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Unpopular opinion: I like Sonic's universe more than Sonic himself


Marco9966

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I always felt the stories were not all about Sonic, but about the new people he meets, Tails's quest for confidence, Knuckles's struggles, E-102, Shadow, Chaos, Tikal, Emerl, Blaze...

I'm not here for the fast gameplay, I'm here for the stories, the character interactions, the mythology, the exciting stories.

Sonic's world has so many cool things in the lore: Interesting cute creatures like Chao, Wisps live in the same world as mythological and powerful beasts like Chao, Black Arms, Dark Gaia...

Interesting locations like Angel Island, Mystic Ruins...

That's why I feel the newer games have been so lifeless and soulless because it's only Sonic, and the other characters are cheerleaders.

Also, the IDW comics need a Sonic Universe spinoff so we can see the expanded Sonic Universe, not just Sonic and friends bash robots in nameless town!

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(art by shaolinfeilong)

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That's kind of a thing with a number of series.

Sonic shouldn't really have that problem, but I guess history kinda spoke for itself outside of games like Lost World and to an extent Black Knight, plus spinoff stories like the Cruise Ship episode of Sonic X.

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I don't think that's really that unpopular an opinion at this point,  I feel like a lot people who bother to get into sonic and other material ends up liking some of the characters and the world sometimes more than sonic, just different ones depending on what it is.

Even people like Arin Hanson of Game Grumps , strait out said sonic nowadays comes off as an asshole who doesn't appreciate anyone. The guy who does sonic for goofs, even can see that sonic kind of comes off himself as thsi weird insufferable asshole with no personality  and he doesn't care really.

A few years ago the meta not caring sonic worked because it was coming off years of failure and it was refreshing , but now I feel a lot of people that has kinda worn off and they sort of just want a good 3d sonic game with cool characters and world. And sonic being infalible and taking nothing seriously

I feel like sonic forces as bad as it was, to make a purely sonic world thing with characters and stuff, and make the world feel lived in and taking itself a bit more seriously was a response to that

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But of all possible universes to love, why this one?

I'm not saying there's nothing appealing about the series, obviously, and I can't argue against whatever enjoyment you've gotten out of it, but if you're looking for a series with well developed characters, interesting lore, an evocative setting, and compelling story arcs...Sonic is pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel. From the start, the series isn't meant to be going anywhere; there's no long-term story, no ending to work towards, so everything is kind of in stasis. Aside from a few rare and fairly minor cases, established characters and setting elements can't really change, because they're meant to provide the same appeal in perpetuity. Only new characters have the capacity to change, and really only once, into the character they're "meant" to be from then on (or into a corpse). It rarely even tries to build on existing elements across multiple games, instead constantly dropping characters and concepts and introducing new ones. And the new ideas are so scattershot that you can't even build a coherent world out of them; we're hurled around between gods and genies and aliens and lost flying continents, and then to completely different gods, aliens, genies, and lost flying continents, basically at random. Not to mention that at this point we've got an animal world, a human world, a parallel dimension, a future time period, two storybook worlds, and a classic dimension, with little understanding of how some of these things even relate to each other. And when the series does slow down a bit and actually focus in on an idea for a moment...it's usually not even very good. Regardless of whether we're talking about recent games, the Adventures, or whatever, there's an awful lot of poor writing in the series, rarely even reaching the "it's ok...for a video game" level.

Again I'm not trying to argue people out of what they've already enjoyed, but I don't see what about this series' mess of a universe is so compelling.

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33 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

But of all possible universes to love, why this one?

I'm not saying there's nothing appealing about the series, obviously, and I can't argue against whatever enjoyment you've gotten out of it, but if you're looking for a series with well developed characters, interesting lore, an evocative setting, and compelling story arcs...Sonic is pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel. From the start, the series isn't meant to be going anywhere; there's no long-term story, no ending to work towards, so everything is kind of in stasis. Aside from a few rare and fairly minor cases, established characters and setting elements can't really change, because they're meant to provide the same appeal in perpetuity. Only new characters have the capacity to change, and really only once, into the character they're "meant" to be from then on (or into a corpse). It rarely even tries to build on existing elements across multiple games, instead constantly dropping characters and concepts and introducing new ones. And the new ideas are so scattershot that you can't even build a coherent world out of them; we're hurled around between gods and genies and aliens and lost flying continents, and then to completely different gods, aliens, genies, and lost flying continents, basically at random. Not to mention that at this point we've got an animal world, a human world, a parallel dimension, a future time period, two storybook worlds, and a classic dimension, with little understanding of how some of these things even relate to each other. And when the series does slow down a bit and actually focus in on an idea for a moment...it's usually not even very good. Regardless of whether we're talking about recent games, the Adventures, or whatever, there's an awful lot of poor writing in the series, rarely even reaching the "it's ok...for a video game" level.

Again I'm not trying to argue people out of what they've already enjoyed, but I don't see what about this series' mess of a universe is so compelling.

Well the games might be careless about the story, but as a kid I played SA1 and in the early 2000s there was all these sites that group profiles of characters with their characteristics (like, don't like, story, personality, crushes...) and explain every character and locations and items, and that at least looked like a well-developped series for me back then, also the community is very engaging and many forums had all these theories discussions about whether or not Shadow was a robot, theories about the Biolizard, Gerald, Super Emeralds, I thought the "mysteries" of this series made it very interesting but it's in fact just writers that don't care...

Sadly, these encyclopedia sites give the ILLUSION that the world is well thought out, one needs not to look further than Sonic Rush/2006 Blaze problems and Classic Sonic in Forces, but I still have soft spot till today because it's a game franchise from childhood.

Now, without these sites trying to explain all the elements of Sonic Universe, it would look very careless indeed (Blaze Nega problems, reintroducing Chaotix as new characters, removing animals from robots to avoid having to explain why no chao garden in Sonic Heroes, and recently Neo Classic Sonic and Vector teaming up with a cat from a parallel world and a hedgehog from the future for a racing competition in an alien planet!!).

At least the IDW comics try to make sense of it and references Wisps and Black Arms, two completely different alien races (but they still can't tell us the planet's name is Mobius, or if there's 2 worlds, or where was Shadow during 6 months)

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45 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

removing animals from robots to avoid having to explain why no chao garden in Sonic Heroes,

Say what now?

 

51 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

Blaze Nega problems,

That's at least been cleared up and clarified, respectively.

46 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

 

At least the IDW comics try to make sense of it and references Wisps and Black Arms, two completely different alien races (but they still can't tell us the planet's name is Mobius, or if there's 2 worlds, or where was Shadow during 6 months)

Which it got from Archie.

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4 minutes ago, DabigRG said:

Say what now?

Iizuka said that if there was animals the players would ask where is the Chao garden to give these animals to the Chao. But there's no Chao Garden in Sonic Heroes. So to avoid confusion, he removed the animals from the robots entirely.

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1 hour ago, Marco9966 said:

 I thought the "mysteries" of this series made it very interesting but it's in fact just writers that don't care...

I think I've said this to you before more or less but I legitimately feel bad for someone like you who comes to this series for that. There are some story based series that I really like too and I definitely like some character development in my fictional universes. There's obviously a lot of inherent appeal in those sort of things.

But as I mentioned to you before (I forget what thread conversation that was) the writers in the Sonic videogame series do not care about the consistency and quality of writing anymore than they do a loose strand of fabric falling of their t-shirts. Since I've been a fan of this franchise (as a little kid in the middle of the classic era) the writing has only needed to be passable enough to push the current project they are working on to follow current trends and maximize sales. That's it. Its never, ever, ever been carefully thought out in any long term, world building sense. Ever. Because the purpose of the character and series from the beginning was to be a gaming and pop culture giant with universal appeal (although SEGA has often approached this problem in a thoughtless way). There are a lot of people who care about Sonic that are SEGA employees but the writing has never in its history gotten its just desserts. It is a shame but it is true. So fans who complain about that will find themselves disappointed to perpetuity.

Additionally Sonic himself is, as many have noted, a mostly surface level character himself with a straightforward motive (as most pop culture giants are). He's expressive and an impatient jerk and never more complicated than that. As well as his eternal conflict with the series primary villain who also has a straightforward motive with an irrelevant backstory. The only real depth between the two is the nature vs machine conflict, which itself is probably not the most complex issue out there. So you can see how when characters like Shadow and others who have a lot more potential for "depth" are introduced, they also introduced great potential for clashing heavily with the series basic narrative and protagonist. If Sonic is the iconic protagonist who is meant to be a household name and product based on facets of his appeal, then by developing further in that direction causes major identity problems for the series, which we all know Sonic has had now for a long time. You have fans like yourself that crave things from Sonic that Sonic himself, his basic motive and the series primary narrative have never really been about! I hate to say it but it is literally true that there are a large amount of Sonic fans who are not actually Sonic fans! They like almost everything about the series except for Sonic and everything uniquely "Sonic-y" about his basic gameplay and appeal! (I've seen this very, very often actually). 

Which is why a smarter team would have segmented Sonic's other "deeper" characters and their backstories off into a spinoff franchise a long time ago and then made no bones about catering to fans who love them, while protecting the main brand of the series and keeping it consistent and focused on what it actually is, rather than just throwing random ideas at the wall and hoping it sells that year. Easiest thing in the world to see. SEGA really seems to not care about maximizing their potential with the series though, and instead is content with short term profits while the brand degenerates through careless handling.

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53 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

Iizuka said that if there was animals the players would ask where is the Chao garden to give these animals to the Chao. But there's no Chao Garden in Sonic Heroes. So to avoid confusion, he removed the animals from the robots entirely.

...Huh. Don't think I ever heard that seriously.

Well, at least it ended up serving a gameplay purpose.

 

 

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There were animals in robots long before there even was a chao garden. If that's actually something he's said, it's most likely a half-joking answer.

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So many different posts worth quoting and debating with that I don't even know where to start. That being the case I'll say unironically that I like Sonic and his position as a larger than life character and how it effects those that he interacts with. It's why I like both the massive ever expanding lore and the simple adventures that don't go anywhere. Sonic is an adventurer and by following him on his adventures I see exciting and interesting new things that stimulate my imagination due to the potential a great deal of the half baked ideas that fill the franchise has. Admittedly, if not for my like of Sonic himself I probably wouldn't care at all and all of the half baked ideas within his franchise would just annoy me instead of entertain for years long after they were badly executed. But that childlike forgiveness of my favorite character and the nostalgic comfort provided by it is more than enough reason for me to constantly fall in love with Sonic's universe again and again no matter how broken it is. It's when the characters, especial Sonic himself, start feeling broken and divorced from how I see them that I get angry, but even then, I can always fall back onto a past interpretation and imagine how that interpretation would interact with the current state of the franchise and again be entertained for years on end. I really do love this franchise and unlike the OP, it's because of Sonic himself that I am able to love everything that makes it up.

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2 hours ago, Diogenes said:

But of all possible universes to love, why this one?

I'm not saying there's nothing appealing about the series, obviously, and I can't argue against whatever enjoyment you've gotten out of it, but if you're looking for a series with well developed characters, interesting lore, an evocative setting, and compelling story arcs...Sonic is pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel. From the start, the series isn't meant to be going anywhere; there's no long-term story, no ending to work towards, so everything is kind of in stasis. Aside from a few rare and fairly minor cases, established characters and setting elements can't really change, because they're meant to provide the same appeal in perpetuity. Only new characters have the capacity to change, and really only once, into the character they're "meant" to be from then on (or into a corpse). It rarely even tries to build on existing elements across multiple games, instead constantly dropping characters and concepts and introducing new ones. And the new ideas are so scattershot that you can't even build a coherent world out of them; we're hurled around between gods and genies and aliens and lost flying continents, and then to completely different gods, aliens, genies, and lost flying continents, basically at random. Not to mention that at this point we've got an animal world, a human world, a parallel dimension, a future time period, two storybook worlds, and a classic dimension, with little understanding of how some of these things even relate to each other. And when the series does slow down a bit and actually focus in on an idea for a moment...it's usually not even very good. Regardless of whether we're talking about recent games, the Adventures, or whatever, there's an awful lot of poor writing in the series, rarely even reaching the "it's ok...for a video game" level.

Again I'm not trying to argue people out of what they've already enjoyed, but I don't see what about this series' mess of a universe is so compelling.

Ok, I gotta ask. A LOT of your post are complaining about the franchise. So, are you really a Sonic fan? Why are you on a Sonic fan forum if most of what you do is criticize the series?

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4 minutes ago, ShadowSJG said:

Ok, I gotta ask. A LOT of your post are complaining about the franchise. So, are you really a Sonic fan? Why are you on a Sonic fan forum if most of what you do is criticize the series?

I criticize out of love. And frustration. And sometimes for laughs but mostly the first two probably.

Basically I love what Sonic used to be (and what it briefly was again between August and November 2017) but I really don't like a lot of what it's become.

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It’s really a shame how Sonic as a character has become less and less likable. By the time of Lost World, I wanted to deck him. He had become that obnoxious. Forces is... an improvement, but a bland plot device is only better than a heartless asshole for so long.

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I think the real unpopular Opinion is liking Sonic. And personally I like Sonic. 

I like that he's a jerk with a heart of gold that he snarks but does genuinely care about his friends.  

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35 minutes ago, Miragnarok said:

It’s really a shame how Sonic as a character has become less and less likable. By the time of Lost World, I wanted to deck him. He had become that obnoxious. 

To be fair, that was sort of the point in Lost World.

Not sure about other games, though.

36 minutes ago, Miragnarok said:

Forces is... an improvement, but a bland plot device is only better than a heartless asshole for so long.

Bland?

I thought that was one of the better portrayals of Sonic himself we've gotten gamewise, not to mention one of the better aspects of the game itself.

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I don't really get the argument that Sonic is bland in Colors-Forces. He actually has a personality and character traits now. Sure he makes jokes a lot but  the games show he's got more to him than just cracking jokes.

Colors he shows real disgust at Eggman sucking the life out of the Wisps and pushed Tails to safety because he didn't want him hurt. Lost World he admitted he acted without thinking and was trying to own up to the disastrous consequences. Forces he leads the Resistance into the final battle and inspires them to keep fixing the world Post-War.

  

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34 minutes ago, SBR2 said:

I don't really get the argument that Sonic is bland in Colors-Forces. He actually has a personality and character traits now. Sure he makes jokes a lot but  the games show he's got more to him than just cracking jokes.

Colors he shows real disgust at Eggman sucking the life out of the Wisps and pushed Tails to safety because he didn't want him hurt. Lost World he admitted he acted without thinking and was trying to own up to the disastrous consequences. Forces he leads the Resistance into the final battle and inspires them to keep fixing the world Post-War.

  

Sonic is just a sociopath in Forces. He doesnt care if Eggman conquers the world, he gotta make them jokes.

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33 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

Sonic is just a sociopath in Forces. He doesnt care if Eggman conquers the world, he gotta make them jokes.

Yeah, another misuse of the sociopath word. Yay, fun. /s (I might be a bit salty about that kind of things)

More seriously, even with taking the wrong use of this world, he have been shown to care. He did say that Eggman would pay; he talked about how Eggman basically enslaved people (even if it's not shown), have been shown to antagonize more him and Infinite than he tend to do in other games. He even do the small philosophical talk at the end of the game about how we have to rebuild the world and stuff. The game have enough writing issues like that without needing somebody to add more :'D

For me, how Sonic act in this game is not really worse than in SA2, where he joke when he is basically doing an hostage exchange with Eggman. He is basically like Flynn's Sonic, with maybe a bigger dose of power of friendship.

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29 minutes ago, Marco9966 said:

Sonic is just a sociopath in Forces. He doesnt care if Eggman conquers the world, he gotta make them jokes.

Sonic's the only character in Forces who acts like he's from a Sonic game, it ain't his fault everything else is off tone.

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.

16 minutes ago, Kazhnuz said:

Yeah, another misuse of the sociopath word. Yay, fun. /s (I might be a bit salty about that kind of things)

More seriously, even with taking the wrong use of this world, he have been shown to care. He did say that Eggman would pay; he talked about how Eggman basically enslaved people (even if it's not shown), have been shown to antagonize more him and Infinite than he tend to do in other games. He even do the small philosophical talk at the end of the game about how we have to rebuild the world and stuff. The game have enough writing issues like that without needing somebody to add more :'D

For me, how Sonic act in this game is not really worse than in SA2, where he joke when he is basically doing an hostage exchange with Eggman. He is basically like Flynn's Sonic, with maybe a bigger dose of power of friendship.

 

15 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Sonic's the only character in Forces who acts like he's from a Sonic game, it ain't his fault everything else is off tone.

Pretty much.

And I thought Infinite managed to somewhat jive with that.

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I mean, the point of Sonic is he’s meant to be cocky, arrogant, and/or lighthearted, it’s a character flaw that has been abused in the past before and actually works to give Sonic a black stain on his record that despite his speed, and attitude, he’s human and able to mess up as badly for letting ego get in his way.

Eggman uses him to lure him into a near inescapable death trap while using it to trick Tails at the same time, The Zeti got to run around as much as they did because Sonic’s arrogance backfired hard on him when he thought it’d be simple to stop Eggman by breaking the conch, and even in Archie Sonic, Eggman flips the script on his head and practically obliterates Sonic and his arrogance by mocking him for not only his failures in stopping Eggman’s larger schemes, but going as far as mocking his failed love life in the comics and whatever else, enraging Sonic and making him slip up multiple times.

Like, Spider-Man is the exact same, cracking jokes in the worst possible times, and it’s a humanising feature because it’s used to try distract enemies, keep himself calm by making fun of the situation, and to try give others hope by making the threat seem less serious and making it seem like Spidey will always win. I don’t see how that’s different for Sonic, he’s a guy who despite flaws believes that the good guys can always turn things around and save the world, even in the bleakest moments. Of course Sonic’s going to be the guy who tries to keep situations light and more importantly try to reassure himself, his friends and others that things are alright. If anything, I’d say it’s admirable he tries to keep such a calm carelessness about the situation and inspire others that’ll be alright despite how bad things seem.

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I care more about the characters and story world concepts then I do anything else of this series. I enjoy good gameplay the same as many people, however it is not the reason I care about this series, because gameplay by itself in a void means absolutely nothing to me. Gameplay for me is the way we interact, explore and become apart of a world... I want to see the mysteries behind these worlds, who lives there and what kind of day to day lives they live... I want to experience something new and different from real life when I play a game or watch a story typically.

A long running franchise like Sonic is nice because it's something that keeps getting new content, which always gives something to look forward towards unlike a short series that is dead soon as it finishes it's main storyline. One method for a great series is something that sparks the imagination of it's fan base, which is why despite a lot of the Sonic franchise concepts being poorly executed in the end... regardless of that it's concepts and the things it actually did good are still fun and gets us thinking and invested.

As a fantasy art lover this series has visually really appealed to me too for the most part... especially the less realistic and more abstract, surreal fantasy + cartoon/anime style stuff. I think if the series was just about a normal looking human guy who runs fast in a realistic setting world I never would had cared about it, just like how I don't care for most media that lacks otherworldly aspects to them.

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On 11/26/2018 at 8:30 AM, Marco9966 said:

Sonic is just a sociopath in Forces. He doesnt care if Eggman conquers the world, he gotta make them jokes.

What, exactly, invalidates those scenes where he was portrayed better than usual? 

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It is important to notice that this is far from a recent trend. Just remember how strong Sonic always was in FF.net, (obviously, it's losing ground on the recent couple of years, but that's a natural consequence of how abandoned the franchise is) no matter how crappy a fanfic material may be, it means that someone behind this text had this mindset, this desire to see more of the lore, and not the game.

To the point that calling out this set of people for being faux fans really don't cut it. Maybe if it was said fifteen years ago or something like that...

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