Why do critics always pan Sonic storylines but give Mario a free pass?

[Cayenne]

19 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Except nobody actually dies in SPM. The two star-crossed lovers are both alive, just separated (with one having amnesia and being transformed and the other assuming the first is dead). And the game ends with them being reunited, their love saving all worlds, and very strong implications that they get their happy ending together somewhere offscreen.

SA2 has a sick girl get shot by a soldier in a botched raid, and at some point in the future her insane grandfather is presumably executed by the government.

If you don't look deeper than "man mourning loved one tries to destroy everything" they look similar but the details are wildly different.

Yep, my bad. Played Super some years ago and it had the "villain tries to destroy the world because he lost someone", but I didn't remember the part about them staying alive.

Anyways, I played enough Sonic games to have this mindset (also finished SA2 and SA2B), but i'm not going try to change anyone's opinion. Peace.

[Meta77]

8 hours ago, DabigRG said:

You "get" messages?

Yes. i upload the old intros in hd on youtube and twitter and people "message" me about having enjoyed t hem

[thumbs13]

17 hours ago, Miragnarok said:

Sonic the Hedgehog, as a franchise, has its own Complete Monster page on TV tropes. You should read through that. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Monster/SonicTheHedgehog

Listing things down on paper make them seen scarier than what's actually presented. That's always been the case. Mephiles and Infinite are still near impossible to take seriously. Black Doom and Erazor less so, but they're still all cartoonishly evil. Actions speak louder than words, and all that.

And like, yeah, if someone did all this stuff in real life, they'd be super evil and threatening. But in a fictional media, presentation is everything. So Infinite dropping a sun on everyone isn't as scary as it's supposed to be taken, and no amount of posturing about their evilness will make a shadow clone without a mouth scary.

And honestly, most of this is generic badguy stuff that doesn't make Sonic seem that dark. It just seems that way in comparison to Mario and other kiddie mascots. But since Sonic at the time was a wannabe anime, it didn't seem out of place at all.

[Plasme]

The Sonic games aren't actually menacing, but that's only because most of their plot points are badly executed. You aren't supposed to laugh at Mephilles, he's supposed to be a dark badass. And while I think Infinite has a bit more self-awareness about him, I don't think we were supposed to laugh at his 'I'm not weak' moment. The fact that they come across as laughable rather than scary and intimidating doesn't mean Sonic isn't aiming for as dark a tone as people make out, it just means that the series' stories are typically awful.

And tbh, I do think Sonic has sometimes successfully executed a really uncomfortable and dark tone, such as Gerald's death tape, which is voice acted well enough to be unsettling and has fairly decent direction and presentation. It's definitely far beyond what you'd usually see in kid's games.

[Badnik Zero]

Because Sonic stories are some weird shonen anime now, twisting back on itself with time travel and evil twins and future twins, and void monsters. It’s not as accessible as it should be. An icon like Mario stays iconic because he keeps it simple.

[Wraith]

Nothing we're discussing is darker than what we see in shonen aimed at 10 year old boys, so I still don't really see the issue unless Sonic being as presentable as possible to American critics is the endgame. 

[Whatever the WhoCares]

Ever notice how critics don’t rip apart stories like Generations or the 2D games? That’s because, as others have said, the stories that get bashed are the ones that take themselves seriously AND have gigantic narrative/pacing/tonal/presentation/dialogue flaws. That’s because - Sonic 2, 3&K, and Mania aside - every Sonic story to take itself seriously has had such flaws. 

And we’ve seen with games like Unleashed, critics finding the good parts of the narrative and setting, and praising it accordingly. We’d have seen similar praise for Sonic Forces, but there weren’t any praiseworthy aspects. 

[Multikaris]

9 minutes ago, Whatever the WhoCares said:

Ever notice how critics don’t rip apart stories like Generations or the 2D games? That’s because, as others have said, the stories that get bashed are the ones that take themselves seriously AND have gigantic narrative/pacing/tonal/presentation/dialogue flaws. That’s because - Sonic 2, 3&K, and Mania aside - every Sonic story to take itself seriously has had such flaws. 

And we’ve seen with games like Unleashed, critics finding the good parts of the narrative and setting, and praising it accordingly. We’d have seen similar praise for Sonic Forces, but there weren’t any praiseworthy aspects. 

There were also silly stories that suffered narrative flaws in the series, too. Lost World, for example. 

[Whatever the WhoCares]

5 minutes ago, Miragnarok said:

There were also silly stories that suffered narrative flaws in the series, too. Lost World, for example. 

They didn’t get picked at nearly as harshly, though. Because they clearly weren’t story driven. 

[DabigRG]

52 minutes ago, Whatever the WhoCares said:

 We’d have seen similar praise for Sonic Forces, but there weren’t any praiseworthy aspects. 

I kinda doubt that.

 

42 minutes ago, Miragnarok said:

There were also silly stories that suffered narrative flaws in the series, too. Lost World, for example. 

The thing with Lost World is that it(and to an extent Adventure 1 and Heroes) was trying to be more of a balanced plot that had a variety of things going on in a simple premise, sorta like some Pixar movies.

The problem was that the story overall was arguably the first big showcase of the current games issues with having things build up and pay off accordingly.

[Multikaris]

1 hour ago, Whatever the WhoCares said:

They didn’t get picked at nearly as harshly, though. Because they clearly weren’t story driven. 

Yeah. But hypothetically of they pushed a light-hearted story at the forefront full of holes, that would shoot a stake into the heart of the bugbear that is the idea that darker stories are the problem, right?

[Badnik Zero]

1 hour ago, Wraith said:

Nothing we're discussing is darker than what we see in shonen aimed at 10 year old boys, so I still don't really see the issue unless Sonic being as presentable as possible to American critics is the endgame. 

That’s my point. Not presentable because of subject matter - Accessible. Accessible like Pixar. Naruto is not for everyone. DBZ is not for everyone. They limit it by taking it down certain storylines. See Forces for a good example.

[Wraith]

3 minutes ago, Badnik Zero said:

That’s my point. Not presentable because of subject matter - Accessible. Accessible like Pixar. Naruto is not for everyone. DBZ is not for everyone. They limit it by taking it down certain storylines. See Forces for a good example.

I don't want Sonic to be for everyone

[Badnik Zero]

Like for example, how Pokémon is for everyone? Sonic was a phenomenon in the 90s because he was more accessible. He was easy to like. Every time Sega releases another poorly thought out story he’s going to take another reputation hit.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

3 hours ago, Badnik Zero said:

That’s my point. Not presentable because of subject matter - Accessible. Accessible like Pixar. Naruto is not for everyone. DBZ is not for everyone. They limit it by taking it down certain storylines. See Forces for a good example.

Pixar has the Incredibles which has adults shooting at children with realistic machine guns. Even pointed out beforehand that adults will kill the children if they get a chance.

Where does that fit in the definition of accessible subject matter?

 

[Diogenes]

It's been a while; exactly how many children get shot and killed in The Incredibles, in the end?

I am going to take a guess and say the answer is less than one.

[Cayenne]

I'd say that Sonic is already accessible for everyone. What we see in this series isn't different from action cartoons aimed at a very young demographic like Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League or the first two Thundercats cartoons.

Sonic just needs a well-done and sincere story and nothing more IMO.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

@Diogenes Was the question specifically about children dying or was it about accessible subject matter in general? I’m gonna take a guess and say the answer is the latter, so let’s stick to that.

[Diogenes]

Superhero kids getting shot at but never actually getting hit is pretty fair game for a family-friendly action story, I'd say.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

So are most the things they do in most Sonic games, including Forces sorry excuse of a story.

[BaronGrackle]

Sonic Adventure 2 was a strong shift away from the storytelling and tone of previous games. Those earlier games could be described without words like "government conspiracy", or "president", or "sexy and smooth". That atmosphere hung around for ShtH and had similar echoes in Sonic '06. But I think it's disappeared since then?

[Badnik Zero]

@Conquering Storm’s Servant The Incredibles was rated PG, probably for those same gun sequences. Are guns pervasive and acceptable in our culture? Maybe. On bad guys though because they’re bad and then get beaten up? That’s up to the ratings board. It didn’t stop the critical acclaim for the movie.

Sonic gets no acclaim for story because they don’t make sense sometimes, and on top of that he’s chosen a genre that’s not entirely accessible. Mario’s only genre is as a game platformer. What if Mario decided to have a noir theme? In a main game. Not accessible, some people just would not be feeling that style.

Why is Sonic Mania Adventures so charming? It’s because they keep it simple. I look great in a T-shirt and jeans. If I’m trying to be more fashionable than that then I need to do it right, because it starts to get easy to screw it all up the more layers you go into a thing.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

45 minutes ago, Badnik Zero said:

@Conquering Storm’s Servant The Incredibles was rated PG, probably for those same gun sequences. Are guns pervasive and acceptable in our culture? Maybe. On bad guys though because they’re bad and then get beaten up? That’s up to the ratings board. It didn’t stop the critical acclaim for the movie.

Sonic gets no acclaim for story because they don’t make sense sometimes, and on top of that he’s chosen a genre that’s not entirely accessible. Mario’s only genre is as a game platformer. What if Mario decided to have a noir theme? In a main game. Not accessible, some people just would not be feeling that style.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty confident that the creative team behind Mario could pull off a noir theme if they put an serious attempt to it.

They’ve managed to pull off a cartoony take on a horror theme with works like Luigi’s Mansion.

[Wraith]

2 hours ago, Badnik Zero said:

Like for example, how Pokémon is for everyone? Sonic was a phenomenon in the 90s because he was more accessible. He was easy to like. Every time Sega releases another poorly thought out story he’s going to take another reputation hit.

I'd take something weird over something flavorless like Pokemon. 

[knuckles20]

7 hours ago, Miragnarok said:

There were also silly stories that suffered narrative flaws in the series, too. Lost World, for example. 

Be careful, you’re poking holes in the anti-serious narrative.

If I wanted safe and simple, I would picked up Mania. For modern Sonic I prefer have a story that takes it self seriously and has more going for it than “Stop Eggman” over simple stuff like Lost World or Colors because I found the writing in the those games were so lacking, it made me ask if the games doesn’t care why should I put down $40+ for them.