Is it time to apologize to Pontac and Graff?

[FlameStream]

On 3/1/2023 at 3:07 AM, SticksSuperFan14 said:

I'd argue Sonic has been "Americanized" from the start, his design was heavily inspired by American culture.

I'm not sure how this adds to the conversation. You can express/feel dissatisfaction when things go further away from your values, which is what happened at the time. Things don't need to be completely red or blue; they can be balanced in-between.

[Multikaris]

I think the reason why fans didn’t go after the weaker side material was because they blamed Pontaff’s direction for those weaker outer fringe stuff being approved of by Sega to begin with. Trying to target the root of the problem rather than dealing with the symptoms. Yet there is evidence the problem does go higher than Pontaff, (see with Morio Kishimoto) and has only recently begun to change. Even then, most of what they had was already quite weak, and at least with Colors, what they did actually improved the game. Further, can Lost World be improved as it stands, keeping the Cutscene direction intact?

[Slashy]

I feel it is time to update this thread with this new information.

 

https://twitter.com/warrengraff/status/1746318188458213703?t=4ui1Dn8_9x4P7jaivJJo4g&s=19

[MetalSkulkBane]

is it new information? *reading through previous comments in this topic*

Not really. We already knew Pontac & Graff didn't choose to silly tone or plot. All this post says (well, implies) that there was even more scrutiny than we thought.

The real question is whether someone like Flynn could do it better. Humor aside (not a big fan of their jokes), did they try to give Eggman some dignity but got notes back "No, make him completely jokey"

[Salamander]

I feel like some gamers have this outdated view that it's still the 1990s in terms of localisation, that the English writing team are just spinning up whatever they want without the Japanese developers knowing or indeed caring.  It hasn't worked like that in a long time.