had this been a one-off thing it would’ve been fine. It’s blocky and focused on platforming, but it’s still fun regardless, and when the game does open up to 3D sections that aren’t straight lines, it feels fantastic. The wisps, as aforementioned, are non-intrusive and fun for the most part. The level concepts are fantastic, and the music is fire (but when is it not). Colors got praise when it dropped because it was good. Even if you don’t like it, you have to admit it’s competent, or at the very least, not stupid, which is more than I can say for any game in this series that was released from 06-10. No, the story isn’t as sharp as Black Knight’s, but it didn’t need to be. It’s not that kind of game. And no, it’s not as ambitious as Unleashed, but it’s better solely because it doesn’t have the assfuckingly stupid inclusion of the Werehog. I’d actually argue this series’ main problem is ambition. But Colors is the first game in this series in a long time that didn’t try to bite off more than it could chew, and it’s all the better for it. In the past couple years there’s been some backlash to the praise Colors got upon release, attempts at revisionist history to claim that not only is the game not good, but that it never was, either. True, Colors is a blueprint for everything bad about Forces. But that has less to do with Colors than it does Forces for just fucking up simple, basic ideas. Colors has issues, and it isn’t flawless. And maybe it’s reputation for a little while as the thing that saved the series was a little premature. But with the one-two combo of Colors and Generations (a game that most people won’t deny is actually good) dropping a year later, had the series continued on this upward trend, I’ll be damned if it wasn’t deserved at the time.

what’s so hip about the word “soloed”? Isn’t that just like a normal word? you’re acting like sonic zipped in and dropped the link to his mixtape on SoundCloud or something lmao

the use of the term “mercenaries” makes me wonder if Rough and Tumble are related to the same band of mercenaries Infinite was a part of before he decided he wasn’t weak and went crazy and shit

the sonic social media embracing memes and the failures of the series through said memes works for me. If memes aren’t your thing I get it, but this is how PR works when it comes to social media, and the Sonic franchise is a lot less cringe when it comes to that end than a lot of other brands on Twitter*, if you can believe that. Someone in here earlier mentioned that the PR team using memes was akin to Family Guy making jokes about how terrible it is while still continuing to be shit - that’d be apt if Sonic and Tails were making jokes about automation, boost pads and scripted events during the plot of Sonic Forces, but the snideness of recognizing that there’s some bad shit in your past while continuing to make bad shit only really exists when it’s occuring in the subject itself. Sonic Boom making jokes about its own writing while delivering subpar episodes? I personally think Boom is very well done, but I see the issue with that. But this is a PR arm that has no control over the games - they make content based on what’s there. I don’t think that it’s bad that they roast the series - it’s got a checkered past. What would be worse to me would be a soulless PR account that just retweets fanart, positive shit, and announcements about the games, ignoring the negative aspects of the past altogether. This way, even though we’re in the midst of a mediocre era right now, it feels like the series can laugh at itself, and that’s comforting. It’s something, and in my opinion being able to laugh at yourself me your past failure instead of ignoring it altogether and pretending everything is and always has been ok is a much better alternative. Plus I think the Sonic Twitter and the memes and shit they post is funny so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ *Wendy’s just dropped a fuckin trap mixtape the other day and I don’t think I’ve ever cringed harder at a brand trying to relate to an audience harder in my goddamn life

why is there an assumption that that concept can’t work within the confines of a sitcom format you can literally spin “plucky talking animals fighting against an evil madman” a million different ways, and the way Sonic Boom spun that concept is a million times more respectful than some of the other entries in this series that aren’t even spin-offs

Ian being the “least terrible Archie writer” still puts him miles above everyone that’s written for this series post-Adventure 2 lmfao. With Unleashed being the sole outlier. So I’m not really sure what you’re getting at here. No one is saying Flynn is perfect, but he at the very least can write a coherent script, which is more than I can say for what we’ve been getting for the past decade.

all comedy plots work when it’s something consistent like Colors (for the most part) and isn’t written like shit, this series has a silly premise and works when it embraces that Unleashed and Black Knight prove that even though the concept is silly, seriousness when written competently and within this series’ boundaries can work and create some amazing or poignant moments in the game, but only when it takes itself seriously and treats its characters like real nuanced things while still understanding it’s still a game about a talking blue hedgehog Shadow/06/whatever else prove that when you take yourself too seriously, forget what the series is about, and don’t take time to breathe for comedy you get unintended comedy. Cringeworthy, meme-birthing, mindfuckingly absurd comedy. that’s all there is to it It’s not even a matter of tone, really. It’s a matter of good writing, of which this series has had maybe 5 times in the past 20 years. the tone arguments at this point don’t even matter this series just needs a good fucking writer please god thats all I’ve ever wanted

There's always a lot of talk as to why a serious tone in Sonic can't or doesn't work - I will always rebut that with the fact that this series has just failed to do it right so many times. I don't need to say why Shadow or 06 or, to a lesser extent, Forces, don't work. Even as a fan of Adventure 2 and it's story, I'll admit that by the end the sci-fi government conspiracy and child murder cover-up plots got... Weird. But there's absolutely no debating the holy trinity of Adventure, Unleashed, and Black Knight, which all strike a perfect (and somewhat similar) tone for this series, in my opinion. Adventure takes the genocide of an entire species and contextualizes it into the backstory of the games in a way that isn't too dark, although it might seem a bit dated. Unleashed is a world traveling adventure that, while corny at times, is a light fun romp with a lot of amazing moments - the opening cutscene in general is probably what all Sonic games should strive to be, story-wise - and Black Knight is the best character study of Sonic to date, and actually uses side characters in the best way since, well, Adventure. What works about these is that there is balance. We criticize Colors for the emphasis on jokes, not just because they land badly a lot of the time, but because when it is time for shit to get serious at the end, it feels paper thin because the game has been a joke factory up to that point. We criticize ShtH because it takes the concept of an anthropomorphic alien hedgehog toting a gun and swearing and dares you to take it seriously. Both of these things don't work, because this series isn't a giant joke, and even when it unintentionally devolved into one, it was never self-aware enough to make fun of itself (say what you want, but a version of ShtH where the writers are aware of how mindfuckingly absurd the whole thing is would make for a hilarious game). Adventure works because first and foremost, it's about the characters, which is to say, it's about people. It's not asking you to swallow anything big or ridiculous beyond what's already been established. It's simply a game about how the individual characters face (sometimes intersecting) problems that manifest both mentally and physically. Tails is having an identity crisis. Knuckles is trying to piece together his history, his sense of self and basically bring back order into his life. Gamma spends the majority of his short life doing bad things before he realizes his own moral code and decides to do things according to his heart. Big just wants to find the goddamned TV remote his pet. There's obviously the backstory of Chaos, but boiled down to their true essences, these are just stories that respect their characters enough to characterize them beyond one simple trait, and the tone reflects the different moods a person will go through. Black Knight understands who Sonic is. So it's funny and adventurous, but when some end of the world shit starts to go down, the story isn't afraid to step up and follow Sonic as he delivers a speech to a supervillain about how the end of a story or a life can be a beautiful thing. And it's not corny, or forced (heh), because dammit, Shiro Maekawa knows how to write Sonic the fucking Hedgehog. except 06 but let's pretend he didn't write that ok It's 2018. We can elicit tearful reactions from people when a bunch of living toys are about to burn in an incinerator, or when we learn that an Ice Wizard was really just a regular guy before he lost his mind a thousand years ago, or when a kid with a shiny rock in his stomach cries for one reason or another. Just because something is inherently ridiculous absolutely does not mean that we cannot take it seriously. Serious doesn't mean grimdark, it just means that the writers have enough respect for the material they're writing about to treat it with nuance. You have to balance between extremes like Colors and SA2, and when a writer that respects the material enough to find that balance starts writing for the games, I think this series will be much better off. tl;dr this shit shouldn't be all jokes and shouldn't be weird melodramatic penders/06-esque bullshit either, but a happy medium between dark and whimsical that is sometimes serious (and jfc it's ok for a series like this to get serious in the right way regardless of how silly the premise is) is ok

I know tons of people thought they were slow and too big and boring, but fuck it. I want a fleshed-out and modernized version of the treasure hunting stages packaged in a full game about Knuckles. With a good story. And a rap soundtrack. Sue me.

Have we figured out what getting all the Red Rings does yet?

Forces seems to have a higher level of integration with the plot than pretty much any game since Unleashed in that we have actual reasons for going to places again and there are plot related transitions to different stages instead of just "yeah you were just in Hang Castle but now you're on the Egg Fleet and no we aren't going to explain how or why". I'm not sure why that level of cohesion was just suddenly here, but I'm willing to bet that's why.

I might just be blind but where are you guys seeing the Freedom Fighter cameos

It might just be because the writing has been mostly trash for a couple years now, but hearing Knuckles narrate the trailer and sound competent as fuck while doing it may be the most satisfying thing I've heard from this franchise character-wise in a very long time tbh

I don't get it the budget is higher, they had 4 years to design these levels I just don't understand how 4 years worth of money, time and effort went into a game consisting of 2 minute levels that are nothing but straight lines and 2D sections I just really can't comprehend how the level design took such a hit it's so...bad