Popular and unpopular Sonic opinions you agree and disagree with!

[Tarnish]

5 hours ago, Splash the Otter said:

While we're on the subject of voice actors, I don't think William Corkery did a bad job as Tails.

I think his voice was a pretty darn good match for the character. His delivery was sometimes off, but overall it was pretty good.

[ComeAsYouAre]

Crush 40 Isn't "Buttrock", their Music is more similar to Pantera or Dragonforce than Motley Crue 

[DabigRG]

15 hours ago, Shadowlax said:

Geoffrey was one of those characters , while suffering from many other issues suffered from the issue. " Sega introduced a character that does the thing I do but better "  and that character was rouge the bat. What happened to rouge ( and many other characters ) during that period was not great. And I think part of the reason some of the characters like Geoffrey came off boring is because...their official counter parts kinda needed to be butchered so they could have relevance. Which speaks to how relevant they were, but that's another discussion.  I guess the reverse version of this is mina a character introduced to kinda be new amy, but she still fits the bill of " the official version is better " even during that period.

During boom it was mentioned that sega didn't want characters that encroached on what the main cast was good at, if you told me that period of the comic was responsible... I would believe it.

Was Geoffrey even that active once Rouge joined the comic's cast? I seem to recall him disappearing after Nate Morgan's death outside of the Elias stuff.

12 hours ago, Tarnish said:

It's not about nostalgia, I just think he nailed the character the best so far. If it was about nostalgia, I'd either prefer Sonic to remain silent, or want Jaleel White back from the cartoons. And like I said, in Adventure 1, his delivery was pretty crappy, which I certainly don't miss.

I'm mainly poking fun of how that sounded.

 

[sonic 1-derful]

I think actor Jason weaver could voice sonic in any future cartoons. I saw a recent interview with him, and he still sounds quite youthful. I think he could do a similar job as Jaleel white.

unpopular opinions

I would prefer sonic's world to be colourful, light-hearted, without any complicated plots or 'deep motives'

I think 'adventures of' best captured sonic's personality, tails' origins, and the friendship between the two

I think sonic should be the only playable character in the games 

[MainJP]

13 minutes ago, sonic 1-derful said:

unpopular opinions

I would prefer sonic's world to be colourful, light-hearted, without any complicated plots or 'deep motives'

I think 'adventures of' best captured sonic's personality, tails' origins, and the friendship between the two

I think sonic should be the only playable character in the games 

And let me guess, no villains whatsoever?

[sonic 1-derful]

32 minutes ago, MainJP said:

And let me guess, no villains whatsoever?

I think the whole 'heroes vs villains' concept is tired in general, not just in sonic games. there are other possible stories to tell that don't involve conflict. I find that boss battles slow things down. i'm not saying robotnik should be removed, but maybe he could be used in a different way? I actually like the sonic 1/cd hybrids created by fans, and the sonic runners format, that take on a more obstacle course style of gameplay. for me, it's about the speed, platforming, and exploration. anything else is baggage in my opinion.

[Iko]

Unpopular opinion:

Sega did a series of bad decisions in the history of the franchise, and they released some rushed games too, but the fault for the downfall of Sonic mostly belongs to the fans.

The excessive criticism even for little details, such as green eyes, "Sonic's Crappy Friends" or the Sonic Cycle, contributed to destroy the franchise's reputation, so that even if a good game came out, people would still criticize it to death and make fun of it.

Sonic Mania is well received because it's made by "fans" and it's a return to the original games... it's not just because of the "quality" itself, but it's also seen as a form of "revenge" of the fans against Sega, a manifestation of the will to forget about everything that Sega released after Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I think this is still part of that excessive criticism that ruined the franchise, and in the long run it's going to affect this situation even worse... reading a couple of comments about the IDW comic, I think that said comic is the next thing that risks getting a bad reputation if fans continue with their criticism (mainly the Shadow debate that happend recently).

Things can change but the damage is done, it's something that's going on for almost two decades, there's no way to change that anytime soon. The fact that Sonic Team has been merged with other teams and it's not dedicated to Sonic only anymore is a big warning, the franchise is losing priority (and budget), and one day it may end too.

[Diogenes]

"Green eyes" was hardly anything more than a meme. The Sonic Cycle and shitty friends complaints, on the other hand, were (admittedly shallow-aiming) criticism of actual, serious issues with the series. Blaming people for making those complaints, rather than blaming the people who actually made bad games, for the state the series is in is ridiculous.

[DabigRG]

There is definitely a certain level of spite in the reception of many things in this series, though.

[Diogenes]

There is spite towards the parts they keep fucking up.

[DabigRG]

3 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

There is spite towards the parts they keep fucking up.

No, there's also been some flak and dissin going on between different games and other continuities.

[Iko]

I mean, Sonic Colors was the game that broke the Sonic Cycle, it was good enough to stand among the Nintendo games in their home console, but... well, it was overrated, it's just blocky platforming, wisps are bad and annoying, and pontaff bad jokes... so it was bad apparently.

Dimps is evil, fans got rid of Dimps, no matter if they created the Advance and Rush games and plenty of people loved those and still do. Only to get some different companies to work on the Sonic Boom games and create even worse games, and in the meanwhile Sega continues making games with the same flaws people attributed to Dimps (bottomless pits and cheap hazards, boost to win etc.) to prove that maybe it wasn't Dimps' fault.

People made Sega drop the Sonic 4 series even though in retrospective, those games are still enjoyable and not as bad as people said, especially if you see them as mobile games mostly (even though they play nothing like the classics).

And so on, the Adventure games are bad because of the different playstyles, modern Sonic has bad storytelling and cutscenes, etc. Everything Sonic is bad according to the fanbase, and this affects the common opinion of the general audience toward the series too.

I'm not saying that Sega is perfect, but even with all the bad decisions Sega made, they didn't deserve all that bashing they received in the last 15/20 years.

[Diogenes]

Colors addressed some of the problems the series was dealing with, but it didn't fix all of them, and introduced some of its own. The fans didn't "get rid" of Dimps, the fans have no real control over what companies Sega gets to make Sonic games, and the fact that other developers fall into similar design traps doesn't absolve Dimps of their bad work. And Sonic 4? Sonic 4 is trash. It was, from its inception, meant to be nothing more than a cheap nostalgia grab, which then got pushed as a "true" sequel to the Genesis games, with barely any more effort put in to actually try to raise it to that level.

If you want to support games like these, that's your choice. I don't. And I'm not going to be shamed for not pretending to like them, as if that has more of an impact than the actual developers' work on the series.

[Iko]

This is not the point. I'm not saying we should support bad games. I'm just saying that the constant bashing and making fun of Sega and the Sonic franchise in the years damaged the reputation of the franchise itself, and this means less sales, that means less budget and lower effort/quality as a result.

You can dislike a game, I dislike some Sonic games too, everyone is allowed to. If you don't like a game, don't buy it.

What I'm saying is that the fanbase (may it be a vocal minority or what, but enough to make some noise and get noticed) made a constant work of defamation to the company/franchise for decades through the Internet. I think this is the reason why the franchise is in the situation it is now, more than anything else. You can disagree, ok, we are in an opinion thread after all, this doesn't change the fact that, just like advertising works as a way to build a product's reputation and demand, defamation works as a way to turn people away from a product as well, and Sega got a lot of defamation for sonic games in the past, so much that at a certain point they had no choice than to make irony of themselves to gain some respect back.

----

Sonic 4 is not the best game, but as a mobile game it's fine, I've seen much worse mobile games in my experience as a gamer, and at least it doesn't have microtransactions. Homing Attack is even kinda justified if you are playing with a touch screen. I bashed Sonic 4 too in the past, especially episode 2 for the team moves that IMO just slowed the pace and broke the flow; in retrospective though I think they were fine games, even in the classic era there were some minor 8 bit spin-offs and some of them were lower quality compared to the main games; Sonic 4 fits that bill, and I don't think it deserves more hate than a Sonic Spinball or Sonic Blast (IMO Sonic Blast was much worse than Sonic 4 by the way). I bashed the game as well but I kinda feel bad for that now, because I see the game with different eyes, and I think it didn't deserve all that hate. They marketed it as a sequel of the classics? Honestly I don't see how this should affect the value of the game, I prefer to judge a game for what it is: a cheap mobile game to be played with a touch screen that also got ported on PC/consoles, and while it was kinda weak in basically every aspect, I think it was still enjoyable enough for what it is.

[Diogenes]

It's not "defamation" to criticize a product. Nobody's going around shitting on Sonic games just to hurt the series or Sega or whoever. They've earned their reputation by putting out a stream of mediocre to terrible games. If they were actually producing worthwhile games, hardly anybody would have reason to complain.

[Iko]

One thing is constructive criticism, another thing is hate. Sonic games have often been hated way more than deserved, often for questionable reasons. You notice this when the general audience's receptions is more positive than the vocal minority's reception (and it happend quite a lot in the Sonic franchise).

Stuff such as the Sonic Cycle and the hate on Sonic's friends (to cite two examples, there have been more in the past) weren't consturctive at all; the Sonic Cycle was just "Sonic sucks all the times" based on assumptions, and I remember the Sonic friends being hated and made fun of not because of their gameplay in Adventure, but because they existed at all; hating Sonic's friends was like a meme at the time, even not-fans knew that "Sonic''s friends suck".

Making fun of kids who make fan characters, making videos showing how to destroy a Sonic 06 disk, and so on, stuff such as that is all but constructive, and only puts a bad reputation over the franchise and the fanbase, and it all came from the fanbase itself.

There was a time many years ago, when even the 8 bit Sonic games were hated for the sake of it, because someone has spread the voice that Sonic Labyrinth is trash and people assumed that all the 8 bit games were trash by default. It took a while (and the introduction of the Virtual Console and similar services) for people to realize that not all the 8 bit games were like Sonic Labyrinth, and that some of them were actually good/decent.

[Wraith]

Unfortunately most criticism on the internet doesn't come from a constructive or productive place. This is especially true when it comes to games and especially true when it comes to Sonic. You can argue the series reputation is self earned, but it makes it frustrating for me when so much smoke around the games often obscures the facts of their circumstances and content. A lot of bad takes based on untrue or exaggerated information tend to go around that make seriously discussing the series a nightmare. 

I don't think you can pin all this on Sonic Team making bad games.

[Tarnish]

6 hours ago, Iko said:

Unpopular opinion:

Sega did a series of bad decisions in the history of the franchise, and they released some rushed games too, but the fault for the downfall of Sonic mostly belongs to the fans.

The excessive criticism even for little details, such as green eyes, "Sonic's Crappy Friends" or the Sonic Cycle, contributed to destroy the franchise's reputation, so that even if a good game came out, people would still criticize it to death and make fun of it.

Sonic Mania is well received because it's made by "fans" and it's a return to the original games... it's not just because of the "quality" itself, but it's also seen as a form of "revenge" of the fans against Sega, a manifestation of the will to forget about everything that Sega released after Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I think this is still part of that excessive criticism that ruined the franchise, and in the long run it's going to affect this situation even worse... reading a couple of comments about the IDW comic, I think that said comic is the next thing that risks getting a bad reputation if fans continue with their criticism (mainly the Shadow debate that happend recently).

Things can change but the damage is done, it's something that's going on for almost two decades, there's no way to change that anytime soon. The fact that Sonic Team has been merged with other teams and it's not dedicated to Sonic only anymore is a big warning, the franchise is losing priority (and budget), and one day it may end too.

Yup, that's definitely unpopular.

At the end of the day, it's the developers'/publisher's decision to decide what direction to take the franchise in, regardless of fan criticism, requests and what not. They have to have their own vision for the games and the franchise. It's not our fault they apparently don't have any real vision or direction they want to follow, and instead are just bouncing from fan request to fan request. It's not our fault they decided to introduce so many different characters and so many different mechanics, playstyles, tones and who knows what else that now they have multiple groups of fans wanting/asking them to use those characters/mechanics/playstyles/tones more. It's not our fault they eventually decided to give in to fan requests/sugestions just because they were fan requests/suggestions. If they're doing it to "please every fan", that's a futile attempt to begin with and they should know that it's impossible to please everybody. They could have said 'No' at any point, but they didn't and now the whole franchise is a bloody mess.

Also, for me Sonic Team is just an empty name now, doesn't mean a damn thing. When you only have like 1 constant member and everybody else is just "whoever they decide to assign", there is no real team there. Just a group of people.

[Kuzu]

The situation with the series is far more complicated and nuanced than simply Sega/Sonic Team being bad at making games. But since a lot of fans don't understand all of the details, it's just easier to blame everything on the developers while ignoring everything else.

Yes, the developers are ultimately responsible for the direction of the series, and Sega are notoriously poor at managing it. But there was simply a lot of shit that was simply out of their control and cannot be completely blamed for.

 

No matter how much we want to blame someone or something for the state of this series, it's really just a matter of a lot of unfortunate circumstances and bad luck that can't be pinned on one singular thing.

[ComeAsYouAre]

Many star War fans who bashed Lucas back in the day deeply regret it nowadays since they realised that it led to him not wanting anything to do with the IP and selling it off to Disney who pretty much turned it into "Marvel no.2"

 

Sometimes "Criticism" can just be toxic whining that damages an IP

[Splash the Otter]

9 hours ago, Iko said:

The excessive criticism even for little details, such as green eyes, "Sonic's Crappy Friends" or the Sonic Cycle, contributed to destroy the franchise's reputation, so that even if a good game came out, people would still criticize it to death and make fun of it.

Of these, only "green eyes" was the doing of fans.

[Diogenes]

7 hours ago, Iko said:

One thing is constructive criticism, another thing is hate. Sonic games have often been hated way more than deserved, often for questionable reasons. You notice this when the general audience's receptions is more positive than the vocal minority's reception (and it happend quite a lot in the Sonic franchise).

This isn't some concentrated hatred-drive, this is people having different opinions. There's pretty much always going to be a certain set of fans who are more critical of the games than other people.

7 hours ago, Iko said:

Stuff such as the Sonic Cycle and the hate on Sonic's friends (to cite two examples, there have been more in the past) weren't consturctive at all; the Sonic Cycle was just "Sonic sucks all the times" based on assumptions,

The Sonic Cycle didn't just come out of nowhere. It wasn't an accurate breakdown of the series' problems, but it was an expression of people realizing that they weren't happy with how the series was going, and that it wasn't just an occasional misstep but a repeating cycle of disappointment. It also showed that it wasn't just blind hatred to try to attack the series; the start of the cycle is people having hope for the new game. People want to like Sonic, they want to believe that this time will be different, that Sonic Team's learned from their mistakes, but the just end up disappointed again.

7 hours ago, Iko said:

and I remember the Sonic friends being hated and made fun of not because of their gameplay in Adventure, but because they existed at all; hating Sonic's friends was like a meme at the time, even not-fans knew that "Sonic''s friends suck".

The characters were hated because people didn't like how they played, they didn't like how they were written, and they didn't like how they took time away from the parts of the series they were interested in. You may disagree with the takes on these characters, but these aren't inherently unreasonable positions to take.

7 hours ago, Iko said:

Making fun of kids who make fan characters, making videos showing how to destroy a Sonic 06 disk, and so on, stuff such as that is all but constructive, and only puts a bad reputation over the franchise and the fanbase, and it all came from the fanbase itself.

Yes, sure, that kind of stuff is childish. But it's not anything unique to Sonic. There are edgelords, provocateurs, and clowns in any fanbase of sufficient size, but if people were actually happy with the series, they'd be practically irrelevant. Watching people shit on '06 is cathartic because we're all frustrated and disappointed in the game; seeing someone take a hammer to a Sonic 2 cartridge would be meaningless because people generally like the game. There are reasons these things happen.

7 hours ago, Iko said:

There was a time many years ago, when even the 8 bit Sonic games were hated for the sake of it, because someone has spread the voice that Sonic Labyrinth is trash and people assumed that all the 8 bit games were trash by default. It took a while (and the introduction of the Virtual Console and similar services) for people to realize that not all the 8 bit games were like Sonic Labyrinth, and that some of them were actually good/decent.

They weren't "hated for the sake of it", they're disliked because most of them aren't very good, and all of them are dated to a point that's hard to deal with. The platformers are competing with their "big brothers" on better hardware, and while you can squeeze some fun out of them at times they really don't compare. The others are weird, gimmicky, experimental things, often also struggling with the limitations of the hardware, and they're misses more than hits. Even Tails' Adventure, which I'd say is probably the best of the GG Sonic games, is a slow-paced, muddy-looking, often-confusing game.

None of this stuff comes from nowhere. It's not the platonic ideal of constructive criticism, but nobody should expect it to be; public opinion is always going to be a blunt hammer. But it all still points to actual problems with the series that people are struggling to articulate, and isn't just mindless, poisonous hate.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Honestly, it really says something when it comes to the actual problems, the most vocal logic of the criticism more often than not defaults to “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” with the added collorary of “if it is broken, then don’t bother fixing it.”

[BaronGrackle]

Sonic Colors wasn't hated. Sonic Generations wasn't hated. Sonic Mania wasn't hated. People REALLY WANTED to like Sonic Forces, before they played it.

I just can't blame fans. I certainly won't blame us for hating Sonic 4 and loving Sonic Mania. I mean, you could even say that 2D Sonic is fixed at this point. If SEGA were to announce tomorrow that a new 2D Sonic game was in development by the Mania team, fans would be optimistic. They'd be excited. 2D Sonic HAS A GOOD REPUTATION AGAIN, all because Dimps and the Sonic 4 model were allowed to die. You aren't going to convince me to feel bad that 2D Sonic is fun again; you really aren't!

SEGA still has a chance to pull that off with 3D Sonic. But it's not up to the fans - it's up to the developers.

[ComeAsYouAre]

4 hours ago, BaronGrackle said:

People REALLY WANTED to like Sonic Forces, before they played it.

This isn't true, A lot of people wanted it to fail