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Is it time to apologize to Pontac and Graff?


Slashy

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The only reason Colors, TSR even hold up at all is because they were both fairly campy, lighthearted affairs for 99% of the runtime. There were very few tonal shifts that needed to be tackled in either game, so you never had to take much if anything seriously.

 

In other games, like Forces, the cast would go back and forth talking about the bleakness of war while on the other foot having Sonic walk out of months of torture even more spry than when he went in. The inability for us to take any of those situations with any ounce of sincerity is what ultimately undermines the P&G era. When the time came to add some gravity to the situation, the characters felt out of place and the audience would become disillusioned as a result. They had to start cramming square pegs into round holds because they were incapable of marking any kind of real balance between tonal shifts.

 

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Apology? Not really. They were comedy writers that were pretty bad at writing jokes. It feels pretty open and shut to me. Obviously humor is sobjective but compare the reception the colors gags get to something like Sonic Boom. Still not my cup of tea but at least people still clip and quote that show. I don't like a lot of stuff of the stuff mentioned in the OP either but that just means they need to continue restructuring things and making changes. Pontaff getting the boot is just the start.

Now, I think Sonic Team should also get more heat for being pretty dull narrative designers in their own right. The dull cutscene direction, shallow world building and de-emphasis on weaving narrative and gameplay together started from them and continues to be a problem even now that pontaff are gone. Games like Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces not really having a proper climax comes because Sonic Team didn't actually build a scenario for a writer to work off of. I can't think of many ways to add weight to "You fight Egg Nega Wisp a third time" myself. 

I still long for the brief era where Sonic was more about characters taking action over chatting, and Pontaff didn't really start that, but getting rid of them was still a move in the right direction.
 

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I have to echo the sentiments of others in this thread that, while of course they deserve an apology for all the harassment they had to endure while writing for the series, most of their scripts were just plain bad. I'm sorry but even within the constraints of dubbing, you can do way better than that. 

I honestly can barely recall any jokes or moments that made me genuinely laugh in any of their stories. Like c'mon.

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Comming from a long time defender of their content until 2017 uhhh, why? Their stuff was weak, majority of fans thought so and explained why several ways in extremely long tired diatribes not worth rehashing. They just were not a good fit for this franchise in the long term and the things most people find engaging about these characters and world was totally absent while they were at the helm.

Frontiers has its issues with its presentation and writing but the reception it’s recieved compared to Forces is like night and day and it’s not hard to see why. I just don’t feel the need to apologize to writers that had a near 10 year long run to do whatever they wanted, they had their time, it wasn’t liked, now we move on 

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Wasn't it shown that the Forces script was absolutely terrible even before their involvement? Still, their punching up of dialogue in Forces didn't exactly make it better. 

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As one of their more vocal critics around here... I can't really say I'm inclined to. Their scripts/ translations were non-offensive at best and just plain bad a lot of the time. I'm not going to apologize for calling that out and wanting better. People can say that those complaining harped on it for too long but I'd argue that was simply a push and pull reaction to the dominate narrative in the early to mid 2010s others shouted of "Sonic is a cartoon and doesn't need a serious story". Both sides are equally loud in these debates so lets not pretend they were one-sided echo chambers.

You can claim that their writing style wasn't at odds with what the series had done or continues to do, sure. Though the fact of the matter is, for comedic scripts, they rarely had me even chuckling (and even less so for actually being funny and more so along the lines of "jfc how did it get this bad"). The Boom show was actually funny a lot of the time. The OK KO special was lighthearted and fun. The twitter takeovers were both funny and campy most of the time. Just because they were of similar tone does not mean they were of similar quality.

That all being said, I'll also repeat the obvious fact that nearly everyone in topic has stated. They shouldn't have gotten harassed. No one ever deserves that.

Was it even entirely their fault? No, Sega and ST do deserve just as much heat for that decade+ of nothingness and, trust me, I'm going to continue to do just that. Hell, some of the traits prominent in that time that I have (and still) complain about were a thing in Frontiers so, even with a writer that has a better handle on these characters and an overall better narrative, we're not out of the woods yet. Though, I do greatly appreciate where we could be heading now and that's something I haven't been able to say since I joined here.

If I'm sorry for anything, it's that I'm sorry that a fandom I associate with harassed them. It's an apology that probably has 0 value to it though as A, the damage is already well past done B, I nor anyone I've seen on this forum had anything to do with that, and 3, they both have probably moved on for arguably better things; but it's one I'll still give.

I'll repeat it again, no one deserves harassment.

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I didn't really like their writing beyond Colors (which I'll maintain was exactly what the series needed at the time), but they were also dealt a bad hand. It's hard to come down on them given the circumstances that surrounded a lot of what they wrote.

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2 hours ago, Wraith said:

Still not my cup of tea but at least people still clip and quote that show. I don't like a lot of stuff of the stuff mentioned in the OP either but that just means they need to continue restructuring things and making changes.

No fans love the Twitter Takeovers. Because Shadow's obsessive deaires in marriage partners is peak comedy gold now.

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1 minute ago, Slashy said:

No fans love the Twitter Takeovers. Because Shadow's obsessive deaires in marriage partners is peak comedy gold now.

Sonic fans love a lot of things that are bad

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3 minutes ago, Wraith said:

Sonic fans love a lot of things that are bad

I was actually tempted to pull at Soyjack meme by pointing out how the Twitter takeovers are pretty much the same, it is just the ability to make more meta-jokes makes it funnier. People just block out when the Twitter Takeovers are not funny which is like at least half the time.

The thing is Pontac and Graff also get funnier when they are allowed to make context free jokes see the Eggman Announcements at the Interstellar Amusement Park or the Announcer Chatter in Madworld. I know their Boom episode was well received as well.

It is just that their flubs on Lost World and Forces were huge and aggravating, that people ignore the times they did things right because they are not as notable. And no one pays attention to the failures of the Twitter Takeovers or the stuff on IDW made by guest writers.

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21 minutes ago, Slashy said:

I was actually tempted to pull at Soyjack meme by pointing out how the Twitter takeovers are pretty much the same, it is just the ability to make more meta-jokes makes it funnier. People just block out when the Twitter Takeovers are not funny which is like at least half the time.

The thing is Pontac and Graff also get funnier when they are allowed to make context free jokes see the Eggman Announcements at the Interstellar Amusement Park or the Announcer Chatter in Madworld. I know their Boom episode was well received as well.

It is just that their flubs on Lost World and Forces were huge and aggravating, that people ignore the times they did things right because they are not as notable. And no one pays attention to the failures of the Twitter Takeovers or the stuff on IDW made by guest writers.

I think it's because Shadow is there

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25 minutes ago, Slashy said:

 see the Eggman Announcements at the Interstellar Amusement Park or the Announcer Chatter in Madworld.

 

They really buried 95% of those Eggman announcements. The only way you can clearly hear most of them are via audio rips on youtube.

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I will never apologize to Pontac and Graff.

Because I always liked them, and am on record talking up their writing on these forums since Colors in 2010.

I like Ian Flynn's writing as well, granted. It's even better than Pontac and Graff, I'll say. But I'll always appreciate Pontaff saving us from the writing of the mid-to-late 2000s. (Unleashed notwithstanding, which I rather liked) After sitting through Heroes, Shadow, and 06, I welcomed Pontaff's stories with open arms and still look back on them fondly. (Forces notwithstanding, which I rather disliked; It's a shame that was the game they went out on.)

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The fact this is even a conversation in a forum dedicated to a PLATFORM video game shows how fucked this fanbases priorities are.

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7 hours ago, Dr. Mechano said:

I will never apologize to Pontac and Graff.

Because I always liked them, and am on record talking up their writing on these forums since Colors in 2010.

I like Ian Flynn's writing as well, granted. It's even better than Pontac and Graff, I'll say. But I'll always appreciate Pontaff saving us from the writing of the mid-to-late 2000s. (Unleashed notwithstanding, which I rather liked) After sitting through Heroes, Shadow, and 06, I welcomed Pontaff's stories with open arms and still look back on them fondly. (Forces notwithstanding, which I rather disliked; It's a shame that was the game they went out on.)

I don't see how going from shit writing to shit writing but it has jokes is necessarily an improvement.

Its easier to ignore like @Sega DogTagzsaid, but that's not the same as being an actual improvement.

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2 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

I don't see how going from shit writing to shit writing but it has jokes is necessarily an improvement.

That's sort of an uncharitable take on what Dr Mechano said, don't you think? It's pretty obvious from his perspective that the Pontaff stories weren't bad. 

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Absolutely not. Granted their style was welcome at the time of color’s release because before that we were constantly getting stories about getting the chaos emeralds to save the world. But later on it became apparent they weren’t all that good at writing stories that are supposed to have stakes like Lost World and Forces.

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2 hours ago, Forgeafrontier said:

The fact this is even a conversation in a forum dedicated to a PLATFORM video game shows how fucked this fanbases priorities are.

Well what the hell would you like us to talk about then?

Like it or not they had a significant impact over the writing of the series for a period of years and its worth revisiting every now and again to re-evaluate.

 

My stance on them is that the fanbase did what it typically does, greatly over-exaggerated their problems.

For one thing, how many times did people complain about Baldy Nosebair Vs how many times it actually got used in the game was quite the one sided ratio.

44 minutes ago, Johnny Boy said:

 Forces.

Did they write for this game?

I thought they stopped by then?

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2 hours ago, Indigo Rush said:

That's sort of an uncharitable take on what Dr Mechano said, don't you think? It's pretty obvious from his perspective that the Pontaff stories weren't bad. 

I'm more or less saying that independent of any biases, the writing wasn't that much of an improvement. I don't even dislike Pontac and Graff that much either and I'll admit to being slightly more biased towards towards the early 3D games, but comparing both against each other, they're both different levels of bad.

Like Shadow, 06, Lost World, and Forces are all bad in my eyes. Different levels of bad, but not that much different.

If anything, they all have similar problems of tonal dissonance and too much exposition. Just on opposite ends of the spectrum.

 

So I never quite agreed with the fandom wide civil war that one is wholly better or worse than the other.

 

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Your argument is that it's not debatable that both are bad, but that sidesteps the point that someone clearly prefers one over the other. Arguing that both styles of writing being "bad" is irrelevant; it would probably be more productive to ask what it is in particular that one would dislike about the stories prior to Pontaff and what one likes about their style of writing. 

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Whilst I personally think both styles in question are bad, they're both almost polar opposites. Of course some people are going to like one over the other. 

37 minutes ago, Kuzu said:

I'm more or less saying that independent of any biases, the writing wasn't that much of an improvement. I don't even dislike Pontac and Graff that much either and I'll admit to being slightly more biased towards towards the early 3D games, but comparing both against each other, they're both different levels of bad.

Unless you can define what is good and what is bad in completely objective terms (spoiler: you can't), this is an naff argument that tries to paint one opinion as more correct than another. 

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8 minutes ago, Blue Blood said:

Whilst I personally think both styles in question are bad, they're both almost polar opposites. Of course some people are going to like one over the other. 

Unless you can define what is good and what is bad in completely objective terms (spoiler: you can't), this is an naff argument that tries to paint one opinion as more correct than another. 

That's not at all what was intended. As Badnik mentioned, there is a very bad precedent set by people that overexaggerate how bad (or good) something is. I'm more or less saying a lot of the problems that have been harped on tend to be consistent across the series, but are either downplayed or exaggerated due to bias.

I feel like most would agree that the games I pointed to all have similar issues relating to tone, exposition, among other issues.

I don't feel like its not wrong to point that out. I even admitted that I preferred the older games despite thinking they're still bad.

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I'm not the biggest fan of the Pontac and Graff era (more like neutral), but the harassment was completely unacceptable.

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