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There aren't that many Sonic heroes. You just have to accept that not all of them have to be in every game.

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1 minute ago, Wraith said:

You just have to accept that not all of them have to be in every game. 

But that is replacement in a sense and "I" as a fan, simply cannot overlook that.

Every character has been replaced with air since Unleashed onward, so it's bad.

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5 hours ago, Pengi said:

When you begin a sentence with "Actually" it implies that the thing you're responding to is factually incorrect. I didn't mention the cartoon characters at all.

Oh, technicalities.

Alright then. 

43 minutes ago, Tangled Jack said:

The last thing I want to mention with the FFs comparisons and then I quit: Sonic was highly dependant on the Freedom Fighters,

More like the inverse: The Freedom Fighters would call Tails, Sonic, Amy, and Big for help sometimes. Otherwise, they each normally do their own things.

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meanwhile Tangle and Whisper are their own heroes already, yes they were part of the resistance for a brief time but other than that, they are not mainstays on Sonic's team, they have their own adventures.


 

Meanwhile, Whisper is indeed her own thing--whether it's normally a hero or not will be clarified in her miniseries. 

 

16 minutes ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

As far as the fear of "replacements" goes, who would they even replace?

 

Eh, while replace is generally a strong word people use regardless, Tangle is essentially another Amy, Marine, and Charmy.

16 minutes ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

More villains and reoccuring friendly story NPCs are things I'd welcome with open arms though.

Definitely.

15 minutes ago, Wraith said:

There aren't that many Sonic heroes. You just have to accept that not all of them have to be in every game.

Yeah, it's technically just Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles.

13 minutes ago, StaticMania said:

But that is replacement in a sense and "I" as a fan, simply cannot overlook that.

Every character has been replaced with air since Unleashed onward, so it's bad.

And Extreme Gear doesn't run on that anymore, too.

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3 hours ago, Wraith said:

There aren't that many Sonic heroes. You just have to accept that not all of them have to be in every game.

Well, of course. Generally speaking, thats already something that people have trouble dealing with. Especially if they're characters who are less popular and barely get any play by play as it is. Adding more to the pile increases the risk of even less chances for a shared spotlight in the eyes of most.

I feel a lot of the push back to any topics suggesting the inclusion of more Sonic Heroes would die down if Sonic Team were already shouldering the burden of an extended cast well. Then the focus would largely be on how they'd function rather then the method needed to see how space can be divided accordingly.

For example, the idea of "rotation" that people suggest at times sounds just vague enough that people could worry or not worry depending on what factors they were accounting for or cared about.

For me, it doesn't matter as much in terms of storytelling as a good writer (if they find one) could write around it. It might be a bit more muddled when you consider gameplay.

Depending on what kind of gameplay the characters have (who can even say at this point) is the issue of dividing them so that we don't have too many of a character that can fly, for example,  going to make things weird? Who do you put with who to mediate this? How many playable characters are going to be around per game? They won't have the same roster each game to make the rotation equal most likely. Why wouldn't they just default to the most popular ones consistently to avoid people raising eyebrows at Big being playable when Shadow isn't? 

This isn't stuff I worry about necessarily. Personally, if I got one good 3D game where I could play as all three of the Chaotix individually I'd be happy to wait another 15 years until it happened again.

I'm just playing devil's advocate because I see where both sides are coming from and its a shame that Sonic Team hasn't worked things out better by now.

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I could probably draft a story and field some moveset ideas for any given Sonic character. I just think it's irritating when I want to focus on one but people just ask about the others. I sympathize with being starved for content: Tikal  Blaze are some of my favorite characters. It's just not something I want to talk about every topic. It's fun to me to discuss how to implement individual characters but the brakes always come out at "what about ___" or some classic fan mumbling about how they cant do anything right, so why bother talking about anything at all?

The answer to the character juggling "problem" isn't just obvious to me: there's actually multiple ways they could have easily delt with it by now IMHO. They're just not seriously interested in dealing with it, so it's not that interesting of a discussion to have for me anymore.

But on the other hand the topic I presented clearly isn't enticing to people when the series isn't even doing it's current characters justice. There are characters older than tangle and whisper that might warrent more focus as far as making fans happy and I get that. Thats why I just let yall have it. It's hard to discuss these things as long as the series is still kind of aimless amd lackluster.

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14 hours ago, Tangled Jack said:

But she is way better than Sally as comic exclusive character in my opinion, I'm glad for what Ian did to Sally during the reboot, but still she's obviously the precious writer pet who steals the show, perfect in every way, with big responsibilities on her shoulder, a princess, I know I'm describing a Mary Sue, but I don't want to call Sally that because it's superficial. Tangle is the variant on the other hand, a very simple character like Sonic who acts in weird moves, confident but wacky, hyperactive and coolest thing of all… she is ordinary with a boring life, she wants to be a hero but she's afraid to leave her buddy and home town unprotected, her mini-series will show what she's capable of, besides the fact that she has an interesting gameplay gimmick. Because honestly, in her debut issue, she was just a random girl who crushes on Blaze.

Whisper is also sweet, she fits into the Sonic narrative, into the Avatar gameplay with her wispon and Wisps team, and to counter Tangle, she has a complicated origin story apparently. I'm explaining this for those who don't know the characters and haven't read IDW, but both are great in fact I would say that Tangle & Whisper are female versions of Sonic and Shadow, but they are friends instead of rivals, and there is a lot more to uncover for them beneath the surface.

As for the other Freedom Fighters, I was never a fan of them but still, in the reboot they were decent, Antoine I kind of dig for his fears but occasional exploits of bravery, which is cool, but he's still the typical cliché of an arrogant snob french, eh, Bunnie is interesting, and so is Nicole, at least post-reboot. Rotor, sadly, I never could stand, for multiple reasons.

 

Long story short, the FFs had 20+ years of stories, most of which are mediocre, and I never liked to see them as heroes alongside Sonic, meanwhile Tangle and Whisper have won me over (and a lot more people) with just 5-6 appearances, and I'm curious to know more about them and explore them as characters, so that might be why… they are still unexplored territory and that picks my interest?

Username checks out.

 

On 7/11/2019 at 5:51 PM, Sean said:

The reason that this can't be applied to non-game characters is because...??

Because Tangle Good Sally Bad.

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5 hours ago, Wraith said:

I could probably draft a story and field some moveset ideas for any given Sonic character. I just think it's irritating when I want to focus on one but people just ask about the others. I sympathize with being starved for content: Tikal  Blaze are some of my favorite characters. It's just not something I want to talk about every topic. It's fun to me to discuss how to implement individual characters but the brakes always come out at "what about ___" or some classic fan mumbling about how they cant do anything right, so why bother talking about anything at all?

Nowadays I just often dump my character spinoffs & gameplay ideas onto my twitter/art blogs/discord and sometimes the status updates on here. I don't really feel it is typically worth the trouble of making certain topics here for example about what ideas for gameplay & stuff I'd give Blaze or Metal Sonic staring in their own games... because half the replies will just be "We can't have other playable characters including spinoffs until SEGA perfect the gameplay of Sonic first!" and "The ONLY characters we need are Sonic & Eggman! the rest need to be deleted forever! Roar!!!" or "Other characters deserve the spotlight far before your choices!" It isn't the end of the world when those type o reactions happen... but it can get kinda discouraging for what was only meant to be a harmless idea thought challenge for entertainment.

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8 hours ago, Wraith said:

The answer to the character juggling "problem" isn't just obvious to me: there's actually multiple ways they could have easily delt with it by now IMHO. They're just not seriously interested in dealing with it, so it's not that interesting of a discussion to have for me anymore.

For what it's worth, I'm interested in finding out what these solutions are one day. It'd be nice to feel more secure in a position that supported how to confidently utilize the cast. Understandably, ending each recent topic discussion with "It's pointless to do X because of Y" is starting to make the very act of discussing things seem futile. 

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What Sonic Team should do is take a break and work on another franchise entirely like what they did with Billy Hatcher or Nights. Let them refresh themselves with old IPs, and keep any Sonic development in the background. If they really go for it, they could hire an indie team yo make a 3D Sonic game while they're doing this. Imagine if that happened?

Even experimenting with characters like Tangle and Whisper in their own game could be interesting. Don't we all want to see Sonic Team do something fresh and interesting, no matter what it is? Don't we?

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9 hours ago, Knight56 said:

Don't we all want to see Sonic Team do something fresh and interesting, no matter what it is? Don't we?

There's no such thing as fresh and interesting.

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The whole 'no original ideas exist' thing never appealed to me, considering that there are always new ways to execute an old idea. Reviewers praised Breath of the Wild for being a new take on the Zelda formula, despite it taking traits from open world game, a genre that has been done to death at this point. Living in a world where you see nothing new and instead see everything rehashed over and over again is a very sad way to live when many inspired creators exist.

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That's not exactly cynical, it's just real.

And totally tubular, dude.

It's the individual thing that can become fresh using something old, that's whatever.

New ways to tackle old ideas is literally the only place to go.

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On 7/13/2019 at 12:42 PM, Dr. Detective Mike said:

As far as the fear of "replacements" goes, who would they even replace?

Tangle is supposed to be an audience surrogate for the newbies according to Flynn and we've got really no clue what Whisper's deal is yet.

A better question is why the hell are people talking about characters replacing others in the first place based on them simply being present? Because I swear people never seem to realize how big a fallacy that is judging things for just their surface traits.

Sally being within a foot of Tangle’s presence doesn’t mean she’ll replace her, or any other character you want to compare. It’s like people completely ignore the differences these characters have from each other—it’s like saying Shadow will replace Sonic, which you can already tell makes no sense just by reading that aloud. It not like Elise being a princess somehow makes her a replacement for Blaze.

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The fear of adding more clutter to the expansive cast of Heroes is a much more valid fear, and one I do ultimately agree with. Its not as though there can't exist ways around this issue, of course. Its just that the larger the main cast becomes the harder it is to maintain a comfortable balance and the more talent and effort is needed to keep things in check. 

More villains and reoccuring friendly story NPCs are things I'd welcome with open arms though.

I agree with more villains, but I don’t think clutter is the problem than it is direction when it comes to cast. Just based on the games alone, Sonic has a moderately small cast compared to other games out there.

The latest Smash Bros has well over 60 characters, just to name one example, each playing different from each other.

Rainbow Six Seige, it being a tactical shooter “peekaboo simulator” notwithstanding, has around 40 characters that have different abilities that complement and counter each other.

And if you want an even more extreme example, League of Legends has a whopping 145 characters and counting . And not only do each character have different styles of play that still work with the core gameplay (hell, you can even play characters in roles that they’re not supposed to play if you’re good enough, like making an assassin double as a tank), they each have background that are as developed, if not more so, than Shadow the Hedgehog whom many in the Sonic fandom like to point to as the poster-boy for being “too complex”—and that’s not even getting into their dozens of Alternative Universes where the characters are different there, tho that’s mainly a cosmetic aspect with skins, so take that how you will. That huge cast not only means that people have a bigger choice of finding their preferred style of play, but that each character has strengths and weaknesses that can be taken advantage of—basically Rock, Paper, Scissor with DLC (note: that’s not exactly how this game plays, just FYI :lol: ).

I can understand why people make the case about it, and in some ways, I agree with it—Sonic Team hasn’t given us a lot of confidence they can make a huge cast work, and for that reason I find it hard to argue. But at the same time I also find the whole argument of not cluttering the cast to be more counterproductive than intended, because it stifles a lot of creativity in actually moving past the problems that we keep pointing out, or even misses the point of what the actual problems are.

 A big cast is only a problem if each character plays so different it’s like playing a different genre of gameplay—like going from action-platformer to an FPS, as opposed to making a ranged character work in said action-platformer. If Sonic Team were to somehow get this right, and make a Sonic game that can incorporate the likes of characters like Antoine, who’d function as a swordsman, and Whisper, who’d function as a pretty awesome sniper with multiple other abilities, and make them play as fluid (for lack of a better word) as a speedster like Sonic under the same core mechanics, the only problems would really be petty gripes from fans upset they have to share the setting with characters from alternate media much to the same extent people bitched about the games having a cast of 9-12 playables back during the era of Heroes-06, often for reasons completely unrelated to gameplay—which isn’t to say they didn’t have reasonable points about gameplay, but would often veer into the petty bashing that sections of fandom still has yet to grow up over.

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On 7/13/2019 at 5:47 PM, Wraith said:

 

The answer to the character juggling "problem" isn't just obvious to me: there's actually multiple ways they could have easily delt with it by now IMHO. They're just not seriously interested in dealing with it, so it's not that interesting of a discussion to have for me anymore.

 

What are some of those ways?

On 7/14/2019 at 12:33 AM, Knight56 said:

What Sonic Team should do is take a break and work on another franchise entirely like what they did with Billy Hatcher or Nights. Let them refresh themselves with old IPs, and keep any Sonic development in the background. If they really go for it, they could hire an indie team yo make a 3D Sonic game while they're doing this. Imagine if that happened?

That would indeed be a good thing to do. The only concerns are what other companies are sturdy enough to do so and apparently whether they even can do so?

On 7/14/2019 at 3:51 PM, Conquering Storm’s Servant said:

A better question is why the hell are people talking about characters replacing others in the first place based on them simply being present? Because I swear people never seem to realize how big a fallacy that is judging things for just their surface traits.

Sally being within a foot of Tangle’s presence doesn’t mean she’ll replace her, or any other character you want to compare. It’s like people completely ignore the differences these characters have from each other.

 

Either mostly baseless paranoia or a conscious attempt to appeal to fear.

What's extra funny about that example and fulfilling of your reasoning is that Sally in particular can't really replace or to an extent overlap with anyone to begin with--she's inherently distinct and specific based in her original concept.

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The situation with having another company make a 3D Sonic game is that no other company has experience in making one. Christian Whitehead and the other developers who worked on Sonic Mania had years of experience in making and porting 2D games, leading to Sega eventually trusting them in making a game. The most we have for 3D games are engines, test levels, and compilations of levels from the Adventure games. Some have gone farther and are genuinely impressive, but none have ever worked with Sega closely like the Mania team did. I honestly think it is unlikely for this to happen unless we see close collaborations for some period of time--despite how much we'd like to see otherwise.

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Considering even Sonic Team has never actually figured out 3D Sonic gameplay I don't see why experience working with the series is so necessary. Any developer taking on that challenge would need to figure it out on their own anyway.

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3 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Considering even Sonic Team has never actually figured out 3D Sonic gameplay I don't see why experience working with the series is so necessary. Any developer taking on that challenge would need to figure it out on their own anyway.

Is it the gameplay or the level design that's more shaky though?

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6 minutes ago, DabigRG said:

Is it the gameplay or the level design that's more shaky though?

Both.

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2 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Both.

Well what has been some of the closer reaches of each thus far? And how has the different characters influenced?

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14 minutes ago, Diogenes said:

Considering even Sonic Team has never actually figured out 3D Sonic gameplay I don't see why experience working with the series is so necessary. Any developer taking on that challenge would need to figure it out on their own anyway.

I would still rather Yuji Naka or somebody related to the series do it than most of the rest of the industry. 2D Sonic design is so unorthodox that most people miss the point.

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14 minutes ago, Wraith said:

I would still rather Yuji Naka or somebody related to the series do it than most of the rest of the industry. 2D Sonic design is so unorthodox that most people miss the point.

Case in point would be Dimps with Sonic 4, or any of the Game Gear spinoff games. It plays nothing like a 2D Sonic game.

Just eyeballing the design of the games don’t get it quite right either, as many Sonic fangames have shown.

Very careful studying of the engine and the games would get us closer to a 3D rendition of it.

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On 7/15/2019 at 8:04 PM, DabigRG said:

Well what has been some of the closer reaches of each thus far? And how has the different characters influenced?

What do you mean by that?

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1 hour ago, MainJP said:

What do you mean by that?

What games have gameplay and/or level design that sorta has the right idea and how/why did it end up missing?

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On 7/19/2019 at 3:13 PM, DabigRG said:

What games have gameplay and/or level design that sorta has the right idea and how/why did it end up missing?

You know what? And this might have even been brought up before, but I'll go ahead and say early Windy Valley. It's basically a momentum-based rolling mechanics style Sonic level built for a 3D environment (it's just too bad the game's engine couldn't support it in the end). 

Sloped terrain that transitions seamlessly into a quarter pipe for the purpose of building momentum to launch off of the obstacle.

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Quarter pipes you can Spin Dash up to gain massive air like the Classics.

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Seamlessly integrated wall-runs.

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And of course it gives you various different options for traversing the stage by including high-routes and low routes as well as different paths leading to differing rewards.

In this area alone you have a few options.

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You can take those quarter pipes to a high route that gives you access to a ramp or the two item boxes and an elevator, take the wall-run that gets you an item box and takes you to the blue springs or take the tunnel to the spiral grass rode.

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This literally is a classic level in 3D.

It's not perfect but it's certainly good for a first attempt in 1998 and it's better than Sonic Team's recent attempts.

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