What are the worst things that happen to the franchise?

[Rowl]

Well... since the poster for the Sonic movie has came out, the franchise seems to get one again another nail into the coffin. This happens so many times, that people have start stop counting. This movie will damage the series probably very hard again and Sonic will become more of a laughing stock for the industry. Sega really had after the classic era no clue, where to go with Sonic that they went so many different directions. And each one of them really didn't help out the franchise.

The first thing was that they created in my eyes just way to many characters. To the point where I have the feeling that they only created those characters, just because they needed a new eye catcher that they can show of on the box art. This series has so many of them, that they can easily get rid of half of them. Do we really needed characters like Sticks, Ray, Mighty, Jet, Big, Cream, Team Chaotix, Marine, Silver or even Blaze? It really seems that all of them do not really contribute much to the world of Sonic.

The second worst thing in my eyes it the forced edginess they went with the series since Sonic Adventure 2. You can't really make a character like Sonic edgy. At least not for me. In my eyes he is still a cartoon character with a Felix the Cat like design. I can't take this series serious when they talk about  stuff like death, and lost, almost making out with humans, ancient demons, aliens, revenge etc. I think because of that direction a lot of the games have turned out pretty bad, because it seemed that the highest priority for Sega was not to make Sonic good but rater edgy and cool. 

Than of course are all of the bad games like Black Knight, Heroes, Chronicles, Secret Rings, Boom and especially 06. Can you imagine if a series like Kingdom Hearts or Ratchet and Clank would pull of only bad game like those ones. Those series would have died out. Sega is lucky that Sonic is such a popular character that fans are willing to forgive them. It really seems that Sega either doesn't care or has no idea what to with Sonic anymore.

Those are at least my three worst things that ever happen to the series: To many character, try way to hard to be cool and also the bad games.

What about you guys? 

 

[Sean]

I'm just going to remind y'all to please be respectful of others' opinions. I can predict already many possible directions this topic can take and it would make it much less of a headache if you don't take anything you read here personally and relax before you respond to something someone else says about Sonic. Thanks

[Osmium]

The whole development cycle of Sonic X-Treme has to be one of the most deterimental things to have happened to the series in the long-term. It created a very awkward situation for the IP where there was no main series game for years while Nintendo's mascots were pioneering the way for 3D. This was a key time for Sonic to show he could keep up with innovation, but the process for creating what was going to be the first 3D Sonic game as we all know was an absolute disaster. Sonic Adventure 1 was very much a case of too little, too late in the long run and pretty much sealed Sonic's fate when it came to competition to Mario. 

Even more unfortunate, SA1 showed the primitive beginnings of what could have been a graceful transition of the Mega Drive games to 3D while being plaqued with issues all the same. SA2 threw all of that away and went in the wrong direction.

[Diogenes]

2 minutes ago, Osmium said:

The whole development cycle of Sonic X-Treme has to be one of the most deterimental things to have happened to the series in the long-term.

Yeah that and the post-Genesis pre-Dreamcast period as a whole probably did a whole lot to fuck up the series; in some sense every game past that has been struggling to figure Sonic out again. The series started off so strong and then they just completely lost it.

[SBR2]

Can I be real? I really don't think any "Worst thing ever" has really been that bad. Though I will admit I haven't played 06 or Forces but honestly for the most part from what I've seen they look meh but like hardly ever worth the absolute trashing they tend to get. 

[Cayenne]

Sonic 06.

I know this is beating a dead horse, I know this game was made almost 12 years ago, but I still can't forget what Sonic 06 not only did to Sonic but Sega as well. Sega didn't have a totally perfect record with games before '06 (The Cyber Shinobi, Super Thunder Blade and Sonic Labyrinth aren't what I would call "good", for example), but seeing the company that competed with big names like Nintendo, Sony, Taito and Namco in the video game/arcade market release a complete mess for their mascot's birthday was pretty embarassing. Shadow the Hedgehog was a big mistake but Sonic 06 was a nuclear bomb to Sonic's and Sega's reputation.

Nowadays, I have fun with the most playable parts of this game, but i'm not going to defend it and say "No, guys, it wasn't that bad! It's just those evil and bad youtubers that love to hate Sonic!". Sonic 06 deserved and still deserves all the scorn it receives.

[Mr Loopone]

It's a tricky question because some of the worst things that did happen, some people still liked the games because there was either something that appealed to them or just liked a bit of entertainment.

Anyway the first signs of a decline was the gap between Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic Adventure in terms of a mainline game. Its the old Sega of America vs Sega of Japan conflict that was going off with one side wanted to do that the other side didn't want to do and vice versa. Sega of Japan wanted a clean slate away from the old consoles (apart from the Game Gear in Japan) to focus on the Saturn while Sega of America wanted to keep supporting all the older consoles/addons and even Sega Europe wanted to support the Master System for just a bit longer. It was lucky that the Mega Drive still got games after 1995 despite support was pulling out. So much of the games on the Saturn were new IPs or the latest arcade ports while Sega of America wanted to keep pushing Sonic. They did try to get Sonic X-treme off the ground but with so many issues including a near death of the programmer for that it had to be cancelled and it ended up with an isometric spinoff based on a genre that was well out of date with a quickie port to the Saturn just to get anything as well as a Game Gear platformer that could be considered one of the worst Sonic games of that period. They were desperate to keep going whether its porting CD and 3&K to the PC, having an edutainment spinoff that was rebranded from another game that put Sonic's mug for more sales. Sega of America even brought Sonic's Gameworld out of Japan just so the Pico could get a game. By the time that Yuji Naka was interested in a Sonic game, it was just too late and all that could be managed was a compilation of the 3 main Sonic games excluding CD. No main Sonic game on the Saturn meant that there was about 4 to 5 year gap and interest can easily go during that time, it isn't like now where a game could take 5 years to be made.

Shadow the Hedgehog, both of his game and his character even though there are people who do like/love Shadow. It started a decline in the series with his inclusion that while might have worked okay in Sonic Adventure 2 due to his story and his focus, future appearances seemed like he was included just because he was popular with no reason why. He was a story focused character and in his next appearance was the opposite as in a gameplay focused game with a minimal story. Then came the idea of a spinoff; let's give Shadow a gun, let's make him swear, introduce aliens oh and give him some censorship because a new rating system was introduced. It was a case of Sega chasing trends where they thought people like edgy games, we give them an edgy game without understanding why because it was the in thing at the time. Interestingly, Shadow got just as bad reviews as 06 but only some people were put off by this move, whether it was because they liked the character enough to play the game or that the game wasn't as broken as 06.

Then there's 06 and the development hell that the game went through. Yuji Naka left during development, some of the team left to work on Secret Rings and a game that had to be released on Sonic's 15th anniversary during the most busiest period in gaming meant that the results weren't looking good even though it had a really promising trailer to start off with. Plus other development issues including build issues and apparently firing the QA department meant that even in the best of cases, it would have ended up being the same as it is now. The reviews apart from two magazines (that were most likely bribed) ranged from mixed to really negative that most Sonic games didn't manage to get beforehand meant that the reputation in the series was pretty much going. When 06 is still considered a joke in this day and age, it says something about the game even though there are people who do like the game or at least entertained by it.

This also affected Sonic Unleashed as well. Even though Sonic Unleashed became a cult classic later on with its reception being warmed up, when it originally came out it was better than 06 but still only got mixed reviews and most of the complaints were about the Werehog and the hub levels, some places that didn't like 06 didn't like Unleashed either. There were people recommending the Dimps version of the game despite having more of the thing that reviewers complained about and that was the Werehog just because the reputation of Sonic Team was at its lowest. Also due to the rise of online with young people acting edgy and "adult", it meant that the series was getting mocked due to both 06 and this game as well as Shadow for some. While the game wasn't the worst thing that happened, it took years for the reputation of the series and of the game to improve just because it came out at the wrong time.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

While not really having as much of impact on the series at large and being smaller scale - I would say that Penders' era of Sonic comics was really awful, especially since it was the only consistently new Sonic product during the development of XTreme, pretty much.

Due to the time it happened, there was no real Sonic stories to speak of. The games had no story, the comics were comedic, and the shows were either serious or over the top. But Penders' era of comics ended up lasting right up to Shadow, where by that point, stories did begin coming out more and more often, and due to the fact Penders got to get away with a lot in his era of comics, due to both laziness and incompetency, we got an era of awful comics. Filled with melodramatic nonsense, confusing storylines, bad dialogue, bad attempts to reference something else (Remember when Sonic became Batman and/or Spider-Man for a few days?).

How about when Sonic and co found themselves going to high school when about a year or two prior, the cast had been going on wars against Eggman? That's not even to mention all of his original characters, his absolutely baffling and confusing stories based on the Echidnas and pushing them to the absolute degree of "we're better than everything and everyone", it was a really frustratingly bad era of comics. Especially when the stories began to degrade from action to more melodramatic crap. Oh hey, Sally's just marrying Antoine who's secretly Patch from an evil dimension who also broke Bunnie's heart prior to this, have fun watching Sonic mope over it for two issues! Then Bollers (who I do believe was a better writer) added a few more silly things, granted with some good ideas/characters like Mina.

Oh look, Sally ended her relationship with Sonic publicly by slapping him because Sonic made the unreasonable concept that no one else can handle Eggman and Sally took it to mean that Sonic was being selfish for risking his life daily! Oh look! There's Knuckles who's time-travelling around the place with his unexplained green chaos powers!

The point where I would say this reached it's absolute boiling point of awful is Issue 150, where prior - the milestone issues were about major shifts to the status quo and large stories, Issue 150 was about...Evil Sonic randomly appearing and basically flirting with all of Sonic's friends. He coaxs Bunnie into a date, he plays on Mina's old feelings for Sonic, and that's not even mentioning Fiona Fox. Not only does it horribly try to revert characters like Mina back to prior stages of their arcs (By this point, she had been long over Sonic and had been happy with someone who was supporting her musical career) but it also just was plain boring.

It was like the final straw of this awful melodramatic era of Penders where everything was badly written drama and love triangles instead of anything relating to Sonic. Thankfully, by that point, Penders was taken off the comic when new restrictions came into play, and Ian Flynn appeared as the new writer and refocused everything back towards Sonic. But even then, Ian had to spend about 20 issues trying to clean up all of the messy contrivances and melodramatic plotlines that Penders had left. 

[ShadowSJG]

06, Shadow the game, Boom, Penders era. I disagree above as characters are fine. Mario has a lot of characters too. 

[Plasme]

SEGA not respecting Sonic as an intellectual property. We can see the problems in this only 2 years after Sonic 1 released. 1993 was a really bad year for Sonic. They made loads of terrible cartoons, pushed out games as fast as possible  in spite of quality (Sonic Spinball), created some terrible looking prototype spin offs and just generally acted upon a policy of 'Sonic's doing well now, let's milk as much money as we can before he's unfashionable".

It's this sentimentality, which was always present from the beginning, which ultimately led to the death of the franchise. It's most blatant with 06 and Boom, but it's always been around in some way. 

There's been somewhat of a change in recent years, with the games being delayed for quality reasons. But this upcoming movie, which looks dire, is a perfect example of how this still ruins the franchise.

[Rowl]

6 minutes ago, ShadowSJG said:

I disagree above as characters are fine. Mario has a lot of characters too. 

The big difference is, that every single Mario character has a different role in their universe, while with Sonic more than half of them are technically just like Sonic himself. A heroic character with a special power that fights the bad guys. The only characters that kinda have a different role are Tails (support), Amy (love interest), Knuckles (friendly rival), Dr. Eggman (main antagonist), Metal-Sonic (secondary antagonist) and Orbot and Cubot (main antagonist's henchmen). Maybe I can also throw in the Whips, but I'm not sure if they are still considered as characters or are just simple items now.   

[Diogenes]

1 minute ago, ShadowSJG said:

Mario has a lot of characters too. 

But the way Mario uses its characters is way different. Most new Mario characters are NPCs, usually in fairly minor roles, and usually exist without the assumption that they're going to reappear. But the Sonic series tends to create major, often playable characters, and keep them around as permanent fixtures (even if they don't appear in every game).

[Multikaris]

8 minutes ago, Rowl said:

The big difference is, that every single Mario character has a different role in their universe, while with Sonic more than half of them are technically just like Sonic himself. A heroic character with a special power that fights the bad guys. The only characters that kinda have a different role are Tails (support), Amy (love interest), Knuckles (friendly rival), Dr. Eggman (main antagonist), Metal-Sonic (secondary antagonist) and Orbot and Cubot (main antagonist's henchmen). Maybe I can also throw in the Whips, but I'm not sure if they are still considered as characters or are just simple items now.   

Pink Gold Peach? Sprixie Princess? 

[Rowl]

5 minutes ago, Miragnarok said:

Pink Gold Peach? Sprixie Princess? 

Well... the important once like Wario, Peach, Yoshi, Toad, Prof. E. Gadd, Toadsworth etc. I mean, if you come up with Pink Gold Peach and the Sprixie Princess and can say the same exact thin with many Sonic characters like Sticks, Marine, Mighty, Ray, Charmy Bee, Cream, Vanilla, Big, Froggy, Omochao etc. 

[Diogenes]

4 minutes ago, Miragnarok said:

Pink Gold Peach? Sprixie Princess? 

Are never going to be anything more than cameos or multiplayer filler from here on (and they weren't much more to start with). No Mario game is going to be derailed by needing to make them playable or give them screentime in its very important and very serious story, and no fan is going to complain about that.

[Wraith]

Mario and Sonic basically use them in the same way as background filler now so it's not really a discussion that needs to be had again, but who am I kidding.

[Plasme]

A lot of Sonic characters fill the same role too. Knuckles, Metal Sonic, Shadow, Zavok and Infinite are all anthro rivals for example. It's overkill.

[Multikaris]

23 minutes ago, Rowl said:

Well... the important once like Wario, Peach, Yoshi, Toad, Prof. E. Gadd, Toadsworth etc. I mean, if you come up with Pink Gold Peach and the Sprixie Princess and can say the same exact thin with many Sonic characters like Sticks, Marine, Mighty, Ray, Charmy Bee, Cream, Vanilla, Big, Froggy, Omochao etc. 

E. Gadd was not necessary to explain FLUDD. It could have stayed a mystery. 

[Wraith]

1 minute ago, Plasme said:

A lot of Sonic characters fill the same role too. Knuckles, Metal Sonic, Shadow, Zavok and Infinite are all anthro rivals for example. It's overkill.

Most of the cast are anthros who fought sonic before so this broad strokes shit could be applied to all of them.

Most people can't actually articulate what's wrong with Sonic's extended cast without doing shit like this or just complaining about the people who like them ala Diogenes above.

[Plasme]

1 minute ago, Miragnarok said:

E. Gadd was not necessary to explain FLUDD. It could have stayed a mystery. 

Sunshine is the one Mario game which is criticised for its awful story, so it's not like Mario got away with it.

Just now, Wraith said:

Most of the cast are anthros who fought sonic before so this broad strokes shit could be applied to all of them.

Most people can't actually articulate what's wrong with Sonic's extended cast without doing shit like this or just complaining about the people who like them ala Diogenes above.

The point is that it's ridiculous. You don't need six or so rivals for one character. It's as if Mario had six characters who filled the role of Wario.

[Wraith]

3 minutes ago, Plasme said:

The point is that it's ridiculous. You don't need six or so rivals for one character. It's as if Mario had six characters who filled the role of Wario.

These characters were all introduced far apart in the series history, all have different backstories and do different things. The thing they have in common is that they all fought Sonic before. 

I could post every character that's had beef with Mario ever before or point out that the fact that some characters are brought back to do the same things endlessly is a point of contention even among fans of the Mario series. I could point out that Wario has been directly Mario's rival maybe one time and his role in the context of the series has since changed. I could point out that Knuckles and Shadow are similar in that regard. 

I just really don't get the sense enough people play Mario games here to do direct comparisons. A lot of the same shit is happening with that franchise. 

[Diogenes]

5 minutes ago, Wraith said:

... or just complaining about the people who like them ala Diogenes above.

You, uh, maybe wanna go back and read my posts and try to figure out what I actually said? I'm not talking shit about people just for liking characters. But the way so many characters get treated as main characters, by the developers as much as by the fans, is a problem.

[Plasme]

1 minute ago, Wraith said:

These characters were all introduced far apart in the series history, all have different backstories and do different things. The thing they have in common is that they all fought Sonic before. 

I could post every character that's had beef with Mario ever before or point out that the fact that some characters are brought back to do the same things endlessly is a point of contention even among fans of the Mario series. I could point out that Wario has been directly Mario's rival maybe one time and his role in the context of the series has since changed. I could point out that Knuckles and Shadow are similar in that regard. 

I just really don't get the sense enough people play Mario games here to do direct comparisons. A lot of the same shit is happening with that franchise. 

Mario simply doesn't have the overwhelming surplus of characters who all fill exactly the same, or similar roles. To get really specific, Metal Sonic and Shadow are basically the same character. Both are dark mirror Sonics and are as fast as Sonic. They both serve the same role, except Shadow is more edgy, that's the only real difference between the two of them.

In Mario, the closest to this redundancy in characters is Bowser and Bowser Jr, but Bowser Jr is always a mini-boss figure and not built to be an equal rival to Bowser.

As Dio says, Sonic has an absurdly large cast of characters, many of whom overlap or serve identical roles, and are all built up as major characters. That's really the crux of the problem.

[Wraith]

2 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

You, uh, maybe wanna go back and read my posts and try to figure out what I actually said? I'm not talking shit about people just for liking characters. But the way so many characters get treated as main characters, by the developers as much as by the fans, is a problem.

Mario characters quite literally get made the main characters of their own subfranchises. Spinoff wallpaper piece Pauline is the face of the last major game's marketing campaign. Characters like Luigi, Yoshi and Bowser Jr float in and out of being mainstays all across the series. Rosalina was appearing so often at one point based on fan demand that it was considered weird when she didn't show up. Peach is only playable in Mario games now to the degree that she is because people wouldn't stop asking them about it, and no one would say that was a bad choice. 

In other words, there are a lot of Mario characters, some of them new even, that are considered major pillars or mainstays. The Sonic series is allowed to have these. Fans are allowed to push for their characters to get bigger roles or play a bigger part. It doesn't do any serious damage to the series unless you interpret these things wrong. 

 

[Dr. Detective]

6 hours ago, Rowl said:

The first thing was that they created in my eyes just way to many characters. To the point where I have the feeling that they only created those characters, just because they needed a new eye catcher that they can show of on the box art. This series has so many of them, that they can easily get rid of half of them. Do we really needed characters like Sticks, Ray, Mighty, Jet, Big, Cream, Team Chaotix, Marine, Silver or even Blaze? It really seems that all of them do not really contribute much to the world of Sonic.

Technically, especially nowadays, we don't need any character aside from a hero and a villain. The characters, their personalities, and their motivations are supposed to serve as tools necessary for telling different kinds of stories. When you're telling a story and you need a jewel thief, a government agent, a group of detectives, or (heaven-forbid) a bridge to the future, that's kind of what they're supposed to be there for, for the most part. Sometimes they can stick around just to enhance a story or develop the thoughts and relationships that our main character has too. There's plenty you could do with them.

They just don't. So you're just left with a pool of characters that don't do much. Honestly, having a ton of characters in and of itself isn't an issue. All the games you thought were bad would have still been bad had you just been playing as a bunch of meaningless avatars or Robo-Sonics. Characters in games, aside from providing an excuse to tweak the gameplay slightly, are mostly just for story and if that's not something you care about then it's not going to matter.

The story isn't something the games have cared about for a long time so the issue surrounding the characters is mostly just what the fandom desires. In that sense, at least as far as I'm concerned, the problem is that they're not being used anymore.

Also, I'm still baffled as to why people act like Marine is an actual character that gets used. She isn't. She appeared once as a non-playable NPC, got mentioned once later in a throw away line in Colors DS, and was given a Mii costume for the Olympics. 

6 hours ago, Rowl said:

The second worst thing in my eyes it the forced edginess they went with the series since Sonic Adventure 2. You can't really make a character like Sonic edgy. At least not for me. In my eyes he is still a cartoon character with a Felix the Cat like design. I can't take this series serious when they talk about  stuff like death, and lost, almost making out with humans, ancient demons, aliens, revenge etc. I think because of that direction a lot of the games have turned out pretty bad, because it seemed that the highest priority for Sega was not to make Sonic good but rater edgy and cool. 

Even if I agreed with this, it doesn't matter now because they don't do anything even remotely close to this anymore. The pre-release to Forces stated that they were going to have a more serious plot and I was hoping for something that felt like a cool, action-adventure, anime/action-cartoon again. Like Adventure 2, Unleashed, or Black Knight but hopefully done a bit better. But no, it was just another Colors, Generations, Lost World with a coat of cheap paint. There was barely anything there. They reused ideas. All the cool new ideas they did have were wasted. Important scenes and explanations were skipped over. Sometimes things would contradict themselves like the bullet-points behind Infinite's backstory.

I don't care about "edgy" or whatever overused word people are using as a placeholder for narratives with conflict. I just appreciate having a sincere story. The hero's journey and an adventure that sees the characters doing things, facing hardships, and overcoming the odds isn't something that happens by just having the character prattle on about military tactics and barf out garbage about "Heart, soul, and the bonds of friendship". That's earned by showing it to us. I get more out of that then cheesy dialogue of Sonic acting like he's in a goddamn after-school special.

I'm not too sure why there being death, ancient demons, aliens, and revenge is an issue though. Those seem like fairly common troupes in children's media. They show up fairly often in plenty of Disney and Pixar movies. Or stuff like Transformers, TMNT, Sly Cooper, and even some Nintendo stuff. If the argument is that Sonic Team doesn't know how to properly utilize those in a mature of satisfying way than I can agree with that. 

1 hour ago, Diogenes said:

You, uh, maybe wanna go back and read my posts and try to figure out what I actually said? I'm not talking shit about people just for liking characters. But the way so many characters get treated as main characters, by the developers as much as by the fans, is a problem.

I feel like it's only really a problem because these developers just aren't up to the task of handling a large cast. Not necessarily because there is one. Now, as far as the fandom goes, it's too late, especially for me. It's already in my head that the main and secondary cast is comprised of all the characters who appeared in Heroes + Silver and Blaze. Orbot and Cubot too. It's a good thing they stopped adding to the pool of heroes after Silver's debut and have seemingly stuck with just introducing new villains since. That's honestly the better way to go. People typically don't expect villains like Orbot, Cubot, Zavok, and Infinite to be playable outside of a spin-off. New NPC characters that are important to a specific plot aren't unwelcome either.

I don't know about anyone else, but for me, one very simple solution would just be to hire a writer who knew how to use these characters in a story and just rolled with it. It wouldn't fix everything. There'd still be people out there who'd want ALL the main characters to be playable at once or something like that but I feel like a good first step towards fixing the issue with the characters would be to utilize their ability to enhance the story first. 

Games where Sonic is the only playable character may lower some of their chances to spread their wings a bit but it doesn't completely destroy it. There's plenty of games and stories out there where you go through the narrative through the point of view as one person and manage to flesh out your world and the people you come across.

It's only a problem because there's no one over there who wants to truly give that a shot. We're stuck with them being used as trophies in Generations and "interchangeable dialogue distributors" in Forces. Nowadays, they all have the same goal, they all have the same motivation, and they're all huddled together doing the same stuff. The ones who sometimes aren't huddled together doing the same stuff, like Team Dark, usually have whatever they're doing be completely superfluous.