What defines the post Unleashed era to you?

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

I dont mind comedy but when the characters become walking memes and punchlines then I have a problem.

[Badnik Mechanic]

Idon'tcare never said there has never been any humor in the games or rest of the franchise whatsoever. He's saying that there's been a notable increase of it at the expense of something else within the narrative, which I don't know how anyone can actually deny that.

Urm hang on, he said.

Sure Sonic could crack a joke back in the day but these days he's acting like an amateur stand up comedian on open mike night.

Well how is that anything new from all the supporting material during the 90s? The games didn't have it because you're dealing with huge technical limitations when trying to make a decent console selling platform game. 

But even then, there's still some humour in there, like how in Sonic CD if you let Amy hug you for too long, the way the 'waiting' sprite animation is designed is done in a way so that it will start and look as though Sonic is feeling awkward about Amy hugging him. 

It's not like it wasn't there in a huge deal back in the 90's. If anything the games have just started to catch up with what the surrounding material was doing. 

I dont mind comedy but when the characters become walking memes and punchlines then I have a problem.

Basically Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric.

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

Basically Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric.

That, and the Sonic Boom series and pretty much Sonic Lost World.

[Nepenthe]

 

Urm hang on, he said.

Well how is that anything new from all the supporting material during the 90s? The games didn't have it because you're dealing with huge technical limitations when trying to make a decent console selling platform game. 

But even then, there's still some humour in there, like how in Sonic CD if you let Amy hug you for too long, the way the 'waiting' sprite animation is designed is done in a way so that it will start and look as though Sonic is feeling awkward about Amy hugging him. 

It's not like it wasn't there in a huge deal back in the 90's. If anything the games have just started to catch up with what the surrounding material was doing. .

The very quote you pulled up proves my point: "Sure Sonic could crack a joke back in the day but these days he's acting like an amateur stand up comedian on open mike night." Basically: Sonic was comedic to some extent back in the day, but now there is an increase in humor to something's detriment. He never said there was never any humor at all, which is a statement you and Diogenes were trying to debate against.

So now that that's out of the way, I can now say this is now simply a disagreement concerning your point of view. I watched AoStH back in the day and posses a few of the video tapes, but I was never under the impression that it was supposed to be representative of the games in any real capacity. Sonic dressing up in a silly costume in the show to fool Eggman like a bad Bugs-and-Elmer routine did not represent the tone of the games to me or even his character any more than the Super Mario Bros. Movie being the live-action clusterfuck it was meant it wouldn't be weird if Nintendo ever actually visually represented that world in any of the games. I mentally compartmentalized these different mediums and enjoyed them all without ever going "Yep, AoStH Sonic is definitely what the games are about."

Did this mean that Sonic never had humor? Again, no; all it means is that the games changing more to be in line with stuff like AoStH is a marked change from what the games were always doing on their own, which to me were simply fun, straight-forward action-adventure stories were comedy was meant to break the tension versus being the main point of the narrative.

[Badnik Mechanic]

That, and the Sonic Boom series and pretty much Sonic Lost World.

The difference between Boom (ROL specifically) and SLW is that with ROL, whoever was sorting out the dialogue cues for that did a piss poor job, even if the game had been a masterpiece/the preview build they showed/lied to us about, the dialogue cues are so bad I would suspect it would have detracted from the entire game. 

The problem is that, if you take out all the jokes, and leave in all the other dialogue, it's still shit. Why? Because they comment on everything, remember how when we saw the E3 footage everybody was saying "SHUT UP SONIC!" and Stephen Frost lied (Yeah you lied to us, go cry on twitter about it) to us about how it was done for show floor purposes? 

Well the problem with this, like many games, if you keep using dialogue unnecessary people start to hate the good dialogue, because you resort to the standpoint of "Oh god here he goes again." Look at a game like Puppeteer, absolutely fantastic, but that fairy thing won't shut up, at one point later in the game she even points out how annoying she's being, as a result you start to hate the dialogue because it feels like everybody won't shut up.

So you've got these not so great jokes on top of an abundance of dialogue, even if there was one or two decent lines in there, the abundance of crap makes the lot sound crap.

Lost World is different, characters are for the most part quiet during stages, the cut scenes is where talkie talkie starts, and sadly the humour suffers from the meme thing, in that the humour isn't that great and it becomes dated very fast, almost in the instant. 

I think part of the problem is that they're trying to write for multiple audiences and don't quite know how to do it. 

If you look at Boom the tv show, there's a lot of slapstick/visual humour in it. Why is that? Well spoken jokes are not going to cross too well into multiple languages or cultures, however visual humour tends to be more successful, e.g. does telling a joke about a guy who banged his head get more laughs than seeing it? However the games don't do this as much, they tend to rely more on the spoken word, however the issue here is that as we know from comparing the Japanese version of the game to the Western release, tons of dialogue is changed. Yet the actions are the same. 

So they're hoping that a general 'joke' will go down well in all english speaking territories, vs a funny moment/action which has near universal response.

[PandoloFox]

Lets see.

An increase in focus on gameplay ( a good job of improving the actual mechanics since 06, though on a personal level i dont find the boosting that fun. Lost world though a bit on the mario side had the better gameplay )

An increase in exposition dialougue, plot points are basicaly explained over and over again. Many cutscenes could have been skipped entirely.

An increase in humor. It overshadows the plot and can get annoying quite fast.

A decrease in the importance of other characters. ( Sonic is basicaly the only one you play as, the other characters arnt that usefull to the story )

A decrease in world building. Simply put, it doesnt feel like im running around in sonics world, it feels more like playing a level in a game. I dont feel immersed in what im doing.



 

[Idon'tcare]

 

Yes we know that, you made that pretty obvious, but if you are going to efficiently say Sonic never cracked jokes or was supposed to be funny. Sorry but you're completely wrong, especially given how much Sega would enforce and issue direct/guidelines to all the license holders back in the day. 

Sonic was and has always cracked jokes, you can say he's not supposed to as much as you like, but the fact is, Sonic has always been strongly linked with a comedy genre.

I don't remember commenting on whether or not I like the jokes used in the Sonic series.

Stop putting words in my mouth, I never said he didn't crack a joke in the past games, I said its gotten worse with the cheesy jokes post Unleashed.