Detective SSMB & The Case of the Sonic 25th Anniversary "P.g. 100 is the best... food discussion started."

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

2 minutes ago, Chris Knopps said:

Because a constantly growing world with a never growing cast (save villain/groupie villains of the week) just doesn't seem right in a franchise that once was never afraid to grow, again with Cream, Blaze, etc.

You can't do that for so long, then suddenly freeze any further growth like that, especially when they balanced out cast long term so it wasn't overcrowded, with only the best kept long term, two being one's I mentioned.

I rather they focus on the cast they DO have. Yes, they have a large cast but for that reason they should hold off on making any more on going characters. They don't even know how to use the ones they do have, why add in more? 

[Diogenes]

It's not even as if they've stopped making characters; Colors had Yacker, Cubot, and formally introduced Orbot, and Lost World had the D6. And Boom created a whole bunch of new characters for no one to care about. Generations is the only game since Unleashed that didn't introduce a new character, because it was purely retrospective.

[Enesephus]

1 minute ago, Mikyeong said:

I rather they focus on the cast they DO have. Yes, they have a large cast but for that reason they should hold off on making any more on going characters. They don't even know how to use the ones they do have, why add in more? 

Well, to be fair, while seeing a beloved or interesting character return is always fun, I feel like many of them were initially made to only appear once or twice, like in a cartoon, and I don't feel that the fact that the series has created a lot of characters should hold it back from bringing in new ones should the creators want to do so.

[Chris Knopps]

Just now, Mikyeong said:

I rather they focus on the cast they DO have. Yes, they have a large cast but for that reason they should hold off on making any more on going characters. They don't even know how to use the ones they do have, why add in more? 

That excuse wore itself out long ago and is no longer relevant.

If you read my comments carefully, you'll see I stated they always balanced out the cast, keeping the best/most popular and letting the rest stay behind. There was never over-crowding in the series as they never put some fifty characters in a game.

The only time we had a huge main title cast was Heroes basically.

And again, read my comment, and you'll see I stated new villains should cease if it means no new heroes/playable characters and that causes people to accuse the franchise of too large a cast. Stick with Eggman and make new hereos/playable characters Diogenes.

...Why are you and Mikyeong constantly cheer leading/sidekicking one another by the way...?

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

3 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

It's not even as if they've stopped making characters; Colors had Yacker, Cubot, and formally introduced Orbot, and Lost World had the D6. And Boom created a whole bunch of new characters for no one to care about. Generations is the only game since Unleashed that didn't introduce a new character, because it was purely retrospective.

I think people wanted reoccurring characters, I think. 

[Lord-Dreamerz]

I'm not completely against new faces. tho I don't think it's worth worrying about them making new characters or not right now, as it's questionable if they'll even start using any of the others we have currently in meaningful ways in the future.

And just a suggestion, might be best not to drag this subject to long on this topic. :S

[Diogenes]

2 minutes ago, Chris Knopps said:

If you read my comments carefully, you'll see I stated they always balanced out the cast, keeping the best/most popular and letting the rest stay behind. There was never over-crowding in the series as they never put some fifty characters in a game.

The only time we had a huge main title cast was Heroes basically.

I'm laughing if you think '06's 9 wastes of code made for a balanced cast.

Quote

And again, read my comment, and you'll see I stated new villains should cease if it means no new heroes/playable characters and that causes people to accuse the franchise of too large a cast. Stick with Eggman and make new hereos/playable characters Diogenes.

New playable characters carry more "weight" than villains, which carry more weight than NPCs. Playable characters are the core cause of bloat in the series, not the solution to it.

[MegasonicZX]

25 minutes ago, Chris Knopps said:

I've said it before, I'll say it again.

If the world is going to grow, the cast within it needs to realistically do the same, instead of main villain/groupie villains being the only new faces.

I'm ready to see plenty of new anthro faces in this franchise, cause to me Sonic was at his best when we had new characters akin to his kind popping up, Cream in Advance 2, Blaze in Rush, Shade in Chronicles, we need that to return.

Seriously, how long can people play this franchise, see new place after new place, without seeing any new faces or playing as any new characters save for the villain cast?

And if all the new villains is why Sonic has too many characters, to that I say a major F@CK you and stop making new villains, stick with Eggman, and give us new heroes instead.

I honestly don't think we need anymore new heroes, maybe one off characters like chip or yaker every once in a while if the plot demands it but in a series where we barely even see half the cast in a substantial role as is, i'd rather we see more of them before getting a whole bunch of other characters that are just going to fall into the same line of obscurity.

[Shaddy Zaphod]

9 minutes ago, Chris Knopps said:

I've said it before, I'll say it again.

If the world is going to grow, the cast within it needs to realistically do the same, instead of main villain/groupie villains being the only new faces.

I'm ready to see plenty of new anthro faces in this franchise, cause to me Sonic was at his best when we had new characters akin to his kind popping up, Cream in Advance 2, Blaze in Rush, we need that to return.

Seriously, how long can people play this franchise, see new place after new place, without seeing any new faces or playing as any new characters save for the villain cast?

And if all the new villains is why Sonic has too many characters, to that I say a major F@CK you and stop making new villains, stick with Eggman, and give us new heroes instead.

That's really a bad mentality, we have more characters than we know what to do with already, adding more is contributing to the "Sonic's shitty friends" idealism that we all want to work against. I'm not saying that we shouldn't oppose it, but this is a series that's meant to, you know, make money.

 

Secondly, Eggman as a villain hasn't changed the way he does things since Adventure 1. It's either build a lot of huge shit and get stomped, or find a new thing to exploit, get stomped by that, and watch Sonic stomp the thing. I think, more than anything, we need more villains that are not associated with Eggman at all or at the very least aren't familiar with him before they are with Sonic, and have the guy be as confused as we are to the new terror, and even be a little jealous that he's getting the glory hogged away from him. Otherwise, you have Lost World and Generations' problem where the villains are just bland and you can see every plot twist coming, or Sonic 4's problem where everything is so similar to the past games that you don't get any sort of new experience.

2 minutes ago, Chris Knopps said:

Nonetheless they are CONSTANTLY making new characters in just about every game. Both evil and good.

(Especially in the spin-off titles)

Not so much Sonic, where the last attempt to do this was Unleashed.

But the Mario series constantly making "new" characters is also ailed with the fact that they're all fucking boring, except for spinoff Luigi. And whether you're talking about one-off characters or mainstays, the Sonic series hasn't had a character that is likable at face value since Adventure 2 or maybe Rush, since Silver took until Rivals to be fun (with help from the comics), and Shadow himself has actually gotten worse since SA2. And any if not all one-off characters have been bad in this series. Emerl was okay, but not because of his personality. 

1 minute ago, Chris Knopps said:

Because a constantly growing world with a never growing cast (save villain/groupie villains of the week) just doesn't seem right.

But the world isn't growing either. The Sonic canon has not had an ounce of worldbuilding since Unleashed, and even then it's so distanced from anything the other games portrayed in terms of deities and energy that it barely feels like anything worth a damn. So, before that? Nothing since Battle. We've gotten stories, sure, lots of those, but nothing that actually puts more definition into the rules of Sonic's planet. And the important thing is always, always the ways that the characters are portrayed, never the number of characters. This is everything wrong with the Ken Penders stories in the comics, they're filled with bland worthless characters that are underutilized and undercharacterized, whereas actual Sonic material has several less, but massively more interesting ones. We don't want the games to be like Penders, and again, we've already got sort of the same problem. Why do we need to create a new character when we can repurpose an old one? Nack, Bean, Bark, Mighty, and Ray haven't done anything for the last two decades, maybe they could have new backstories and roles. We haven't had anything to do with GUN for ten years, maybe you could make them less dumb. Heck, maybe you could make Marine not a trainwrecked atrocity of a character that I want to crush in my hands and toss into a meat grinder.

1 minute ago, Chris Knopps said:

That excuse wore itself out long ago and is no longer relevant.

Okay, why.

2 minutes ago, Chris Knopps said:

If you read my comments carefully, you'll see I stated they always balanced out the cast, keeping the best/most popular and letting the rest stay behind. There was never over-crowding in the series as they never put some fifty characters in a game.

YOU DON'T TRASH THINGS THAT DON'T WORK JUST TO MAKE NEW THINGS THAT DON'T WORK, YOU JUST MAKE THE THINGS THAT DON'T WORK, WORK! And excuse me but Sonic 06 had TEN, DIFFERENTLY PLAYING, STORY-RELEVANT CHARACTERS THAT ALL FUCKING SUCKED AS A RESULT OF THIS. Is that what you think the model for future games is? Do you think that's normal for video games? What was the last main Mario platformer that you played with ten characters that all played integral roles in the story and meshed with the game as well as an aggrevated wildebeest with a rice cooker?

3 minutes ago, Chris Knopps said:

And again, read my comment, and you'll see I stated new villains should cease if it means no new heroes/playable characters and that causes people to accuse the franchise of too large a cast. Stick with Eggman and make new hereos/playable characters

Why. The people accusing the series of too large a cast do so because of the heroes, not the villains. If they make more villains, those complaints don't happen. And if they make no more villains or heroes, then you're fresh the fuck out of new plots and ideas, and you have Mario syndrome where the games all have the exact same plot with absolutely no variance from game to game and the series stagnates into a pile of New Super Mario Bros. Wii 3D Land World 2 games. There is such a thing as fixing stuff that isn't quite right. It's what the Boom TV series, Dash 2, the toy line and probably Fire and Ice are doing for the subfranchise, because it would be an enormous waste to just abandon it. That's like cancelling the construction of a new planet because your shoelaces were untied when you signed the contract.

[Chris Knopps]

3 minutes ago, Inspector Shaddy said:

The people accusing the series of too large a cast do so because of the heroes, not the villains. If they make more villains, those complaints don't happen.

I call bull on that because it's ridiculous. New heroes/playable characters means "oh no too much!!" but constant "new villain/groupie villains of the week" is acceptable and nothing to raise a finger over?

[Nepenthe]

The context is that the villains are almost never playable so they're not going to affect the majority of the gameplay experience. You can't equate people's responses to characters with completely different purposes.

And why are we talking about making new permanent characters when we have a perfectly good secondary cast sitting right there? I'll be damned if Knuckles and Shadow continue getting sidelined before New The Furry shows up.

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

The villains usually do not stick around and are usually one-time characters. I don't think anyone is saying there's too many Sonic characters in general, I mean if someone says that, I would point them to Megaman and Pokemon. 

[Chris Knopps]

1 minute ago, Nepenthe said:

The context is that the villains are almost never playable so they're not going to affect the majority of the gameplay experience. You can't equate people's responses to characters with completely different purposes.

And why are we talking about making new permanent characters when we have a perfectly good secondary cast sitting right there? I'll be damned if Knuckles and Shadow continue getting sidelined before New The Furry shows up.

Uhh... What about BOOM Knuckles and Shadow? They get a ton of spotlight there.

(Well, they're working on Shadow, but still)

[Diogenes]

1 minute ago, Chris Knopps said:

I call bull on that because it's ridiculous. New heroes/playable characters means "oh no too much!!" but constant "new villain/groupie villains of the week" is acceptable and nothing to raise a finger over?

Yes? More or less, at least, it's not like there haven't been any complaints about the glut of one-shot villains, though they've mostly been in the "they're stealing Eggman's spotlight" vein and not about overcrowding the cast.

You get a new playable character, you're going to be staring at their ass for a significant percentage of a game. You get a new villain, they'll show up in some cutscenes and a few boss fights, that's it. Playable characters dominate more screen time than villains since you actually play as them in addition to whatever story role they have. Not to mention the series had a problem with letting go of its playable characters for the longest time, whereas new villains tended to die at the end and thus remove themselves from the series.

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

3 minutes ago, Nepenthe said:

And why are we talking about making new permanent characters when we have a perfectly good secondary cast sitting right there? I'll be damned if Knuckles and Shadow continue getting sidelined before New The Furry shows up.

Exactly. Before making new villains or heroes, why not use the ones they already have? They are called reoccurring characters for a reason. 

[Nepenthe]

4 minutes ago, Mikyeong said:

The villains usually do not stick around and are usually one-time characters. I don't think anyone is saying there's too many Sonic characters in general, I mean if someone says that, I would point them to Megaman and Pokemon. 

People literally argue that there are too many Sonic characters in general all the time and we need to start cutting out the majority of them entirely (despite the fact that they've been absent from major roles for nearly a decade now). Even you made topics about this.

3 minutes ago, Chris Knopps said:

Uhh... What about BOOM Knuckles and Shadow? They get a ton of spotlight there.

(Well, they're working on Shadow, but still)

Ignoring the fact that I don't care that much about Boom and whatever it does, Shadow doesn't actually get a ton of spotlight there. He randomly appeared once or twice in the games and had one episode dedicated to his presence. That's not satisfying.

[Chris Knopps]

Just now, Nepenthe said:

People literally argue that there are too many Sonic characters in general all the time and we need to start cutting out the majority of them entirely (despite the fact that they've been absent from major roles for nearly a decade now). Even you made topics about this.

Ignoring the fact that I don't care that much about Boom and whatever it does, Shadow doesn't actually get a ton of spotlight there. He randomly appeared in a few games and had one episode dedicated to his presence. That's not satisfying.

Well, really starting to feel its best I stop bringing up more characters altogether. Seems no matter the argument you can't gain a positive response, even when using the constantly growing villain roster which is a-ok...

[Dee Dude]

CK, just out of curiosity. If they did create new playable permanent anthro characters in the series, how exactly would you write, portray and design them and what animal would they be? (You better not say hedgehog, fox or echidna.)

Also, Nep is obviously referring to main series Knuckles and Shadow. 

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

1 minute ago, Nepenthe said:

People literally argue that there are too many Sonic characters in general all the time and we need to start cutting out the majority of them entirely (despite the fact that they've been absent from major roles for nearly a decade now). Even you made topics about this.

Yeah but I never called for them to be downsized because there's too many, but because I personally believed they worn at their potential. Certain characters that is. I still stick by this firmly but it is a argument I rather not get into. 

[Enesephus]

1 minute ago, Mikyeong said:

Exactly. Before making new villains or heroes, why not use the ones they already have? They are called reoccurring characters for a reason. 

Well, if SEGA wants to try telling somewhat deeper stories again (as Lost World seems to indicate), that may involve bringing in new characters if there are no existing characters that really fill the niche or role they've got in mind for the story. Bringing in a new rival character for Sonic while Knuckles and Shadow are just sitting there would be kinda bogus, but, on the other hand, there really is no Sonic character that could fill Chip's role in Unleashed, for example.

[Nepenthe]

1 minute ago, Chris Knopps said:

Well, really starting to feel its best I stop bringing up more characters altogether. Seems no matter the argument you can't gain a positive response, even when using the constantly growing villain roster which is a-ok...

The metonym is "Sonic's shitty friends" for a reason. The argument has never actually been focused on the villain roster for the reasons stated above. You might as well point at the Wisps and say "See, people didn't mind these characters being playable" if you're trying to wring an accusation of hypocrisy out of the entire debacle.

[Chris Knopps]

1 minute ago, Detective-Dude said:

CK, just out of curiosity. If they did create new playable permanent anthro characters in the series, how exactly would you write, portray and design them and what animal would they be? (You better not say hedgehog, fox or echidna.)

Also, Nepeth is obviously referring to main series Knuckles and Shadow. 

Being honest, I'd like another feline in the franchise since Blaze is (SUPPOSED) to exist in a different dimension and can't really coexist with Sonic like the rest of the cast.

A female character, with a persona akin to Sonic himself so we have someone who can throw Sonic's persona/attitude in his own face, kind of give him a taste of the medicine he gives everyone else.

Would make for an interesting plot.

[Shadowlax]

On 2/3/2016 at 1:22 PM, DaddlerTheDalek said:

 

11 minutes ago, Nepenthe said:

 

Ignoring the fact that I don't care that much about Boom and whatever it does, Shadow doesn't actually get a ton of spotlight there. He randomly appeared once or twice in the games and had one episode dedicated to his presence. That's not satisfying.

To throw sonic boom a bone, dunno if it deserves it. They are making a lot more shadow the hedgehog related boom merch this year, maybe they might be doing a lot more with him in future. But that's just a maybe. 

I agree with you though .

[Enesephus]

3 minutes ago, Detective-Dude said:

CK, just out of curiosity. If they did create new playable permanent anthro characters in the series, how exactly would you write, portray and design them and what animal would they be? (You better not say hedgehog, fox or echidna.)

Also, Nep is obviously referring to main series Knuckles and Shadow. 

Well, I dunno. It would kinda depend on what kind of game the character would be introduced in (since that does kind of shape your character's personality). I would just focus on giving the character a unique design based on an animal that hasn't really been seen in this (game, not Archie) series before (like a genet, lemur or, I dunno, penguin), and a fun, unique personality that fills a niche that hasn't yet been filled. I suppose a straight up villain protagonist would be fun, kinda like Team Dark but, well, more dark, and maybe more funny.

[Shadowlax]

33 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

 

New playable characters carry more "weight" than villains, which carry more weight than NPCs. Playable characters are the core cause of bloat in the series, not the solution to it.

Nah bad gameplay and shit level design is. 

Its not like there are platformers with multiple playable characters that are good. Oh wait, there are bunches, and a bunch of em have sonic's name on it.